At this point, I'd take texas BBQ than whatever Bioware is cooking.
Anthem may not be a great game nor have great player retention, but it did sell very well.
I mean goddam
Of course, but this is more of a "Kevin Costner's Waterworld" situation.
Producers delegate work, create the schedules and champion the director's wishes. As far as the live team in Austin goes, Ben was the primary guy but that said BioWare have had a Lot of internal criticism regarding the over-reliance on middle management (producers among others) and given the launch state of the game I wouldn't look at Ben and think that he was the best fit for such a Project, but A producer is still better than No producer. He pointed to their community managers saying "It's in good hands"... Excuse me, WHAT? A community manager isn't hands on with the production of the game, they're just there as a messenger between developer and fans, consumers and community.
The DA team has a solid core staff of veterans who were on respectively DA2 and DAI. and Mark Darrah as executive producer. It's in great hands. Ben was also not well liked by the SWTOR fans which is the project he managed before Anthem. He wasn't that much of a force at BioWare to be honest, certainly not for Mass Effect or Dragon Age.
Either EA stupidly banked on it blindly believing in "BioWare's new IP" or BioWare made a lot of unrealistic promises years ago and the marketing deal was locked. Whatever it was, EA banked HARD on the marketing and publicity for the E3s and launches of Anthem, and meanwhile BioWare's leadership was falling apart and their project management was screwing up. I'm sure they've had angry phonecalls from EA since release.
The Anthem Lead Writer Jay Watamaniuk also wrote about moving to a new building the other day. I think BioWare is scaling down.
Same thing that happened with Andromeda, and about the same time frame.
He works out of Edmonton - they've been working on moving to a new building before Anthem came out, and it's larger
Unfortunately, the epidemic of anxiety and depression came from this move and some employees said it was a cheaper setup allowing you to cram more employees in on the office space. Judging by good old Glassdoor this seems a common point of contention: Casey's open office initiative and I'm actually speculating that they might be moving back or into a smaller place now. The move should have ended last year, it started in September. They're moving again.
Yup...you can say it was a failure and a flop...but not even close to the biggest flop, even this gen. It sold really well for the first month or so and is still top 5 NPD for the year in the US.
Exactly. That's why I'm not really that beaten up about the news. I saw that EA unplugged thing and even the other developers from Respawn and stuff had sort of a skeptical look at him as he just sat there running his mouth about things he didn't seem to have much of a grasp on. It was like "did this guy even work on the game?" based on how he described their process. People have to remember Anthem was primarily built by the Edmonton team with the Austin team managing its live-service features. A big thing but it was primarily a project led out of the Edmonton studio, which Ben did not work in.
So you just making stuff up? Also I looked up Glassdoor, there's been three reviews this year and two of them are from Austin employees, they only moved this year, so how is this a "common point of contention" for the Edmonton office?
I feel bad for him. I thought he was on track to be the "Datto" of Anthem. Problem is no one cares about Anthem like they do Destiny.
He was referring to the new BioWare office. They are moving to a new building soon.
