Anthem Review (Part 2): Post-Mortem

now we're out in the floor this is where all the magic happens so this area here is the lighting environment art environment our group all through here they are the magic makers I'm simply the person running around from desk to desk saying make it more blue the day that God of War Review embargo is lifted I was in Sydney and so was Corey bar log and Corey belaga is the creative director of God of wars the guy it's at the top of the pyramid and that day I got a phone call from Sony from their PR person and he says to me hey dude you know Corey you know Corey saw your review and I just you know thought it was cool tape do you want to meet Corey he's in Sydney today would you like to meet him and I'm like yeah that'd be amazing I'd love to you know meet the dude that just produced this incredible masterpiece of a video game I was super excited so I get in a new bar and I head down and I arrive at Sony's office and when I do I'm told that Corey is busy and I'd have to wait a few minutes fine all good so I'm sent to a room where another Sony Santa Monica developer is hanging out and we just start chattin just killing time whatever and eventually I asked you I'm like how did you guys do this how did you manage to pull something like this off and he said to me something that I'll never forget he said this it was really simple we just took our stuff to Cory and if he liked it we went with it and if he didn't we changed it that was it game's development is a remarkably complex undertaking that leverages the skill and talent of dozens hundreds thousands of people at any point in time and this guy was talking to he did that for a living he knows that better than anyone so he certainly wasn't suggesting that God of War was the result of Corey sort of single-handedly carrying the entire endeavor on his back like some sort of Californian atlas what he was saying was that Corey had a vision he knew what was in that vision he knew what was out of that vision and he knew how to communicate that vision to his team and the talented people he had under him believed in that vision and in him and with that clarity there and that steadfastness and that trust they were able to accomplish something extraordinary I bring this up because a few days ago Jason Schreyer of Kotaku published an 11,000 word X they on the deeply troubled development process that led to the disastrous launch date of anthem it's an extremely compelling read and one that only Jason could have put together since he's pretty much the only journalist in the whole industry doing this sort of work I've left a link in the description below and I strongly recommend giving it a click to show Jason the support he deserves for such fine work there are some truly staggering bombshell reveals in this article but to list them all would simply take too long there's just too many of them but there are some important themes that emerge from it and chief among them at least to me is that without clear unifying vision and without strong leaders to inspire people toward that vision you're going nowhere fast and that's exactly where anthem landed nowhere [Music] after I'd done my review of anthem I was talking to my brother and I said to him there's no way in hell that this game was in development for six years I said if you gave this final release product as a brief to an indie development team and said build this for us they could have turned this around in nine months to a year my assumption was that the game had been rebooted multiple times in its development cycle and that the bulk of the final work was done in the last 12 months as it had been for games like destiny turns out this wasn't the case at all the game hadn't been rebooted the game had never even existed in the first place after nearly five years of work anthem had only just emerged from the pre-production period in 2017 a phase of the game's development where the sort of concepts underpinning the game's design and the art and the story they're all locked down 2017 was squandered though as at the start of 2018 anthem had only one playable mission made as anthems leadership team lurch from indecision to indecision the article recounts one situation which I'm sure anyone in corporate life could relate to Bioware developers would meet to decide something but the meeting would end without any decisions being made people would just walk out of the room confused there wasn't a vision that people could rally around or use as a decision-making framework and there weren't strong leaders able to make the calls when the time needed it was just a quagmire and one that would go on to have direct consequences for the core design pillars of the game in my review I commented that the most frustrating thing about anthem was that it seemed to have learned nothing from the looters that came before it this is a genre with a history going back decades and yet anthem felt like a product that was determined to make every single mistake that the genre had already made and already fixed you got the sense that Bioware had not even played these looters let alone studied what made them successful having read Jason's article I am stunned at how simple the explanation for this is and it's this will take for granted that anthem was always trying to be a Loutre shooter but the other day we learned that even this is wrong Bioware had initially envisaged a more narrow mission based game with less focus on loot and grind something closer to an action RPG than a ludus shooter over time and through a process of osmosis Bioware eventually arrived at the ludus shooter template seemingly because