Late to the party but this hit close to home. I worked at EA Mythic as a CSR for the launch of Warhammer Online. Taking the job meant a 600 mile move for my family, so I asked about job security. They laughed at the idea of a lay off. A month or so after launch, they had us meet in a large group at a hotel down the street from Mythic headquarters to lay us all off in one massive group (the first of several rounds). Rob Dibiano, the head of Customer Support, had to fight EA tooth and nail just to get us a 2 week severance after we made huge changes to our lives to be there just a few short months ago. The sad thing is that it could have been a great game, but EA had to throw the creative shackles on development and guide it into the steaming pile it became.
I'm really sorry to hear that happened to you, and all those other people! Quite frankly, I'll never understand why publishers choose to be so hands-on when product after product lands in the trash heap. No matter how many studios and employees they cut down due to "not meeting expected figures", bafflingly things don't seem to go better next time! Who would've thought?
EA loves doing this. I personally watched them pull all of Black Box into a meeting room to do the same. I was safe somehow, and watched them do it again the second Skate 3 hit gold. They made the devs come in on a weekend and take their stuff, so people wouldn’t notice. Best choice my wife and I ever made was leaving that shit hole.
It reminds me of how Bethesda said something along the lines of "Fallout 76 will last forever!" even though the game is dependent on Bethesda's centralized severs, and if those servers go down then the game is completely unplayable by anyone for the rest of eternity and everything in it is lost forever. The original Fallout is 22 years old now, but I can still play it. 22 years from now I don't think people will be able to play Fallout 76.
As much as they are to blame, if we're gonna be honest, gamers aren't really the best clientele to be creating products for. They are fickle, ignorant, obnoxious and entitled. Bad games flop because they're flops but good games can flop because of the gamers themselves. The more popular gaming has become, the stupider the gamers as a whole have become. We're talking about a hobby where the fanbase is so obnoxiously loud and demanding, yet they know so little about the development process or how their hobby is actually created. This is very evident when they complain about shit that they wouldn't be complaining about if they just had the knowledge of how their hobby functions and is created. The point is this. Some games ride a line and their success isn't dependant on how good the game is, its how much or how little the gamers' overreactions are going to be. One small little issue can snowball into a game just tanking when it really shouldn't have. Games like Evolve. Perfectly decent game that was hurt from day 1 because gamers didn't understand the development process, starting spreading misinformation and literally threatened developers on forums.
Update: - 1.0 was basically abandoned as BioWare moved on to make the 2.0 overhaul. - Casey Hudson left the company again to form his indie studio. - 2.0 was then just cancelled and left in the dirt. 10 year plan everybody. Didn’t even last a month.
I was working at Bioware Austin in 2015/2016 and the whole internal culture even back then was kind of confused and unfocused. This also applied to Andromeda. Granted, I was watching from the sidelines, working on the Knights of the Fallen Empire expansion for TOR, but I found the whole thing both exciting and unsettling at the same time. I wanted to work on both projects, but was told by those who were that it was a disorganized experience (some used harsher words). The point for me when Bioware stopped being a magical place, was when we were standing in an All Hands meeting talking about the next five years of release plans, and I made a hopeful remark about Jade Empire 2... and everyone laughed as though I had been joking. Because what I had suggested had clearly been THAT far-fetched and crazy. I laughed along with them at the time, but after the meeting was over I felt... sad. That was also around the time that half the dev team kept asking why we weren't making KotR 3, and were told over and over again that it just wasn't "in the cards". I'm sure things have changed a bit since then, but even back then the dev team knew what people wanted, but were being told that the obvious choices were actually "wrong" by mysterious higher-ups who never had a clear and solid reason why... except to always say: "maybe after Dylan."
I was actually in college for game and simulation programming and my dream was to work at Bioware Austin because of my love for Mass Effect. Fortunately I dropped out because I would have been working on Andromeda :/ I'm like alternate reality you.
@@DarkKingBowser The thing is, I've worked on three titles at three companies, and two of them were failures. I wouldn't trade those experiences for the world. Working on a game, even one that is unfocused and frustrating like Andomeda, is still a *good* thing. If you work in the industry, you'll inevitably land on a clunker, and you'll be laid off several times, and it never feels good. But the *process* of failing is still valuable, and is still worth putting on a resume.
"I can make my character look like it's wearing Iron Man armor." That's all I saw from it on my Twitter feed, until people got bored of that. What a legacy.
My second thought after seeing the exosuit at e3 was "well what happens if you swap armour components? Are there subsystems in the armour to plug into? Can you sequence functions together?" And after seeing nothing that was it for me. DOA.
@@DaSquareful Anthem was DAO for me the moment it was announced. I played Bioware for single player rpgs, so I didn't have any reason to care about a destiny clone. After Anthem launched, Bioware become dead to me as a company, which is funny because I was one of the biggest fanboys for years.
Red Lantern's Rage On the subreddit I’ve seen someone describe Anthem as a homeless fire. It’s warm and can be cozy at times, but ultimately the fire is made out of trash and smells like trash instead of solid wood, and the devs keep throwing more trash into it. Another thing that really put this game’s development into perspective is “This is the game that will have [Added a statistics page] in a loot statistics based game” and it still doesn’t have one a month later. Ridiculous. Nioh, a game stuck in development hell for even longer with another studio completely unfamiliar to loot games managed to be a statistical playground from the start with hundreds of armor and weapons to equip and even reskin with no use of microtransactions.
And the funny thing is, a stats page will be mostly irrelevant as your gear's "power score" has far more of an influence on your performance than the actual stats do. It is far more beneficial to equip something with garbage stats but the highest power score than it is to put something on that's lower score but well rolled.
