The Onion is funny, but not exactly kind here. I would recommend Mark Darrah's post-mortem on Anthem; he's not an unbiased source (he became an executive producer on the project part way through development, and I think he does try to let himself off easy in his retelling of events), but it's pretty clear that mismanagement--both within Bioware and especially from EA--set Anthem down a track that was hard to recover from. Development goals, gameplay design, and even architectural decisions were constantly shifting until late in development, leading devs to constantly rework the game as new requirements came and went.

https://youtu.be/CxwrCRdqZb8

Seems Anthem is gone, but not completely?

From the same post-mortem video:

former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah revealed that internally at the studio, the shooter had code for local play and private server use until a few months before launch. Presumably, it's still there to be "salvaged and recovered."

"Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months up to launch," Darrah commented. "I don't know that they still work but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered."

https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/anthem-is-dead-after-t...

I mean, most likely it just means they could run servers locally for development, that's pretty standard. I used to work on The Division and every dev could trivially spawn local servers for testing, I basically had it set up so every time I ran the client my own server started in the background. That was "local play" since the architecture of the game is fundamentally centered around all the gameplay systems running on the server. If(or rather - when) their public servers go down, the same statement could be made - that there is code in there for "private" or "local" play. But in reality it's just about running the servers locally, "salvaging" is just having access to the full source code, which is not something Ubisoft would ever do, just like EA wouldn't(I would love to be surprised though!).

I loved The Division. Some months ago I re-downloaded it and just ran around for a bit. The setting and world feel are still there and the story is deeper than some single player games. For a while I thought, wouldn't it be amazing if it was ever released (or leaked) so it could be player hosted or modded in a local kind of development like this. But, I didn't stay with that thought. There was just something about that game that had a beginning, middle and end for me. Maybe I'm just getting old.

> There was just something about that game that had a beginning, middle and end for me. Maybe I'm just getting old.

I think you had a very different experience than me. I enjoyed The Division 1 and 2 but the story was completely unmemorable and by the time you get to the end they shift you into end-game Diablo-esque grind-mode, not some definitive ending.

The voice recordings and non-linearity were what made it for me. I felt like I was piecing the world together as I explored. Even after doing the boss fight finding intel that explained something that wasn’t known before slotted it into my understanding of the story. By the time I reached the grind at the end, it was like I had a world in my head and it was ok to close the book.

Not quite; Darrah says in his video that the direction from EA flip-flopped between client server and peer-to-peer several times during development, so the code they'd be salvaging would be the original peer-to-peer code. But since that code isn't part of the final game and Bioware is going away... I kind of doubt that code exists in a state where it could be re-integrated with the retail release of Anthem.

Mark Darrah suggested releasing a single player only version but presumably this version of EA that has entirely shutdown BioWare altogether has even less reason to release Single Player Only Anthem.

There is maybe some hope archivists will find a production build of Anthem in the wilds of Steam versions with that local server code still accessible in some sort of debug flag and then reverse engineer some of the other live services Anthem depended on.

The game _was_ forced to release in that financial year, but as Darrah eloquently puts it: "There was no point in delaying because that team didn't have another year in them"

Both articles GP linked were jokes pointing blame at the mismanagement

For anyone unfamiliar with Anthem (including me, before I read the second Onion article) and curious about what happened, Wikipedia covers some of the executive decisions and leadership changes that hurt the effort:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_(video_game)#Developmen...

The "Frostbite" engine sounds like a disaster.

A long video on the subject from one of its project leads (Mark Darrah): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y65eoBVF0Y&t=10s

The frostbite engine seem to be the tip of the iceberg.

Core issue was lack of clear leadership from what I read on Wikipedia.

Iirc it was a stupid C-suite decision to use Frostbyte across EA studios. It never made much technical sense and DICE lacked the bandwidth and capital to support so many teams and usecases.

Yes after the success of frostbite around Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3 or so, EA decided it should be used in everything. Not unlike the mistake Capcom is making with REngine right now, if the performance woes of Monster Hunter Wilds and Dragons Dogma 2 are anything to go by.

Pretty sure there was even a Need for Speed game on Frostbite which was... huh.

> Pretty sure there was even a Need for Speed game on Frostbite

7 if wikipedia is to be trusted

I worked on three of them! While there are some serious issues with Frostbite and everyone loves blaming it for everything, its role in sabotaging huge projects is definitely overblown.

There are some issues with workflow and it is true that the UI definitely was, as many at EA said, "by programmers for programmers". But it's a very capable engine in the right hands.

