Kotaku‘s big report about the mismanaged development, the work environment, and the indecisive leadership for Anthem, has brought out a response from the developers. (And, it was published in mere minutes.)
The site says that BioWare‘s game has been redesigned multiple times, and thus, the flight ability was removed and then re-added over and over during the game’s lengthy pre-production phase. Initially, it seemed like our character might be just gliding, and it didn’t seem fun either. Also, it was also planned that only one exosuit would have had the flight ability!
There were developers who thought that the flying would take away the factor of discovering and exploring the world, and others complained about how it was difficult to implement this function into Anthem. It kept going until early 2017 when the devs showed an early demo to Patrick Söderlund, a former Electronic Arts (the publisher of the game) executive. He didn’t like it, and this point is where the flight was added to the game without a second thought! However, it required „six weeks of pretty significant crunch,” but Söderlund liked the second demo. It’s amazing, isn’t it? The inadequate technology (the Frostbite engine) didn’t help BioWare either.
BioWare has responded: „We chose not to comment or participate in the story because we felt there was an unfair focus on specific team members and leaders.” Regarding the crunch, they say it was not a major topic of feedback in our internal postmortems”, but there’s „always room to improve. We don’t see the value in tearing down one another or one another’s work. We don’t believe articles that do that are making our industry and craft better.”
Leave a Reply