BioWare has burned most of its credit as a good video game developer with Anthem after the game has become one of the biggest disappointments in recent years. The action role-playing game had all the elements to be a great hit but players discovered that certain aspects of gameplay were a mess. Too many loading screens that made swapping the equipment of your Javelin a cumbersome process, lack of information about the game systems, lack of things to do after the campaign was finished, and myriad other problems made the game an authentic letdown for most players. The developers then started the painstakingly long process of trying to fix all those problems and it caused a delay in their plans to release post-launch content. That was the final nail in the coffin and it ultimately drove the players away from the game.
A year after it's release, BioWare announced that they have not abandoned the game and that they are working on a rework of Anthem that will turn the game experience into something that is not shallow and repetitive. Although no details were been given about what kind of changes the game will suffer it looked like they were going back to the sketching board with Anthem and that there would be a sliver of hope for all those players that expected the game to be great. But it turns out that bringing out all the potential that Anthem has is going to take quite a bit.
The director of BioWare Austin, Christian Dailey, has acknowledged that the process will be long because they have a smaller team working on the game but that they want to be quite transparent with their work by establishing a fluid communication between the developers and the players.
"The Anthem incubation team has kicked off and we are starting to validate our design hypotheses. Incubation is a term we use internally – it essentially means we are going back and experimenting/prototyping to improve on the areas where we believe we fell short and to leverage everything that you love currently about Anthem. We are a small team – about 30-ish, earning our way forward as we set out to hit our first major milestone goals. Spoiler – this is going to be a longer process. And yes, the team is small but the whole point of this is to take our time and go back to the drawing board. And a small team gives us the agility a larger one can’t afford."
It sounds good on paper and we can only hope for Anthem to be interesting for the players when the rework is finished, if it doesn't take too long.
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