Posted by aaronbrethorst 4 hours ago
https://theonion.com/anthem-developers-assure-players-whiteb...
'“We know the thousands of customers who pre-ordered Anthem have some concerns, but we are confident this collection of words scrawled on a conference room board will be a revolutionary third-person shooter experience when released at the end of the week,” said director Jonathan Warner, who shared a progress update with players by sending out a screenshot of an email chain that ended with an agreement to call the game Anthem.'
https://theonion.com/people-criticizing-anthem-don-t-underst...
"Stop complaining and attacking studios just because a game isn’t everything you want. Developers put too much stock in making games enjoyable and playable as it is. Planning to make something as profitable as Anthem was supposed to be and is a huge undertaking, so at least give them credit for trying. BioWare had 18 months to build a game that would sell millions of copies based on the goodwill they built up, and they hit it out of the park. You may not understand Q4 projections, but they do. Anthem is a game that exists and is funding [EA] CEO bonuses, and by that measure, it’s been a huge success."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_(video_game)#Developmen...
The "Frostbite" engine sounds like a disaster.
Core issue was lack of clear leadership from what I read on Wikipedia.
From 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...
There are a handful of notables still there but the majority of the teams that made the classic Baldur’s Gate, KOTOR, and Mass Effect disappeared a long time ago through natural turnover and a couple of brutal rounds of layoffs.
The silver lining is that the talent didn't vanish and we have teams like Archetype working on Exodus, Stoic with The Banner Saga, or offshoots like Yellow Brick and Beamdog.
Going forward, I hope Bioware's people land great new jobs, and here's hoping some of their IP gets picked up by other studios. Mass Effect in particular is a fantastic creation that a lot of people would love to spend more time in.
Timur Bekmambetov might be a more recent example. The Night Watch movies were wonderful. Then he made Wanted, which was expensive dross. The best thing about that movie is that he put a couple actors from Night Watch as supporting cast in it. He’s done one or two things since that rate mention, but going Hollywood made him worse, not better.
I think that pattern is widespread around the greater tech industry: antitrust enforcement, etc. would be great for having fewer cases where decisions which affect thousands of people are being made by executives who are really detached not just from consequences but simply awareness of what’s going on in each of the different segments of their business.
I don't mean to be patronizing but did the formatting go wrong here?
1 - 2017 they cut from 500 -> ~350
2 - 2023 went from 350 -> 200 that included a bunch of very senior people including the OG writer of Baldur's gate Lukas Kristjanson
3 - Early '24 cut down to 100 skeleton crew as the writing on the wall for DA Veilguard sales materialized (sold about 1.5m vs 3m projected)
Tbh, I think the issue is that old RPG designers understood players have very different values and goals, hell they even wrote some academic articles on it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...
The devs of today played the games of yesterday, and felt that the game catered to them, and then sought out making a game like that, but they didn't put in the effort or consideration to appeal to other kinds of players.
And turns out there's economics involved - while people playing shooters want to shoot people in general, RPG players are a diverse bunch with different needs, and if you don't scratch the itch of a certain subgroup, that's part of the audience gone.
Which results in a bomb - a game made for 20% of the playerbase will sell 20% of the copies, and will be a flop.
Halo went from <200 people making a game from scratch to >2k people making the same game on an engine (without multiplayer) - so the design scope is even smaller now.
I don't get how you can lower the scope, have 10x the staff, and still overwork yourself - I mean, I certainly think it's possible, but that speaks of colossal mismanagement.
I mean the graphics got better (not that anyone cares, people still play old games, if graphics were a true differentiator, people would say new games are better because they look better, but they don't).
This is very hard to explain - and so expensive it's actively killing the industry.
This is generally the case in the games industry. Great dev teams seem to function more like bands than companies. For however you feel about the latest iterations, the first Call of Duty was an absolute revelation to the FPS genre that we never would have gotten without the EA firing of the MoH team.
The analogy would be more easier to swallow if it wasn't always used as a mask for enshittification.
They kinda still around w/ BF & FIFA\Madden which is a Money-printing machine. I never understood this, I just wanted NHL back on the PC. Yeah, there is 2004 w/ the Rebuild mod & an OSS port which I didn't checked out. +There Games up 2 '07 4 the PC, but it seems like the Community decided that '04's the ticket.
I always wanted a 'Bloodbowl'/Speedball Hockey title which is a crossover w/ Figure Skating... Where the Figure Skating gurls are like Bayonetta/Rayne & she posseses certain kind of superpowers while the Males are all like WH40k Space Marines & the Goalie is her FemDom Slave or smh? xD Anyhow... 2 bad I can't into gfx.