nothing else stuck as though they arrived there by default in a particularly stunning revelation we learned that even when they arrived at the point where they knew the game was eluded shooter they refused to talk about destiny internally it was a taboo subject and when mentioned leaders would fire back this is not destiny it's staggering to imagine that the game - which anthem was most analogous and one of the more successful ludus shooters ever made an absolute pioneer in the genre in a multitude of ways was not allowed to be discussed as a reference point for learning and evolution it makes complete sense then why anthem felt like such a regression for the genre clearly the game was never meant to be this and so in the pre-production and design phase the team couldn't do the necessary thinking and planning for how to execute these concepts properly and secondly there was such a deep-seated insecurity on the part of Bioware's leadership that they were unwilling to discuss other games like destiny as a learning point how could this game learn from the mistakes of its predecessors if they staunchly refused to acknowledge that these predecessors even existed you may be asking how could a studio have kept this thing in motion for so long when they had no clear understanding of what it is they were trying to accomplish obviously momentum plays a really big part in all of this a game was promised to a publisher and a fanbase so you have to deliver it eventually but the other explanation is really the core thesis of Jason's article and that's what Bioware referred to internally as the Bioware magic [Music] like most Triple A games Dragon Age Inquisition released after a period of prolonged crunch and internal strife frostbite the graphics engine that EA owned and Bioware chose to use was hellish to work with and required a huge amount of retooling to transition from a first-person shooter focused engine to one that could support a third-person RPG it was a mammoth effort and took a huge toll on the dev team with months of crunch to get it done but in the end Bioware pulled it off consensus is mixed on whether or not Inquisition was an amazing game of the year quality title but most people will agree that it was a pretty solid game the dev team got there in the end and internally by away accredited their Bioware magic as the saving grace yes it was painful yes it destroyed lives but in the end they made a good video game and the people that counted thought that that was what mattered most at the end of the day if you read Jason's article you get the impression that this was the first time that Bioware had crunched like this but Dragon Age 2 was famously produced from start to finish in around 18 months it was one of the shortest timelines for a major triple-a release that the industry had seen in that generation especially considering how long Bioware typically took to let their games cook crunch is not a new phenomenon in this industry and it certainly wasn't new to Bioware by the time Inquisition rolled around fer anthem the impact of this Bioware magic Shibboleth was that the team felt like they didn't need to face into any of the uncertainty and confusion they were experiencing during anthems development they felt like this was how it was supposed to be and this would invariably lead to an insane period of crunch which was what was supposed to happen and then the Bioware magic would kick in and everything would be fine only there was no magic this time and the human cost was immense Schreyer spoke to developers who had to find empty rooms in the office just so they could burst into tears they spoke of dozens of people who left on stress leave many of whom did not return and many who simply decided that they've had enough and they wanted out the huge human cost associated with the lack of leadership that Bioware was demonstrating was one that would be paid by hundreds of developers who had no way to avert this fate because Bioware's leadership weren't listening to the feedback they were getting from places like Bioware Edmonton who had already built shipped and supported a life service game with the Old Republic for many years Bioware Austin wouldn't listen to them because they felt like they knew best I know many will try and lay the blame for a lot of this pressure at the feet of EA as someone who does not like EA and has been very public about my distaste for the way they run their business and make their money I have no problem telling you that EA are not to blame for anthems failure at no point during this entire 11,000 word expose do any of shreya sources comment that EA was this evil boogeyman hovering over Bioware forcing them to make a ludus shooter forcing them to stuff with microtransactions forcing them to meet unfair deadlines eleven thousand words 19 people interviewed and no one called EA the bad guy here for the simple reason that they weren't the bad guy they didn't force Bioware down this path and they didn't hamstring them in any way during the development process even the suggestion that they forced by a way to use frostbite isn't true as this was confirmed to be a choice made by Bioware themselves during the pre-production stage of Inquisition and the studio then became wedded to it and it became embedded in Bioware's institutional knowledge base the reality is that we should be thanking EA for things not being worse than they were at one point EA is number two man Patrick so Dolan played a demo of anthem and basically threw it back in bio waste phases saying it was [ __ ] six weeks later the team redesigned core components of the game and added back in the flying mechanic