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[IbizaPocholo]

Anthem Took Less Than a Year and a Half to Make, Says Developer

Anthem, one of BioWare's most recent games, was made in less than a year and a half. BioWare is [...]

comicbook.com

The game was filled with issues at launch, lacked any kind of meaningful content, and was generally quite boring. Support for the game was dropped fairly quickly and player counts plummeted. Many praised the core gameplay mechanics such as the Iron Man-esque flying, but it was clear this game was not the franchise starter EA had likely hoped for. It turns out that part of this is because the game was made very, very quickly. A lot of AAA games nowadays take anywhere from 3 – 5 years to make, if not longer, but Anthem was made in less than a year and a half according to a developer. On Twitter, ex-BioWare employee Ian Saterdalen revealed that Anthem was made in about 15 months, which is a really short amount of time for any AAA game, let alone one from such a massive studio for a new IP that was meant to be a live service game.

 

[tommycronin]

Is this supposed to be seen as a flex?

 

[j0hnnix]

What would have been if they worked on it another year or two. I got the game on deep sale and enjoyed it.. oh well.

 

[Topher]

Source:

 

[Draxon Gamer]

Visually and mechanically that makes this game more impressive.

As a playable game not so much.

Maybe EA should consider making CG movies for theaters.

 

[Perrott]

We already knew this from Schreier's report on Anthem's entire development cycle from four years ago.

But yeah, fucking wild that EA allowed BioWare to mess around and deliver nothing on this project for FIVE YEARS and then had them produce such a turd out of the shitshow of a pre-production they had done, while on the other hand they were cancelling Amy Hennig & Visceral Games Star Wars game and PopCap's action adventure PvZ game after they had produced solid vertical slices and with their launches being just a year away by the time the plug was pulled on those projects.

Patrick Söderlund was a cunt that didn't deserve his role as manager of EA's entire family of studios during that era.

 

[ChorizoPicozo]

we knew that.

which is very interesting when there is this acceptance of "videogames take too long to make"

 

[Sleepwalker]

The quote tweets are more interesting:

 

[RaptorGTA]

I seriously forgot about this game until I saw this post.

 

[dorkimoe]

I never bought into the hype around it but I picked it up for $20 and had fun playing solo then just sold it. It wasn’t that bad just wasn’t that good either

 

[TransTrender]

The quote tweets are more interesting:

Absolutely this trainwreck is much more interesting than the op

 

[Ozzie666]

That explains everything. I wouldn't be proud of it at all. The only thing they got right was the flying, it felt good. Then misleading fans with the roadmap to fix the game. But they were able to generate a good feel, but not a great loop.

 

[JimmyRustler]

15 months? How? Wasn‘t BioWare working in this forever? IIRC the project floated around as project Dylan .

 

[M.W.]

Fun game. Amazing it was only 15 months.

 

[Robb]

Explains why it felt like a hollow shell more than anything else.

 

[nemiroff]

The quote tweets are more interesting:

Oh man.. I honestly try not to.. But that's some correlations hard to unsee..

 

[Nihilum]

Bioware "magic" seems to be another word for mismanagement

 

[Team Andromeda]

So sad we never got a sequel to fix the issues of the 1st game, which for all its faults was an amazing experience and captured the sense of flight perfectly

 

[Eotheod]

Wasn't there a thread on this already?

 

[genesisblock]

Played the demo with a friend to give it a chance. But the constant loading screens, and tight corridor like design restricts your flying too much easily put us off. It's clearly a game of mismanagement.

 

[digdug2]

The bones of this game were great, considering the fact that the game was just literally bones and nothing more. EA should have let them overhaul it, as originally planned. The flying and combat were actually great, it's just that the game just felt like an empty husk.

 

[Perrott]

15 months? How? Wasn‘t BioWare working in this forever? IIRC the project floated around as project Dylan .

The didn't have a solid vision for it (was going back and forth between being a survival game, a looter shooter or an RPG, and everything in between) until EA told them to put together something by early 2017 or they'd cancel the project. They made a demo with the flying suits, and EA liked it so much that told them to make it pretty for E3. The team didn't know what kind of game Dylan was going to be until after they all saw that demo at E3, which was when all BioWare finally managed to be on the same page regarding the vision for this new IP. Too bad that it was too late for them to make a complete, polished AAA game out of it.

 

[mhirano]

It took less than 1 and a half years and it shows.
You get what you pay for, I guess…

 

[SmokedMeat]

I didn’t know this. Makes it all pretty impressive, really. Compare what they managed in 15 months vs Arkane’s 60 months.