BioWare & Anthem: A Cautionary Tale
I love playing video games. My favourite game series is called Mass Effect made by a game studio called BioWare.
I am a huge fan of BioWare’s games and I was looking forward to trying out their new game Anthem.
Anthem came out in early 2019 to universally poor reviews. The game was half finished, had poor gameplay and did not respect the player’s time. I ended up giving it a miss.
This week, Kotaku’s Jason Schreir has an excellent article about what went wrong with Anthem. It turns out Anthem’s development was troubled, and the development team faced the same sort of problems (some self-inflicted) that I have seen a few times in my career. I suggest you take some time to read the excellent article linked above. It is a wonderfully researched and well-written piece.
So what went wrong? Schreir’s article talks about game studio politics, financial pressures and many other contributed factors. I want to focus on what went wrong with Anthem as a software project. Here are some of my thoughts on this cautionary tale that I think may apply to many software development teams.
Building a product for a market you don’t understand
BioWare is famous for making role-playing games (also know as RPGs). The core team for Anthem had made well-loved games such as Mass Effect — single player, immersive, story-driven experiences. They were asked, by their owner EA, to build a multi-player, online, loot-driven shooter such as Destiny.
These games made money through micro-transactions; charging players small amounts of money to buy in-game items. The Anthem team did not understand the fundamentals of the product they were being asked to create. Basic mechanisms such as loot drops (where players get rare items for completing missions) did not work well. YouTube is full of players ranting about Anthem’s lack of loot.
Not being clear about the scope of the product
The Anthem lead team were slow in making decisions about critical features. Flying: a fundamental gameplay feature was added and removed multiple times. The team was only aware that flying was in scope following a demo to an EA executive who decreed that the game must allow it. This is like building a desktop app and not being sure whether mouse input should be enabled. It makes things difficult for the design and development teams.
Being forced to use a technology stack by decree
Most modern games are built using game engines such as Unity or Unreal Engine. EA mandated that all its games, including Anthem, must be built using the in-house Frostbite engine. They wanted to cut costs and re-use resources by not having to pay a licensing fee. Apparently, the Frostbite engine, while used successfully in games like the Battlefield series, was poorly documented and not suited to a game like Anthem. The development team struggled to make it work, and productivity suffered.
The same team that had made the Mass Effect series using the Unreal engine.
Inflexible deadlines & Developer burnout
Anthem was in pre-production since 2012 but didn’t go into full-scale development until 2018. They had shown off an early beta to a rapturous audience at E3 in 2017 . Commercial pressures meant the team had to have the game out by 2019. This was ambitious for a project already beset with problems. The gaming industry is notorious for treating it’s developers badly, but the Anthem team started a brutal ‘crunch’ period that ended up with many developers going on extended sick leave due to stress. Developers left Bioware in droves because of the miserable working conditions.
Shipping before being ready
A YouTube reviewer I follow mentioned that the game played as if the developers hadn’t even bothered playtesting their own game. The article talks about unstable builds and unavailable test environments. There was no time left for a thorough quality assurance process. When the game did come out, players complained about interminable load times and repetitive missions. There were also hard crashes and un-usable inventory systems: a big problem for a looter shooter.
In conclusion..
Anthem is a failure and has resulted in Bioware losing credibility as a game studio. I think it failed because it was a poorly managed software project. It was a poorly thought out product released in a broken state by a confused and stressed development team. This pattern is not unique just to the video game industry. I am sure software engineers of a certain vintage have seen this play out in a variety of industries.
