Kotaku has published an amazing article about the development of Bioware’s latest title, Anthem. According to former Bioware developers, Anthem wasn’t meant to be a looter shooter in its early days, Frostbite has introduced a lot of problems during the game’s development and a lot of the stuff found in the E3 2017 demo was faked.
Bioware has always planned to make Anthem – which was initially titled Beyond – an online multiplayer game however it was meant to be more of an action/survival online game than a looter shooter.
As Jason Schreier described, players would embark from a city and go out on expeditions with their friends, staying out in the world as long as they could survive. Players would use a robotic exosuit and they’d fight monsters with melee and shooting attacks, but the focus was less on looting and more on seeing how long they could survive.
“We’re going out as a team, going to try to accomplish something as a team, then come back and talk about it.” said a former developer while another one added “It was really interesting. It really struck a chord with a lot of the people who were working on it originally.”
The game would also have dynamic events happening randomly, something that could even enhance the survival aspect of the game.
“The idea was going to be that there were all these levers that could be pulled internally so there’d be different events happening at all times. You’d be out somewhere, and an electrical storm would happen at random, and you had to survive it. We had an early demonstration of this where the environment was dynamic and by pulling levers we could change it from summer to winter to fall. You’d see the snow hitting the ground, hitting the trees… There were states of the build where that was being demonstrated, and that we could see this was something you could actually accomplish.”
However, most of the aforementioned features were canned due to the engine that was powering the game, Frostbite. According to the former developers that spoke with Jason, Frostbite was awfully documented and presented major obstacles at every given time. In other words, the Anthem team encountered the exact same problems that the Mass Effect Andromeda and Dragon Age: Inquisition teams found while developing their games.
A former Bioware developer said:
“Frostbite is like an in-house engine with all the problems that entails—it’s poorly documented, hacked together, and so on—with all the problems of an externally sourced engine. Nobody you actually work with designed it, so you don’t know why this thing works the way it does, why this is named the way it is.”
Another developer added:
“Part of the trouble was you could do enough in the engine to hack it to show what was possible, but then to get the investment behind it to get it actually done took a lot longer, and in some cases you’d run into a brick wall. Then you’d realize, ‘Oh my god, we can do this only if we reinvent the wheel, which is going to take too long.’ It was sometimes difficult to know when to cut and run.”
“If you can hack around it, you hack around it, as opposed to fixing it properly.” said a third developer who worked on Anthem and continued: “I would say the biggest problem I had with Frostbite was how many steps you needed to do something basic. With another engine I could do something myself, maybe with a designer. Here it’s a complicated thing.”
A fourth developer concluded:
“It’s hard enough to make a game. It’s really hard to make a game where you have to fight your own tool set all the time.”
Last but not least, a former developer confirmed that a lot of the stuff we saw in the E3 2017 demo was faked. And even though Bioware was fully aware of it, it still claimed that the game would not be downgraded (and by now we all know that it was indeed downgraded).
“After E3, that’s when it really felt like, ‘Okay, this is the game we’re making,’. But it still felt like it took a while to get the entire team up to speed. It was also kind of tricky because there were still a lot of question marks. The demo was not actually built properly—a lot of it was fake, like most E3 demos. There was a lot of stuff that was like, ‘Oh are we actually doing this? Do we have the tech for that, do we have the tools for that? To what end can you fly? How big should the world be?’”
We strongly suggest reading the entire Kotaku article as it provides a lot of additional details about the game’s development!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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How many times does BioWare need to die before people realize it died in 2012, after the Mass Effect 3 Ending controversy. This fake BioWare is just composed of developers from other EA studios that they have closed down over the years.
Clearly this guy can’t be trusted. This industry never, ever lies. Ever.
A lot of games changed when being worked on, see Duke Nuke-em Forever.
Ouch. Not the best example to use. A game that sat in development hell. In any case, I’m sure everyone here knows all too well, about misrepresentation in the video games industry. It’s not exactly a secret, considering how blatantly it’s done.
Yes, its very probable that the game changed. But Derceto is still right imho. Similar articles were released in the past about bEAware. I suspect its partly true and partly not.
It seems that Frostbite is really problematic for RPGs but I dont believe that its as much problematic for simpler genre of action/survival. And dont forget bEAware already dealt technically at least with some of these problems while developing Inquisition and Andromeda. EA studios SHARE the code.
So I suspect that its partially damage control. They blame the engine while a lot of problems was in the bad management + many late changes + unclear direction from EA interested in MT + department of experienced devs from the studio.
