General Gaming How Anthem Went Wrong (Jason Schreier/Kotaku)

[Paperclyp]

18 hours ago, Kal-El814 said:

 

EA’s response took time to write and it was posted 16 minutes after the article went up. There’s no way they consumed the content of the article and wrote their response in that amount of time.

 

 

I’m sorry, EA saying “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,” to this particular article is 100% undiluted and disingenuous bullshit and should absolutely be called out for the ridiculous nonsense that it is.

Preach

[Paperclyp]

41 minutes ago, mikechorney said:

And personally, I don't believe unionization is practical for the VG industry 

How so?

[skillzdadirecta]

11 minutes ago, Paperclyp said:

How so?

I was gonna ask the same thing.

[AbsolutSurgen]

1 hour ago, Paperclyp said:

How so?

 

1 hour ago, skillzdadirecta said:

I was gonna ask the same thing.

Game developers don't have the kind of leverage to make unionization stick.  There aren't large capital investments in plants (like the auto or steel industries). It is relatively easy for a publisher to transfer work from a union shop to a non-union shop in another place (or country).

[Paperclyp]

1 hour ago, mikechorney said:

 

Game developers don't have the kind of leverage to make unionization stick.  There aren't large capital investments in plants (like the auto or steel industries). It is relatively easy for a publisher to transfer work from a union shop to a non-union shop in another place (or country).

I am skeptical of that claim. And if a strong union could be formed, I would expect a PR nightmare if a developer suddenly out-sourced the work just to skip out on dealing with a union. 

 

They need some kind of protections, and unionizing is the most likely way to get what they need. Perhaps people like Jason shining light on this stuff is helping. 

 

I agree he has a thin skin, but his work is typically pretty dang thorough. 

[Jason]

1 hour ago, mikechorney said:

Game developers don't have the kind of leverage to make unionization stick.  There aren't large capital investments in plants (like the auto or steel industries). It is relatively easy for a publisher to transfer work from a union shop to a non-union shop in another place (or country).

 

The TV and film industries are both extremely unionized despite the fact that they're all lurching from contract gig to contract gig.

[Duderino]

19 hours ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

They need to be allowed to use Unreal Engine. 

Honest question, have there been any UE4 games with Anthem’s complexities that demonstrate the game would be better suited for the engine?  Something like a big AAA open world game with high speed traversal, loads of FX on screen, and online multiplayer?

 

I’m sure frostbite came with major challenges, but Anthem’s game pitch isn’t exactly a safe bet for any engine.

[Xbob42]

1 hour ago, Duderino said:

Honest question, have there been any UE4 games with Anthem’s complexities that demonstrate the game would be better suited for the engine?  Something like a big AAA open world game with high speed traversal, loads of FX on screen, and online multiplayer?

 

I’m sure frostbite came with major challenges, but Anthem’s game pitch isn’t exactly a safe bet for any engine.

Despite all its other problems, Crackdown 3 is open world and has plenty of fast traversal. Days Gone, too. Fortnite for sure. Kingdom Hearts 3 has everything but the online play (and let's be clear: 4-player co-op is not a challenge for the fucking Unreal engine), Ark, PUBG, etc.

Is there any single game exactly like Anthem? No. But "has graphics, open world and 4-player co-op" are not features I expect Unreal to struggle with, and tons of Unreal Engine games move extremely fast and look extremely nice. You don't even fucking fly that fast in Anthem. You fall to the ground like 3-4x faster than you jet straight down, it's slowed down that much.

Know what else UE4 has? A FUCKING THIRD-PERSON CAMERA OPTION BY DEFAULT.

 

Frostbite isn't built for this shit. You have developers screaming that the engine and tools suck, there is no need to defend or pretend. Frostbite is great if you're Dice, making a Dice game, and not great for anyone else. Period.

[TwinIon]

1 hour ago, Duderino said:

Honest question, have there been any UE4 games with Anthem’s complexities that demonstrate the game would be better suited for the engine?  Something like a big AAA open world game with high speed traversal, loads of FX on screen, and online multiplayer?

 

I’m sure frostbite came with major challenges, but Anthem’s game pitch isn’t exactly a safe bet for any engine.

