alt Hacker NewsAs always, the Onion nailed it perfectly long ago:
https://theonion.com/anthem-developers-assure-players-whiteb...
'“We know the thousands of customers who pre-ordered Anthem have some concerns, but we are confident this collection of words scrawled on a conference room board will be a revolutionary third-person shooter experience when released at the end of the week,” said director Jonathan Warner, who shared a progress update with players by sending out a screenshot of an email chain that ended with an agreement to call the game Anthem.'
https://theonion.com/people-criticizing-anthem-don-t-underst...
"Stop complaining and attacking studios just because a game isn’t everything you want. Developers put too much stock in making games enjoyable and playable as it is. Planning to make something as profitable as Anthem was supposed to be and is a huge undertaking, so at least give them credit for trying. BioWare had 18 months to build a game that would sell millions of copies based on the goodwill they built up, and they hit it out of the park. You may not understand Q4 projections, but they do. Anthem is a game that exists and is funding [EA] CEO bonuses, and by that measure, it’s been a huge success."
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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.
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.