I see frostbite engine as much as its a great engine for battlefield/battlefront and fifa, its not a friendly engine to use to make an open world adventure rpg style games, its perfect for big maps with destructive elements but for a big seamless world with more complex interactivity its not a good engine.
But of course its not an excuse in making a mediocre game, it could be perfect with no loadings and no bugs and looks as good as e3 2017 video and after the “woaw effect” at the end people will figure out the game is a very shallow experience.
I could says its 100% EA fault but i also believe Bioware lost their touch since mass effect 3(the last good game with an incomplete final chapter like mgs5 and an horrid conclusion even with the extended cut)
Sad to see one of my favorites developers failing one game after another
Dragon Age: Inquisition came after ME3, so much for ‘losing it’s touch’.
DA:I is widely considered to be a terribly optimised game with the worst story telling in the game’s series.
I STILL have not installed DA:I… every time I look, everyone says it’s just a bad game.
I will play DA Origins for a 5th time with over 100 mods instead.
It’s alright to play through once. The game has basically no replayability, so I’d recommend it just for the sake of the story and lore, assuming you care about that.
Be warned though this game has notoriously bad PC optimisation and will cook your CPU for no reason. Using a framerate limiter helps a bit.
I wouldn’t give DA:I that much praise but I agree on your other points, it’s not as bad as a lot of people say. Personally I think it’s the last good Bioware game. But you can’t deny it very much shows the Frostbite limitations, especially on PC.
“the story of DAO is quite generic and the gameplay was repetitive and boring?” Yes I agree, I think DA:I is the better of the three. I’m not sure why people hated it so much. Just like I’m not sure why there were so many reviewers that just plain ignored the glaring issues in the game.
Heh we’re not all that bad 😛 I always try to argue with facts. My comment you first replied to is the general consensus you find on the internet, not necessarily my opinion.
I’m mostly btthurt about that game’s PC performance. I still haven’t forgotten how it was supposed to ship with the Mantle API on release but instead had a semi functional DX11 implementation that needed loads of patches.
The actual game itself though? I’d give it a 7/10.
I played the game first on a 970 at 1080p as well but I have a 1080Ti and 8700k with 1440p165hz monitor now.
It’s great not to have to bother with any of that. All games just work maxed out. I just put shadows on the second highest setting in all games cause theres no visual difference and leave the rest on ultra.
All Frostbite games released with a lot of bugs. And a lot of them were so obvious. If you take bf3 its shows that the engine doesnt have proper UI tools. The release BF3 with battlelog and no UI. Every other game after BF3 has a UI. But all have horrible UIs. It shows something for this engine. Pretty and optimized but horrible to work with it.
“Nobody you actually work with designed it (the frostbite engine), so you don’t know why this thing works the way it does”.
some engines are products of commitment and hard work to make something specific that someone had in mind real. frostbite was one of those engines (source and 4A’s engine are another examples that come to my mind). frostbite is just EA’s cash machine and they’re going to milk it as hard as they can then they’ll be done with it and move to another engine that can be used for another 20 years for maximum profit. every game they make feel the same (just like games that ubisoft makes) but average consumer is too dense to realize that.
in a World where Unreal Engine 4 exists, “bad engine” is not an excuse, if EA is cheap so much that would rather use the wrong engine for the job than to pay Epic for licencing percentage which is very low to what EA pile up from money on yearly basis
not to mention Bioware is very familiar with Unreal Engine, all Mass Effect games used UE
they could’ve made better game if not for Frostbite being forced to them, and probably would’ve took way less time, EA could’ve made more money if they just let Bioware do what they do best and stop interfering
Frostbite is clearly an engine made specifically for Battlefield and FPS games and only DICE do great things with it
Recent NFS games, Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, Andromeda, Anthem all these games suffered from using this engines, they were all broken in some way or another due to that
>Frostbite is clearly an engine made specifically for Battlefield and FPS games
The differences between FPS and TPS are purely cosmetic. The things that can’t be copy-pasted from other Frostbite games are elaborate data management systems for player progress, world state, that sort of thing.
The dev complains about lack of documentation and lack of people in-house who already know the engine. Apparently they didn’t have anyone from DICE helping them learn how the engine works which is weird because their third game in it. But this kind of mismanagement is obviously common in the games industry. It happens all the time. They probably neglected to spread understanding of the engine in-house early on when they started working with it, and now, years later and on their third project, they were too embarrassed to reveal to EA and DICE just how clueless they still were and that they still needed tons of help.
You have to understand that while this applies to you and me, people who follow games and want good products for their money and are very critical of crap games, it doesn’t apply to your every day gamer.