Two things that came up in the article that I think would make a difference are standard game features and the availability of knowledgeable support staff. UE has a whole lot built by default (cameras, inventories, and save states were things mentioned specifically, but there are a lot of other features built up over the years.) Also, a lot of that standard stuff is relatively well optimized. Maybe you have to write your own inventory system anyways, but every feature you don't have to write from scratch saves a lot of time. The support thing is also a really big deal. With Frostbite if you have a question as to how something works, how to change something, or even if something exists, there aren't a bunch of resources. It's your team, EA Sweden, and maybe someone working on a very different game. With UE, you have both a community of people working with it and real professional support that can help you out.

 

You're absolutely right that it would take a lot of work to get a game like Anthem working on UE. It's not an out of the box perfect solution or shortcut to making a complex game work well. What it does do is both jumpstart the process by eliminating the necessity of building basic systems from scratch, and it streamlines development by giving you access to both a wider community of support and paid, professional support at Epic. I have no clue how EA's math looks when they compare those benefits to UE's substantial licencing fee but stories like this one make you question their conclusions.

[SimpleG]

19 minutes ago, Xbob42 said:

Frostbite isn't built for this shit. You have developers screaming that the engine and tools suck, there is no need to defend or pretend. Frostbite is great if you're Dice, making a Dice game, and not great for anyone else. Period.

Gotta disagree with you here

Dice sucks with the frsotbite engine as well. The engine needs to die.

[Xbob42]

Just now, SimpleG said:

Gotta disagree with you here

Dice sucks with the frsotbite engine as well. The engine needs to die.

True enough.

[Duderino]

2 hours ago, Xbob42 said:

Despite all its other problems, Crackdown 3 is open world and has plenty of fast traversal. Days Gone, too. Fortnite for sure. Kingdom Hearts 3 has everything but the online play (and let's be clear: 4-player co-op is not a challenge for the fucking Unreal engine), Ark, PUBG, etc.

Is there any single game exactly like Anthem? No. But "has graphics, open world and 4-player co-op" are not features I expect Unreal to struggle with, and tons of Unreal Engine games move extremely fast and look extremely nice. You don't even fucking fly that fast in Anthem. You fall to the ground like 3-4x faster than you jet straight down, it's slowed down that much.

Know what else UE4 has? A FUCKING THIRD-PERSON CAMERA OPTION BY DEFAULT.

 

Frostbite isn't built for this shit. You have developers screaming that the engine and tools suck, there is no need to defend or pretend. Frostbite is great if you're Dice, making a Dice game, and not great for anyone else. Period.

  Ark and PUBG definitely have had their performance issues.  Crackdown 3 ran well, excluding the apparent hitching on PC,  but is far less dense of a world than Anthem’s.  Days Gone looks to be the more demanding open-world UE4 tittle, but going by earlier impressions has also faced performance challenges throughout development.  State of Decay 2 also clearly struggled with streaming issues. Kingdom hearts I can’t really speak to. Fortnite I’d put into a similar camp as Dice, given its built by the engine developers.

 

There’s obviously a lot more to an engine than just how performant it is, but I do see a common thread of open world tittles that have also struggled in this department with UE4.  Doesn’t mean the engine is incapable, just there’s likely a lot of modifications happening under the hood by these devs to get their games running well.

[Xbob42]

PUBG and Ark have performance issues because they were programmed by talentless apes. 

[Keyser_Soze]

10 hours ago, TwinIon said:

Mostly that, but also they then had to build the story around what  "Anthem" meant.

 

Nah, you just have to build up to a dramatic moment and then a character has to say, "This is our Anthem!"

 

And everyone gets blown away because that's the name of the game holy shit!

[Duderino]

4 hours ago, Xbob42 said:

PUBG and Ark have performance issues because they were programmed by talentless apes. 

I guess that kinda speaks to the problem.  

There’s just not many AAA open world UE4 tittles out that demonstrate the engine is well suited for a world like Anthem’s. Not saying that Frostbite is either of course.

[JPDunks4]

https://kotaku.com/bioware-boss-addresses-studio-issues-vows-to-continue-1833802608/amp?__twitter_impression=true

[crispy4000]

11 hours ago, Duderino said:

  Ark and PUBG definitely have had their performance issues.  Crackdown 3 ran well, excluding the apparent hitching on PC,  but is far less dense of a world than Anthem’s.  Days Gone looks to be the more demanding open-world UE4 tittle, but going by earlier impressions has also faced performance challenges throughout development.  State of Decay 2 also clearly struggled with streaming issues. Kingdom hearts I can’t really speak to. Fortnite I’d put into a similar camp as Dice, given its built by the engine developers.