This isn't so much a wha happun about Anthem, as it is a wha happun about Bioware. It's pretty safe to say the studio is dead at this point, so doing this video now was pretty apt seeing as Anthem is basically the last nail in the coffin.
You know you messed up when the wha happun ends up sounding so much better than what we would find out afterwards. Here it sounds like a company who is good at making rpgs doing the wrong genre. Now we know it's so...so much worse.
That... microtransactions... looter shooter... massive multiplayer... multiplayer only... moba... battle royale (mode)... so many red flags in the gaming industry in those one-two multiplayer genres. People say gaming is going to shit, but I've been playing singleplayer horror, platformers and (action) rpgs for decades and honestly, so far my experience has been quite consistently amazing, even with AAA titles, not even to talk about the indie scene. Probably mostly comes from the fact that single player games are that much harder to monetize since whales will much less likely get hooked if they don't have other players to lord their stupid shit over.
You can tell someone inside Bioware was trying to warn us something was up when the studio intro for Dragon Age depicted the Archdemon, the literal embodiment of evil, turning into the EA logo.
>"Signed on the dotted line and became part of the EA family" >Shows clip from Little Mermaid of Ariel making a deal with Ursula ....so true, I want to cry.
@@LiquidDIO A youtube comment once said to look beyond the studios name, look at the people who actually make it. View the video game industry as a movie industry and find out the good directors and artists
@@acewolfgang276 similarly, look at the high muckamucks in ea (for example). how many games industry jobs did they have before coming to this one; how many dev studios have gone dark since they took a position at ea; how large was their "golden parachute" when they eventually dropped out of the company to make room for the next suit with no experience of, or passion for, games.
@@AD-lh3jk Aside from obligatory Halloween and Christmas events, not really. There are fixes here and there and new cosmetics get added, but there's been little of actual substance the last 3 years. The game also has also been experiencing a rampant bot problem, for around 2 years now, which started after some jackass leaked the game's netcode online. These bots are mostly Snipers or Heavies with aimbots that walk along predetermined paths, spamming annoying shit over the mic (sometimes crashing the server in the process). Every Valve-owned server is guaranteed to have at least 1 bot, and while they can be kicked there's a high chance that another bot will just take their place. Some bots are even partied up, and may even start votekicks against actual players. It makes matchmaking servers almost unplayable. The only way to guarantee a bot-free game in TF2 these days is to either play on community servers, or use an external matchmaking service.
Being a BioWare fan nowadays is like watching an old friend slowly die of some incurable disease, you keep hoping against hope that they’ll make some miraculous recovery but deep down you know they’ll be gone any day now and all that will be left is the good times you had before
That shit started already when they suddenly announced they are going to be acquired by EA. Everyone just wrote "RIP Bioware" in their old forum that they still had during their Neverwinter Nights time. That was at least 16 years ago. Their games got more samey, the gameplay got dumped down bit by bit, making it more "appealable" to mass audience, as well as shit DLC and microtransaction shenanigans that ramped up over time. On top of all that they had some brain drain going on. A good chunk - if not all - of their old guard devs and writers have already left the company.
Unfortunately it's a lot less an employee's call and more of management's call. They want some fat EA money that you know they keep in a white bag with a $ on it. That's why a lot of these EA company acquisitions start with a bunch of employees leaving that company. Everyone knows it's a death warrant but there's money to be had in signing it
At this point, I really question how desperate a company must be to sign away their company to the likes of EA, their victim list is long and notable enough to be a fair warning
@@gratuitouslurking8610 I'm pretty sure that wasn't the first problem, they called that stage 2. That was them trying to get people back playing the game. The real problems I saw playing were crap loads of tech issues, horrible balancing, but even worse it wasn't even fun at its most balanced state. Edit: Wait you are right! I forgot that you had to buy new characters and monsters. Uhg, soooo bad.
"Exploiting the economy" is quite possibly the single dumbest reason for banning a player in a PvE setting. Since... y'know... that's ostensibly THE POINT of PvE multiplayer games.
EA: Buys bunch of good studios only to fuck them up and shut them down. Makes bunch of shitty games to ban their players. Still expects to make a shit load on money though.
The only way a game lasts 10+ years is when then the devs themselves don’t realize they will be working on the game for that long. You cannot force longevity, you can only suggest it. The longevity must come by itself.
@@outvaders689 And a big shoutout to the community too. They gave the community tools to make their own stuff. Hammer editor and SFM fostered creativity, the trading market kept a lot of the traders engaged with the game, and some other stuff. SFM played a bigger role (imo) since the animations made by community members spread awareness of this game pretty much everywhere.
According to someone on reddit with a packet sniffer when the VIP demo failed to connect it was coded to retry connection with no delay, essentially making everyone trying to play into a DDOS attack on the game's servers. Probably why the Head of Live Services "couldn't say" what the problem was.
@@DarkBykeTwitch I don't think you can deny that this is a highschool-level mistake? Even having different developers working on each category doesn't excuse it from passing QA?
Every episode of this I've seen so far can be distilled into a single statement: "The executives couldn't be bothered to listen to feedback from the people who make or enjoy games, and it all went downhill from there"
hmm it does look extremely stupid if you present it like that... but you know you're always smarter afterwards. I'm just kidding this Destiny ripoff was only made because someone from EA ordered that is the way to success and money not because anyone had any vision or inspiration about it.
a.k.a. miagi Well EA did claim no one is interested in single player experiences anymore and people only ever play multiplayer games now a days. Even though games like breath of the wild, god of war and, Super Mario odyssey say otherwise.
