For anyone unfamiliar with Anthem (including me, before I read the second Onion article) and curious about what happened, Wikipedia covers some of the executive decisions and leadership changes that hurt the effort:
replyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_(video_game)#Developmen...
The "Frostbite" engine sounds like a disaster.
>Internally, the project was codenamed "Dylan" by BioWare, in reference to Bob Dylan in hopes that it would be a name that would be spoken about years later.
replylol wut. Is this like an SEO thing?
No, this is more like a The Secret thing.
replyThe frostbite engine seem to be the tip of the iceberg.
replyCore issue was lack of clear leadership from what I read on Wikipedia.
Iirc it was a stupid C-suite decision to use Frostbyte across EA studios. It never made much technical sense and DICE lacked the bandwidth and capital to support so many teams and usecases.
replyYes after the success of frostbite around Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3 or so, EA decided it should be used in everything. Not unlike the mistake Capcom is making with REngine right now, if the performance woes of Monster Hunter Wilds and Dragons Dogma 2 are anything to go by.
replyPretty sure there was even a Need for Speed game on Frostbite which was... huh.
A long video on the subject from one of its project leads (Mark Darrah): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y65eoBVF0Y&t=10s
replyWhat’s most disappointing about Anthem was that the game had so much potential. The graphics, flying around like Ironman, sound, etc was incredible. But the world and content felt like you were playing a tech demo. It was like they finished polishing everything technical and were forced to launch before the game to rest on top of it was even started.
replyNo other game has come close to capturing the absolute joy of flying in that game.
I still think that the storyline of the game and that the fact that an AT-AT just shows up in the middle of the storyline like you should know what it is seemed to hint the game might have at one point been intended to be a "Mandalorian simulator" (the central macguffins also had a very "Lost Mandalore" from Clone Wars and Rebels cartoons/"KOTOR" feel; the central quest hub pub was very Star Wars cantina-ish; etc). I don't think we'll ever get the full story on what happened, but it seemed like the game came out in a period where EA was worried they had lost the Star Wars license forever and might have panicked and over-corrected from a licensed game with a lot of excitement behind its storyline to an "original" property without the right writers to file the serial numbers off very well and without enough passion for whatever they were trying to make original about it. Whereas if they waited just a couple years they would have a shared Star Wars license again and the hype train of Disney+'s Mandalorian show, and a "Mandalorian simulator" might have been very well timed to be what "everyone" wanted.
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replyThe Onion is funny, but not exactly kind here. I would recommend Mark Darrah's post-mortem on Anthem; he's not an unbiased source (he became an executive producer on the project part way through development, and I think he does try to let himself off easy in his retelling of events), but it's pretty clear that mismanagement--both within Bioware and especially from EA--set Anthem down a track that was hard to recover from. Development goals, gameplay design, and even architectural decisions were constantly shifting until late in development, leading devs to constantly rework the game as new requirements came and went.
replyThe game _was_ forced to release in that financial year, but as Darrah eloquently puts it: "There was no point in delaying because that team didn't have another year in them"
replySeems Anthem is gone, but not completely?
replyFrom the same post-mortem video:
former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah revealed that internally at the studio, the shooter had code for local play and private server use until a few months before launch. Presumably, it's still there to be "salvaged and recovered."
"Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months up to launch," Darrah commented. "I don't know that they still work but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered."
https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/anthem-is-dead-after-t...
Mark Darrah suggested releasing a single player only version but presumably this version of EA that has entirely shutdown BioWare altogether has even less reason to release Single Player Only Anthem.
replyThere is maybe some hope archivists will find a production build of Anthem in the wilds of Steam versions with that local server code still accessible in some sort of debug flag and then reverse engineer some of the other live services Anthem depended on.
I mean, most likely it just means they could run servers locally for development, that's pretty standard. I used to work on The Division and every dev could trivially spawn local servers for testing, I basically had it set up so every time I ran the client my own server started in the background. That was "local play" since the architecture of the game is fundamentally centered around all the gameplay systems running on the server. If(or rather - when) their public servers go down, the same statement could be made - that there is code in there for "private" or "local" play. But in reality it's just about running the servers locally, "salvaging" is just having access to the full source code, which is not something Ubisoft would ever do, just like EA wouldn't(I would love to be surprised though!).
replyI loved The Division. Some months ago I re-downloaded it and just ran around for a bit. The setting and world feel are still there and the story is deeper than some single player games. For a while I thought, wouldn't it be amazing if it was ever released (or leaked) so it could be player hosted or modded in a local kind of development like this. But, I didn't stay with that thought. There was just something about that game that had a beginning, middle and end for me. Maybe I'm just getting old.
replyNot quite; Darrah says in his video that the direction from EA flip-flopped between client server and peer-to-peer several times during development, so the code they'd be salvaging would be the original peer-to-peer code. But since that code isn't part of the final game and Bioware is going away... I kind of doubt that code exists in a state where it could be re-integrated with the retail release of Anthem.
replyBoth articles GP linked were jokes pointing blame at the mismanagement
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