-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
EA roundtable with Apex Legends, Anthem and Battlefield V devs
- Thread starter Theorry
- Start date
It's roundtable about development challenges, so a perfect place for Anthem devs to be I would say
Anthem devs "it was utter chaos"
Bfv devs "we still needed months to get things in place"
Anthem devs "help us"
Developers are always facing development challenges, so none of them are out of the woods. All 3 games are ongoing active services.
This is a very insightful video about how hard these service games are.
To discuss their ongoing live service game? Jesus christ.
only playing devils advocate here, but anthem hasnt had an update since may. the other two just seem like way better candidates to discuss challenges and how to overcome them during a live service game.
like all im saying is anthem is a bad example why would anyone listen to their advice
Anthem devs... which ones ?Bioware Austin who got the whole thing dumped on them after Edmonton decided to go back to Dragon Age 4?
OP
OP
Sigh. This isnt about now this is about all development also how it starts etc. And this isnt about advice also just talking about games and what they came across.
But he maybe watch the vid. Crazy thought.
Did you not watch the video? How many times do devs have to say...things are hard and take time. May was two months ago...geez...some people need to have some respect for people that create things in general. It's always "why can't they just do this"?
Thats only 2 months, these things take much more time than you'd think. Especially when we are in a era where people are complaining about crunch times. + It's summer, people might be on holiday and such. Sorry if i came off as a snarky asshole lol
Battlefield I can understand a bit better, but they've had people working on that series with frostbite for a while now.
Anthem.... it goes far beyond "this is hard and games are hard"
There were fundamental issues not related to MAKING the game but deciding HOW things work, like loot. That age old, tired beating the game gets; yes I know.
When Ben Irving was talking about incentives, gameplay loot, the treadmill and rewards and it's like :head exploding gif: a thousand people have already told them how it works in other games but they ignored it. They went out of their way to be unlike other games, articles have been written with info from insiders telling them how development choices over there was frankly, miss managed. But I would imagine most people have read that and I don't need to ramble on.
Anthem.... it goes far beyond "this is hard and games are hard"
There were fundamental issues not related to MAKING the game but deciding HOW things work, like loot. That age old, tired beating the game gets; yes I know.
When Ben Irving was talking about incentives, gameplay loot, the treadmill and rewards and it's like :head exploding gif: a thousand people have already told them how it works in other games but they ignored it. They went out of their way to be unlike other games, articles have been written with info from insiders telling them how development choices over there was frankly, miss managed. But I would imagine most people have read that and I don't need to ramble on.
Last edited:
Because there is something to learn from failure..? I'm sure they're VERY aware that their game did poorly, and the other two are doing fairly well. Different perspective and what can be done is helpful. There is value and worth in discussing why something isn't working or succeeding. There are probably some really interesting subtle reasons why, alongside the obvious glaring issues we all know about.
Yup, something very small for us gamers can take up a lot of time. It has to work with everything in place.
I don't know much about game development, or software for that matter (Nothing actually) But as a Sea Of Thieves insider I've learned that these things take much, much more than you'd think.
Made me appreciate the work behind these updates, even if it feels as a gamer that things move too slow.
Epic Games claimed it took 4 weeks to release a colored re-skin and at least 18 months for a hero in Paragon (RIP). Crazy prep goes into this shit before we see it.
Game is still total mess from design, balance and technical standpoints. It has been ~8 months and no signs of it getting better.
Shame as it's pissing off their core fans and gives impression that DICE is at loss with Battlefied.
Alright well maybe not that one then but BFV was totally rushed
Anthem developer is not discussing the game from the failure stand-point. EA would not allow developers to be critical of their own games in public.
The entire table is talking about the challenges that other studios have figured out long time ago, especially Anthem who fails to take anything from Warframe, Path of Exile, Borderlands or even Diablo II. The BFV grandpa talking how the world has changed boxed vs service, but the change happened many years ago...
One of the cameras has a smudge on it ;(
I think it existed for 7 years but I highly doubt anything from year 1 to 6 is even in the game. A thousand years of development time doesn't help when you spend 999 of it waffling between fundamental design choices. I think we can glean from various articles and interviews that recent EA games spend most of their time in a sort of pre-production phase where decisions are made, worked on, reversed, then reversed again until the year of release where they go into turbo mode to get the game out.
I think they could've released this fall and been perfectly fine. It probably hurts the bottom line but I'm the customer. I'm not supposed to care about that.
Thanks for posting. Love listening to here developers share their opinions.
Pretty much yeah.. it's like they all been sleeping on everything around them
"That's why systems that are reusable are so important for that type of game.." - Not an Anthem developer.
BioWare cries in Apex Legends.
The reason I dare to bring it up is because the last time I snooped on BioWare company reviews, and given the Jason article, the impression you get constantly is that middle-management is abhorrent there, and well... people like Ben Irving those are the middle managers.
BioWare cries in Apex Legends.
Badum tss.
I hate to be that guy but there's definitely slacking and especially incompetence at BioWare. Just listening to that Ben Irving guy I feel like half of his stories are incredibly surface-level, general stuff like it makes me question what influence he even has on the game as lead producer. AFAIK a producer is responsible for delegating tasks and serving the project direction's wishes which is especially important in really big teams where there's no way a director can do it all at once. That means producers need to have some smart and efficient decision making and a good understanding of various fields of work within gamedev, and I dunno what Irving's background is but the way he's presented himself in a lot of recent things you'd think all he understands is marketing and teamwork but nothing nitty-gritty.
The reason I dare to bring it up is because the last time I snooped on BioWare company reviews, and given the Jason article, the impression you get constantly is that middle-management is abhorrent there, and well... people like Ben Irving those are the middle managers.
Last edited:
That 14 month timeframe seems to be hard to judge without knowing what goes into it. Could be that they spend months just prototyping ideas for new characters before one sticks.
Pretty hilarious that Ben Irving was there considering how little content Anthem has gotten since launch. I am unsure if it should even be considered a live services game as they have only added one new stronghold and legendary missions (which are just redos of story missions). There has been no service to speak of for Anthem.
Pretty crazy that it takes so long to build one legend for Apex as well. That doesn't seem normal for one character does it?
Pretty crazy that it takes so long to build one legend for Apex as well. That doesn't seem normal for one character does it?
OP
OP
Why do people think this is only about the post launch support? Its about the development since the beginning until now. Not about the development after launch.
I watched the entire video and it really isn't about anything other than broad-strokes how the industry has changed and a little bits of game development trivia.
For the industry, the service jump was end of last gen -> this gen.
For EA, it was more like 2016? -> learning service games now.
Yes, EA had Battleforge ahead of the industry, but for their Bioware/DICE teams, they are still figuring out the ropes of live-service games compared to F2P giants like League of Fortnite.
You are infinitely better watching half of a GDC presentation compared to this video.
Well we know how development of Anthem went down already and we know that Ben isn't going to be honest about that in a public way on anything more than the most superficial level. It's hard to say "We had no clue what we were doing and still don't." Which is honestly pretty much pre and post launch for Anthem at this point.
OP
OP
Stil dont see the link to this. "Pretty hilarious that Ben Irving was there considering how little content Anthem has gotten since launch."
Its about the whole gaming development. If you think it doesnt go in depth enough thats fine. But nowhere its stated this is about only post launch.
Part of the"whole gaming development" for a live service game is the continued live service portion of a live service game no? He then talks about the live service aspects of his game which has no actual live service.
OP
OP
Oh, okay D:
I hadn't watched the video yet. I was mostly arguing the merits failure bring. But if they're just acting like everything is fine then that's... not a good look.