@@miagi1337 Actually, it wasn't EA's decision to make a looter-shooter, Bioware was given complete free-rein to do as they please after Mass Effect 3 on a new IP and the higher-ups in Bioware chose to make a multiplayer looter-shooter because they thought it would sell.
I saw a video actually, that it wasn't EAs full fault. Bioware was messing around for 5 years in pre-development and only took 1 year of true production. They didn't know what the game was like until the reveal trailer
I just want to appreciate Mr. McMuscles' subtle future sight in using Sonic music while talking about Anthem's disaster of a chart given the response to the recent Sonic Origins chart.
If your watching this in 2021 and the news has somehow escaped you: Anthem was put on life support, the "Anthem 2.0" rebuild was abandoned, the servers are still up but probably won't be for long. To which I say, good: they can now focus 100% on DA and ME.
13:29 "Frostbyte engine is known for being a stable and versatile bit of tech".... From what I've heard from multiple sources including the teams behind Anthem and Andromeda the Frostbyte engine is actually incredibly difficult to work with if you are making anything other than a multiplayer fps. It was designed to be used for the Battlefield franchise and lacks any functionality for the most basic rpg mechanics like character stats and player inventories (which is most likely the reason why Anthem doesn't let you look at or change your equipment without going through multiple loading screens). For some reason known only to the eldrich EA executives the company mandated that all EA games going forward would have to use Frostbyte which ate up huge chunks of both Anthem and Andromeda's development time while fundamental parts of the engine were rewritten from scratch.
Actually, EA's reasoning for using Frostbyte for all their games is pretty simple. If they have their own proprietary engine that can be used to build all their games, then they don't need to cut a cheque to Epic to use Unreal, or to Unity Technologies to use Unity. I'm not saying this was a _good_ idea; I'm just giving the rationale.
@@tybraker27 Ah, but see, you're thinking about this like a developer, not a mid-level manager who needs to justify his continued employment. Advocating for a proprietary engine makes you look good in the organization and keeps the company from having to spend development money and share future profits with third parties. Sure, it makes life harder for the devs...but since _you're_ not a dev, it's really _their_ problem.
@@tybraker27 I totally believe that EA would force them to use an in house engine despite problems. You would think that higher-ups would care about productivity and how many hours are wasted on a project, but that would require them to care about, or listen to their employees, which I doubt happens at EA. I would imagine they just coldly listen to what some bean counter tells them rather than get input from project managers, who are probably too scared to rock the boat, anyway.
@@blakechandler167 its not consedence its ea startagy find promising dev lure them in with money and promises of freedom let them make two great games then put there foot fown and interfering and rushing the third normally murdering said franchise then they wait a few years find a new young dev shut down the old studio after drainging it of all staff and repuation by the young dev with money and promises and repeat over again
Casey Hudson prior to the launch of ME3: "It's not even in any way like the traditional game endings, where you can say how many endings there are, or whether you got ending A, B, or C" Why are we listening to a word that man says?
in a snakey way he told the truth the ending is nothing like tradtinal bioware games because theres only one shitty ending and none of your choices matterd at all Yeepie
@10:10 I want everyone to watch this, and remember that quote, then think about this. Remember 2016? Remember when EA sent Titanfall 2 out to die by releasing it right alongside of that years' Battlefield? And then what happened? Well whaddya know, EA flat out purchases RESPAWN studios in its entirety in 2018. Gee, it's almost like EA did that on purpose, so Titanfall 2 would fail, and then they could swoop in to devour them. EA is a disease, a video game cancer that consumes, and spits out the bones of once Great game makers.
Respawn has said repeatedly that they chose that release date though, and that L is on them. There are plenty of reasons to shit on EA, we don't have to make up new ones.
Sonic 06's tale is a really heartbreaking one. Two of the main problems was the one-two sucker punch of "Your team is getting cut in half because we need a game on the Wii" and "You need to work massive overtime because we need this out the door by the holiday season." it's totally way more complex than that but that's just the basics.
What happened(unpopular opinion)?: EA put all their eggs in the Anthem basket and had absolutely no faith in Apex Legends by Respawn Entertainment. Therefore, repeating the same mistake in 2016. Sound familiar?
@@TheAndradeCS yeah. They even released it between battlefield and COD which is pretty telling of their opinion on Respawn. Titanfall 2 is easily better than the other two.
@@justinl8791 Ye gods! My game is ruined! ( looks to Bungie) But what I stole elements from Microsoft and disguise it as my own? Devilishly clever, Bioware...
TechnicalTortuga yeah, it's a bad mass effect game with many glitches and flaws, but it's not a uninspired loot shooter, so I figured it was worth going back to and finishing
@Adam Thompson I had hope when Drew Karpyshyn signed up to work on Anthem... but then he quit BioWare a year before Anthem released... second time he quit.. he won't be back lol.
the exact same thing is happening with Activision and Blizzard. These mega developers like Activision & EA will buy their smaller competitors, wring out as much money as they can from them and shut them down as soon as they can thereby eliminating a competing studio without having to actually compete with them. When you see the main talent start quitting the company they built you know that the end is near for them. RIP.
And now the No Man's Sky-scale remake to this game - one meant to save it from itself - has been guillotined by EA. It'd be funny if it weren't so pitiful.
It's now 4 years on from Anthem's release, and I can say with complete confidence that the claim of it being a "10 year experience" might have been just a little bit too ambitious. You know, given the fact we're less than halfway through it. Honestly a 'What Happened?' video coming out *a month* after Anthem did in February 2019 is just indescribably hilarious.
Hey Matt, really love the video, and the channel in general! Since you asked for subject suggestions: I think that Metroid: Other M would make for a perfect What Happened episode. There's so much to unpack, and the Iwata Asks gives a lot of material to draw from regarding the development!
