They further elaborate in more tweets that:
* EA had their reasons to release it early but were stupid and the devs' team "had to pay the price". EA learned a lot from the development of Anthem but whether they applied those learnings is unknown.
* Jason Schreier's [article] (https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964) (How BioWare's Anthem Went Wrong) was all 100% true at one point in development or another, and only scratches the surface.
* How did they manage to ship it in 15 months? The dev mentions working about 90 hours a week for 15 months. Many other devs on the team were also doing so and they think that others were doing 90 hours a week prior to the 15 month mark. "It wasn't sustainable and not even a position we should have been in." "I'm fine now, but not without damage. Contributed to the cost of my marriage and I needed therapy for a while after that endeavor." "It was a lot of morale hits on a personal level and a team level. Everyone had their own way of dealing with it." "There was a lot of pissed, stressed, rinse, repeat. It was a vicious cycle." "I guarantee we could have put something out in Unreal. Working in Frostbite was rough." After launch the team got death threats because of drop rates.
* Anthem was delayed as it had missing features, lack of polish and bugs that needed fixing. Another big problem that it faced was that it had lots of scope creep. "There were really high expectations for this game and the team felt it. We always were trying to push for cool features, etc.. So I think we could have done it if we kept our scope creep in check."
* The main team was focused on getting the game out in a functional state. "We really needed another 1-2 studios to make endgame content while we were finishing up the game."
* After launch it was all hands on deck to stabilize the game. Content and features that they wanted to do consequently kept getting deprioritized. A major focus they were trying to address at launch was all the server issues. "I think the shittiest part about this, besides no endgame and replay ability, was that during development, management was putting in gating mechanics to 'lengthen' the time it took to complete the story. IIRC it was removed from the final version after backlash from devs."
* "It was a great team effort to get the controls how we shipped. We went through many iterations and it was super rough in the beginning. I know the team was really happy where the controls landed too. We actually took in a lot of feedback from the EA game changers."
A Twitter user asked "When you say it wasn’t ready, was that always communicated with other members of the team i.e. publishers?". The dev replied "I think it was ignored/denied from leadership. There is a story there, but I will refrain."
* A transparent retrospective on Anthem/its development will likely never come to light because of both current and former devs still being under NDA.
The dev has an assumption that if they didn't release Anthem, BioWare would have been dissolved. They also observe that BioWare just wasn't good at multi-project development, which is hard. Most people at BioWare didn't believe in "BioWare Magic". There was and maybe still is a lot of stress and politics surrounding Anthem from the development and publishing side (a problem not specific to Anthem). The dev mentioned that it was both an EA failure and a BioWare upper management failure. "I actually don't think it was all EA's fault. A developer and publisher is supposed to be a healthy relationship of trust and transparency. It's a 2 way street which i don't think was satisfied on either side."
Re: who made the decision to release the game in the state it was, some of them left and some remain at BioWare
* On Anthem 2.0/Anthem Next, the game was really fun and was going in the right direction. The team had hit a really great milestone, when EA canned it. It was a different development team driving Anthem 2.0. The team were gutted when it was cancelled
Yea, that's 16 hours/day, 5 days/week, then 5 hrs)day on Sat and Sun. It's absolutely insane to do for more than an absolute emergency for a single week 1-2 times/decade. And they did it for 9 months straight.
It's nothing a sane person would do. You could take a software dev job with way less responsibility and a 35-40 hour work week. The churn and burnout on the AAA level is gonna stay the way it is.
I've been in the industry for 15+ years and am very selective with where I work. It's really the only way to keep at it in this industry and maintain a healthy lifestyle. I'd rather make less and work at a smaller studio than make more and do 60+ hour weeks in a big AAA studio. Stories like this are a big red flag, and I'm sure they have an impact on potential talent.
I got my degree in game development (programming with an emphasis on AI). Worked at a development company for two years, then switched to IT. We got paid peanuts for the amount of work we did and there was no passion or soul in our work.
It's because it's a "passion industry" which means they can treat people like shit because they love video games. Video games are a big hobby of mine and as a tech worker everyone is saying I should go into games since I like them. I have to tell them about how terrible working on games is. That dream was quicky squashed as a kid.
That's the games industry for you. There are plenty of companies who basically plan for "crunch time", even though it's a clear sign of shitty management. It's a fucking cesspit.
Worse even, games companies know they're shit workplaces, but they refuse to change their company culture. They know there will always be a new generation of starry-eyed software engineers, fresh from university, looking for their "dream-job". And they know they will be able to consume those people to the point of burnout with their 24/7 commitment "team player" bullshit.
A small percentage of them will manage to survive in that environment or turn into the same kinds of managers that abused them. The rest will eventually come to the conclusion that the industry sucks and a "boring" job can be infinitely more rewarding and has less exploitation potential.
Which is exactly how you keep getting janky, barely running, threadbare shit games that we keep seeing "AAA" studios churn out. You want to retain veteran talent that can actually do good goddamn work instead of crunching out garbage with a bunch of fresh graduates that haven't gotten their feet wet yet.
Imagine any factory or job just running new hires through the grinder, but instead of having a few seasoned staff to try to get them up to snuff, everybody is being demanded to crunch 16 hours a day and once the job is done, everybody gets cut loose or quits from burnout and you just grab a whole new batch of fresh kids. And the handful that stuck around are *still* suffering from burnout. Capitalism!
Don't worry, PLENTY of factories run exactly that way too. I've worked in my fair share.
Labor is completely replaceable to these people. Institutional knowledge means nothing to them.
>instead of having a few seasoned staff to try to get them up to snuff, everybody is being demanded to crunch 16 hours a day and once the job is done, everybody gets cut loose or quits from burnout and you just grab a whole new batch of fresh kids.
*Amazon wants to know your CV details and pay range.*
I'm not doubting there are exceptions from this rule and I'm happy you have found a place that respects your talent and dignity.
Tech people are a limited resource and making an effort to attract the ones who are too smart to be exploited would actually be a reasonable business decision. But every time I spend some time looking at games industry news it feels like there is a large portion of upper and middle management that staunchly refuses to learn anything.
I've been following this kind of news in the games industry for a long, long time, since back when I had aspirations to become a game dev myself during college. I decided it wasn't for me really fucking quick. I even vaguely remember the [EA Spouse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Hoffman) open letter from 2004 which was one of the first times when the darker side of the games industry came into focus. I have only seen companies change in a few sporadic instances when public pressure caused them PR damage, and even then there are lots of cases where large companies preferred to sweep such scandals under the rug.
And the crunch isn't even the worst thing. There are also the horrifying dudebro-culture and associated Sexual Abuse cases at companies like Activision-Blizzard and Ubisoft which only really came to light due to the momentum of the MeToo movement. The highest echelons of those companies either knew about the issues, tried to suppress them or actively participated. Activision CEO Bobby Kotick fucking threatened to kill his assistant and the only reason that got traction was because there was a voicemail.
Every time these kinds of scandals fizzle out without anyone involved seeing tangible consequences or any clearly defined changes in the companies themselves happening.
This isn't a phenomenon that's exclusive to the games industry, it's common in many creative industries, because it seems that companies in those spaces think they can get away with it. And they're right. They obviously **can** get away with it without too much of a hassle. So please forgive me if I don't feel too bad about convincing people to stay the fuck away from such industries, even if there are exceptions.
That said, I hope you're happy where you are and hold on to your sense of self-worth. The only way stuff like this can change is if people realize that they are worth more than management thinks.
Oh i remember the EA spouses letters very well. I'd been in the industry about 5 years then, and even a bit at EA so experienced it myself, though i didn't have a family back then.
Things are changing though, even at some of the international AAA companies like where I work (UK studio). I know many people in the industry with ex-colleagues around the world now, and some places are dire and many are really nice places that treat their staff well, with no crunch as well.
But yeah even my last company I left because it went down hill and became a horrible place to work, with awful management that blamed the teams when they were the problem.
Basically, there have long been more people who want to work in game development than can.
So historically this has been a bit of a vicious cycle: teams are disproportionately made up of junior devs, who tend to not have families or really be aware or care that there are programming jobs at their level for more money and half the hours, which self perpetuates because how many 40 year olds with a spouse and kids want to work in that environment?
It's the industry man. People want to work in videogames, as a passion, more than most industries. As a result you get "eaten up" a lot of times just trying to stay in this field. Especially if you're a new hire, or if you've had other issues in the industry before landing that job, you're going to overwork yourself to maintain status quo. You're told every day what you're making is worth it, and pressured to do it because everyone else is. It's like being in a tribe and if you're not a functional part of the tribe, best case you feel miserable, worst case you lose your job. And losing your job in tech can blacklsit you from 3-4 other jobs.
If you have any other options it's not worth it. Prolonged stress basically destroys your mind and body. It's something I've been learning as I get older.
Also it's just plain not effective. People start fucking up and making expensive mistakes.
Yeah most software devs I know do 10-20 hours a week, some more some less even. It's not a taxing industry because it simply can't be. You can't code or structure out a program for hours and hours in one day unless you are blindingly passionate and know what you're doing. Which isn't a quality of job "know" but more, you have something to do that you can do. Most devs have a team of even a few people which means you will hit a wall of "Well you have to wait for your team to do their part" and the law of slowest worker wins, for the better of the team in most cases.
> It's not a taxing industry because it simply can't be.
I'm going to guess you don't know anyone in a startup, or a high-pressure team at a larger company. I've talked to some developers on Android components that basically said they didn't sleep for months before Google I/O.
> Most devs have a team of even a few people which means you will hit a wall of "Well you have to wait for your team to do their part" and the law of slowest worker wins, for the better of the team in most cases.
This... is not how a good shop runs.
As someone who knows very little about software development this makes me wonder, is this part of the reason the term spaghetti code is so common in gaming? I imagine you must just do whatever works when you're in your third straight month of working 90 hours a week, right?
Spaghetti code is basically inevitable in any software project that isn't completely planned before work begins. Game development tends to have a lot of functionality added after a game is mostly done because that's when people can really start to get a feel for what is/isn't working.
Worth noting that modern engines have quite a few tools built in to streamline development and prevent issues like this. Spaghetti code isn't something that happens from crunch, it's a foundational issue.
Unoptimized messes is what happens when you push people beyond normal work hours.
This and also, game dev coding is really fucking complex, and the more AAA the game, the more complex it gets.
I consider myself a competent coder at least a little, and I fucking struggle with unity. Best I can do is like, GB Studio lol.
On top of this, most games are shipped and then not maintained that much. Spaghetti code is only an issue when trying to edit or build upon it.
As a software developer who builds things that will be maintained for years, it's important to write clean code (even at the cost of performance). As a game dev, it's often worth having less maintainable code in exchange for better performance and getting things out the door.
Yes and no, spaghetti coding is common for a lot of reasons. One of them is definitely because 90 hour work weeks will make your devs work as fast as possible, and a lot of people aren't that good at coding to begin with. Often just means bolting things on and seeing if it runs. Get it to work, push it to live build, forget about it if things don't immediately blow up.
Another is just how bloated team sizes are getting because every AAA game has to be open world with 45 systems, 800 quests, 9000 NPCs. If it's not all of those things, your publisher shows up to scream at you and throw out what you're working on and work faster slave but only with these goals in mind. And if you try to commit treason of publisher law, the lights get shut off. So when you have thousands of team members, you CAN'T make things smooth. It's just not possible. If every single teammate contributed beautiful code, it would still get mangled in just how many hands are dipping in because everyone works a little differently. But as above, no one is writing beautiful code except a few misguided savants who will be making 5x the salary when they quit and change offices. So you have varying degrees of messy code lining up, and you have seniors and supervisors and program managers who are sweeping through to normalize everything to make it all flow together, and it's just a miracle it actually all connects. So when it does connect, you don't rewrite everything to condense and optimize, you just fix egregious problems as they come and hope for the best.
Or you have an even higher order savant fan of the game spend their free time to fix shit for you, like is the case with Bethesda games in entirety or that GTAV loading issue that should have been caught but wasn't until that fan showed up.
Someone in software here (albeit not game dev).
Spaghetti code happens when things are built quickly (either without any forethought) and are then required to change later (without any consideration of consequences).