 

There’s obviously a lot more to an engine than just how performant it is, but I do see a common thread of open world tittles that have also struggled in this department with UE4.  Doesn’t mean the engine is incapable, just there’s likely a lot of modifications happening under the hood by these devs to get their games running well.

 

Don’t forget Scalebound.  From what we know, performance issues were a large contributing factor to its cancellation.

 

That game might have been the closest equivalent in UE4 to what Anthem went for, on a technical level.

[AbsolutSurgen]

16 hours ago, Jason said:

 

The TV and film industries are both extremely unionized despite the fact that they're all lurching from contract gig to contract gig.

Yes.  But the dynamics in the TV and film industries don't exist in video game production.

[SaysWho?]

15 minutes ago, JPDunks4 said:

https://kotaku.com/bioware-boss-addresses-studio-issues-vows-to-continue-1833802608/amp?__twitter_impression=true

 

Quote

Since the publication of this week’s article, I’ve heard from a number of developers who work or have worked at beloved AAA game studios with messages like, “Replace BioWare with [my studio] and it’s the same story.” We can only hope that continuing to talk about and report on these issues will lead to widespread change.

 

My concern has always been that this kind of work environment could be detrimental to people wanting to get into the industry. I feel the solution revolves around a combination of, 1) better treatment for workers, better pay, less abnormally high hours per week, and 2) making games as easy to develop as possible considering development times have increased.

[AbsolutSurgen]

2 minutes ago, SaysWho? said:

 

 

My concern has always been that this kind of work environment could be detrimental to people wanting to get into the industry. I feel the solution revolves around a combination of, 1) better treatment for workers, better pay, less abnormally high hours per week, and 2) making games as easy to develop as possible considering development times have increased.

One of the fundamental reasons that studios can get away with this, is there are more people that want to make games, than there are jobs for them.  If it was hard for studios to find new people that wanted to work in the industry, they would treat them better.

[TwinIon]

3 hours ago, SaysWho? said:

My concern has always been that this kind of work environment could be detrimental to people wanting to get into the industry. I feel the solution revolves around a combination of, 1) better treatment for workers, better pay, less abnormally high hours per week, and 2) making games as easy to develop as possible considering development times have increased.

As someone that was writing code in high school and went to college for comp sci, all while loving video games, my understanding of the work culture of creating games kept me out of the industry. Little of this is new, it's just worse in some cases than others, and it generally gets more press when the games don't meet expectations.

 

One of the under discussed parts of this report is that Dragon Age: Inquisition had many of the same issues (Frostbit sucks, horrible crunch time, etc.), but the game ended up being good and sold well, so no one changed.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

The responses to the BioWare reaction have been scathing:

 

The Press is Not Your Enemy, BioWare (Polygon)

BioWare responded just 15 minutes after the report was published with a terse statement that doesn’t dispute the details in Kotaku’s report. However, the response does awkwardly conclude with a wag of the finger at the press for shining a light on the studio’s problems.  If the takeaway for BioWare’s leadership is that the press shouldn’t hold them accountable, then they perhaps haven’t learned from the game’s tumultuous development.

 

BioWare's awful response to Kotaku's exposé pours petrol on a raging PR fire (Rock, Paper, Shotgun)

In a mere 424 words, BioWare handwaved away the entire brutal content of Kotaku’s piece. The original article alleged gruelling working practices, devastating levels of mental health issues amongst staff, and awful-sounding issues with direction and leadership. BioWare appeared to dismiss all these matters, whether factual or not, as “not a major topic of feedback in our internal postmortems.”   But even more seriously, they also appeared to condemn the very concept of journalism itself.

 

 

[Bacon]

As great as all of this exposing is, if it doesn't result in the next game being good then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

17 hours ago, SimpleG said:

Gotta disagree with you here

Dice sucks with the frsotbite engine as well. The engine needs to die.

 

[Dexterryu]

The interesting thing for me is whether this game is able to turn around like the Division did. The games came out in a similar state... Very good core gameplay, cool world, great graphics, but buggy and with a rough end game. In Divisions case, if felt like the release product was more the case of a publisher pushing the game out the door before it was ready in addition to some beginner mistakes in regards to MMOish games than just a bad development effort.

 

Anthem's struggles seem to be more of a developer in disarray. Lots of engine and design disfunction, which I think giving Bioware's history are a little big harder to forgive. They've released some absolutely amazing games, they've released a somewhat successful MMO (SWTOR), and they've done lots of open worlds, rpgs, and shooters. So now things are going to be dependent less on the competence of the developers technical ability and more on whether or not they can be a functional development studio again.