My main problem with Anthem has and always been the smoke EA and BioWare was blowing up our ass before the game dropped. We were told to "Expect everything in Anthem that you would see in a Traditional BioWare game" and one by one we were told there was no romance options, less dialog options, few world shifting choices, and the whole time I was wondering, where is this Traditional BioWare game? If they just started by saying this is going to be us focusing more on gameplay and multiplayer I would have been annoyed, but not pissed. BioWare had so much goodwill from its customers, EA and BioWare took advantage of that and lied to their customers to make a quick buck, and now its blowing up in their face. Fuck'em.
Before shutting down a studio, they always set them up for failure. How did they expect a bunch of people who are used to making rpgs, to make a world class, open world looter shooter? Then they release it when it's clearly not done, repeating Andromeda's mistakes.
@@Helvetica_Scenario its not consedence its ea startagy find promising dev lure them in with money and promises of freedom let them make two great games then put there foot fown and interfering and rushing the third normally murdering said franchise then they wait a few years find a new young dev shut down the old studio after drainging it of all staff and repuation and consuming there ip for mobile games then buy the young dev with money and promises and repeat over again
I remember when the hype was so high, that when you mention anything that you think looked worrisome, you would be viciously be attacked in comment sections.
I remember walking into a GameStop just after this came out and asking the guy working the store if it was any good. He said it was trash and he wished he could get it out of his store as soon as possible. I think I ended up buying Persona 5 Royal that day instead, so it’s safe to say I dodged a hell of a bullet there.
I worked at EA in customer support at the time and as soon as I heard which ppl were quitting, I knew the project was doomed. Sadly, I couldn't say anything to my friends who were hyped for Anthem bc of the NDA I signed.
Игры
Late to the party but this hit close to home. I worked at EA Mythic as a CSR for the launch of Warhammer Online. Taking the job meant a 600 mile move for my family, so I asked about job security. They laughed at the idea of a lay off. A month or so after launch, they had us meet in a large group at a hotel down the street from Mythic headquarters to lay us all off in one massive group (the first of several rounds). Rob Dibiano, the head of Customer Support, had to fight EA tooth and nail just to get us a 2 week severance after we made huge changes to our lives to be there just a few short months ago. The sad thing is that it could have been a great game, but EA had to throw the creative shackles on development and guide it into the steaming pile it became.
I'm really sorry to hear that happened to you, and all those other people! Quite frankly, I'll never understand why publishers choose to be so hands-on when product after product lands in the trash heap. No matter how many studios and employees they cut down due to "not meeting expected figures", bafflingly things don't seem to go better next time! Who would've thought?
EA loves doing this. I personally watched them pull all of Black Box into a meeting room to do the same. I was safe somehow, and watched them do it again the second Skate 3 hit gold. They made the devs come in on a weekend and take their stuff, so people wouldn’t notice.
Best choice my wife and I ever made was leaving that shit hole.
@@gingerd2098 Interesting. Most likely, EA was already acting like this for a long time, maybe even in the very beginning.
What is a CSR?
@@giammariamariani4976 Customer Support Representative. Same thing as a GM in other MMOs like WoW
Not even 6 months later Anthems roadmap was abandoned.
10 year plan, folks.
It reminds me of how Bethesda said something along the lines of "Fallout 76 will last forever!" even though the game is dependent on Bethesda's centralized severs, and if those servers go down then the game is completely unplayable by anyone for the rest of eternity and everything in it is lost forever. The original Fallout is 22 years old now, but I can still play it. 22 years from now I don't think people will be able to play Fallout 76.
@@HyperShadic0 Says a lot about why video games are so messed up these days.
As much as they are to blame, if we're gonna be honest, gamers aren't really the best clientele to be creating products for. They are fickle, ignorant, obnoxious and entitled. Bad games flop because they're flops but good games can flop because of the gamers themselves. The more popular gaming has become, the stupider the gamers as a whole have become. We're talking about a hobby where the fanbase is so obnoxiously loud and demanding, yet they know so little about the development process or how their hobby is actually created. This is very evident when they complain about shit that they wouldn't be complaining about if they just had the knowledge of how their hobby functions and is created.
The point is this. Some games ride a line and their success isn't dependant on how good the game is, its how much or how little the gamers' overreactions are going to be. One small little issue can snowball into a game just tanking when it really shouldn't have. Games like Evolve. Perfectly decent game that was hurt from day 1 because gamers didn't understand the development process, starting spreading misinformation and literally threatened developers on forums.
@@Damaged7 ok dude who made Fez
"Years? Did you say 'years'? Oh, you must have misheard me. We said we had a '10-month plan'"
Update:
- 1.0 was basically abandoned as BioWare moved on to make the 2.0 overhaul.
- Casey Hudson left the company again to form his indie studio.
- 2.0 was then just cancelled and left in the dirt.
10 year plan everybody. Didn’t even last a month.
I was working at Bioware Austin in 2015/2016 and the whole internal culture even back then was kind of confused and unfocused. This also applied to Andromeda. Granted, I was watching from the sidelines, working on the Knights of the Fallen Empire expansion for TOR, but I found the whole thing both exciting and unsettling at the same time. I wanted to work on both projects, but was told by those who were that it was a disorganized experience (some used harsher words).
The point for me when Bioware stopped being a magical place, was when we were standing in an All Hands meeting talking about the next five years of release plans, and I made a hopeful remark about Jade Empire 2... and everyone laughed as though I had been joking. Because what I had suggested had clearly been THAT far-fetched and crazy.