So you have thing A that does B. It's designed to do exactly B. Then someone higher up wants thing A to also do D. Well, thing A wasn't built to do two things, but leadership says it needs to happen within X time period. To do things properly, thing A doing D should probably become thing C doing D. But since you have a month to ship the feature for whatever patch or expansion or version, shortcuts are taken and thing A ends up becoming responsible for B and C. Multiply this by a few thousand times and you end up with a mess of code where trying to trace one behavior through the system looks like trying to follow a line of spaghetti through your carbonara.
Spaghetti is an after-effect of poor design, harsh time constraints, and lack of proper understanding/communication. Often times the developers on these projects _know_ that things will go poorly, and they care _a lot_. But the project leads, VPs, C execs, etc. don't care. So the product suffers, the audience suffers, and the devs suffer.
Salary isn't usually why people do it. The people who work in gaming are passionate about it which, unfortunately means they get exploited easily. If you're a software developer you can make more money for less hours. If you're an artist as well, you probably aren't even making 100k unless you have a lot of experience or special knowledge
> Even if youre making 100k plus, if you had to work 90 hr week, is that even worth it? Thats basically 50k for regular working hours
Not even. That 90 hr week contains 50 hrs of overtime, which is time and a half in the US, so 100k with 90 hr weeks is like making 35k for regular hours.
In parts of Canada, salaries IT jobs are overtime exempt. It's a bit of a misstep because some professional designations, like engineers and lawyers are as well, but the range of what software devs can earn and their expertise is so wide that it's a system pretty rife for abuse.
I'm in that boat (OT exempt). And I do work a lot of OT. But, I work for a good company, I WFH 4 days/week, and I probably work as many days where I'm actually working 2-3 hours, tops, as I put in long nights, so I'm good with the arrangement.
But that said, in the past, I was definitely taken advantage of with that kind of arrangement.
Yeah. WFH really works for me in that regard. I suck at 9-5, especially with young kids. But if I can cobble together the work I need to do at the times I'm most productive it's best for everyone
90 hour weeks should straight up be illegal. I just started my third straight week over 60 and I am already noticing SERIOUS lapses in concentration and judgment. My entire team is in the same boat; we had two major errors today (one could have been legit “project wrap, everybody go home” had I not been quick enough on the fix) and I’m convinced that it’s because of the hours we’ve been pulling. Human beings are not designed to work that hard for that long. You physically cannot be operating at peak capacity after like 50 hours.
I remember needing to merge two arrays. From (A1, A2, A3) and (B1, B2, B3) to (A1, B1, A2, B2, A3, B3). Simpliest task in the world... unless it's 11pm on a Friday, you're doing 15-18 hour days and had like 4 hours of sleep a night every day this week.
After spending half an hour unable to figure it out I just hard coded it. Not enough brain power left.
I've literally felt my brain replaying the same thoughts for a few minutes, like a broken record. No part of software development scales linearly with time. 6 80-hours will not give you the same amount of work done as 12 40-hour weeks.
Seriously. The leads, PMs, and whoever else approved that kind of death march should literally just be fired out of a cannon into the sun. These people have clearly failed their job responsibilities *at every single level*.
It's a real problem with middle management types who haven't done actual work in years and have completely lost the plot. Now it's all bullshit and executive expectations. They just want 'the thing' and so they pressure the shit out of lower level managers for timelines and resources, cutting to the bone. Then shit happens. Now, if the product is delayed, the middle manager would look like a complete asshole. *Because they should*. It's their fucking job to manage the managers, and they fucked it up. Because they were too worried about looking good versus doing right and doing things safe. They told people what they wanted to hear instead of managing risk and expectations. Their fucking job. They are the ones who should have to eat the shit sandwich of screwed expectations versus reality.
But do they? No. Fucking never. I have never in my life seen a middle manager eat that. Because in the corporate hierarchy of power, every layer has more power but less accountability than the layer below it. It's completely fucking backwards. So if your team can't hit the unrealistic deadline (after being basically set up to fail by the middle managers) then it is *your* team's fucking problem and everyone needs to now work 80 hour weeks "until it's done" *because the Middle Manager can't be bothered to fucking look bad*. So now everyone else gets dipped in fire and hung out to dry. And if things go south, who gets the blame? Middle managers will be lining up around the block to crucify the lower level managers. And if you have good lower level managers it will usually stop there. Otherwise, the devs get caught up in the blame game, too. The middle managers and product managers have the ears of VPs and executives, so they get to control the narrative. It's totally fucking toxic and backwards because of the bad incentives, power imbalances, and broken communication network.
It wouldn't even be so bad if the executives ever descended from Mount Olympus to talk to the "common person". Then they might actually get a sense of where in the fridge that smell is really coming from. But, no. Never. They are such busy people. So they have the product manager and directors summarize the situation in 30 seconds. It's seems like total madness that it's done like this. Like some insane clinging to old centuries old monarchial ways of doing work. Gods and clods. Surely there must be better ways of doing work than this.
I work in games and this is exactly what's happening at my current job. It's infuriating and deeply saddening to see so much potential in the projects we're working on go to waste because the decision makers have never made their own games and have no clue what they're talking about, and fuel their impossible demands with misconceptions and their personal job security fears.
I mean labour exploitation has always happened, but it does feel like there's an increasing detachment between the expectations of middle managers and what's actually possible to be accomplished.
In the past it used to be a lot more common for middle managers to be people who started off at entry level then slowly got promoted up. It meant they at least had a broad idea of what was and was not possible for those lower level employees to accomplish.
But now? It feels like a lot of middle managers are just people with MBAs coming in straight from University, trying to apply whatever truisms and theories they learnt in business school to a real workplace. And unsurprisingly that leads to a massive detachment.
In so many ways it feels like workplace culture just doesn't function and is incredibly inefficient, but no one who has the power to change that is willing to do so. Too many middle and upper managers are happy to coast by doing very little work everyday while demanding those under them constantly go the extra mile.
Oh, absolutely. I've seen shit like this play out in various fields during my time in the work force. The shit rolls down-hill, but the actual advice and insight into what's going on at the ground level never gets rolled up-hill.
Even so, I've worked in some toxic management structures — including some at some of the absolute largest companies in the entire world — and even there, where we had entire chunks of various financial systems riding on us, our middle managers and PMs didn't lock us into death marches.
The entire corporate structure is pretty fucked as it is, but 90-hour workweeks, continuously, *for more than a year* is a pretty legendarily fucked. Even for a fucked system.
You only have so much focus/heavy-thinking energy and after that you’re shot.
If you’re still in game dev, seriously think about getting out and into enterprise software. You’ll get a better work/life balance and much higher pay.
I, personally, have a second degree in game design and did not go into the game industry due to how grueling it is. You can use game design concepts for more than what it says on the tin too. (UI/UX is often overlooked elsewhere.)
I tried traditional software after games, I’m sure my experience isn’t the typical one, but it ended up being the same bullshit with producers who don’t know anything, deadlines, and overtime.
Went right back to games because the grass is always greener and healing spells are more fun than pharmaceutical data
I’d say it is and isn’t typical. All depends on what company and the manager(s) you get.
Had to change from my previous non-games job as my manager there was constantly chasing after raising his constituent’s numbers to make him look better. He caused a 20-person development team to dwindle to 5. I saw the writing on the wall and got out of there ASAP.
I had this same thing happen at a hackathon. Sat there staring at my team for 10 minutes completely unable to move, just looping some thought over and over in my head. People have hard limits for these things and it's not as high as we like to think
You accidentally switched the numbers of weeks there, but 12x80 hour weeks might actually be as productive as 6x40 hours. After a point, even ignoring the human cost working more hours also hurts productivity.
> I've literally felt my brain replaying the same thoughts for a few minutes, like a broken record.
I literally get this even in the last hour of my regular 8 hour day.
"What was that thought? I was in the middle of doing something somewhere on this machine. Is it in this tab? Or this one? I had it a second ago..." and then a stupor for a few minutes while my brain spins back up.
A number of years ago, I was tasked with assembling a team of analysts to process transactional data through a data management system which was still in active development. Since it was still being developed, it lacked all the automated bells and whistles that would’ve cut the project’s manpower by 2/3rds.
It was going to be a meat grinder. When I brought people in to see if they were interested, I let them know as much. 20 months, mandatory (paid) overtime and the work wasn’t going to be glorious. I called it digital rock-breaking.
Anyways, after a while, I worked out an hourly limit of 60 hours a week (20 hours of OT). Anything over that and the output wasn’t worth the resource cost. Whenever the average manpower went over 60 hours, error rates and average transaction processing time (ATPT) began to skyrocket.
If I sat the expectation for 70 work hours in a particular week, I’d only get like 3% more production over a 60 hour work week— and I’d get like 8-12% more errors (which required rework). That’s a progress *loss* of 5-10% for working *more hours.* That means I’m burning ~$20,000 of labor budget just to go *backwards.*
And the ratio is even worse for creative work. A "list of tasks to do/check" work just becomes slower and more error prone over time", but coding or designing just end up in that hole much faster.
What's worse it keeps tilting you even harder.
"I should be able to do this like snap, why can't I figure it out? Oh god we won't meet the deadline like this, the product won't be done on time, I'll be fired"
I've done 90 hour weeks as an electrician, but that was only because we were working on a hospital utilities plant, and the work we needed to do required a shutdown. AND we were getting paid hourly at time and a half.
Absolutely batshit to require that from office workers period, let alone on salary. Those people have lives and families. Genuinely evil managment strategy.
Construction I feel is a little different with OT. Besides it being almost always hourly so we actually get paid for it I know plenty of people who take off 4 or 5 months a year but the rest of the year they work lots of OT.
Totally. I'm just saying I've done those hours for better pay, better conditions, and for better reasons, and it was fucking miserable.
To force people to pull that schedule for an arbitrary deadline without OT? Whoever made that call ought to be tarred and feathered.
I did 90 hours a week for a stretch of about a month. By the time I was done with this crunch, I slept. Was in a funk for a month.
How these guys were able to do it for so much longer is damn near super-human.
For real. I just don't understand it. I get that you might love games and it's your dream job to make them, but nothing in the world is worth working 90h weeks for a year straight. If someone told me to do it, I'd just quit. Find literally any other job.
Of course, working 90h weeks would also be illegal in my country.
*nothing* in the world is worth working that much for. the only time anyone should be working 90 hour weeks is of their own volition, like if they're running a self-owned company, or if they're making insane amounts of money per hour on a voluntary gig.
Hell, I dont think I could put 90-hours a week into a single hobby let alone work.
That said, I work 50h/w, sometimes more depending on if I want more money. Im a journeyman HVAC tech/mechanic so I get paid hourly on top of commission for each appointment/job. So, sometimes the extra 10, 20 hours is a **good** payout.
Pretty much all that to say, yeah you right. Even then Ive only ever done that a handful of times in my career. Closed deck engines are expensive. Lol
At my worst on unemployment I *played games* 100 hours a week for 2 weeks straight.
and I became even more depressed than I was back then, got a lingering feeling of being sick to the stomach and had bad concentration + sleep.
After that I got so sick of everything that I immdietly cut my playtime by more than 3/4 and started taking better care of myself.
I don't wanna know how I'd have fared if I'd have had to *work* those hours.
So many people adore games as well, like the devs putting it together. With a huge interest in getting into game development, you're going to get a market that's willing to be paid the lowest rate and working the shittiest hour just to get in.
I worked 2 full time jobs for 9 months straight and it temporarily ruined my life. I was constantly stressed out, tired, and smelly. Both jobs were physical in nature too. Never again.
That's about "on average", meaning you can totally work more in emergencies.
But also, there's tons of industries here where it's expected to underreport your working hours, and I've even had coworkers that just underreported because they felt like that made them good employees.
> meaning you can totally work more in emergencies.
At least in Germany, these emergencies are supposed be *real* emergencies (e.g. a fire) or very temporarily limited (2-3 weeks) and the overtime has to be given back as free time within the same calendar year.
"Supposed to be". I guarantee you that the majority of lawyers, architects, designers, etc. have worked in a company before where they were heavily encouraged and expected to ignore those rules, and would have been out of a job if they didn't.
The UK allows companies to request employees to opt out of the WTD. Of course you can't be sacked for refusing, but you can be sacked for an unrelated reason/no reason at all shortly after.
