EA is a bunch of f*c*ing idiots

Hey Wave,

Your Ironman mod for MEA was a great lead-in to the flying in Anthem.

Agree, shifty decision (over, and over, and over, and over, and over ad nauseam it seems) by Blower and EA.

Can't stomach MP without flying now; even the assisted jumps in MEAMP and junk like in  DOOM pale in comparison to the full Iron Man.

Before lauch I expected Anthem to replace SWOTOR. Old Mass Effect team builds Anthem up -> game gets shifted to Austin -> SWOTOR gets his finale -> Mass Effect team returns to ME. Didn't work out.

As much as I despise EA, I think we must be realistic here. It was Bioware that messed up Anthem in the first place. Sure - EA is the main investor, but they have given Anthem a fair chance. We all could read what a dumpster fire the development of Anthem was. It was a wonder they could even present anything at all at launch day. I personally predicted Anthem would end like this and I was right. And even after several desperate try's to improve things they could not get it right. The Anthem overhaul could only be succesfull if they did an "all hands on deck" type of rescue operation. That simply did not happen, and I am afraid that was the moment Anthem's fate was sealed.

Even while Bioware has changed drastically from their old "roots", they where still a company that primarily concentrated on single player, story driven RPG type of games. Multiplayer games are a whole kind of other breed. You cannot use the knowledge of the former games to shoehorn that in a multiplayer game. It simply will not work. In a single player game you play as the person where the whole game is concentrated around. In a multiplayer game that is not possible, and so the whole story telling must be changed. That was unknown territory for Bioware. Sure - They had some good idea's, but in the end they had no knowledge about what was really important in a multiplayer game. And we all have seen the result. Getting the loot completely wrong in a game that revolves around the party driven looter-shooter concept is not very bright.

I feel really sorry for those that like the game, but I think the game was not savable without a massive investment. As Bioware have to survive I think it was the right decision to put all the resources and manpower they have in the remaining titles. If one of those titles fails also, I think Bioware is no more. Also - I personally hate the idea that all the resources and manpower that was swallowed up by Anthem was taken away from those games that Bioware is (was) really good at, namely story drive single player role playing games. I still get mad if I think about what Mass Effect Andromeda could have been if all resources where not drained from the development of that game, only to be put in Anthem.

Good point, but they aren't really juggling the games at the same time, no? We see them stretch the releases out for much longer now because of this.

I think one can hope that they have the talent to develop good games which aren't like their gems of the past. Hopefully they will keep the "essence" of DA and ME as they do it.

As for scrapping Anthem, it was probably the only choice by now. The game was abandonned pretty much right after the release when they left it with a skeleton crew, and later it became more evident when that skeleton crew didn't grow after the whole Anthem 2.0 idea.

Merely the inevitable fallout from terrible leadership and their unfortunate decisions.(Looks at Hudson and Walters)

A small, partial "trail of tears"
--ME3 endings debacle
--DAI moves to Frostshite, suffers the "at the last moment" dev process, launches a buggy mess.
--"New" IP (Anthem) siphons resources
--MEA craps out, same dev probs as above. Gets abandoned to focus on new IP Anthem.
--Anthem craps out. Same dev probs as above. Gets abandoned to focus on DA4.

To me, a simple fallacy of leadership. Compounding bad decisions. By the same people. (Looks at Hudson and Walters again)

Only a partial list, and only a partial list of doofus "leaders".

Slippery slope anyone?

Expecting much from anyone involved in that mess is insanity.

I suspect there will be more than ample blame to pass around during Biowers autopsy.

You forgot the "roadmap" that vanished into thin air.

They have to meet EA's expectations first of all things.

Yes, and failing just adds difficulty to the next project. More cuts means less success chance. They are in a vicious circle.

We will have to wait to see, but I'm betting they don't.  I hope I'm wrong.

If I recall correctly Casey Hudson's initial plan was to make a sort of survival game in space, which then morphed somehow into a looter shooter when trying to explain the "fun" of it to EA.

Hilariously enough I think a survival game would have done fantastically given the recent surge in popularity of Rust and Valheim on Steam and Twitch. That would have been Bioware getting out ahead of the pack and predicting trends and would have been Bioware doing something very Bioware-y.

Too bad answering these tough questions to huge publishers like EA make it much easier to follow trends instead of helping to set them.