As always, the Onion nailed it perfectly long ago:

https://theonion.com/anthem-developers-assure-players-whiteb...

'“We know the thousands of customers who pre-ordered Anthem have some concerns, but we are confident this collection of words scrawled on a conference room board will be a revolutionary third-person shooter experience when released at the end of the week,” said director Jonathan Warner, who shared a progress update with players by sending out a screenshot of an email chain that ended with an agreement to call the game Anthem.'

https://theonion.com/people-criticizing-anthem-don-t-underst...

"Stop complaining and attacking studios just because a game isn’t everything you want. Developers put too much stock in making games enjoyable and playable as it is. Planning to make something as profitable as Anthem was supposed to be and is a huge undertaking, so at least give them credit for trying. BioWare had 18 months to build a game that would sell millions of copies based on the goodwill they built up, and they hit it out of the park. You may not understand Q4 projections, but they do. Anthem is a game that exists and is funding [EA] CEO bonuses, and by that measure, it’s been a huge success."

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ilamont 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

For anyone unfamiliar with Anthem (including me, before I read the second Onion article) and curious about what happened, Wikipedia covers some of the executive decisions and leadership changes that hurt the effort:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_(video_game)#Developmen...

The "Frostbite" engine sounds like a disaster.

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aucisson_masque 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The frostbite engine seem to be the tip of the iceberg.

Core issue was lack of clear leadership from what I read on Wikipedia.

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user____name an hour ago | parent [-]

Iirc it was a stupid C-suite decision to use Frostbyte across EA studios. It never made much technical sense and DICE lacked the bandwidth and capital to support so many teams and usecases.

	▲	teirce 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yes after the success of frostbite around Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3 or so, EA decided it should be used in everything. Not unlike the mistake Capcom is making with REngine right now, if the performance woes of Monster Hunter Wilds and Dragons Dogma 2 are anything to go by. Pretty sure there was even a Need for Speed game on Frostbite which was... huh.

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brendoelfrendo 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The Onion is funny, but not exactly kind here. I would recommend Mark Darrah's post-mortem on Anthem; he's not an unbiased source (he became an executive producer on the project part way through development, and I think he does try to let himself off easy in his retelling of events), but it's pretty clear that mismanagement--both within Bioware and especially from EA--set Anthem down a track that was hard to recover from. Development goals, gameplay design, and even architectural decisions were constantly shifting until late in development, leading devs to constantly rework the game as new requirements came and went.

https://youtu.be/CxwrCRdqZb8

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activitypea 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The game _was_ forced to release in that financial year, but as Darrah eloquently puts it: "There was no point in delaying because that team didn't have another year in them"

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burningChrome 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Seems Anthem is gone, but not completely?

From the same post-mortem video:

former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah revealed that internally at the studio, the shooter had code for local play and private server use until a few months before launch. Presumably, it's still there to be "salvaged and recovered."

"Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months up to launch," Darrah commented. "I don't know that they still work but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered."

https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/anthem-is-dead-after-t...

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gambiting 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I mean, most likely it just means they could run servers locally for development, that's pretty standard. I used to work on The Division and every dev could trivially spawn local servers for testing, I basically had it set up so every time I ran the client my own server started in the background. That was "local play" since the architecture of the game is fundamentally centered around all the gameplay systems running on the server. If(or rather - when) their public servers go down, the same statement could be made - that there is code in there for "private" or "local" play. But in reality it's just about running the servers locally, "salvaging" is just having access to the full source code, which is not something Ubisoft would ever do, just like EA wouldn't(I would love to be surprised though!).

	▲	springtimesun 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I loved The Division. Some months ago I re-downloaded it and just ran around for a bit. The setting and world feel are still there and the story is deeper than some single player games. For a while I thought, wouldn't it be amazing if it was ever released (or leaked) so it could be player hosted or modded in a local kind of development like this. But, I didn't stay with that thought. There was just something about that game that had a beginning, middle and end for me. Maybe I'm just getting old.
	▲	brendoelfrendo an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Not quite; Darrah says in his video that the direction from EA flip-flopped between client server and peer-to-peer several times during development, so the code they'd be salvaging would be the original peer-to-peer code. But since that code isn't part of the final game and Bioware is going away... I kind of doubt that code exists in a state where it could be re-integrated with the retail release of Anthem.

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hbn 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Both articles GP linked were jokes pointing blame at the mismanagement