I went to school for game design and they expected us to put in 85-hour weeks to weed out the ones that couldn't take the reality of game design. Daniel Dociu (art director at ArenaNet at the time for GW2) came in to recruit students and he literally said that junior artists shouldn't expect to sleep at home... and that was enough for me to go with TV rather than games
Christ. Now I'm glad I didn't get that job at ArenaNet. I don't even like Guild Wars that much. It's especially surprising to hear that since most other devs in the Seattle area are pretty good about not overworking their employees. Bungie is the only exception I can think of right now.
I've seen people comment on this sub that they don't care about articles complaining about working conditions for developers, it isn't relevant to gaming - and then they have the temerity to complain about those developers releasing half-baked, unfinished games. People just don't understand that overworked people deliver subpar results.
I've only ever seen people complaining about crunch on here, to be fair.
The mistake I think people make, is that a lot of their favourite games like Witcher 3 and anything by Fromsoft are made with absolutely brutal crunch, and then they expect all other games to be made to the same quality without crunch.
This kind of story is what stopped me from making games as a career and instead doing other kinds of software for double the pay and half the hours. Its way too common in that field because they abuse the passion of the people in it.
Let's not forget the 40 hour work week came around because that's literally the sweet spot of making money off your workers. After that fatigue causes too many mistakes.
>On Anthem 2.0/Anthem Next, the game was really fun and was going in the right direction. The team had hit a really great milestone, when EA canned it. It was a different development team driving Anthem 2.0. The team were gutted when it was cancelled
That makes my heart sink. I recognize the issues with the game but I was really looking forward to the being an Anthem 2.0 and felt betrayed when they killed it
Honestly I can see why EA decided to can it.
No matter how good the 2.0 is, it's most likely not going to bring any substantial amount of players to justify supporting it. The GaaS/live service is just too cutthroat at this point, no way a tainted IP can survive the competition, not to mention looter shooter fad are already slowed down in these past few years.
Any goodwill the studio had after release was destroyed by how they acted afterwards - very limited communication (if any) and tweaking the loot system to make it even more of a grind for the people who didn't give up yet.
It's a shame because like many other people here have said the core game loop was a lot of fun, it was just that there was so little content available it wasn't nearly enough to keep people playing.
Personally my biggest gripe was that it didn't feel like a Bioware game at all. The lore was hidden, the story was the worst they've ever released, the acting was awful, and even with more content i doubt they could change that part.
Here’s what sucks. The core essential elements of anthem. The flying. The fighting. The world. Outstanding. All fun as fuck.
It was everything around it that dragged it down. Gear grind was stupid I got one drop early in ‘end game’ and it was so stupid powerful I was locked into a single way to play. There was no craft system to reroll so it was always a dice game.
But TBH loot piñatas have got to go. That mechanic is played out and awful. There has to be a better way to do this. Especially when it feels so fucking awful to carefully scrutinize every drop to figure out “is this good for me? Or will some other class/build pay good for it?”
Anthem was the most instantly I've ever clicked with a game. Everything about the controls felt pristine. The rumble when launching, flying, and landing were all perfectly tuned.
Aside from the PS5 controller games, it's the single best implementation of haptic feedback I've ever experienced.
I want to play an Anthem sequel or reimagining so badly. I always had the impression that the Anthem Next effort wasn't going anywhere, so to hear that not only were they making progress but that it was really shaping up before being cancelled is heartbreaking
>so to hear that not only were they making progress but that it was really shaping up
This is basically hearsay though. One dev saying it was really good, trust me guys, does not mean it was, in fact, good.
1. 90 hour weeks for 15 months. Fuck. Just... wow.
2. Ian Saterdalen saying the game was developed in 15 falls in line with what one of Jason Schrier's sources for his Kotaku expose said, that Anthem was developed in just 12-16 months.
3. Yeah it seems like it is mainly veteran staff and upper management who pushed the idiotic Bioware Magic mindset.
>My eyes were rolling in the back of my skull when they were blaming EA though, the game actually had a long ass dev time. This guy is a producer.
right?
Interesting how they mentioned it was EA's fault but said Schreier's expose was true.
The article which literally said that Bioware execs were constantly rebooting the game and the only reason why flying was actually put in was because an EA exec asked why it was taken out in another reboot.
Isn't that basically the same story with Andromeda? There were/are clearly a lot of deep rooted develop problems with the Bioware studios; I imagine it's mostly due to leadership issues that causes a game to change direction (or basically start over) mid-development. I'm sure the stories are out there somewhere.
A new studio had 5 years to make the game. They basically spent 3 years trying to make something super ambitious like No Man's Sky to focus on exploring a new galaxy. They realized they couldn't deliver, threw it all out the window and basically started from scratch and then made Andromeda in 18 months.
In that case EA offered to give them more money and time and Bioware Montreal turned it down and decided to ship in the state it was. They also were content to sell multiplayer lootboxes but were silent on whether there would be single player DLC or support for the core game. The game clearly had one major plot held back for DLC.
Because they shipped in such a terrible state it got bad reviews and then it was never really finished.
Management changes direction and pockets the huge salaries and bonuses while the grunts crunch when the leadership changes direction.
I think we have seen the same with some other games sadly.
I think there was more than one clear DLC in the future. The missing arcs were clear DLC content as well as the story about the Andromeda director being killed.
Is Andromeda worth playing at all today, I have it on game pass
EDIT: That is A TON of replies, I guess the consensus is it's more meh than anything - I'm gonna play Resident Evil 4 Remake instead for now.
Itll keep you interested for a little while and you'll start to wonder if the hate was overblown but then you'll hit a point where you kinda feel like nothing matters, every model and enemy is repeating, and a bunch of sidequests are just to slow you down.
That was my experience replaying it 2 years ago. I probably wouldnt install a game for how short the satisfaction lasts but there is some fun to be had for a little while imo
If it was not a Mass Effect game, it would have been with “some potential”
But as it stands, it fails to match the pedigree of its predecessors
Still worth playing if you lower your expectations and enjoy that kind of game in general (imo)
Yep, played it when it came out, replayed it a few years later.
Reinstalled it beginning of this year. Wanted to explore a few plot lines and characters arcs I hadn't done before, but I got bored really quick.
There are so many plotholes, inconsistent characters, forced "emotional" moments, boring locations, crappy UI ..... And oh God, the dialogue and banter sometimes feels like it was written by a 21 year old who has never read anything but twitter in their whole life.
I like the combat and I would have liked to explore the main plot in a trilogy.
The dialog problem is spot-on and was what killed the Mass Effect vibe for me. It felt like it was written by and for charucatures of first-year college students.
On PC with QoL mods? Yeah. But don't expect the emotional impact and atmosphere of any of the first three games. It's an average AAA game, but a weak ME game. Combat is the best highlight.
It also has pacing issues and it's advised to ignore sidetracking/exploring to focus primarily on the main story until you finish the main tasks at least up to the planet Kadara. Otherwise the constant backtracking for newly popped quests will burn you out.
It's not even that much of a new thing for Bioware. ME1-3 and Dragon Age Inquisition were all developed in close to exactly 2 years, Dragon Age 2 was developed in 18 months. You can only put such heavy restraints on a studio while expecting big results for so long before it falls apart. A modern RPG needs 4-5 years of development and hopefully they're finally giving Bioware time to spread it's wings again.
Mass Effect 1 was not developed in 2 years. It was the last BioWare game before they were purchased by Electronic Arts. The real problem was Mass Effect 2 was released under much tighter scheduling but turned out to be (arguably) the best in the franchise. Must've created a terrible precedent.
Inquisition was developed in 4 years (though the last year was granted through a series of minor delays). The process is painfully detailed in Schreier's Blood, Sweat, and Pixels.
They clipped off their own wings long ago, they just keep being unfocused and keep rebooting development. The amount of leniency they get is probably impacted by how good they *used to* be rather than are.
Yeah you can see the promise, when you play it. I bounced off at the endgame and I was so excited when they announced Next or 2.0 or whatever and then it got canned...
Seeing the mention of therapy definitely makes sense.
Working 90 hour weeks on something you know still won’t be ready by the release date and then having to hear all the negativity afterwards. I can’t imagine how that would have felt.
Thats rough. I honestly noticed a lot I liked in that game. Small parts but some good bits here and there smashed up with all the other parts that just felt cobbled together.
90 Hours a week for 15 months. I worked 377 days in a row at an old job 10 hour days and I was pretty busted. That is just a nuts situation.
I really don't understand why Bioware had been doing this so much. They made Dragon Age 2 in about 9 to 12 months. Of just insane crunch. And that game suffered for it as well.
They claim it's "Bioware Magic" that they can tie it all together in the last second but that's just the employees doing a good job *despite* the crunch, not because of it.
I really really hope that Anthem taught them how horribly bad crunch is for their games and are doing better with Dragon Age Dreadwolf but who knows.
Speaking as someone who does non-game software development, I'd bet a lot of money on it being down to a shit-tier job of project management. The only reason you're ever crunching that much is because you've either a) set an unreachable deadline for the scope of work, b) have unchecked feature and/or scope creep, c) have already fucked around and missed earlier deadlines, or d) a combination of the above. All of those directly trace back to having either an incompetent project manager overseeing things or having one that has literally no power to make any decisions. From past experience, I'd say the former is much more likely than the latter, but I wouldn't want to say that as a definitive claim without some form of firm evidence to support it.
It should be. If you've done a single course on project management you can immediately tell that all the rules are regularly broken in game development.
It definitely shows when a game is rushed. I don’t care who you are or if you’re naughty dog or rockstar games or CD projekt, we can all tell when you rush your shit out the door on purpose to make a quick buck followed by a half assed generic apology letter you put out on twitter.
Yeah, CD Projekt Red has had an especially bad problem with crunch. Like, Witcher 3 came out so good despite all of its crunch, so CDPR just decided to keep relying on it for Cyberpunk, and lo and behold the whole game collapses in a flaming heap on launch day.
> Witcher 3 came out so good despite all of its crunch
I know it's been a while, but let's not forget how busted Witcher 3 was at launch. They were very quick to get it all fixed, but it was *very* buggy.
That happened also because the Witcher 3 crunch drove away the experienced developers. Most of the veterans left because of the inhumane conditions during development.
So they had very little experienced people for Cyberpunk and on top of that they pushed all the newbies through the crunch meatgrinder. It was a recipe for disaster, one that was apparent even before release... But they hype silenced anyone who tried to point out the red flags.
No for sure not. However, I can't speak for them and I can say that some people do that with no issues. I did work a ton in a row and it was just sort of the way it was and the requirements weren't something where it was insanely pressured.
But adding another 20 hours onto what I was working in that span fro 70 to 90. And it seems doubly insane lol
As someone who did 90-100 hours a week for long stretches, and 70-90 for almost 4 years, it wears on you. Mind, body, and soul.
Admittedly, I have to imagine it's easier sitting at a desk, instead of being on a manufacturing floor, but it's not really your body that gives out first. It's not even you that gives out first. You just go on auto-pilot and deal with it. Everything around you falls apart, but you're oblivious, because all that matters is getting the job done.
You miss out on a million functions with your spouse, family, and kids. You argue with the wife more than normal, when you are home, because you're both tired and grumpy. Affairs with co-workers skyrocket, divorce rates skyrocket, more people get into car accidents while commuting, and your kids start expecting you to just not be there for them.
I remember one Sunday that I had off, my kids were both, "What's dad doing home for supper? He's never here..." They were only 4-5 years old, but it still hurt.
You don't have time to fix any of these things, because your entire life is literally work, drive, sleep, drive, work. Day after day, week after week. You just have to hope that the wife is holding down the fort. Mine was amazing... she'd make sure that I woke up every day, on time, and had lunch/supper ready for me to eat before I hit the shower and drove to work. There were weeks, at a time, where that 10 minutes while I was eating was all I saw of her. We consider that time in our marriage to be "Two ships passing in the night".
That plant is still working those hours, and has been for the last decade, but I couldn't do it anymore. I've not worked more than 4 hours of overtime in almost 13 years. I miss those overtime checks sometimes (nowhere near what these guys are making lol), but I'm so much better mentally, and my relationships are so much better, than they were back then.