Imagine how easy it is to sell these games to kids, who watch the trailer and go “WOW I want that”. Or a parent who doesn’t understand anything about what they are buying and what kind of business practice they are supporting. And they outnumber the “hardcore” gamers probably by a huge margin. This is it. This is how games from massive publishers like EA look like from now on.
You’re both right, and this makes me sad!
The term used to be associated with fun, addictive gameplay. Now it’s just microtransactions and grind.
The oldest “looter shooter” I can think of would be Borderlands, and that game was nothing but GRIND. So when were these games about anything but grind? Addictive is right, but for the worst reasons.
Diablo.
How many times does BioWare need to die before people realize it died in 2012, after the Mass Effect 3 Ending controversy. This fake BioWare is just composed of developers from other EA studios that they have closed down over the years.
Could not agree more, Mass Effect 3 was the last real Bioware game, and in some aspects of that game you could start seeing the new Bioware bleeding through, mostly the writing. The writing of Mass Effect 3 goes from that amazing old Bioware quality to crap. Its all over the place. Still that game has some awesome moments.
Bioware died after that, with Inquisition being a glimpse of the horrible things to come. The horrible mmo quests, the horrible looking characters, ths sjw culture, the boring open world, the horrible writing, the frosbite engine. Andromeda was Inquisition 2.0 and Anthem is the worst thing new Bioware has ever released. And I really don’t think Dragon Age 4 can fix any of that.
Its’ like you live in an alternate universe:
Wiki-“Dragon Age: Inquisition received “Generally favorable” reviews”
It was not as good as many of their previous games if you want to talk about critics, even dragon age 2 had more personality than inquisition
Manure. Wiki
“Both Bajo and Hex from Good Game gave the game 10/10”
“Alexander Sliwinski from Joystiq gave the game a perfect score. ”
“Phil Savage from PC Gamer praised the rich content, fulfilling, dramatic and memorable plot”
“Dragon Age: Inquisition is the most successful launch in BioWare history based on units sold”
Cherry picking some quotes doesnt change a thing.
No matter how far you dig into Wiki, that game is still gonna be crap.
Only reason DA:I got any awards was because W3 delayed until the next year. Fact.
Lol, that game was just lucky it came out before the Witcher 3, and that game journalists still held Bioware in high regard back then.
Hell, even compared to Dark Souls, Mass Effect 2, Witcher 2 AOK and Dragon Age Origins that game is extremely mediocre.
But hey man if you like running errands for NPCs, fetch quests, forced sjw issues, and romancing Sera, more power to you!
That game has not aged well, and Andromeda is basically the same game, how are the reviews for Andromeda?
It’s like I am allowed to have my own thoughts and opinions!
Yeah, no that game was crap.
nah mass effect games were all trash action games.
I enjoyed them and Mass Effect 2 is considered one of the best games of all time.
And even if they were all trash action games, they were still miles better than Inquisition.
inquisition was dog shet. bioware’s best game was baldure’s gate 2 then dragon age origins for me. i don’t care about the rest. i never got into mass effect. i played all of them and they were all trash.
Origins was my favorite, one of those games I have never deleted from my Hard Drive. Its been there for years, heavily modded too. I spent hours upon hours modding Origins. Getting Leliana to look exactly like in the trailer.
I love that game along with Dark Souls, Witcher 2, Mass Effect 2, Vampires The Masquerade and Alpha Protocol. All of them still installed.
Too bad you didn’t enjoy them, but hey, to each its own.
Still, that Bioware is long gone and I don’t think DA4 can change that.
i remember pouring a lot of time on modding origins as well, i remember it was a bich to mod. i beat that game like 15 times so far and i’m not exaggerating.
dark souls however is a different story for me. i have never ever hated a game more than dark souls games and it’s mostly because i find the combat system boring, simple, unexciting and very stupid (also it looks very goofy).
bioware died after origins.
they are trash, all of them.
they are.
they are terrible.
you are dumb.
I am, unfortunately.
i am
Its’ like you live in an alternate universe:
“Dragon Age: Inquisition received “Generally favorable” reviews”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Age:_Inquisition
Dragon Age: Inquisition was a big hit. Have you been in a cave since Mass Effect 3?
Are you able to map controls to more than 2 mouse buttons yet?
It was mediocre at best, level design was just awful. being a big hit doesn’t mean anything, Fallout 76 is also a big hit.
anthem made 100 million.
bioware lost last bit of its soul after dragon age origins. dragon age origins was still a consolized baldure’s gate.
