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Former BioWare developer Ian Saterdalen reflects on Anthem’s poor reception : “We knew it wasn't ready, as this game was literally created in 15 month

FireFly

Member
When it comes to these video game sob stories, there's probably blame to go on all ends from the grunts to management. Ok, the janitor and cafeteria workers are safe.

But in gaming it sure seems when there's a shit game, management is always to blame. You never hear the other way around because management almost never publicly calls out morons at the office unless it's Elon Musk outing people on Twitter. They act more mature on social media.

Just to show how one sided it is, everyone has had mistakes at work or churned out a bad product, MS office doc or some sessions of bad customer service. It doesn't matter what job it is.

Look at all the mistakes you made. How many of them are truly the bosses fault and how many were oops I kinda fucked it up myself?
Well, my boss' job is to monitor the work I am doing and make sure it is up to task. Obviously, not every mistake gets "seen" but if I am consistently failing to perform as expected and my boss doesn't pick up on it, he should be held accountable. In big projects such as Anthem, there should be meetings where the scope of the game is established, deliverables are set, and progress is evaluated. If employees can't perform their jobs, it should flow up into those meetings.

There is actually a super comprehensive post mortem on Anthem in which employees discuss all the mistakes that were made. And the key takeaway is that in these meetings, nothing was actually decided!

"The most common anecdote relayed to me by current and former BioWare employees was this: A group of developers are in a meeting. They’re debating some creative decision, like the mechanics of flying or the lore behind the Scar alien race. Some people disagree on the fundamentals. And then, rather than someone stepping up and making a decision about how to proceed, the meeting would end with no real verdict, leaving everything in flux. “That would just happen over and over,” said one Anthem developer. “Stuff would take a year or two to figure out because no one really wanted to make a call on it.”

“They were still finding the vision for the game,” said a second. “I saw multiple presentations given to the entire studio trying to define what Anthem was about. The Hollywood elevator pitch version of Anthem: ‘When we talk about Anthem, what we mean is X.’ I saw many, many variations of that over time, and that was indicative of how much conflict there was over trying to find a vision for this game, and over how many people were struggling to have their vision become the one that won out.”

"That was the thing that the team lacked—nobody was making decisions. It was deciding by panel. They’d almost get to a decision and then somebody would go ‘But what about this?’ We were stagnant, not moving anywhere.”

 
Nobody wanted a fucking GaaS game from Bioware.

Single player story telling games got them famous and earned them a fan base.
If I want to have gamers screaming expletives at me I'll start up Call of Duty or Destiny.
 
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