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BioWare Edmonton leads move on to new projects/Dragon Age 4; Austin supporting Anthem

Landford

Landford

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Saw on a reddit thread, it seems all of the upper management that was working on Anthem is no longer doing so. Seems only Ben Irving and Chad Robertson are working on it now. It was kinda predicted that the game would pass on the smaller "live team", but Anthems launch and subsequent months were anything but predictable.




What are your thoughts? Is Anthem dead or is this expected?
 
DNAbro

DNAbro

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Oct 25, 2017
25,872
This was known right? I thought they moved development to a dedicated live team.
 
Dimple

Dimple

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Jan 10, 2018
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906500d2589d959c73c33b4dcdda34f5fda3485255b19132d42b491c823e807e.jpg
 
ThroughtheVoid

ThroughtheVoid

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Oct 25, 2017
6,890
It happened with Destiny as well, no amount of issues will keep the original team on the project. They need to move onto other upcoming projects that need direction/leads.

Sometimes a live team can be good though. It's not necessarily a bad thing.
 
AxeVince

AxeVince

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Oct 26, 2017
580
Bioware Austin did a great job with SWTOR, if anyone can redeem the thing, it's them.
Directors are also among the first to leave any project shipped (though not live) but it was announced a while ago Austin would take the lead once delivered.
 
Dest

Dest

Has seen more 10s than EA ever will
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Jun 4, 2018
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anthem was doa and no one in my office wanted to believe me
rip bioware
 
Lant_War

Lant_War

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Jul 14, 2018
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Isn't this normal for multiplayer titles? Battlefront 2 got some staff leaving for a while too while they made Battlefield V
 
Com_Raven

Com_Raven

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Oct 27, 2017
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Some of that was to be expected. They threw a lot of hands onto the game towards the end, so ramping it down after shipping is normal. Mark surely went back to leading Dragon Age, and was always supposed to, no?
 
Falchion

Falchion

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Oct 25, 2017
40,908
Boise
Yikes, hope this doesn't signal a reduced level of support and content but it kind of looks like that.
 
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OP
Landford

Landford

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Oct 25, 2017
4,678
Something to note is that by my own experience with that game and reading the forums and the subreddit, Ben Irving time with The Old Republic was really reviled. The community seems to think it almost killed for good that game.
 

Deleted member 1185

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As far as I know the plan was always for Edmonton to ship and Austin to take over while Edmonton moved on to the next game. This wasnt a secret
 
shinobi602

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Oct 24, 2017
8,327
This doesn't really mean anything. They're now on new projects and Austin is taking over Live service.
 
Disclaimer

Disclaimer

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Oct 25, 2017
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Darrah being back on Dragon Age shouldn't surprise anyone. Glad he's back doing something he's passionate about rather than picking up the pieces of other people's mess.
 
Hella

Hella

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Oct 27, 2017
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It's not really unusual for multi-team studios to have a "development" studio and a "live game support" studio, is it? I don't actually think this is a big deal.

Not to say that Anthem has the brightest future, but it's not like they're announcing that there's no more devs working on the game or anything.
 
Rodjer

Rodjer

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Hella said:
It's not really unusual for multi-team studios to have a "development" studio and a "live game support" studio, is it? I don't actually think this is a big deal.

Not to say that Anthem has the brightest future, but it's not like they're announcing that there's no more devs working on the game or anything.
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Exactly, this was planned from the beginning.
The new leads are from BioWare Austin and one of them is the head of LIVE SERVICE, nothing new.
 
Theorry

Theorry

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Oct 27, 2017
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Project Leads dont usually stay and move over to a new project when the live service takes over.
 
chrominance

chrominance

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Oct 25, 2017
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I think the main concern I have is that I don't know what the live team is tasked with so it's hard to gauge how much ongoing development there will be, as opposed to supporting an ongoing events calendar. Handing off to a live team makes sense when the fundamentals of the game are largely complete. There's a lot of argument over whether this is true for Anthem.

That said, it's true that you don't necessarily need someone like a Mark Darrow around post-launch. The game is shipped, the pressures on development and content are different now.
 
Thera

Thera

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I imagine the dev team of Dragon's Age 4, when the guys who miserably lead one of the most epic failure of this gen, walk in the meeting room :
"We are the lead team now !"
 

rras1994

Member
Nov 4, 2017
5,742
Landford said:
Something to note is that by my own experience with that game and reading the forums and the subreddit, Ben Irving time with The Old Republic was really reviled. The community seems to think it almost killed for good that game.
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Except that's not accurate- Ben Irving's lead producer time was actually the most successful expansions SWTOR had, and they were releasing something pretty much every month. Content did drop but you could the timing coincided with resources being taken for Mass Effect Andromeda and then Anthem to get them out - that's not really something Ben Irving can be blamed for. A lot of hardcore MMO were annoyed because the game focused on story content during his time, which some really didn't like, but again, KOTFE and KOTET were SWTOR's most successful expansions according to the devs by a large margin.
 
Rodjer

Rodjer

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chrominance said:
I think the main concern I have is that I don't know what the live team is tasked with so it's hard to gauge how much ongoing development there will be, as opposed to supporting an ongoing events calendar. Handing off to a live team makes sense when the fundamentals of the game are largely complete. There's a lot of argument over whether this is true for Anthem.

That said, it's true that you don't necessarily need someone like a Mark Darrow around post-launch. The game is shipped, the pressures on development and content are different now.
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Anthem previous leads were from the Edmonton Studio, now they moved to live service support to Austin, this was known, thread title is misleading.
 
jschreier

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This is not a sign of anything, and in fact it was always the plan for BioWare Austin to take the reins on the live service (although plenty of people in Edmonton are still on Anthem).

Darrah and Gamble both only joined Anthem in mid/late 2017. Darrah was always going to go make DA4 afterward. Gamble is on something else now. Warner is off for a personal thing.
 
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Landford

Landford

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rras1994 said:
Except that's not accurate- Ben Irving's lead producer time was actually the most successful expansions SWTOR had, and they were releasing something pretty much every month. Content did drop but you could the timing coincided with resources being taken for Mass Effect Andromeda and then Anthem to get them out - that's not really something Ben Irving can be blamed for. A lot of hardcore MMO were annoyed because the game focused on story content during his time, which some really didn't like, but again, KOTFE and KOTET were SWTOR's most successful expansions according to the devs by a large margin.
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Thats fair. My time with the game was short, for sure, but I read a ton of negative impressions on reddit about him, but, you know, reddit
 
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Landford

Landford

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Oct 25, 2017
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To clarify: I know this was supposed to happen and it was planned. I said as much on the OP. However, almost nothing about Anthem's launch happened as expected, and with the playerbase dwindling, I thought it could be interesting to discuss it.
 
FakePlasticTree

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Jul 24, 2018
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Here's hoping Lukas Kristjanson, Pat Weekes, Mary Kirby, Sheryl Chee and the rest of BioWare's veteran Dragon Age writers gets to make Dragon Age 4 at least
 
Becks'

Becks'

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Omae wa mou shindeiru.

I guess it will live for a couple of years. I liked the movement in it though.
 
Anno

Anno

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Wasn't this already known? Anyway, Austin is the studio who actually has lots of experience doing this well, so it seems like a good thing anyway? Hopefully they get the necessary time and resources.
 
Haze

Haze

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Oct 25, 2017
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Anthem really doesn't seem like it can be salvaged. It can't keep up with its roadmap which... if it means Austin is working stupid hours to get to the promised roadmap dates, is fine. But the issue is that if and that's a big if, the game is ever even in a "good" state, will anyone even give a shit?
 
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