which was a feature that was constantly being added in and removed and added in and removed and when Sutherland played that new build with the flying he was like yes this is exactly what I was looking for flying is pretty much the only good thing in anthem and we have EA to thank for that with the flight concept locked in the studio set to work on building their e3 demo which is the one we saw back in 2017 now most III trailers are pretty fake they're highly scripted they have visually touched up to look better than the real game ever could they might have one or two features that might not make it into the final game very standard stuff but what we now know is that the anthem trailer of 2017 was a complete lie visually it was like night and day compared to the release product the portrayal of a bustling fort Tarsus an outdoor landscape with an infinite horizon insane foliage and weather detail none of this would make it into the final release the idea that you could go from the fort to the actual game without a two minute load screen total lie the organic feeling world full of dynamic events a total lie the ability to see the loop that drops and equipment immediately total lie hill jours wrath the weapon that she looted didn't even ship with the game even the weapon was a lie it was a lie because none of this even existed yet and yet this is what we would be told would be in our hands playable in the span of just a few months for a few years as a consumer it's natural to be angry about this but we have to keep things in perspective the Bioware development team they went through hell lives were ruined on the back of anthems development this is a serious thing for us as consumers the worst that happened to us is that we lost out on 60 bucks and maybe a few hours of our time we have to keep things in perspective but we also have to hold by a way to account it's not ok to develop games like this to churn and burn your staff and then to lie to consumers about what they can expect it's not ok to release a game this broken and unfinished and rely on the live service model to eventually make it good the challenge with all this though is that a lot of the discussion about games nowadays has become deeply partisan and tribal my review was one of the first major reviews to hit YouTube and it was one that really didn't hold anything back I could immediately see how terrible this game was and I said as much in my review the result was a backlash the likes of which I have never experienced before in my entire time covering games even bigger when then when I warned everyone about like fallout 76 when I did my Peter impressions video which people also hate it back then I had hundreds thousands of people abusing me as cancerous and toxic and thirsty for hate clicks I had reddit threads that dissected my review point by point to rebutted a dozens of influences and content creators EA game changes publicly call me out for being toxic in various reaction videos one group of really crazed Anthem supporters began spreading this theory that I didn't understand how the game's combat worked and that's why I was reviewing the so Paulie it wasn't anthem that was bad it was made I still get tweets and comments from these people almost daily telling me that I've lost all credibility as a voice in the gaming industry because of the way that I talked about anthem I think for a lot of these people they're leveraged so deep into their support for anthem that they're unable or unwilling to see the reality that's staring them in the face this sort of blind support for a game is one of the reasons that publishers and developers are so comfortable with releasing games that are not finished they know that a sizable chunk of their fanbase will not only put up with it but defend it my initial review was part one and I plan to do a part two after I'd spent a few weeks at the end game but as I was playing it I realized that there was no end game there's nothing there there's just nothing no mission variety no loot worth chasing no cosmetics worth a damn nothing so I cancelled that review and had planned to come back to the game later when the cataclysms launched which by the way we still have no [ __ ] clue what they are but anyway having read this article now I just don't even know if I'll come back I don't maybe I will I honestly don't know yet the thing about anthem this train wreck it's it's a wreckage still in motion only a few weeks ago it was revealed that the entire scaling math on which the game is built is smoke and mirrors and that your level one weapon does more damage than a fully stacked legendary it was revealed that having empty gear slots buffs your DPS because of the way that item level is calculated it's still a total mystery what the luck stat is and whether or not the stat does anything but everyone's pretty certain it doesn't the recent patch that was meant to fix the game completely broke the game removing guaranteed master works from the bosses they went on to fix that later but it's still funny the new vanity chests that have been added to the game a total garbage full of stuff no one wants and there's still no sort of honor and things that people want to chase to make the character look cool that whole system is basically non-existent at this point at the very core of all of this though is Bioware's unwillingness to improve drop rates and make the game rewarding you spend 20 minutes in-game to get a shot and an item which has a tiny tiny percentage of being useful to you it's a world of warcraft your operate overlaid onto a ludus shooter drop pool it's absolutely the wrong calibration for the item