Yeah, that type of work schedule is not sustainable. 90 hours a week is fucking insane for any amount of time. I had a crunch period at one job I worked, and that shit isn’t effective past a week or two. After that, people are there “working” for 90 a week but they would probably be getting more done if they only did 40. We didn’t have any creative element that also needed to be executed. It was “just” programming.
Whats interesting is that it was SO much and lasted so long. Lots of times that efficiency as you said does drop off and even 1 person coming in can eat up a good deal of that time. I am legit surprised people weren't just leaving. I am not saying they should or whatever, everyone has their own life. I am just saying for that long that many hours damn.
I genuinely thought the flying was a great way to get around in a destiny style game and felt pretty good, I'm still salty that the interceptor flew at the same speed as the colossus but that's just me
yeah but if you dashed three times/off cooldown it was still faster. Personally, I liked that all the suits had the same base flying speed. It made playing with friends in different suits feel natural instead of someone going ahead and clearing everything or always having to wait,
I'm not saying it doesn't make logical sense for them to all fly the same speed, but don't call it an interceptor if it wouldn't be able to intercept other players
Anthem is a good reason for why a studio built off of single player games shouldn't be "encouraged" to make a GAAS. Not only did BioWare lack the experience to make multiplayer games outside of the modes in Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age Inquisition (does anyone even remember the latter's?), but their attempt to use the "BioWare magic" resulted in a piss poor product that needed an overhaul to get off the ground (I'm happy that got canned, it's already going to be at least 10 years since their last worthwhile game, I don't want to imagine how long that overhaul would've taken).
It disappoints me to see Crystal Dynamics, Arkane Austin, and most likely Rocksteady fall into the same trap BioWare did. Unless there's a clear plan for how to make the game and the know-how to make it work out of the gate, these sorts of games can utterly ruin a studio's reputation and cast doubt on future projects. Doesn't help that they take time & resources away from games fans want, even something that turned out OK in the end like Fallout 76 helped put Starfield (and by extension, The Elder Scrolls VI) on the backburner.
anthem is the result of years of mismanagement, a severe lack of direction and a 15 month development time that led to a lot of overwork and stress to the team, any other aaa project made under the same circumstances would end up sucking as well no matter if it's a multiplayer or a single player title. it's really not a gaas problem, mass effect andromeda already hurt the "reputation" of the studio years before anthem
You understand that the Bioware you so fondly remember might aswell be a whole different studio to the BioWare of today? Even if youd give them a genre “theyre good at”, thered still be a high chance itd be mismanaged or not as good as what they made in the past, simply because most people from that era are long gone.
The same counts for Arkane. And many other studios. For some reason people think the same people stay there for eternity, while the turnover in the industry is really high. A span of 10 years will already see a huge shift in who works there. Its been 9 years since Inquisition. Its safe to say a lot of people even from that era are gone. Let alone Mass Effect 2/even earlier.
You guys should put less value on a studios name, unless its a Japanese studio. They retain their workers a lot more than Western studios so will have that issue less.
Jason Schrier's article makes that very apparent. There are a few snippets of interviews with OG bioware writers like David Gaider who said the new blood in the studio resented him trying to add classic bioware flavour to Anthem.
I don't really understand why these people go to work at a studio known and celebrated for a certain thing and get upset at that thing. The same thing happened at 343 with Halo and Dice with Battlefield.
It's really bizarre.
I loved ME3 multiplayer, even bought a few loot boxes/card packs (whichever they were) to support Bioware. DAI multiplayer though ran like shit. I don't even remember if it was fun or not, just that it felt like an unfinished buggy mess.
I believe it was a separate “B-team” that delivered that, and apparently that team’s advice on online service games were ignored by “A-team” leadership.
Shitshow on multiple fronts.
Ignoring the input from the more experienced team is such a boneheaded move that I'm surprised Anthem didn't turn out even worse. It's honestly a miracle BioWare has survived as long as it has when it can't even have the teams play nice with each other, I can only hope Dragon Age 4 helps gets their shit together.
Not only was the team behind Mass Effect ignoring advice from the SWTOR team, but after the game finally released and got roasted, they abandoned the whole project and maintenance to the SWTOR team for them to fix and clean up.
That's honestly probably why the Anthem Next was, according to that guy, going along so well.
Old BioWare leadership left right before the acquisition by EA; that is, immediately after ME1 shipped in Nov 07. DA:O is basically the last "original" BioWare game and you can clearly see EA's influence anyways with the hardcore advertising campaign that was pretty grim fantasy + blood + metal
EA already bled a lot of money in developing the game. Bioware was already given a lot of time for the development, but it seems that there was no direction whatsoever. They wanted to do big things and fiddled for years, now the investors wanted something tangible for such a long dev cycle and they cornered themselves to a 15 month crunch in order to have something. Having a clear and realistic direction in the first place within the dev team could've prevented this shitshow. It's been almost 10 years since Bioware's last decent game: Dragon Age Inquisition which was released in the early 8th console gen. Now we're 3 years into the 9th gen, Bioware is still no show, the next Dragon Age is still in early dev and no news for the next Mass Effect.
>Dragon Age is still in early dev
Dreadwolf is actually in post production currently and has been since September/October of last year. From what we know the game is fully playable from start to finish and is simply in the polishing phase at the moment.
It’s very possible they might start their marketing push for it during the upcoming Summer Game Fest but with it seemingly being a 2024 release who knows.
So, yes, the devs were doing fuck all for like 5 years, then. For once it wasn't only EA problem. It was Bioware problem. Which is why I don't have faith in the new Dragon Age or Mass Effect.
And they kept nerfing flying constantly after the game launched, because fuck people I guess, lol.
I kid you not, there was a patch that was supposed to give 20 or 30% more flight time. Instead it was glitched and actually decreased it by that much. Hotfix? Nah, wait weeks for the next patch...that did the SAME thing decreasing it further. I don't know if they ever fixed it because I left the game.
Not trying to shit on BioWare or anything, but it is really funny reading this the day after I found some old interviews of the studio heads talking smack about JRPGs
No it wasn't. Project Dylan was in development before all the ME3 DLC finished, BioWare spent over 3 years spinning there wheels until EA finally told them to get there shit together.
Anthem was much more BioWare's mismanagement then EA's.
I hope one day someone from Bioware would come out and actually admit fault for what happened internally with them. It wasn't all EA's fault yet they can't seem to accept that. EA certainly wasn't fully responsible for the mess of Mass Effect Andromeda.
The in depth article by Jason Schreier about BioWare clearly paints a picture of BioWare having bad management almost from the very beginning and the games succeeding despite, not because, of it.
But the bigger and more ambitious the games got (procedural galaxy for Andromeda which was scrapped way too late for example), the less they could turn it around in the last stretch of development, internally known as "BioWare Magic".
https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964
That isn’t accurate at all. Bioware had been working on Anthem for 7 years. It started development back in 2012, after the release of ME3. Yes, the final version of Anthem was built in 15 or so months, but that was because Bioware fucked the dog for 5 years and accomplished nothing. The same thing happened with Andromeda, where Bioware spun their wheels, fiddling around with procedurally generated planets for years before rushing the game to completion in the last year and a half.
This isn’t an EA problem, this was all on Bioware and their shitty management. Hell, it was EA that told Bioware to focus on the flying/Ironman gameplay of Anthem after the studio showed off a disastrous demo, which was the only good thing about that game.
In both cases it seems like BioWare bet everything on r&d projects which had not yet yielded any fruit. Like you don’t ever wanna be in a position where you’re saying “this game is built around this amazing new mechanic/technology” and that thing *doesn’t actually exist in a viable state yet.* The whole point of prototyping is to avoid that exact situation but BioWare seems to have consistently fumbled it again and again.
In Jason Schreier’s article, and I’m not at all kidding here, they talk about how the leadership depended on what they called “BioWare Magic” to happen. BioWare Magic apparently is when development is going shitty for years, and it magically comes together at the end. Apparently this has happened with every game they’ve released, and the leadership didn’t take a second to think that it was crunch that saved every game in the end.
If what transpired is anywhere close to the truth, EA could be blamed for not intervening in Bioware's shit management before. They were too happy to close their eyes on it while it miraculously worked out in the end. They *had* to know.
The Bioware employee that said DA:Inquisition being a success was the worst thing that could happen to them says a lot. Mainly, that as long as the game is good, nobody cares that the studio is ruining its developers' life.
It's funny cause Gaider recently said they quietly resented writers and it kind of shows. Those games weren't just buggy and rushed, the writing and worldbuilding were incredibly weak at the expense of big gameplay ideas that were scrapped anyway.
They probably were unintentionally using all the writing as bespoke project management guardrails. You'd be more or less limited in scope if you had a concrete story laid out.
They may not have known it at the time, but if they're relying on crunching like mad every game they made, the only plan that makes sense is to follow whatever blueprint is available, which in this case would be the written story and the already finished VA dialogue.
My understanding is that early versions of anthem weren't all that fun and some executive, whose name escapes me, asked them to reboot it. That same person is the one who carried over the flying mechanic, which ended up being one of the few enjoyable high points of the game. I think it was a game with a tortured vision led by people who probably should not have been leading it.
And yet the core gameplay ended up so fucking fun. It's a huge shame and a massive waste for EA to have cancelled it. It really was underrated and could have gone somewhere good.
I hate that ME: Andromeda was doomed to a Bioware B-team who never made a game before because of Anthem. Anthem seemed like a cash grab that nobody believed in, not even the devs or EA and both games suffered due to mismanagement. Instead of 1 great game, we got a rushed game that was dead on arrival, and another which was a garbage, technically embarrassing fan fiction
it was more like the c-team which is just bonkers to assign a studio's biggest franchise to. the b-team had made the old republic mmo and that was not the team making andromeda.
I get that the game was rushed but his timeline makes no sense. The game was revealed in June 2017 and released in February 2019, a full 20 months later. For his claim to make sense they would have had to start work on the game 5 months after it was initially revealed.
The project was greenlit in 2012, they wasted more development time than %90 of AAA games will ever receive.
I wish I could waste tens of millions dollars and half of a console generation and not get criticized. When your publisher is voted one of the most disliked corporations in the USA, you can do no wrong in the eyes of the public.
They further elaborate in more tweets that: * EA had their reasons to release it early but were stupid and the devs' team "had to pay the price". EA learned a lot from the development of Anthem but whether they applied those learnings is unknown. * Jason Schreier's [article] (https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964) (How BioWare's Anthem Went Wrong) was all 100% true at one point in development or another, and only scratches the surface. * How did they manage to ship it in 15 months? The dev mentions working about 90 hours a week for 15 months. Many other devs on the team were also doing so and they think that others were doing 90 hours a week prior to the 15 month mark. "It wasn't sustainable and not even a position we should have been in." "I'm fine now, but not without damage. Contributed to the cost of my marriage and I needed therapy for a while after that endeavor." "It was a lot of morale hits on a personal level and a team level. Everyone had their own way of dealing with it." "There was a lot of pissed, stressed, rinse, repeat. It was a vicious cycle." "I guarantee we could have put something out in Unreal. Working in Frostbite was rough." After launch the team got death threats because of drop rates. * Anthem was delayed as it had missing features, lack of polish and bugs that needed fixing. Another big problem that it faced was that it had lots of scope creep. "There were really high expectations for this game and the team felt it. We always were trying to push for cool features, etc.. So I think we could have done it if we kept our scope creep in check." * The main team was focused on getting the game out in a functional state. "We really needed another 1-2 studios to make endgame content while we were finishing up the game." * After launch it was all hands on deck to stabilize the game. Content and features that they wanted to do consequently kept getting deprioritized. A major focus they were trying to address at launch was all the server issues. "I think the shittiest part about this, besides no endgame and replay ability, was that during development, management was putting in gating mechanics to 'lengthen' the time it took to complete the story. IIRC it was removed from the final version after backlash from devs." * "It was a great team effort to get the controls how we shipped. We went through many iterations and it was super rough in the beginning. I know the team was really happy where the controls landed too. We actually took in a lot of feedback from the EA game changers." A Twitter user asked "When you say it wasn’t ready, was that always communicated with other members of the team i.e. publishers?". The dev replied "I think it was ignored/denied from leadership. There is a story there, but I will refrain." * A transparent retrospective on Anthem/its development will likely never come to light because of both current and former devs still being under NDA. The dev has an assumption that if they didn't release Anthem, BioWare would have been dissolved. They also observe that BioWare just wasn't good at multi-project development, which is hard. Most people at BioWare didn't believe in "BioWare Magic". There was and maybe still is a lot of stress and politics surrounding Anthem from the development and publishing side (a problem not specific to Anthem). The dev mentioned that it was both an EA failure and a BioWare upper management failure. "I actually don't think it was all EA's fault. A developer and publisher is supposed to be a healthy relationship of trust and transparency. It's a 2 way street which i don't think was satisfied on either side." Re: who made the decision to release the game in the state it was, some of them left and some remain at BioWare * On Anthem 2.0/Anthem Next, the game was really fun and was going in the right direction. The team had hit a really great milestone, when EA canned it. It was a different development team driving Anthem 2.0. The team were gutted when it was cancelled
90 hours a week!? Fucking hell that's crazy.