I laughed along with them at the time, but after the meeting was over I felt... sad. That was also around the time that half the dev team kept asking why we weren't making KotR 3, and were told over and over again that it just wasn't "in the cards". I'm sure things have changed a bit since then, but even back then the dev team knew what people wanted, but were being told that the obvious choices were actually "wrong" by mysterious higher-ups who never had a clear and solid reason why... except to always say: "maybe after Dylan."
Looks like the grey suits and higher-ups always manage to destroy the fun of everyone. Players and developers.
You were right. I would buy Jade Empire 2 in a heartbeat. Damn, what a shame it never will be. :(
I was actually in college for game and simulation programming and my dream was to work at Bioware Austin because of my love for Mass Effect. Fortunately I dropped out because I would have been working on Andromeda :/
I'm like alternate reality you.
@@DarkKingBowser The thing is, I've worked on three titles at three companies, and two of them were failures. I wouldn't trade those experiences for the world. Working on a game, even one that is unfocused and frustrating like Andomeda, is still a *good* thing. If you work in the industry, you'll inevitably land on a clunker, and you'll be laid off several times, and it never feels good.
But the *process* of failing is still valuable, and is still worth putting on a resume.
@@Carakav That's very inspiring.
"I can make my character look like it's wearing Iron Man armor."
That's all I saw from it on my Twitter feed, until people got bored of that.
What a legacy.
That's literally the first thing that popped out of my mind when I first saw the reveal trailer.
It was practically Iron Man, but without the license.
It's ruin man suit.
Maybe it'll later be known as the game that killed EAware.
My second thought after seeing the exosuit at e3 was "well what happens if you swap armour components? Are there subsystems in the armour to plug into? Can you sequence functions together?" And after seeing nothing that was it for me. DOA.
@@DaSquareful Anthem was DAO for me the moment it was announced. I played Bioware for single player rpgs, so I didn't have any reason to care about a destiny clone. After Anthem launched, Bioware become dead to me as a company, which is funny because I was one of the biggest fanboys for years.
You know you messed up when a Wha' Happun comes only a month after release.
Probably get a follow up to this down the line.
Red Lantern's Rage On the subreddit I’ve seen someone describe Anthem as a homeless fire. It’s warm and can be cozy at times, but ultimately the fire is made out of trash and smells like trash instead of solid wood, and the devs keep throwing more trash into it. Another thing that really put this game’s development into perspective is “This is the game that will have [Added a statistics page] in a loot statistics based game” and it still doesn’t have one a month later. Ridiculous. Nioh, a game stuck in development hell for even longer with another studio completely unfamiliar to loot games managed to be a statistical playground from the start with hundreds of armor and weapons to equip and even reskin with no use of microtransactions.
And the funny thing is, a stats page will be mostly irrelevant as your gear's "power score" has far more of an influence on your performance than the actual stats do. It is far more beneficial to equip something with garbage stats but the highest power score than it is to put something on that's lower score but well rolled.
This isn't so much a wha happun about Anthem, as it is a wha happun about Bioware. It's pretty safe to say the studio is dead at this point, so doing this video now was pretty apt seeing as Anthem is basically the last nail in the coffin.
You know you messed up when the wha happun ends up sounding so much better than what we would find out afterwards.
Here it sounds like a company who is good at making rpgs doing the wrong genre. Now we know it's so...so much worse.
At this point "We expect our game to have a persistent 10-year life cycle" is one of the biggest possible red flags for me.
"enjoy playing a beta forever" essentially
That... microtransactions... looter shooter... massive multiplayer... multiplayer only... moba... battle royale (mode)... so many red flags in the gaming industry in those one-two multiplayer genres.
People say gaming is going to shit, but I've been playing singleplayer horror, platformers and (action) rpgs for decades and honestly, so far my experience has been quite consistently amazing, even with AAA titles, not even to talk about the indie scene. Probably mostly comes from the fact that single player games are that much harder to monetize since whales will much less likely get hooked if they don't have other players to lord their stupid shit over.
You can tell someone inside Bioware was trying to warn us something was up when the studio intro for Dragon Age depicted the Archdemon, the literal embodiment of evil, turning into the EA logo.
>"Signed on the dotted line and became part of the EA family"
>Shows clip from Little Mermaid of Ariel making a deal with Ursula
....so true, I want to cry.
Those poor unfortunate souls, it's sad, but true.
Hey! No one knows more about being a "family" than a giant soulless corporation.
When Matt listed the people who all left Bioware, I could only think:"That sounds like all the big, creative types."
That's what I mainly make people aware of. The people that made those classic games you love? Gone. Long gone, even.
They got the fuck out when they realized what a shitshow it'd be.
@@LiquidDIO A youtube comment once said to look beyond the studios name, look at the people who actually make it. View the video game industry as a movie industry and find out the good directors and artists
@@acewolfgang276 You're not wrong!
@@acewolfgang276 similarly, look at the high muckamucks in ea (for example). how many games industry jobs did they have before coming to this one; how many dev studios have gone dark since they took a position at ea; how large was their "golden parachute" when they eventually dropped out of the company to make room for the next suit with no experience of, or passion for, games.
"This game is gonna survive for 10-years!"
TF2: *Looks over and laughs*
That burning you feel? It is _shame._
I imagine the Heavy's burly russian laugh.
Tf2 fan: *suicidal laughter in over two years since last major update and valve giving any remote of a shit about the game*
@Your buddy, GoGo are there new things happening in TF2 from Valve now?
@@AD-lh3jk Aside from obligatory Halloween and Christmas events, not really. There are fixes here and there and new cosmetics get added, but there's been little of actual substance the last 3 years.
