Chris Roberts told Newsweek in a lengthy interview that we shouldn’t dig Anthem‘s grave just yet.

„You’ve seen it from No Man’s Sky and Sean Murray. Let me put it this way. There was 13 of them and they built something amazing. They should not have taken the amount of abuse and flack they had when it came out. As a technical challenge, to build something that big with that much stuff and such a small team, I am hats off very impressed by their talent. The problem was players’ expectations were so far beyond that. They imagined all this extra stuff. When they were first showing it, maybe there was some stuff that, through iteration or whatever, they couldn’t get into the game. They took a huge amount of abuse, they were written off and they just put their heads down and they kept updating, delivering and making it better and better. Now the perception has changed.

I would say the same for Anthem. I’ve played it, so I know there’s plenty of nice stuff in there, stuff that works, and then there’s some stuff that doesn’t work. It’s like what we’re doing on Star Citizen. It’s just iteration. I hope EA and BioWare don’t give up on it, that they get their heads down, roll out and improve things to make it work. Destiny was an ongoing process. That’s kind of how these games are. A lot of gamers don’t understand quite how difficult it is to deliver everything working flawlessly. The expectations keep ramping up, and in some ways, those expectations may be higher than people are humanly possible of always delivering. Then you’ve got some other realities that come in, like if you’ve been working on it for a while and just need to get it out. In the case of the live side, just keep working at it. Keep on swimming,” Roberts said.

He then explained that if Electronic Arts didn’t force BioWare to launch the game in the previous quarter year, then the devs could have delayed Anthem: „I wish there was a bit more and it was a bit deeper, and I wish maybe some of the lore and story stuff was a bit more dynamic. I felt like when it was originally pitched to me it was supposed to be more dynamic, and it felt static when I played it. To be honest with you, Destiny had some pretty static story stuff. It wasn’t that different from what I’d experienced.

Part of the problem is that Anthem comes with the EA penalty so people are predisposed to hate on it because they feel EA messes everything up. Then there was Andromeda which happened before, so there was already a thing where they felt like that was rushed out the door. And now they feel like the next thing was rushed out the door too. Then you have the Kotaku article which sort of pours a little fuel on the fire of that narrative. For situations like Anthem, it’s the result of friction between the needs of a public company and development. In development, if you didn’t care so much about quarters and stuff, you’d put it off for a year to polish, add more stuff and release it when it’s ready,” Roberts added.

The problem is that the expectations were big because of the game’s marketing. The same goes for No Man’s Sky: the pre-release promises were not kept at the tim. If the game was shown in a state it will be playable, without the devs/publishers going off the path of truth, then the situation would be different…

And Roberts – even with hundreds of millions of dollars of backing – at least he doesn’t launch Star Citizen prematurely on Steam, which is why his thoughts are reasonable.

Source: WCCFTech