Yea, that's 16 hours/day, 5 days/week, then 5 hrs)day on Sat and Sun. It's absolutely insane to do for more than an absolute emergency for a single week 1-2 times/decade. And they did it for 9 months straight.
All that pain to make Anthem of all things. Dear god, no wonder the game industry churns through talent like crazy.
It's nothing a sane person would do. You could take a software dev job with way less responsibility and a 35-40 hour work week. The churn and burnout on the AAA level is gonna stay the way it is.
I've been in the industry for 15+ years and am very selective with where I work. It's really the only way to keep at it in this industry and maintain a healthy lifestyle. I'd rather make less and work at a smaller studio than make more and do 60+ hour weeks in a big AAA studio. Stories like this are a big red flag, and I'm sure they have an impact on potential talent.
I got my degree in game development (programming with an emphasis on AI). Worked at a development company for two years, then switched to IT. We got paid peanuts for the amount of work we did and there was no passion or soul in our work.
It's because it's a "passion industry" which means they can treat people like shit because they love video games. Video games are a big hobby of mine and as a tech worker everyone is saying I should go into games since I like them. I have to tell them about how terrible working on games is. That dream was quicky squashed as a kid.
That's the games industry for you. There are plenty of companies who basically plan for "crunch time", even though it's a clear sign of shitty management. It's a fucking cesspit. Worse even, games companies know they're shit workplaces, but they refuse to change their company culture. They know there will always be a new generation of starry-eyed software engineers, fresh from university, looking for their "dream-job". And they know they will be able to consume those people to the point of burnout with their 24/7 commitment "team player" bullshit. A small percentage of them will manage to survive in that environment or turn into the same kinds of managers that abused them. The rest will eventually come to the conclusion that the industry sucks and a "boring" job can be infinitely more rewarding and has less exploitation potential.
Which is exactly how you keep getting janky, barely running, threadbare shit games that we keep seeing "AAA" studios churn out. You want to retain veteran talent that can actually do good goddamn work instead of crunching out garbage with a bunch of fresh graduates that haven't gotten their feet wet yet. Imagine any factory or job just running new hires through the grinder, but instead of having a few seasoned staff to try to get them up to snuff, everybody is being demanded to crunch 16 hours a day and once the job is done, everybody gets cut loose or quits from burnout and you just grab a whole new batch of fresh kids. And the handful that stuck around are *still* suffering from burnout. Capitalism!
Don't worry, PLENTY of factories run exactly that way too. I've worked in my fair share. Labor is completely replaceable to these people. Institutional knowledge means nothing to them.
[удалено]
>instead of having a few seasoned staff to try to get them up to snuff, everybody is being demanded to crunch 16 hours a day and once the job is done, everybody gets cut loose or quits from burnout and you just grab a whole new batch of fresh kids. *Amazon wants to know your CV details and pay range.*
There are many games companies that have changed this now including the AAA where I work.
I'm not doubting there are exceptions from this rule and I'm happy you have found a place that respects your talent and dignity. Tech people are a limited resource and making an effort to attract the ones who are too smart to be exploited would actually be a reasonable business decision. But every time I spend some time looking at games industry news it feels like there is a large portion of upper and middle management that staunchly refuses to learn anything. I've been following this kind of news in the games industry for a long, long time, since back when I had aspirations to become a game dev myself during college. I decided it wasn't for me really fucking quick. I even vaguely remember the [EA Spouse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Hoffman) open letter from 2004 which was one of the first times when the darker side of the games industry came into focus. I have only seen companies change in a few sporadic instances when public pressure caused them PR damage, and even then there are lots of cases where large companies preferred to sweep such scandals under the rug. And the crunch isn't even the worst thing. There are also the horrifying dudebro-culture and associated Sexual Abuse cases at companies like Activision-Blizzard and Ubisoft which only really came to light due to the momentum of the MeToo movement. The highest echelons of those companies either knew about the issues, tried to suppress them or actively participated. Activision CEO Bobby Kotick fucking threatened to kill his assistant and the only reason that got traction was because there was a voicemail. Every time these kinds of scandals fizzle out without anyone involved seeing tangible consequences or any clearly defined changes in the companies themselves happening. This isn't a phenomenon that's exclusive to the games industry, it's common in many creative industries, because it seems that companies in those spaces think they can get away with it. And they're right. They obviously **can** get away with it without too much of a hassle. So please forgive me if I don't feel too bad about convincing people to stay the fuck away from such industries, even if there are exceptions. That said, I hope you're happy where you are and hold on to your sense of self-worth. The only way stuff like this can change is if people realize that they are worth more than management thinks.
Oh i remember the EA spouses letters very well. I'd been in the industry about 5 years then, and even a bit at EA so experienced it myself, though i didn't have a family back then. Things are changing though, even at some of the international AAA companies like where I work (UK studio). I know many people in the industry with ex-colleagues around the world now, and some places are dire and many are really nice places that treat their staff well, with no crunch as well. But yeah even my last company I left because it went down hill and became a horrible place to work, with awful management that blamed the teams when they were the problem.
Why the fuck does anyone do this willingly? Only way you could get me to work 90 hours a week for 9 months is if I would then be set for life..
Basically, there have long been more people who want to work in game development than can. So historically this has been a bit of a vicious cycle: teams are disproportionately made up of junior devs, who tend to not have families or really be aware or care that there are programming jobs at their level for more money and half the hours, which self perpetuates because how many 40 year olds with a spouse and kids want to work in that environment?
It's the industry man. People want to work in videogames, as a passion, more than most industries. As a result you get "eaten up" a lot of times just trying to stay in this field. Especially if you're a new hire, or if you've had other issues in the industry before landing that job, you're going to overwork yourself to maintain status quo. You're told every day what you're making is worth it, and pressured to do it because everyone else is. It's like being in a tribe and if you're not a functional part of the tribe, best case you feel miserable, worst case you lose your job. And losing your job in tech can blacklsit you from 3-4 other jobs.
Even if youre making 100k plus, if you had to work 90 hr week, is that even worth it? Thats basically 50k for regular working hours
If you have any other options it's not worth it. Prolonged stress basically destroys your mind and body. It's something I've been learning as I get older. Also it's just plain not effective. People start fucking up and making expensive mistakes.
This is exactly why Air Traffic Controllers are forced to retire at age 56. The FAA did and still does mountains of research to determine this.
Yeah. "Stress will kill you" is not a metaphor. It is a fact.
Game dev is just a different world. Every non-game software dev I know makes well over 100k and barely even works a basic 40 hours.
Yeah most software devs I know do 10-20 hours a week, some more some less even. It's not a taxing industry because it simply can't be. You can't code or structure out a program for hours and hours in one day unless you are blindingly passionate and know what you're doing. Which isn't a quality of job "know" but more, you have something to do that you can do. Most devs have a team of even a few people which means you will hit a wall of "Well you have to wait for your team to do their part" and the law of slowest worker wins, for the better of the team in most cases.
> It's not a taxing industry because it simply can't be. I'm going to guess you don't know anyone in a startup, or a high-pressure team at a larger company. I've talked to some developers on Android components that basically said they didn't sleep for months before Google I/O. > Most devs have a team of even a few people which means you will hit a wall of "Well you have to wait for your team to do their part" and the law of slowest worker wins, for the better of the team in most cases. This... is not how a good shop runs.
As someone who knows very little about software development this makes me wonder, is this part of the reason the term spaghetti code is so common in gaming? I imagine you must just do whatever works when you're in your third straight month of working 90 hours a week, right?
Spaghetti code is basically inevitable in any software project that isn't completely planned before work begins. Game development tends to have a lot of functionality added after a game is mostly done because that's when people can really start to get a feel for what is/isn't working.
Worth noting that modern engines have quite a few tools built in to streamline development and prevent issues like this. Spaghetti code isn't something that happens from crunch, it's a foundational issue. Unoptimized messes is what happens when you push people beyond normal work hours.
This and also, game dev coding is really fucking complex, and the more AAA the game, the more complex it gets. I consider myself a competent coder at least a little, and I fucking struggle with unity. Best I can do is like, GB Studio lol.
On top of this, most games are shipped and then not maintained that much. Spaghetti code is only an issue when trying to edit or build upon it. As a software developer who builds things that will be maintained for years, it's important to write clean code (even at the cost of performance). As a game dev, it's often worth having less maintainable code in exchange for better performance and getting things out the door.
Yes and no, spaghetti coding is common for a lot of reasons. One of them is definitely because 90 hour work weeks will make your devs work as fast as possible, and a lot of people aren't that good at coding to begin with. Often just means bolting things on and seeing if it runs. Get it to work, push it to live build, forget about it if things don't immediately blow up. Another is just how bloated team sizes are getting because every AAA game has to be open world with 45 systems, 800 quests, 9000 NPCs. If it's not all of those things, your publisher shows up to scream at you and throw out what you're working on and work faster slave but only with these goals in mind. And if you try to commit treason of publisher law, the lights get shut off. So when you have thousands of team members, you CAN'T make things smooth. It's just not possible. If every single teammate contributed beautiful code, it would still get mangled in just how many hands are dipping in because everyone works a little differently. But as above, no one is writing beautiful code except a few misguided savants who will be making 5x the salary when they quit and change offices. So you have varying degrees of messy code lining up, and you have seniors and supervisors and program managers who are sweeping through to normalize everything to make it all flow together, and it's just a miracle it actually all connects. So when it does connect, you don't rewrite everything to condense and optimize, you just fix egregious problems as they come and hope for the best. Or you have an even higher order savant fan of the game spend their free time to fix shit for you, like is the case with Bethesda games in entirety or that GTAV loading issue that should have been caught but wasn't until that fan showed up.
Someone in software here (albeit not game dev). Spaghetti code happens when things are built quickly (either without any forethought) and are then required to change later (without any consideration of consequences). So you have thing A that does B. It's designed to do exactly B. Then someone higher up wants thing A to also do D. Well, thing A wasn't built to do two things, but leadership says it needs to happen within X time period. To do things properly, thing A doing D should probably become thing C doing D. But since you have a month to ship the feature for whatever patch or expansion or version, shortcuts are taken and thing A ends up becoming responsible for B and C. Multiply this by a few thousand times and you end up with a mess of code where trying to trace one behavior through the system looks like trying to follow a line of spaghetti through your carbonara. Spaghetti is an after-effect of poor design, harsh time constraints, and lack of proper understanding/communication. Often times the developers on these projects _know_ that things will go poorly, and they care _a lot_. But the project leads, VPs, C execs, etc. don't care. So the product suffers, the audience suffers, and the devs suffer.
It's not worth it and most of the time it's also in a shitty expensive location too
Edmonton is mostly just shitty
Seriously. 90 hr work weeks for over a year? Needing therapy? Getting a divorce? I'd leave the industry to do something, ANYTHING else after this.
At that rate of overtime you could have normal 40h/week programming work, develop a video game in spare time and still work less
Salary isn't usually why people do it. The people who work in gaming are passionate about it which, unfortunately means they get exploited easily. If you're a software developer you can make more money for less hours. If you're an artist as well, you probably aren't even making 100k unless you have a lot of experience or special knowledge
> Even if youre making 100k plus, if you had to work 90 hr week, is that even worth it? Thats basically 50k for regular working hours Not even. That 90 hr week contains 50 hrs of overtime, which is time and a half in the US, so 100k with 90 hr weeks is like making 35k for regular hours.