The game also has also been experiencing a rampant bot problem, for around 2 years now, which started after some jackass leaked the game's netcode online. These bots are mostly Snipers or Heavies with aimbots that walk along predetermined paths, spamming annoying shit over the mic (sometimes crashing the server in the process). Every Valve-owned server is guaranteed to have at least 1 bot, and while they can be kicked there's a high chance that another bot will just take their place. Some bots are even partied up, and may even start votekicks against actual players. It makes matchmaking servers almost unplayable.
The only way to guarantee a bot-free game in TF2 these days is to either play on community servers, or use an external matchmaking service.
Being a BioWare fan nowadays is like watching an old friend slowly die of some incurable disease, you keep hoping against hope that they’ll make some miraculous recovery but deep down you know they’ll be gone any day now and all that will be left is the good times you had before
That shit started already when they suddenly announced they are going to be acquired by EA. Everyone just wrote "RIP Bioware" in their old forum that they still had during their Neverwinter Nights time. That was at least 16 years ago.
Their games got more samey, the gameplay got dumped down bit by bit, making it more "appealable" to mass audience, as well as shit DLC and microtransaction shenanigans that ramped up over time.
On top of all that they had some brain drain going on. A good chunk - if not all - of their old guard devs and writers have already left the company.
Any developer who signs on with EA is basically signing their death warrant.
Seriously. It’s common knowledge, and I can’t muster ANY sympathy for any company EA acquires at this point.
Unfortunately it's a lot less an employee's call and more of management's call. They want some fat EA money that you know they keep in a white bag with a $ on it. That's why a lot of these EA company acquisitions start with a bunch of employees leaving that company. Everyone knows it's a death warrant but there's money to be had in signing it
At this point, I really question how desperate a company must be to sign away their company to the likes of EA, their victim list is long and notable enough to be a fair warning
I fear for Respawn
@@alexs1640 he meant "developper" the company, not "developper" the employee
Next Wha Happun should be on Evolve please. There was so much hype surrounding it but now I hear no one talk about it at all.
Right? Evolve was like hyped up like it was this big thing but it seems like it just fizzled out.
Evolve..hooo boy what a disaster that is. Even years after it release
Oh man, why did you have to remind me. . . Yes, this game is perfect, I'd love to know why this game was so awful in Matt's voice
Evolve was killed by the lust of microtransactions. When it went Free to Play, it was too little too late despite being a good game during that time.
@@gratuitouslurking8610 I'm pretty sure that wasn't the first problem, they called that stage 2. That was them trying to get people back playing the game. The real problems I saw playing were crap loads of tech issues, horrible balancing, but even worse it wasn't even fun at its most balanced state.
Edit: Wait you are right! I forgot that you had to buy new characters and monsters. Uhg, soooo bad.
"Exploiting the economy" is quite possibly the single dumbest reason for banning a player in a PvE setting. Since... y'know... that's ostensibly THE POINT of PvE multiplayer games.
ya that was dumb... i mean you cant even trade in this game so whats the point.
Exactly. The whole point of the game is to grind and farm loot. "Not that much farming, though", says EA. WTF?
EA: Buys bunch of good studios only to fuck them up and shut them down. Makes bunch of shitty games to ban their players. Still expects to make a shit load on money though.
The only way a game lasts 10+ years is when then the devs themselves don’t realize they will be working on the game for that long. You cannot force longevity, you can only suggest it. The longevity must come by itself.
Just look at Terraria. 10+ years, yet the devs keep telling themselves every update is the last update.
Team Fortress 2 did that through the sheer quality of its core gameplay
@@outvaders689 And a big shoutout to the community too. They gave the community tools to make their own stuff. Hammer editor and SFM fostered creativity, the trading market kept a lot of the traders engaged with the game, and some other stuff. SFM played a bigger role (imo) since the animations made by community members spread awareness of this game pretty much everywhere.
not necessarily since bungie said that and destiny is still alive despite what basically every gamer on the internet would tell you
According to someone on reddit with a packet sniffer when the VIP demo failed to connect it was coded to retry connection with no delay, essentially making everyone trying to play into a DDOS attack on the game's servers. Probably why the Head of Live Services "couldn't say" what the problem was.
That almost sounds like a rookie mistake.
Surely it can't be that? These people can create AAA visuals but can't put a simple delay in?
@@kirillbrodski What does visuals have to do with network coding? These are two different things and different developers working in each category.
@@kirillbrodski
Yeah, common sense tends to be overridden by panic pretty often in the human experience.
@@DarkBykeTwitch I don't think you can deny that this is a highschool-level mistake? Even having different developers working on each category doesn't excuse it from passing QA?
It blows my mind that a game where you can soar through the air with power armor can be rendered so boring, but by golly they found away.
Basically Superman 64, but with Armor.
Can I just say, I love that the internet has collectively decided that the Visceral/Dead Space thing is unforgivable and that we will never forget.
@@ChickenMcThiccken don't expect anything. Most, if not all devs of visceral are gone
@@ChickenMcThiccken i know. I'm saying that most of the original staff is probably gone
Trying to eclipse Calypso Protocol. Nah fam.
Any revival of Dead Space by EA is likely to just be a shambling ghoul with the flayed skin of Dead Space draped over it
@@tsmith9642
@PKHT Jim
Boy did these comments age poorly, Calypso being mid at best and the DS remake apparently being RE2 remake tier.
Every episode of this I've seen so far can be distilled into a single statement: "The executives couldn't be bothered to listen to feedback from the people who make or enjoy games, and it all went downhill from there"
Bioware is knows for their strong narrative-driven single player experiences... "LET'S MAKE A MULTIPLAYER LOOTER SHOOTER!"
hmm it does look extremely stupid if you present it like that... but you know you're always smarter afterwards.
I'm just kidding this Destiny ripoff was only made because someone from EA ordered that is the way to success and money not because anyone had any vision or inspiration about it.
a.k.a. miagi Well EA did claim no one is interested in single player experiences anymore and people only ever play multiplayer games now a days.