AAA games in general have been having massive problems with over-management, where you have hundreds of stakeholders for a game. The second there is proven money in a franchise, massive structures of managers start to meddle in everything, demand day and date release promises, and get involved in everything from creative direction to engineering to resourcing. You end up with thousands of people in the credits for games made by a team of 100 artists and programmers.
The same thing has been happening to big budget movies and prestige TV shows, to the point that everything becomes this sort of neoliberal corporate soup that reflects the culture of the company. Game studios become victims of their own success. In the same way enterprise software becomes consultant feature slop soup, media becomes focus grouped appeals-to-no-one ultra high production value shovelware.
Creative studios stop producing art or meaningful experiences and start producing content.
Both are more recent than the BioWare examples, and of course more recent than Stardew Valley, which is more in line with the Harvest Moon genre.
They basically used to make amazing games in the 2000s and never quite lived up to that reputation again. Whether the acquisition by EA was the cause or the symptom of the decline, I don't know.
Anthem frankly killed them. A live service looter shooter which were already out of vogue by the time it was released. Obviously made by marketing entirely, no soul whatsoever. They never recovered from it.
It might have been successful if it weren't a Mass Effect. Or maybe not, who knows.
This squares with Joker being a fan-favourite character in the main trilogy
This is a great summary of the entire issue with the game.
I really tried to like it but it didn't inspire any enthusiasm. I didn't really care for the plot, the stakes seemed so low compared to the previous title and none of the races/planets really scratched that explore itch.
[1] - https://blog.bioware.com/2022/07/15/bioware-developer-story-...
They do, but only as a means for controlling the people they rule over. The House of Saud, when outside Saudi Arabia, drink alchohol, wear revealing clothing, and make use of the sex industry.
>romancing characters of the same gender You mean yuri action? Otherwise, nobody wants that. And yes. I'm talking solely out of a feminine perspective here.^^
Otherwise, I once was teh mastermind behind a FemDom/FLR Megamod 4 Sims 3. To unite them all was a kinda scummy affair but the monies that stuff generated, man... Yes, it was/is common 4 The Sims mods 2 be paywalled.
Dice acquired the Desert Combat studio, and the same people made BF2.
And all that before those features and how they're pushed often making the games leave a bad taste on one's mouth, most often soiling a whole franchise.
I'm in the process of reshaping my game dev career to avoid contributing to this kind of rot. Don't mind eating noodles if that's what it takes.
in a game that already has romance options, adding a same sex romance option is not taking away bandwidth. and i cannot imagine how it would "soil" an entire franchise. just don't choose the same sex romance option if you don't want to. easy.
Karens aren't misunderstanding how to mind their own business or live-and-let-live; they are trying to enforce what they see as (or wish were) social norms and don't give a damn about the perspective of the folks on the receiving end of their chirping.
After that I knew they were done. ME3 was the last good game they released, imo.
I'd place it around the start of ME2.
In contrast, ME1's ending may have well been a master class in game cinematography and writing.
The combat wasn't very engaging either it was a boring feeling cover shooter. None of your character abilities or gear or anything seemed to have much of an effect.
My point was that ME3 was doomed because ME2 utterly failed at bridging the gap between the strong start of an epic that was ME1 and what should have been the conclusion in ME3.
In fact 'fail' may be generous. I don't think it even 'tried'.
Veilguard was my favority gameplay wise, but the writing... well you know.
By the time of the next Dragon Age game, EA was deep in making decisions.
Veilguard was very poorly marketed to appeal to a neoliberal crowd as if the characters and identity was the primary draw rather than the core story themes (Wizards v Templars, Societal Order vs Individual Freedom, the capacity for evil and corruption of either side) and the world which was fascinating. I love me some inclusion and well crafted characters, but the focus on it to the exclusion of all else as a queer person it gave me the same ick as a corporate float at a pride parade.
I remember debating with Ray why dying in games like Paranoia and Call of Cthulhu could be "fun". As I recall he didn't see the point but to each their own.
Thanks private equity for dismembering the carcass of everything you acquire!
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/7cxz4a/eas_graveyar...
https://web.archive.org/web/20230610092047/https://old.reddi...
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcf.preview.re...
Sad, even though BioWare was dead already.
Art
Blizzard seemed to defy the stereotype but it died a long time ago, it's just a husk.
The contrast with japanese game studios is impressive.
(But purchased by EA obviously)
- Talos Principle 2
- Expedition 33
- KCD2
- Anything by Arcane
- Anything by CDPR
- 007 Last light / Hitman
- Blue Prince
Most recently, I'm loving Order of the Sinking Star, and that's from a US team. There's hope!
