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For those who did not play or ignored BioWare’s Anthem here is a brief idea of what the game entails according to its Wikipedia entry.

“Anthem is an online multiplayer action role-playing video game developed by BioWare and published by Electronic Arts. The game was released worldwide for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on February 22, 2019.

Set on an unnamed planet, players assume the role of Freelancers, heroic adventurers who wear powerful exo-suits to defend humanity from the threats beyond their cities' walls. The game's title refers to the Anthem of Creation, a powerful and mysterious force responsible for most of the extraordinary technology, phenomena, and threats in the world. In the main narrative, the player's Freelancer is tasked with stopping the villainous Monitor from seizing control of the Anthem.

Anthem received mixed reviews from critics, who criticized it for its repetition, technical aspects, and story, contributing to an experience that felt repetitive and shallow, although its combat, flight controls, and visuals received some praise. Despite some positive sales achievements, the game failed to meet commercial expectations. BioWare announced in February 2020 that they would be reinventing the core gameplay of Anthem as part of a long-term plan; all future development was ceased in February 2021." Here is where the melancholy story begins.

BioWare’s Anthem was titled “Beyond” (Dylan as the code name) and was even mentioned that it would be showcased at E3 2017 under the same moniker.

This substitute of a name made some of the developers wonder how was this even related to the game they were working on.  

Things changed and they changed for the worse which may have come as surprise considering BioWare’s legendary releases such as the Dragon Age and Mass Effect franchises.

Poor planning and management as well as troubled pre-production resulted in many features and mechanics being worked on in the extremely late stages of development to the point that even the developers were trepid and confused as to what the game even meant or how it had to work to be released as a final product.

When Anthem launched for the public in February 2019, fans were heavily disappointed for the game did not live up to their expectations and most of the reasons stemmed from the fact that it was heavily littered with bugs and issues plus was not on par with other Co-Op looter shooters such as the Borderlands franchise by Gear Box Studios.

Due to which it received a Metacritic score of just barely 55 and was the second consecutive title after Mass Effect: Andromeda to flop.

The bugs and redundant features to be fixed kept cropping up even days and weeks post launch.

A report by Kotaku revealed an alarming viewpoint thanks to interviews with 19 developers who either worked on the game or adjacent to them, were granted anonymity for fear of being labeled as whistleblowers. It was observed that the technical issues become apparent due to EA’s Frostbite engine not being able to support the game for many of BioWare’s developers, and understaffed departments battled to support the entire project. A toxic relationship between the two studios responsible for developing the game made things worse for rapid prototyping and creation.

According to Kotaku, “This is a video game that was in development for practically seven years but didn’t enter production until the final 18 months, thanks to big narrative reboots, major design overhauls, and a leadership team said to be unable to provide a consistent vision and unwilling to listen to feedback.”

BioWare with Anthem and Mass Effect: Andromeda also showed the industry that toxic work and crunch culture made human beings sink into mental health crises such as Depression and Anxiety.

The pitfall of the sanity of the staff according to the anonymous contributors was and still is literally an ongoing problem in the studio since eons.

Many senior developers had to leave production midway for the safety of their wellbeing and applied the same to other members of the staff too with horror stories such as break downs and combustion barely into 3-4 months of work.  

I quote another example from Kotaku’s deep diver report;

“The most common anecdote relayed to me (the author) 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.’

‘Keep in mind,’ said another Anthem developer, ‘everyone had hard decisions to make that we’ve never done before. New IP, new genre, new technology, new style, everything was new.’”

A lot of trouble was caused due to the fact that the FrostBite engine by EA used for Anthem had to be overhauled and re-jigged in order to work for the systems and general functioning of the game.

Poor tools made it difficult to create the simplest of iterations for the game.

The genre and style of Anthem was never naturally supported by the engine natively.

These are just some of the few reasons that resulted in an ambitious project falling flat on it’s face.

Which brings us to the last part which is that the development style for video games and their respective studios must seriously undergo a quantum shift in paradigms, regardless of the fact that the games industry over the years adopted the “Holly Wood” method for handling the production methods in many AAA or even indie-AAA studios and their titles.

Debates are not enough and, in the future, there hopefully would be a few shining examples of a new generation of studios providing a different approach and methodology towards the creating the entire gamut of video game(s).

By Nachiket Huilgol

Tektrek Co-founder