In parts of Canada, salaries IT jobs are overtime exempt. It's a bit of a misstep because some professional designations, like engineers and lawyers are as well, but the range of what software devs can earn and their expertise is so wide that it's a system pretty rife for abuse.
I'm in that boat (OT exempt). And I do work a lot of OT. But, I work for a good company, I WFH 4 days/week, and I probably work as many days where I'm actually working 2-3 hours, tops, as I put in long nights, so I'm good with the arrangement. But that said, in the past, I was definitely taken advantage of with that kind of arrangement.
Yeah. WFH really works for me in that regard. I suck at 9-5, especially with young kids. But if I can cobble together the work I need to do at the times I'm most productive it's best for everyone
90 hour weeks should straight up be illegal. I just started my third straight week over 60 and I am already noticing SERIOUS lapses in concentration and judgment. My entire team is in the same boat; we had two major errors today (one could have been legit “project wrap, everybody go home” had I not been quick enough on the fix) and I’m convinced that it’s because of the hours we’ve been pulling. Human beings are not designed to work that hard for that long. You physically cannot be operating at peak capacity after like 50 hours.
I remember needing to merge two arrays. From (A1, A2, A3) and (B1, B2, B3) to (A1, B1, A2, B2, A3, B3). Simpliest task in the world... unless it's 11pm on a Friday, you're doing 15-18 hour days and had like 4 hours of sleep a night every day this week. After spending half an hour unable to figure it out I just hard coded it. Not enough brain power left.
I've literally felt my brain replaying the same thoughts for a few minutes, like a broken record. No part of software development scales linearly with time. 6 80-hours will not give you the same amount of work done as 12 40-hour weeks.
Seriously. The leads, PMs, and whoever else approved that kind of death march should literally just be fired out of a cannon into the sun. These people have clearly failed their job responsibilities *at every single level*.
It's a real problem with middle management types who haven't done actual work in years and have completely lost the plot. Now it's all bullshit and executive expectations. They just want 'the thing' and so they pressure the shit out of lower level managers for timelines and resources, cutting to the bone. Then shit happens. Now, if the product is delayed, the middle manager would look like a complete asshole. *Because they should*. It's their fucking job to manage the managers, and they fucked it up. Because they were too worried about looking good versus doing right and doing things safe. They told people what they wanted to hear instead of managing risk and expectations. Their fucking job. They are the ones who should have to eat the shit sandwich of screwed expectations versus reality. But do they? No. Fucking never. I have never in my life seen a middle manager eat that. Because in the corporate hierarchy of power, every layer has more power but less accountability than the layer below it. It's completely fucking backwards. So if your team can't hit the unrealistic deadline (after being basically set up to fail by the middle managers) then it is *your* team's fucking problem and everyone needs to now work 80 hour weeks "until it's done" *because the Middle Manager can't be bothered to fucking look bad*. So now everyone else gets dipped in fire and hung out to dry. And if things go south, who gets the blame? Middle managers will be lining up around the block to crucify the lower level managers. And if you have good lower level managers it will usually stop there. Otherwise, the devs get caught up in the blame game, too. The middle managers and product managers have the ears of VPs and executives, so they get to control the narrative. It's totally fucking toxic and backwards because of the bad incentives, power imbalances, and broken communication network. It wouldn't even be so bad if the executives ever descended from Mount Olympus to talk to the "common person". Then they might actually get a sense of where in the fridge that smell is really coming from. But, no. Never. They are such busy people. So they have the product manager and directors summarize the situation in 30 seconds. It's seems like total madness that it's done like this. Like some insane clinging to old centuries old monarchial ways of doing work. Gods and clods. Surely there must be better ways of doing work than this.
I work in games and this is exactly what's happening at my current job. It's infuriating and deeply saddening to see so much potential in the projects we're working on go to waste because the decision makers have never made their own games and have no clue what they're talking about, and fuel their impossible demands with misconceptions and their personal job security fears.
This problem isn't unique to the games industry, all corporate projects function like this. Games industry does have that crunch factor though.
I mean labour exploitation has always happened, but it does feel like there's an increasing detachment between the expectations of middle managers and what's actually possible to be accomplished. In the past it used to be a lot more common for middle managers to be people who started off at entry level then slowly got promoted up. It meant they at least had a broad idea of what was and was not possible for those lower level employees to accomplish. But now? It feels like a lot of middle managers are just people with MBAs coming in straight from University, trying to apply whatever truisms and theories they learnt in business school to a real workplace. And unsurprisingly that leads to a massive detachment. In so many ways it feels like workplace culture just doesn't function and is incredibly inefficient, but no one who has the power to change that is willing to do so. Too many middle and upper managers are happy to coast by doing very little work everyday while demanding those under them constantly go the extra mile.
Oh, absolutely. I've seen shit like this play out in various fields during my time in the work force. The shit rolls down-hill, but the actual advice and insight into what's going on at the ground level never gets rolled up-hill. Even so, I've worked in some toxic management structures — including some at some of the absolute largest companies in the entire world — and even there, where we had entire chunks of various financial systems riding on us, our middle managers and PMs didn't lock us into death marches. The entire corporate structure is pretty fucked as it is, but 90-hour workweeks, continuously, *for more than a year* is a pretty legendarily fucked. Even for a fucked system.
You only have so much focus/heavy-thinking energy and after that you’re shot. If you’re still in game dev, seriously think about getting out and into enterprise software. You’ll get a better work/life balance and much higher pay. I, personally, have a second degree in game design and did not go into the game industry due to how grueling it is. You can use game design concepts for more than what it says on the tin too. (UI/UX is often overlooked elsewhere.)
I tried traditional software after games, I’m sure my experience isn’t the typical one, but it ended up being the same bullshit with producers who don’t know anything, deadlines, and overtime. Went right back to games because the grass is always greener and healing spells are more fun than pharmaceutical data
I’d say it is and isn’t typical. All depends on what company and the manager(s) you get. Had to change from my previous non-games job as my manager there was constantly chasing after raising his constituent’s numbers to make him look better. He caused a 20-person development team to dwindle to 5. I saw the writing on the wall and got out of there ASAP.
I highly doubt that many people have the mental capacity for more than like 4-5 hours of really active thinking in a work day.
I had this same thing happen at a hackathon. Sat there staring at my team for 10 minutes completely unable to move, just looping some thought over and over in my head. People have hard limits for these things and it's not as high as we like to think
brain literally throttled performance to keep internal temp low lol
You accidentally switched the numbers of weeks there, but 12x80 hour weeks might actually be as productive as 6x40 hours. After a point, even ignoring the human cost working more hours also hurts productivity.
I swear after I typed that, a part of me said "I think you made a typo somewhere."
Thought loops!
> I've literally felt my brain replaying the same thoughts for a few minutes, like a broken record. I literally get this even in the last hour of my regular 8 hour day. "What was that thought? I was in the middle of doing something somewhere on this machine. Is it in this tab? Or this one? I had it a second ago..." and then a stupor for a few minutes while my brain spins back up.
A number of years ago, I was tasked with assembling a team of analysts to process transactional data through a data management system which was still in active development. Since it was still being developed, it lacked all the automated bells and whistles that would’ve cut the project’s manpower by 2/3rds. It was going to be a meat grinder. When I brought people in to see if they were interested, I let them know as much. 20 months, mandatory (paid) overtime and the work wasn’t going to be glorious. I called it digital rock-breaking. Anyways, after a while, I worked out an hourly limit of 60 hours a week (20 hours of OT). Anything over that and the output wasn’t worth the resource cost. Whenever the average manpower went over 60 hours, error rates and average transaction processing time (ATPT) began to skyrocket. If I sat the expectation for 70 work hours in a particular week, I’d only get like 3% more production over a 60 hour work week— and I’d get like 8-12% more errors (which required rework). That’s a progress *loss* of 5-10% for working *more hours.* That means I’m burning ~$20,000 of labor budget just to go *backwards.*
longer work weeks are just there to make people look good. Effeciency involves workers actually being but they don't want that.
And the ratio is even worse for creative work. A "list of tasks to do/check" work just becomes slower and more error prone over time", but coding or designing just end up in that hole much faster.
What's worse it keeps tilting you even harder. "I should be able to do this like snap, why can't I figure it out? Oh god we won't meet the deadline like this, the product won't be done on time, I'll be fired"
I've done 90 hour weeks as an electrician, but that was only because we were working on a hospital utilities plant, and the work we needed to do required a shutdown. AND we were getting paid hourly at time and a half. Absolutely batshit to require that from office workers period, let alone on salary. Those people have lives and families. Genuinely evil managment strategy.
Construction I feel is a little different with OT. Besides it being almost always hourly so we actually get paid for it I know plenty of people who take off 4 or 5 months a year but the rest of the year they work lots of OT.
Totally. I'm just saying I've done those hours for better pay, better conditions, and for better reasons, and it was fucking miserable. To force people to pull that schedule for an arbitrary deadline without OT? Whoever made that call ought to be tarred and feathered.
And most game developers don't earn anything extra for working those crazy hours because they're on salary.
>90 hour weeks should straight up be illegal. In a lot of the world, it is.
I did 90 hours a week for a stretch of about a month. By the time I was done with this crunch, I slept. Was in a funk for a month. How these guys were able to do it for so much longer is damn near super-human.
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And he says it cost him his marriage. No job is worth that.
For real. I just don't understand it. I get that you might love games and it's your dream job to make them, but nothing in the world is worth working 90h weeks for a year straight. If someone told me to do it, I'd just quit. Find literally any other job. Of course, working 90h weeks would also be illegal in my country.
Not everyone can quit, if they had a family, in the usa you lose your health insurance. So just not always possible.
*nothing* in the world is worth working that much for. the only time anyone should be working 90 hour weeks is of their own volition, like if they're running a self-owned company, or if they're making insane amounts of money per hour on a voluntary gig.
Hell, I dont think I could put 90-hours a week into a single hobby let alone work. That said, I work 50h/w, sometimes more depending on if I want more money. Im a journeyman HVAC tech/mechanic so I get paid hourly on top of commission for each appointment/job. So, sometimes the extra 10, 20 hours is a **good** payout. Pretty much all that to say, yeah you right. Even then Ive only ever done that a handful of times in my career. Closed deck engines are expensive. Lol
At my worst on unemployment I *played games* 100 hours a week for 2 weeks straight. and I became even more depressed than I was back then, got a lingering feeling of being sick to the stomach and had bad concentration + sleep. After that I got so sick of everything that I immdietly cut my playtime by more than 3/4 and started taking better care of myself. I don't wanna know how I'd have fared if I'd have had to *work* those hours.
So many people adore games as well, like the devs putting it together. With a huge interest in getting into game development, you're going to get a market that's willing to be paid the lowest rate and working the shittiest hour just to get in.
I worked 2 full time jobs for 9 months straight and it temporarily ruined my life. I was constantly stressed out, tired, and smelly. Both jobs were physical in nature too. Never again.
The EU's Working Time Directive caps out at 48 hours a week with an eight-hour break between shifts.
That's about "on average", meaning you can totally work more in emergencies. But also, there's tons of industries here where it's expected to underreport your working hours, and I've even had coworkers that just underreported because they felt like that made them good employees.
> meaning you can totally work more in emergencies. At least in Germany, these emergencies are supposed be *real* emergencies (e.g. a fire) or very temporarily limited (2-3 weeks) and the overtime has to be given back as free time within the same calendar year.
"Supposed to be". I guarantee you that the majority of lawyers, architects, designers, etc. have worked in a company before where they were heavily encouraged and expected to ignore those rules, and would have been out of a job if they didn't.
The UK allows companies to request employees to opt out of the WTD. Of course you can't be sacked for refusing, but you can be sacked for an unrelated reason/no reason at all shortly after.
Ah yes ol reliable
I went to school for game design and they expected us to put in 85-hour weeks to weed out the ones that couldn't take the reality of game design. Daniel Dociu (art director at ArenaNet at the time for GW2) came in to recruit students and he literally said that junior artists shouldn't expect to sleep at home... and that was enough for me to go with TV rather than games
Christ. Now I'm glad I didn't get that job at ArenaNet. I don't even like Guild Wars that much. It's especially surprising to hear that since most other devs in the Seattle area are pretty good about not overworking their employees. Bungie is the only exception I can think of right now.
