BioWare & EA Cancel Development of Anthem NEXT

[Tomorrow]

Arent those deceased and reanimated as skeleton franchises already?

Id say they are.

I think they are not. Both are still very much relevant. ME3 multiplayer still has a dedicated community. One would think a tacked on horde mode in a predominantly singleplayer game from 10 years ago would have died off long ago. Buit it has not. And there are still people playing ME for the first time.

It's not the IP that's the problem with BioWare. Its writing and management/execution. They have good ideas but if the writing sucks and management is rife with undecisive people then what you get is a poorly executed release with unintresting characters. Bugs can be fixed. Bad writing stays after the release.

 

[msimax]

can i get my refund

 

[mouacyk]

Titan Fall 3 wanted.

 

[kapone32]

Titan Fall 3 wanted.

Now that is a seriously good franchise.

 

[mouacyk]

Now that is a seriously good franchise.

I'm just not sure BioWare should be touching the franchise though. Respawn perfected the games as pure action gameplay without cluttering it up with RPG elements. I'd like to keep it that way.

 

[Vayra86]

I think they are not. Both are still very much relevant. ME3 multiplayer still has a dedicated community. One would think a tacked on horde mode in a predominantly singleplayer game from 10 years ago would have died off long ago. Buit it has not. And there are still people playing ME for the first time.

It's not the IP that's the problem with BioWare. Its writing and management/execution. They have good ideas but if the writing sucks and management is rife with undecisive people then what you get is a poorly executed release with unintresting characters. Bugs can be fixed. Bad writing stays after the release.

Can agree on the first bit. Not so much the second. Bioware lost its talent. It got managed away. Is this a management problem - yes, but the damage has already been done. You don't keep your most talented people by robbing them of their ability to be creative - thát is their selling point. They will go sell that somewhere else and that is what happened to Bioware, and many other 'absorbed' studios.

The writing you got in ME_A is the writing you will be getting.

 

[Tomorrow]

Can agree on the first bit. Not so much the second. Bioware lost its talent. It got managed away. Is this a management problem - yes, but the damage has already been done. You don't keep your most talented people by robbing them of their ability to be creative - thát is their selling point. They will go sell that somewhere else and that is what happened to Bioware, and many other 'absorbed' studios.

The writing you got in ME_A is the writing you will be getting.

Well my point stands about writing and execution. Wheter that is due to lack of talent or brain drain i do not know.

 

[Chrispy_]

Can agree on the first bit. Not so much the second. Bioware lost its talent. It got managed away. Is this a management problem - yes, but the damage has already been done. You don't keep your most talented people by robbing them of their ability to be creative - thát is their selling point. They will go sell that somewhere else and that is what happened to Bioware, and many other 'absorbed' studios.

The writing you got in ME_A is the writing you will be getting.

This is the accurate truth. Despite only playing ME:A last year, I've already forgotten most of the plot because it was pretty unremarkable. I don't know if that's because the story got cut to smithereens when EA pushed to release half a game and half a story, or because the writing genuinely sucked. I'm hoping it's the former, but until we see new material we won't have any way to tell.

Andromeda's settings was rich enough and despite the races missing from the our galaxy it had plenty of potential - there was just way too much stuff left untapped, unexplained, or given cursory narrative that was never fleshed out which smacks of "unfinished content" rather than ineptitude.

 

[junglist724]

Andromeda wasn't bad, it just suffered from EA's heavy-handed, ruin-everything-it-touches forced release schedule. Bioware had to cut it down massively from their original plan with several races from the Milky Way omitted and plenty of unfinished content just being cut altogether. The launch bugs didn't help, but I only played it last year after all the patches had fixed the worst of the glitches.

I enjoyed Andromeda for what it was, and in a relatively bug-free state I just wish they'd had a larger team and more time to release they game they actually wanted to rather than the half-baked, half-sized game that EA made them push out the door.

The problems were all Bioware, their different studios didn't collaborate well and they wasted something like 2 years trying to make procedurally generated planets work before abandoning it leaving 1.5 years to actually finish the game.

 

[Vayra86]

The problems were all Bioware, their different studios didn't collaborate well and they wasted something like 2 years trying to make procedurally generated planets work before abandoning it leaving 1.5 years to actually finish the game.

Exactly. Devs with little talent and/or shaky project management. Good, well cultivated teams dont have these problems and when they do, they solve them, instead of just throwing several years of work in the dust bin. Imagine the money and time to market damage involved! This is what kills a project, and it actually did with ME _A; and there are some scary similarities with what CDPR recently released. The weird communication surrounding the release is another clear sign of damage control.

Luciky we know that the cause with CDPR is and was always a project management thing. Scope was not clearly defined, and then oversold.

 

[Chrispy_]

The problems were all Bioware, their different studios didn't collaborate well and they wasted something like 2 years trying to make procedurally generated planets work before abandoning it leaving 1.5 years to actually finish the game.

Procedurally-generated and Mass Effect shouldn't ever have been used in the same sentence; We want handmade assets that are carefully tailored to the plot!

IMO procedural generation has its place when you will be repeating the same content over and over again a large number of times. ME is not that, the story will be fixed, multi-pathed, for sure, but the whole point of a story is that it's not random.

 

[Voluman]

'keep the Anthem live service running as it exists today'

I cant play since weeks, soo how is it? My game never can find a server to start...

 

[Tomorrow]

'keep the Anthem live service running as it exists today'

I cant play since weeks, soo how is it? My game never can find a server to start...

The servers may be running but if there are no players it is of little use.

 

[Voluman]

The servers may be running but if there are no players it is of little use.

Of course there are no players when you cant pass the login screen becuase it is failed to find a server...

Well, yes, probably there wouldn't be much player, but this way the ones who want to give it a try, they cant do that either. And it is still listed on origin and tempted you to buy, when in reality you cant pass login screen. What am i missing?

 

[Tartaros]

Im sure it was management at EA who were pushing them to use it, I mean thats how we got broken games like ME: Andromeda and some of the FIFA games where players on the pitch are all glitching out.

It's confirmed it was a Patrick Söderlund imposition, much like with Dragon Age, and they had to fight for support against the Fifas and Battlefields because those were the money bringing games.