The SJWs at EA BioWare Edmonton even invited Anita Sarkeesian to tour their studio and take tea with them.
twitter(dot)com/anitasarkeesian/status/956644302301552641
Imagine my surprise when Anthem turned out to be a disaster!
There’s something else I have in mind for Anita Sarkeesian to “take” other than tea. And it wouldn’t be for my own pleasure, but to teach her a lesson.
That sounds a little sinister, lol! Anyway, she’s pretty much irrelevant nowadays and even the soyboy media mostly ignores her so all’s good.
I beg your pardon, but clearly sir, that which I’m referring to is the “break” which she should “take” from political platforming.
“having tea with this great group of women (and allies!). Thanks for your hospitality.”
lmao, she’s allergic to the word “man” and by allies she meant that single dude in the background.
Check out her next tweet below, lol!
“When I tweeted about a recent visit to @bioware, a firestorm of hate inundated my feed as well as the studio’s. If you want to continue seeing more inclusivity in games, help drown out the hateful voices & express support for the change you want to see”
She’s so far down the SJW rabbit hole that she’s become a self-parody of one. Truly hilarious and pitiful at the same time. ?
i just checked her other tweets and i was like damn, give it a rest, she’s constantly tweeting and crying about men. her stamina on this reminded me of a rytard strength.
A career victim if ever there was. I struggle to think of any other person who’s been so financially successful in monetising assumed victimhood. I suppose Brie Larson would be the current mainstream media pretender to the crown.
I would say Larson was successful well before people started making her a victim, seeing as CM is about to pass a billion worldwide…
People? She cast herself through her own racism and sexism in the role of victim. She did it to herself.
CM, given its place in the MCU, was always going to do well at the box office. Larson had little or nothing to do with it being a commercial success. They could have cast a tub of lard in the starring role and the movie would still have done well!
Whaaa…? I have no idea what she said, but tbh you’re the one sounding like a SJW. Tho again, I don’t really care about all of it, so if I’m wrong, my bad.
And she was awesome in the movie I thought. Was very well cast IMO, if the comics are what they went by. (Which I also didn’t read lol)
“I have no idea what she said”
Case closed.
I’m not judging her on anything though.
Well, other than CM, which I thought she was great in.
Off Topic – Man, the Sekiro mods just keep coming! This is great!
Nice. I’ll likely pick up Sekiro once I’m done with playing a few other games. It’d be nice if the actual dev’ bothered fixing things instead of the great modding scene bailing them out once more. For that reason also I’m happy to buy it when at a much lower price so as not to reward FromSoftware’s lack of care.
if i could make money doing what she does i’d do it but she’s not trolling, she’s got mental illness i think.
ea has to die.
This could be interesting but nooooo had to be another looter shooter.
Let me guess, you think only steam should be allowed to exist.
“Anthem wasn’t meant to be a looter shooter”
Judging by the nature of the complaints many would say it still isn’t. ?
Oof
100
Its a Loading Screen Simulator.
It wasn’t meant to be a fun and rewarding game either.
NFS, mass effect,bfv,anthem… Ea is actually falling and no one gives a damn in their company..
So Bioware messed up 4 times in a row and it’s still not their fault? Really?
The concept for “Beyond” seems as boring as Anthem.
Surely no surprise given that they’re a bunch of SJWs so are naturally always looking to dodge personal responsibility for anything while seeking to blame everybody else so they can revert to the default SJW status of playing the victim.
I expect garbage tier sites like PC Gamer and Eurogamer plus dimwitted soyboys like Jim Sterling will be lapping it up.
Yeah we knew that. The problem was the constant lying in your PR by you and your EA daddies – which is still happening imo. You guys are just trying to tug at heart strings now to keep right on scamming consumer. No. Too bad you cant hear me.
Yeah we knew that. The problem was the constant lying in your PR by you and your EA daddies – which is still happening imo. You guys are just trying to tug at heart strings now to keep right on scamming consumer. No. Too bad you cant hear me.
Yeah we knew that. The problem was the constant lying in your PR by you and your EA daddies – which is still happening imo. You guys are just trying to tug at heart strings now to keep right on scamming consumer. No. Too bad you cant hear me.
Yeah we knew that. The problem was the constant lying in your PR by you and your EA daddies – which is still happening imo. You guys are just trying to tug at heart strings now to keep right on scamming consumer. No. Too bad you cant hear me.
instead talking, just fix the game like no man’s sky developer did..
It’s just a way to describe a game that’s suppoused to be playable past the ending.
This is what the games industry have become, they sell you the base project while working to make it into a real game. Unfortunatelly people are still buying!
I would say scammers, but I guess they’re even worse than that.
Was looking for this!
LOL