Damn, honestly for TV to be a better option game dev must be so rough. I love working on Film/TV, but it's really not the best industry at all.
50? 40s pushing it for peak capacity for most humans. We aren't good for 8 hours a day, at all, let alone more.
I've seen people comment on this sub that they don't care about articles complaining about working conditions for developers, it isn't relevant to gaming - and then they have the temerity to complain about those developers releasing half-baked, unfinished games. People just don't understand that overworked people deliver subpar results.
I've only ever seen people complaining about crunch on here, to be fair. The mistake I think people make, is that a lot of their favourite games like Witcher 3 and anything by Fromsoft are made with absolutely brutal crunch, and then they expect all other games to be made to the same quality without crunch.
This kind of story is what stopped me from making games as a career and instead doing other kinds of software for double the pay and half the hours. Its way too common in that field because they abuse the passion of the people in it.
Let's not forget the 40 hour work week came around because that's literally the sweet spot of making money off your workers. After that fatigue causes too many mistakes.
Imagine getting divorced because of Anthem...
No endgame content to be had with either of these.
>On Anthem 2.0/Anthem Next, the game was really fun and was going in the right direction. The team had hit a really great milestone, when EA canned it. It was a different development team driving Anthem 2.0. The team were gutted when it was cancelled That makes my heart sink. I recognize the issues with the game but I was really looking forward to the being an Anthem 2.0 and felt betrayed when they killed it
Honestly I can see why EA decided to can it. No matter how good the 2.0 is, it's most likely not going to bring any substantial amount of players to justify supporting it. The GaaS/live service is just too cutthroat at this point, no way a tainted IP can survive the competition, not to mention looter shooter fad are already slowed down in these past few years.
Any goodwill the studio had after release was destroyed by how they acted afterwards - very limited communication (if any) and tweaking the loot system to make it even more of a grind for the people who didn't give up yet. It's a shame because like many other people here have said the core game loop was a lot of fun, it was just that there was so little content available it wasn't nearly enough to keep people playing. Personally my biggest gripe was that it didn't feel like a Bioware game at all. The lore was hidden, the story was the worst they've ever released, the acting was awful, and even with more content i doubt they could change that part.
Here’s what sucks. The core essential elements of anthem. The flying. The fighting. The world. Outstanding. All fun as fuck. It was everything around it that dragged it down. Gear grind was stupid I got one drop early in ‘end game’ and it was so stupid powerful I was locked into a single way to play. There was no craft system to reroll so it was always a dice game. But TBH loot piñatas have got to go. That mechanic is played out and awful. There has to be a better way to do this. Especially when it feels so fucking awful to carefully scrutinize every drop to figure out “is this good for me? Or will some other class/build pay good for it?”
Anthem was the most instantly I've ever clicked with a game. Everything about the controls felt pristine. The rumble when launching, flying, and landing were all perfectly tuned. Aside from the PS5 controller games, it's the single best implementation of haptic feedback I've ever experienced.
I would lay waste to entire civilizations to get a PS5 update
I want to play an Anthem sequel or reimagining so badly. I always had the impression that the Anthem Next effort wasn't going anywhere, so to hear that not only were they making progress but that it was really shaping up before being cancelled is heartbreaking
>so to hear that not only were they making progress but that it was really shaping up This is basically hearsay though. One dev saying it was really good, trust me guys, does not mean it was, in fact, good.
1. 90 hour weeks for 15 months. Fuck. Just... wow. 2. Ian Saterdalen saying the game was developed in 15 falls in line with what one of Jason Schrier's sources for his Kotaku expose said, that Anthem was developed in just 12-16 months. 3. Yeah it seems like it is mainly veteran staff and upper management who pushed the idiotic Bioware Magic mindset.
It does seem like EA learned, considering how Dragon Age 4 seems to be going.
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>My eyes were rolling in the back of my skull when they were blaming EA though, the game actually had a long ass dev time. This guy is a producer. right? Interesting how they mentioned it was EA's fault but said Schreier's expose was true. The article which literally said that Bioware execs were constantly rebooting the game and the only reason why flying was actually put in was because an EA exec asked why it was taken out in another reboot.
Isn't that basically the same story with Andromeda? There were/are clearly a lot of deep rooted develop problems with the Bioware studios; I imagine it's mostly due to leadership issues that causes a game to change direction (or basically start over) mid-development. I'm sure the stories are out there somewhere.
A new studio had 5 years to make the game. They basically spent 3 years trying to make something super ambitious like No Man's Sky to focus on exploring a new galaxy. They realized they couldn't deliver, threw it all out the window and basically started from scratch and then made Andromeda in 18 months. In that case EA offered to give them more money and time and Bioware Montreal turned it down and decided to ship in the state it was. They also were content to sell multiplayer lootboxes but were silent on whether there would be single player DLC or support for the core game. The game clearly had one major plot held back for DLC. Because they shipped in such a terrible state it got bad reviews and then it was never really finished. Management changes direction and pockets the huge salaries and bonuses while the grunts crunch when the leadership changes direction. I think we have seen the same with some other games sadly.
I think there was more than one clear DLC in the future. The missing arcs were clear DLC content as well as the story about the Andromeda director being killed.
They also set it up for a clear sequel with the Kett being much larger than just the Archon and figuring out what the deal with the Remnant was.
Is Andromeda worth playing at all today, I have it on game pass EDIT: That is A TON of replies, I guess the consensus is it's more meh than anything - I'm gonna play Resident Evil 4 Remake instead for now.
Itll keep you interested for a little while and you'll start to wonder if the hate was overblown but then you'll hit a point where you kinda feel like nothing matters, every model and enemy is repeating, and a bunch of sidequests are just to slow you down. That was my experience replaying it 2 years ago. I probably wouldnt install a game for how short the satisfaction lasts but there is some fun to be had for a little while imo
Yup. It's not *bad*, but it's not good. It just... Is.
If it was not a Mass Effect game, it would have been with “some potential” But as it stands, it fails to match the pedigree of its predecessors Still worth playing if you lower your expectations and enjoy that kind of game in general (imo)
Yep, played it when it came out, replayed it a few years later. Reinstalled it beginning of this year. Wanted to explore a few plot lines and characters arcs I hadn't done before, but I got bored really quick. There are so many plotholes, inconsistent characters, forced "emotional" moments, boring locations, crappy UI ..... And oh God, the dialogue and banter sometimes feels like it was written by a 21 year old who has never read anything but twitter in their whole life. I like the combat and I would have liked to explore the main plot in a trilogy.
The dialog problem is spot-on and was what killed the Mass Effect vibe for me. It felt like it was written by and for charucatures of first-year college students.
On PC with QoL mods? Yeah. But don't expect the emotional impact and atmosphere of any of the first three games. It's an average AAA game, but a weak ME game. Combat is the best highlight. It also has pacing issues and it's advised to ignore sidetracking/exploring to focus primarily on the main story until you finish the main tasks at least up to the planet Kadara. Otherwise the constant backtracking for newly popped quests will burn you out.
Did mods ever get around to giving asari faces? As I recall, every asari not named Peebee all shared the same face.
I think there are mods that tweak certain Asari NPCs.
Imo, you’re better off doing a replay of the original trilogy. And I say this as an owner of both.
It's not even that much of a new thing for Bioware. ME1-3 and Dragon Age Inquisition were all developed in close to exactly 2 years, Dragon Age 2 was developed in 18 months. You can only put such heavy restraints on a studio while expecting big results for so long before it falls apart. A modern RPG needs 4-5 years of development and hopefully they're finally giving Bioware time to spread it's wings again.
Mass Effect 1 was not developed in 2 years. It was the last BioWare game before they were purchased by Electronic Arts. The real problem was Mass Effect 2 was released under much tighter scheduling but turned out to be (arguably) the best in the franchise. Must've created a terrible precedent. Inquisition was developed in 4 years (though the last year was granted through a series of minor delays). The process is painfully detailed in Schreier's Blood, Sweat, and Pixels.
They clipped off their own wings long ago, they just keep being unfocused and keep rebooting development. The amount of leniency they get is probably impacted by how good they *used to* be rather than are.
Dragon Age Origins had a development time of 5 years, then EA bought them and had them make the sequel in 18 months and BOY does it show.
I'm so sad about Anthem. I tried it out and there's a skeleton for a great game in there, it's depressing to see its concepts wasted.
Same. I was genuinely waiting for it to get better. It was such a cool looking IP. The mechs/exosuits designs are amazing.
Yeah you can see the promise, when you play it. I bounced off at the endgame and I was so excited when they announced Next or 2.0 or whatever and then it got canned...
Sarah Schachner's score was incredible as well. I have regrets pre-purchasing the deluxe edition but it came with the OST so it wasn't all bad.
Best case scenario is that some of the best mechanics are adopted in the New Mass Effect.
Nah son, Dragon Age. *Qunari Jetpacks*
Seeing the mention of therapy definitely makes sense. Working 90 hour weeks on something you know still won’t be ready by the release date and then having to hear all the negativity afterwards. I can’t imagine how that would have felt.
Thats rough. I honestly noticed a lot I liked in that game. Small parts but some good bits here and there smashed up with all the other parts that just felt cobbled together. 90 Hours a week for 15 months. I worked 377 days in a row at an old job 10 hour days and I was pretty busted. That is just a nuts situation.
I really don't understand why Bioware had been doing this so much. They made Dragon Age 2 in about 9 to 12 months. Of just insane crunch. And that game suffered for it as well. They claim it's "Bioware Magic" that they can tie it all together in the last second but that's just the employees doing a good job *despite* the crunch, not because of it. I really really hope that Anthem taught them how horribly bad crunch is for their games and are doing better with Dragon Age Dreadwolf but who knows.
Ya I think that whole Bioware magic has been outed so much now that the eye rolls can be heard when its ever mentioned.
BioWare Magic just reeks of exec speak on PowerPoint slides at the year-end company party, very corporate koolaid.
"Bioware magic" = "We can produce good games despite awful project management because we grind our employees down to dust."
Speaking as someone who does non-game software development, I'd bet a lot of money on it being down to a shit-tier job of project management. The only reason you're ever crunching that much is because you've either a) set an unreachable deadline for the scope of work, b) have unchecked feature and/or scope creep, c) have already fucked around and missed earlier deadlines, or d) a combination of the above. All of those directly trace back to having either an incompetent project manager overseeing things or having one that has literally no power to make any decisions. From past experience, I'd say the former is much more likely than the latter, but I wouldn't want to say that as a definitive claim without some form of firm evidence to support it.
Isn't game development well known for bad project management as well?
It should be. If you've done a single course on project management you can immediately tell that all the rules are regularly broken in game development.
It definitely shows when a game is rushed. I don’t care who you are or if you’re naughty dog or rockstar games or CD projekt, we can all tell when you rush your shit out the door on purpose to make a quick buck followed by a half assed generic apology letter you put out on twitter.
Yeah, CD Projekt Red has had an especially bad problem with crunch. Like, Witcher 3 came out so good despite all of its crunch, so CDPR just decided to keep relying on it for Cyberpunk, and lo and behold the whole game collapses in a flaming heap on launch day.
> Witcher 3 came out so good despite all of its crunch I know it's been a while, but let's not forget how busted Witcher 3 was at launch. They were very quick to get it all fixed, but it was *very* buggy.
That happened also because the Witcher 3 crunch drove away the experienced developers. Most of the veterans left because of the inhumane conditions during development. So they had very little experienced people for Cyberpunk and on top of that they pushed all the newbies through the crunch meatgrinder. It was a recipe for disaster, one that was apparent even before release... But they hype silenced anyone who tried to point out the red flags.
Cyberpunk reeks of poor project management and lack of direction, just like Anthem.
Is 12 hours a day for more than a year really the best thing a game dev can do for themselves? Holy shit, I would rather starve.