economy and everyone has been screaming this at the desk for months and they have resolutely ignored these cries at this point it's clear that they don't want anthem to be rewarding they want it to be a soul-crushing time-wasting grind there's no other explanation they want it to be this way otherwise they would change it my guess is that they worry that if people get geared up they'll leave because there's nothing else to do well people are leaving anyway only they're leaving pissed off because Byway are wasting their time I labeled this video a post mortem because I think that the Schreyer article serves as a death knell for anthem it comes after seven weeks of acrimony where tensions just seem to keep building and building and players continue fleeing the game in droves if you read through the anthem subreddit you get the sense that this was an epochal moment for the community with many of them deciding that yes enough was enough it was time to move on I'm not foolish enough to predict that this is the end for Anthem I do think anthem is dead but I certainly don't rule out it returning many many games have been resurrected from the dead by their publishers so it's possible but I think anthem is a fundamentally different situation than the others in my review I tried to impress that anthem isn't just lacking in content like vanilla destiny was and it didn't have just like bad netcode issues and some balance issues like Rainbow six siege did anthem is a deeply broken game and a deeply flawed game from a design perspective I didn't talk about combos in detail in my review not because I didn't understand them but because they are a very one-dimensional combat mechanic at the entirety of the combat model rests on them if you're gonna make a ludus shooter your combat system must have depth to engage players in the long term I do not believe that anthem has that or anything close to that you also need loot worth chasing not just stats on a page not just numbers but actual loot that people look at and they go yeah that's [ __ ] cool I want that ding that doesn't exist at the moment the anthems not even close to that you need a broader suite of enemies better enemy AI better and design more world environments fewer loading screens more endgame activities and better social integration it's not just one or two things that [ __ ] anthem it's the entire package into end just just think about this compare this product with what released just four weeks later with the division to now ask yourself how long do you think it would take to get anthem to the same place that the division 2 is already at or destiny 2 is already at or warframe is already at hell even Borderlands 2 is already at how long will it take to get there how much effort how many more devs churned and burn to make this happen I don't want that for Bioware staff I don't I think they've suffered enough if Bioware were to announce that they'd be winding down long term support for anthem so they could focus on making the next Dragon Age a better product and they could do it in a way that was more sustainable and supportive of Bioware staff then that would be alright with me I know it's an unpopular opinion with diehard anthem fans but that's honestly what I think more than anything though I really hope that Bioware's senior leadership team can identify the core theme running through the entirety of shriya's article and that is that the Bioware magic is dead if it was ever there it's gone now you can't run a studio on crunch and pixie dust it has to be run on good clear thinking rigorous planning a concern for the well-being of staff and at all times complete honesty and transparency with your community Bioware was sent a bullet point summary of the Jason stria article prior to it being published and just a few moments after his article went live they posted their response to it this response was crafted and approved before they had even read shriya's article and yet they chose to characterize his piece as tearing down the work of others and commenting that articles such as these do not make our industry better rather than listen to this feedback take it on board reflect on it respond to it buy away his first instinct was to swat it away I don't personally have faith in anthems redemption but if it is to occur at all it has to begin with better leadership all of this begins and ends with leadership the reason I thought so much about this Commerce I had with this God of War developer about how they managed to create something so magnificent it was because that story always reminds me what good leadership looks like and what good leadership can produce Bioware need new better leaders because the trend chasing of the Old Republic the rushed crunch of Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition the disappointment of Andromeda and the utter catastrophe of anthem weren't the fault of the junior burgers at the bottom of the food chain something has to change and it has to change at the top [Music]

Channel: Skill Up

Views: 850,318

Keywords: skill up, skill, up, gameplay, games, guide, anthem, anthem game, anthem review, review, anthem game review, end game, javelin, final review, full game, content, all content, bioware, rpg, shooter rpg, loot, gear, builds, meta, endgame, combat, loot system, loot drops, best gear, anthem story, anthem gameplay, game play, pc, playstation 4, xbox one, ps4, ps4 pro, xbox one x, anthem javelin, campaign, anthem endgame content, anthem endgame gameplay, rpgs, cutscene, movie, kotaku, postmortem

Id: MKTXBe-jtfk

Length: 20min 59sec (1259 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 06 2019