Even though games like breath of the wild, god of war and, Super Mario odyssey say otherwise.
@@miagi1337 Actually, it wasn't EA's decision to make a looter-shooter, Bioware was given complete free-rein to do as they please after Mass Effect 3 on a new IP and the higher-ups in Bioware chose to make a multiplayer looter-shooter because they thought it would sell.
IN A MARKET DROWNED IN FUCKING MULTIPLAYER SHOOTERS OMGGGGGGG
This is Bioware's cry for help.
EA. That's Wha Happun.
Wha happun?
EA... EA happun...
EA bad
Pretty much
I saw a video actually, that it wasn't EAs full fault. Bioware was messing around for 5 years in pre-development and only took 1 year of true production. They didn't know what the game was like until the reveal trailer
Aaron Gerard Im seeing a pattern
Came here after hearing that Anthem Next was cancelled.
Same.
Things get so much worse. There should be a part 2 for this video.
how so?
I just want to appreciate Mr. McMuscles' subtle future sight in using Sonic music while talking about Anthem's disaster of a chart given the response to the recent Sonic Origins chart.
Never not referring to Anthem as anything else other than "Dylan" ever again.
"bro c'mon hop on and play some Dylan with me!"
Keep'm up Matt!
Wait. THE Gaijin Goombah! Cool!
If your watching this in 2021 and the news has somehow escaped you: Anthem was put on life support, the "Anthem 2.0" rebuild was abandoned, the servers are still up but probably won't be for long. To which I say, good: they can now focus 100% on DA and ME.
13:29 "Frostbyte engine is known for being a stable and versatile bit of tech".... From what I've heard from multiple sources including the teams behind Anthem and Andromeda the Frostbyte engine is actually incredibly difficult to work with if you are making anything other than a multiplayer fps. It was designed to be used for the Battlefield franchise and lacks any functionality for the most basic rpg mechanics like character stats and player inventories (which is most likely the reason why Anthem doesn't let you look at or change your equipment without going through multiple loading screens). For some reason known only to the eldrich EA executives the company mandated that all EA games going forward would have to use Frostbyte which ate up huge chunks of both Anthem and Andromeda's development time while fundamental parts of the engine were rewritten from scratch.
Actually, EA's reasoning for using Frostbyte for all their games is pretty simple. If they have their own proprietary engine that can be used to build all their games, then they don't need to cut a cheque to Epic to use Unreal, or to Unity Technologies to use Unity.
I'm not saying this was a _good_ idea; I'm just giving the rationale.
@@vaclav4435 I'd rather lease an engine rather than force a development team to go through hell just to make some money.
@@tybraker27 Ah, but see, you're thinking about this like a developer, not a mid-level manager who needs to justify his continued employment. Advocating for a proprietary engine makes you look good in the organization and keeps the company from having to spend development money and share future profits with third parties. Sure, it makes life harder for the devs...but since _you're_ not a dev, it's really _their_ problem.
@@tybraker27 I totally believe that EA would force them to use an in house engine despite problems. You would think that higher-ups would care about productivity and how many hours are wasted on a project, but that would require them to care about, or listen to their employees, which I doubt happens at EA. I would imagine they just coldly listen to what some bean counter tells them rather than get input from project managers, who are probably too scared to rock the boat, anyway.
They literally only *JUST* got this engine to work in Inquisition but it was... A little weird and stilted imo.
Oh, man. The death of Visceral games still breaks my heart.
Same.
Wait until Bioware gets the same treatment. Its inevitable.
DanielLive unfortunately. As much as I want to deny it I know it to be true
Also R.I.P. black box
@@blakechandler167 its not consedence its ea startagy find promising dev lure them in with money and promises of freedom let them make two great games then put there foot fown and interfering and rushing the third normally murdering said franchise then they wait a few years find a new young dev shut down the old studio after drainging it of all staff and repuation by the young dev with money and promises and repeat over again
2 years later and all hope has aged like a rotting carcass.
Casey Hudson prior to the launch of ME3:
"It's not even in any way like the traditional game endings, where you can say how many endings there are, or whether you got ending A, B, or C"
Why are we listening to a word that man says?
in a snakey way he told the truth the ending is nothing like tradtinal bioware games because theres only one shitty ending and none of your choices matterd at all Yeepie
"The Bob Dylan of video games"...
Said comedian Rich Hall re Bob: " I saw Bob Dylan live, and I wanted EVERYBODY'S money back!".
Curious...
Dylan became Titanic.
Referenced for years to come.
I love this series so much. The script and editing is really great and so is the research behind, thanks man.
@10:10 I want everyone to watch this, and remember that quote, then think about this. Remember 2016? Remember when EA sent Titanfall 2 out to die by releasing it right alongside of that years' Battlefield? And then what happened? Well whaddya know, EA flat out purchases RESPAWN studios in its entirety in 2018. Gee, it's almost like EA did that on purpose, so Titanfall 2 would fail, and then they could swoop in to devour them. EA is a disease, a video game cancer that consumes, and spits out the bones of once Great game makers.
well adding there ips to its throne never to be used again or using said ips bones to make macrotransaction filled mobile games waring there faces
Looking forward to Anthem 2, where EA will also destroy and devour Bioware.
Respawn has said repeatedly that they chose that release date though, and that L is on them. There are plenty of reasons to shit on EA, we don't have to make up new ones.
Well at least it meant that they could make the best EA Star Wars game of this generation.
Only took another year, but I guess the chapter is at a close.
Gonna be THAT guy...
Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 - Wha Happun.
Rushed to market for Christmas because Sega needed cash.