That said, I'd pick Unreal any day for a AAA project and Unity or Unreal for smaller projects.

cool, i think Frostbite is really pretty honestly. performs well in BF but ive not played other games that use it knowingly.

Why would you pick unreal? It seems a lot of games made in it suffer performance issues. In my mind its a really unwieldy engine. (ofc, because its so feature packed, and perhaps because i am no professional engine dev :-))

For a professional project with at least 30+ developers the complexity of using Unreal is necessary and on par with any competent engine. In fact, I feel it is often much easier to do things well in Unreal.

I like Unreal because it's really quite intuitive and ergonomic for larger productions, fairly well documented, and has some of the coolest tech in the industry. Their rendering pipelines are beautiful and a joy to work with and I could rant all day about my love for Nanite and Lumen. It is light years ahead of Unity and much easier to understand and modify than Frostbite.

I will say that Unity has better support out of the box for custom shaders and compute than Unreal (and Frostbite).

Now, you mentioned performance. Funny thing: performance has been my primary professional concern for the last six years of my career. Unreal itself performs very well if you use it correctly and has really good documentation for best practices as well as amazing tools for measuring performance and indicating what is wrong. The tools in Frostbite were very lackluster. Unity has some fairly good stuff. Unreal feels so far ahead.

I believe the reason there are more visible Unreal games with performance issues is because there are a lot more noteworthy ambitious productions in Unreal. That means games which push what they can deliver, and often don't quite get there. And for smaller productions it's likely just a matter of less experienced teams not following the best practices or cranking settings up to 11 without proper performance budgeting.

It’s just a rerun. Bioware had an entire prototype of a game called “Agent”, a james bond style bioware RPG built on EA technology from sports games … until it became clear the technology to render madden NfL lacked something like “non flat surfaces” you’d need to build a world :/

The core issue is wanting to jump on the Fortnite hype train. Every exec wanted their own money printing machine. It's not unique to this studio: abandoning the core IP to pursue an Overwatch clone.

>Internally, the project was codenamed "Dylan" by BioWare, in reference to Bob Dylan in hopes that it would be a name that would be spoken about years later.

lol wut. Is this like an SEO thing?

No, this is more like a The Secret thing.

Well, a finger curled on the monkey paw, that's for sure.

>Just weeks prior to E3, EA notified BioWare that their desired name for the game, Beyond, would be too difficult to trademark.

They dumped the coolest name ever because of the legal department. Sad!

Frostbite was also a bugaboo for Mass Effect 3, contributing heavily to its shortcomings (although it was a great game nonetheless)

What’s most disappointing about Anthem was that the game had so much potential. The graphics, flying around like Ironman, sound, etc was incredible. But the world and content felt like you were playing a tech demo. It was like they finished polishing everything technical and were forced to launch before the game to rest on top of it was even started.

No other game has come close to capturing the absolute joy of flying in that game.

I still think that the storyline of the game and that the fact that an AT-AT just shows up in the middle of the storyline like you should know what it is seemed to hint the game might have at one point been intended to be a "Mandalorian simulator" (the central macguffins also had a very "Lost Mandalore" from Clone Wars and Rebels cartoons/"KOTOR" feel; the central quest hub pub was very Star Wars cantina-ish; etc). I don't think we'll ever get the full story on what happened, but it seemed like the game came out in a period where EA was worried they had lost the Star Wars license forever and might have panicked and over-corrected from a licensed game with a lot of excitement behind its storyline to an "original" property without the right writers to file the serial numbers off very well and without enough passion for whatever they were trying to make original about it. Whereas if they waited just a couple years they would have a shared Star Wars license again and the hype train of Disney+'s Mandalorian show, and a "Mandalorian simulator" might have been very well timed to be what "everyone" wanted.

That’s amazing, I actually had no idea about the ATAT thing

> No other game has come close to capturing the absolute joy of flying in that game.

Au contraire! Unreal Tournament with the Strangelove mod and no extras (e.g., just the puny Yellow Jacket gun) was some quality flying.

One problem with live service games is management will be tempted to release it as a minimum viable product and add all the features that would make it competitive in later updates. That's all well and good if players are hooked enough to stay, but if they don't there will never be enough money to finish the game.

> felt like you were playing a tech demo

Seems like that description fits a whole lot of modern (read: everything from the past decade) games. And some of those even enjoy success and are beloved by many players for some reason, like Breath of the Wild.

It's like when CA decided to build Hyenas, put millions into it, and shut it down just be the release.

Then they release Pharaoh TW that nobody wanted, Shogun TW "remaster" that everyone hates, and failed in many other ways.

At this point, I hope Sega puts them out of their misery. I can't stand another decade of Warhammer without any proper historical titles.