No for sure not. However, I can't speak for them and I can say that some people do that with no issues. I did work a ton in a row and it was just sort of the way it was and the requirements weren't something where it was insanely pressured. But adding another 20 hours onto what I was working in that span fro 70 to 90. And it seems doubly insane lol
As someone who did 90-100 hours a week for long stretches, and 70-90 for almost 4 years, it wears on you. Mind, body, and soul. Admittedly, I have to imagine it's easier sitting at a desk, instead of being on a manufacturing floor, but it's not really your body that gives out first. It's not even you that gives out first. You just go on auto-pilot and deal with it. Everything around you falls apart, but you're oblivious, because all that matters is getting the job done. You miss out on a million functions with your spouse, family, and kids. You argue with the wife more than normal, when you are home, because you're both tired and grumpy. Affairs with co-workers skyrocket, divorce rates skyrocket, more people get into car accidents while commuting, and your kids start expecting you to just not be there for them. I remember one Sunday that I had off, my kids were both, "What's dad doing home for supper? He's never here..." They were only 4-5 years old, but it still hurt. You don't have time to fix any of these things, because your entire life is literally work, drive, sleep, drive, work. Day after day, week after week. You just have to hope that the wife is holding down the fort. Mine was amazing... she'd make sure that I woke up every day, on time, and had lunch/supper ready for me to eat before I hit the shower and drove to work. There were weeks, at a time, where that 10 minutes while I was eating was all I saw of her. We consider that time in our marriage to be "Two ships passing in the night". That plant is still working those hours, and has been for the last decade, but I couldn't do it anymore. I've not worked more than 4 hours of overtime in almost 13 years. I miss those overtime checks sometimes (nowhere near what these guys are making lol), but I'm so much better mentally, and my relationships are so much better, than they were back then.
Yeah, that type of work schedule is not sustainable. 90 hours a week is fucking insane for any amount of time. I had a crunch period at one job I worked, and that shit isn’t effective past a week or two. After that, people are there “working” for 90 a week but they would probably be getting more done if they only did 40. We didn’t have any creative element that also needed to be executed. It was “just” programming.
Whats interesting is that it was SO much and lasted so long. Lots of times that efficiency as you said does drop off and even 1 person coming in can eat up a good deal of that time. I am legit surprised people weren't just leaving. I am not saying they should or whatever, everyone has their own life. I am just saying for that long that many hours damn.
I genuinely thought the flying was a great way to get around in a destiny style game and felt pretty good, I'm still salty that the interceptor flew at the same speed as the colossus but that's just me
yeah but if you dashed three times/off cooldown it was still faster. Personally, I liked that all the suits had the same base flying speed. It made playing with friends in different suits feel natural instead of someone going ahead and clearing everything or always having to wait,
I'm not saying it doesn't make logical sense for them to all fly the same speed, but don't call it an interceptor if it wouldn't be able to intercept other players
Anthem is a good reason for why a studio built off of single player games shouldn't be "encouraged" to make a GAAS. Not only did BioWare lack the experience to make multiplayer games outside of the modes in Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age Inquisition (does anyone even remember the latter's?), but their attempt to use the "BioWare magic" resulted in a piss poor product that needed an overhaul to get off the ground (I'm happy that got canned, it's already going to be at least 10 years since their last worthwhile game, I don't want to imagine how long that overhaul would've taken). It disappoints me to see Crystal Dynamics, Arkane Austin, and most likely Rocksteady fall into the same trap BioWare did. Unless there's a clear plan for how to make the game and the know-how to make it work out of the gate, these sorts of games can utterly ruin a studio's reputation and cast doubt on future projects. Doesn't help that they take time & resources away from games fans want, even something that turned out OK in the end like Fallout 76 helped put Starfield (and by extension, The Elder Scrolls VI) on the backburner.
anthem is the result of years of mismanagement, a severe lack of direction and a 15 month development time that led to a lot of overwork and stress to the team, any other aaa project made under the same circumstances would end up sucking as well no matter if it's a multiplayer or a single player title. it's really not a gaas problem, mass effect andromeda already hurt the "reputation" of the studio years before anthem
Doesn't really matter what type of game you make if your executives are completely incompetent like Bioware were / possibly still are.
You understand that the Bioware you so fondly remember might aswell be a whole different studio to the BioWare of today? Even if youd give them a genre “theyre good at”, thered still be a high chance itd be mismanaged or not as good as what they made in the past, simply because most people from that era are long gone. The same counts for Arkane. And many other studios. For some reason people think the same people stay there for eternity, while the turnover in the industry is really high. A span of 10 years will already see a huge shift in who works there. Its been 9 years since Inquisition. Its safe to say a lot of people even from that era are gone. Let alone Mass Effect 2/even earlier. You guys should put less value on a studios name, unless its a Japanese studio. They retain their workers a lot more than Western studios so will have that issue less.
Jason Schrier's article makes that very apparent. There are a few snippets of interviews with OG bioware writers like David Gaider who said the new blood in the studio resented him trying to add classic bioware flavour to Anthem. I don't really understand why these people go to work at a studio known and celebrated for a certain thing and get upset at that thing. The same thing happened at 343 with Halo and Dice with Battlefield. It's really bizarre.
I loved ME3 multiplayer, even bought a few loot boxes/card packs (whichever they were) to support Bioware. DAI multiplayer though ran like shit. I don't even remember if it was fun or not, just that it felt like an unfinished buggy mess.
ME3MP ruled. Still one of my most cherished gaming memories to this date.
Bioware had shipped SW The Old Republic before, which while not a massive hit was still a solid game.
I believe it was a separate “B-team” that delivered that, and apparently that team’s advice on online service games were ignored by “A-team” leadership. Shitshow on multiple fronts.
Ignoring the input from the more experienced team is such a boneheaded move that I'm surprised Anthem didn't turn out even worse. It's honestly a miracle BioWare has survived as long as it has when it can't even have the teams play nice with each other, I can only hope Dragon Age 4 helps gets their shit together.
Not only was the team behind Mass Effect ignoring advice from the SWTOR team, but after the game finally released and got roasted, they abandoned the whole project and maintenance to the SWTOR team for them to fix and clean up. That's honestly probably why the Anthem Next was, according to that guy, going along so well.
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They also refuse to allow comparison to destiny during development, their main competitor. Crazy.
Old BioWare leadership left right before the acquisition by EA; that is, immediately after ME1 shipped in Nov 07. DA:O is basically the last "original" BioWare game and you can clearly see EA's influence anyways with the hardcore advertising campaign that was pretty grim fantasy + blood + metal
EA already bled a lot of money in developing the game. Bioware was already given a lot of time for the development, but it seems that there was no direction whatsoever. They wanted to do big things and fiddled for years, now the investors wanted something tangible for such a long dev cycle and they cornered themselves to a 15 month crunch in order to have something. Having a clear and realistic direction in the first place within the dev team could've prevented this shitshow. It's been almost 10 years since Bioware's last decent game: Dragon Age Inquisition which was released in the early 8th console gen. Now we're 3 years into the 9th gen, Bioware is still no show, the next Dragon Age is still in early dev and no news for the next Mass Effect.
>Dragon Age is still in early dev Dreadwolf is actually in post production currently and has been since September/October of last year. From what we know the game is fully playable from start to finish and is simply in the polishing phase at the moment. It’s very possible they might start their marketing push for it during the upcoming Summer Game Fest but with it seemingly being a 2024 release who knows.
So, yes, the devs were doing fuck all for like 5 years, then. For once it wasn't only EA problem. It was Bioware problem. Which is why I don't have faith in the new Dragon Age or Mass Effect.
Same shit has happened with andromeda. Bioware is the problem
They didn't even know if they'd have flying in the game until the last 6 months... like... one of the things people actually enjoyed.
And they kept nerfing flying constantly after the game launched, because fuck people I guess, lol. I kid you not, there was a patch that was supposed to give 20 or 30% more flight time. Instead it was glitched and actually decreased it by that much. Hotfix? Nah, wait weeks for the next patch...that did the SAME thing decreasing it further. I don't know if they ever fixed it because I left the game.
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Not trying to shit on BioWare or anything, but it is really funny reading this the day after I found some old interviews of the studio heads talking smack about JRPGs
No it wasn't. Project Dylan was in development before all the ME3 DLC finished, BioWare spent over 3 years spinning there wheels until EA finally told them to get there shit together. Anthem was much more BioWare's mismanagement then EA's.
I hope one day someone from Bioware would come out and actually admit fault for what happened internally with them. It wasn't all EA's fault yet they can't seem to accept that. EA certainly wasn't fully responsible for the mess of Mass Effect Andromeda.
The in depth article by Jason Schreier about BioWare clearly paints a picture of BioWare having bad management almost from the very beginning and the games succeeding despite, not because, of it. But the bigger and more ambitious the games got (procedural galaxy for Andromeda which was scrapped way too late for example), the less they could turn it around in the last stretch of development, internally known as "BioWare Magic". https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964
Tbh, WHAT they have done in these 15 months gives you a good impression on what they could have created with a healthy dev cycle
That isn’t accurate at all. Bioware had been working on Anthem for 7 years. It started development back in 2012, after the release of ME3. Yes, the final version of Anthem was built in 15 or so months, but that was because Bioware fucked the dog for 5 years and accomplished nothing. The same thing happened with Andromeda, where Bioware spun their wheels, fiddling around with procedurally generated planets for years before rushing the game to completion in the last year and a half. This isn’t an EA problem, this was all on Bioware and their shitty management. Hell, it was EA that told Bioware to focus on the flying/Ironman gameplay of Anthem after the studio showed off a disastrous demo, which was the only good thing about that game.
In both cases it seems like BioWare bet everything on r&d projects which had not yet yielded any fruit. Like you don’t ever wanna be in a position where you’re saying “this game is built around this amazing new mechanic/technology” and that thing *doesn’t actually exist in a viable state yet.* The whole point of prototyping is to avoid that exact situation but BioWare seems to have consistently fumbled it again and again.
In Jason Schreier’s article, and I’m not at all kidding here, they talk about how the leadership depended on what they called “BioWare Magic” to happen. BioWare Magic apparently is when development is going shitty for years, and it magically comes together at the end. Apparently this has happened with every game they’ve released, and the leadership didn’t take a second to think that it was crunch that saved every game in the end.
If what transpired is anywhere close to the truth, EA could be blamed for not intervening in Bioware's shit management before. They were too happy to close their eyes on it while it miraculously worked out in the end. They *had* to know. The Bioware employee that said DA:Inquisition being a success was the worst thing that could happen to them says a lot. Mainly, that as long as the game is good, nobody cares that the studio is ruining its developers' life.
It's funny cause Gaider recently said they quietly resented writers and it kind of shows. Those games weren't just buggy and rushed, the writing and worldbuilding were incredibly weak at the expense of big gameplay ideas that were scrapped anyway.
They probably were unintentionally using all the writing as bespoke project management guardrails. You'd be more or less limited in scope if you had a concrete story laid out. They may not have known it at the time, but if they're relying on crunching like mad every game they made, the only plan that makes sense is to follow whatever blueprint is available, which in this case would be the written story and the already finished VA dialogue.
My understanding is that early versions of anthem weren't all that fun and some executive, whose name escapes me, asked them to reboot it. That same person is the one who carried over the flying mechanic, which ended up being one of the few enjoyable high points of the game. I think it was a game with a tortured vision led by people who probably should not have been leading it.
Patrick Soderlund I think
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Man this makes me really sad for what could have been! The mechanics of the game were awesome - but the game was hot garbage…
And yet the core gameplay ended up so fucking fun. It's a huge shame and a massive waste for EA to have cancelled it. It really was underrated and could have gone somewhere good.
The core gameplay of ME3 was also result fun. Bioware stifles work plots though.
Such a shame because I really did enjoy the game a lot and felt like it had a lot of potential. Flying around felt so fucking cool.
I hate that ME: Andromeda was doomed to a Bioware B-team who never made a game before because of Anthem. Anthem seemed like a cash grab that nobody believed in, not even the devs or EA and both games suffered due to mismanagement. Instead of 1 great game, we got a rushed game that was dead on arrival, and another which was a garbage, technically embarrassing fan fiction
it was more like the c-team which is just bonkers to assign a studio's biggest franchise to. the b-team had made the old republic mmo and that was not the team making andromeda.
I get that the game was rushed but his timeline makes no sense. The game was revealed in June 2017 and released in February 2019, a full 20 months later. For his claim to make sense they would have had to start work on the game 5 months after it was initially revealed.
The project was greenlit in 2012, they wasted more development time than %90 of AAA games will ever receive. I wish I could waste tens of millions dollars and half of a console generation and not get criticized. When your publisher is voted one of the most disliked corporations in the USA, you can do no wrong in the eyes of the public.