- Baldur's Gate 3 (German)
- Disco Elysium (Estonian)
- Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2 (same studio as BG3)
BG3 is notable for its gigantic success. And Disco Elysium is one of the best written games ever made, and it showed that you can have a fantastic RPG with no combat system whatsoever, while still having meaningful progression.
Bruh, Larian is in Belgium
I was going to mention this game as a counter point but then realised that if I am doing that it's kind of the exception that proves the rule.
I do wonder why this is, perhaps there's more money in the US to build bigger games with bigger teams and you just get the 'too many cooks in the kitchen' syndrome.
I must admit most AAA games from the US over the last decade have been underwhelming for me.
They're lucky they were able to No Man's Sky CP2077 alongside Edgerunners being well received.
It's ironic because Hollywood is not doing too well at the moment.
I'm far less impressed with big name actors and that seems like a massive waste of money. As long as the acting is good, and the voices aren't obnoxious, I don't care who the actor is. People might see a movie just because it has an actor they like in it, but I don't think that carries over too well to games.
In one sense, that's perfectly fair. In life if you're looking at your feet or spending your time examining the walls you'd be oblivious to what's going on around you, and for non-critical things having a bunch of little moments that you can only catch if you're in (or looking at) the right place at the right time can improve replay value, but games would have to be careful to make sure that the important stuff can't be missed.
I cannot point to the reasons as to why. Many of these teams are global teams - so a lot of the same problems apply: marketing costs/timelines, release-time crunch etc. The one difference I can point to is that perhaps executive payouts are not overly dependent on total shareholder returns.
Lots of non EU games fall short, including several mentioned in this thread, e.g. Anthem
Warhorse Studios is Czech; Slavs are not all alike.
The list is rather long.
(In no certain order)
- Baldur's Gate
- Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn
- Neverwinter Nights
- Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
- Star Wars: The Old Republic
- Jade Empire
- Mass Effect
- Mass Effect 2
- Mass Effect 3
- MDK2
- Dragon Age Origins
- Dragon Age II
- Dragon Age: Inquisition
And I would argue Obsidian was the better studio anyway. Besides NWN2, and moreso its fantastic expansion, Mask of the Betrayer, they also made the excellent Knights of the Old Republic 2, Fallout: New Vegas, and their own original franchises, Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2, and Tyranny.
There's other studios that similar to Blizzard didn't get bought out early and published multiple hit games, like Insomniac Games.
"Imagine a Blizzard that never made or never found the success they did with WoW and continued on the path of boxed releases every couple years."
I did find myself rather salty back then that it felt like Blizzard abandoned anything outside of WoW until 2010. WoW wasn't something I ever grew an interest in, yet I played an absurd amount of SC and WC3. Then SC2 was a huge miss for me, as well as every game after it.
extremely exaggerated. Recent reports said they are the top game studio at microsoft.
The "been there, done that" vibe is their pitch to the older generation who no longer cares as much about technically or ladder climbing and just wants something to do when it's cold outside
Around 2020 the industry quickly added around 35% more jobs based on three big things. 1) A COVID-shutdown driven demand bubble, 2) PE capital chasing inflated Live Service gaming profit projections and, 3) Speculative land-grab industry roll-ups by Embracer and Microsoft. These triggers were all either temporary, illusory or chasing trends which are net negative for the gaming. Those inflated jobs weren't justified by organic growth and shouldn't have been created in the first place.
It’s like corporations all get the same memo and do the exact same things in lockstep
EA has its money cows, and neither Mass Effect nor Dragon Age are one of them, as it seems. The IP stays with EA anyway, so from their point nothing is really lost.
- Increasingly rapid proliferation of business strategy, competitive analysis and spreadsheet-driven financial optimization means more MBAs in a given industry trying to run similar playbooks at the same time. This increasing homogenization occurs at both the company level and the investor level.
- Corporate executives and managers can have divergent incentives due to differing scopes, time frames and reward structures. A crass example is "Even an obvious Ponzi scheme can be good as long as you personally get out before the inevitable crash", although the way it actually happens in practice is usually much more indirect.
For instance, even the difference between a manager optimizing for their division's end-of-year bonus can diverge from the CEO's incentive to optimize next year's profit margin increase. And those can both differ from an institutional investor's incentives tied to 5 yr stock price appreciation.
Even in the good times their ability to create (and hide) black holes was prodigious.
BioWare, in the last 12 years, has released: Mass Effect: Andromeda, Dragon Age: Veilguard, and Anthem.
It's still painful to see the studio go away, but I sadly agree.
However, The Veilguard to me was amazing. I loved that game and it's my favorite Dragon Age.
They were purchased decades ago