Ohhh the story of that game is FAR more interesting/complex.
I'd love to know what happened to that game beyond "holiday rush oh nooo".
Sonic 06's tale is a really heartbreaking one.
Two of the main problems was the one-two sucker punch of "Your team is getting cut in half because we need a game on the Wii" and "You need to work massive overtime because we need this out the door by the holiday season."
it's totally way more complex than that but that's just the basics.
@@MattMcMuscles Do it, you mad man.
What happened(unpopular opinion)?:
EA put all their eggs in the Anthem basket and had absolutely no faith in Apex Legends by Respawn Entertainment. Therefore, repeating the same mistake in 2016. Sound familiar?
Titanfall 2 was the mistake they made,right? Showing extreme support for Battlefield 1 instead.
@@TheAndradeCS yeah. They even released it between battlefield and COD which is pretty telling of their opinion on Respawn. Titanfall 2 is easily better than the other two.
3 years later and Bioware is still in business. What kind of dirt must they have on the EA higher ups?
“Quality over Quantity” always means ditch quantity entirely, then completely fumble quality so that you have nothing to show for it
( inhales deeply) Ah, fresh from the Bio-oven!
@@justinl8791 Ye gods! My game is ruined! ( looks to Bungie) But what I stole elements from Microsoft and disguise it as my own? Devilishly clever, Bioware...
The Bio-oven is my ass
Hey! Can i add more spice to this game by finding the good loot zones and spreading words so more people can try the new slice?
The one I was waiting for.
EVERYONE SAY “THANK YOU, MISTER MCMUSCLES”
Cobalt Blues Thank you Mr. McMuscles.
THANK YOU, MISTER MCMUSCLES
Given Obsidian made the better Kotor game, that line about quality and quantity is painfully ironic. Obsidian did more with less, not bioware.
Anthem died on its way back to its home planet shortly after
Seeing Westwood studios logo broke my heart. A Command and Conquer wha happun would be great.
I remember playing the demo for Command and Conquer 4 and just having no idea what the fuck was going on...
This video will need a part 2 at this rate.
Rev up that part 2 matt
"Ding dong Anthem is dead, the bad game is dead, Anthem is dead"!
Anthem did one thing right, it made me reinstall and positively reevaluate Mass Effect Andromeda
Or reinstall mass effect 1 and 2 on pc?
TechnicalTortuga yeah, it's a bad mass effect game with many glitches and flaws, but it's not a uninspired loot shooter, so I figured it was worth going back to and finishing
TQT1995 I have the trilogy on PS3, so I could totally do that, but I didn't finish andromeda when it was new, so I thought I'd at least do that
race to the bottom ... how low can you go?
MsLia32 true, there's certainly less creativity and variety in the industry than ten years ago
RIP Bioware
Your were my favorite developers for a good while.
@Adam Thompson I had hope when Drew Karpyshyn signed up to work on Anthem... but then he quit BioWare a year before Anthem released... second time he quit.. he won't be back lol.
@@reed1645 yeah he's not coming back.
Mass Effect 2 was the last great game. In 2011.
@@Yora21 If you don't count the ending that never should have been, the majority of the 3rd game is extremely solid.
the exact same thing is happening with Activision and Blizzard. These mega developers like Activision & EA will buy their smaller competitors, wring out as much money as they can from them and shut them down as soon as they can thereby eliminating a competing studio without having to actually compete with them. When you see the main talent start quitting the company they built you know that the end is near for them. RIP.
9:50 That's Drew Karpyshyn, NOT Karpyshy. Writer of the Darth Bane trilogy and the three Mass Effect books.
When you watch an older episode of Wha Happun? and you think you're having a stroke because there's no intro music.
Completely forgot Anthem existed until now. Maybe I missed the past decade of content they were talking about.
During the Beta i loaded into a map without my guns... or my head. 10/10 from IGN
Anthem: The Destiny Killer
*Shaxx laughs in the distance*
17:48 - 18:37
Well, that didn’t age well
And now the No Man's Sky-scale remake to this game - one meant to save it from itself - has been guillotined by EA.
It'd be funny if it weren't so pitiful.
all of those "we're working on it we promise" hit different in 2021
The Mass Effect calming menus music playing during the description of Anthem.... Damn I need to play ME1 again.
... Mr. Mcmuscles. Thank you. This story really... Really made me rethink the industry, and hearing your take on it helped me process things.
In summary:
EA.
EA happened.
It's now 4 years on from Anthem's release, and I can say with complete confidence that the claim of it being a "10 year experience" might have been just a little bit too ambitious. You know, given the fact we're less than halfway through it. Honestly a 'What Happened?' video coming out *a month* after Anthem did in February 2019 is just indescribably hilarious.
Hey Matt, really love the video, and the channel in general!
Since you asked for subject suggestions: I think that Metroid: Other M would make for a perfect What Happened episode. There's so much to unpack, and the Iwata Asks gives a lot of material to draw from regarding the development!
Someone should get the source codes of Anthem and make an Iron Man game... looks like I've saved $60-$80 by passing it up.
I give modders another month or so.
A shame we didn't wait a year to cover ANTHEM NEXT *_(We're totally gonna do a Destiny 2 you guys! Give us one more chance!)_*
Thanks for doing such a great video, Matt! It was both informative and funny. Keep up the good work!
Can we get a sad update on Hudson leaving Bioware a SECOND time and Anthem announcing the server shutdown? Thanks.
Westwood Studios in Vegas...My uncle worked for them before they were...absorbed...by the EA Akira-like monsters
An uncle at OG Westwood is even better than the "uncle who works at Nintendo".
Time for a part 2 I guess.
First video I’ve seen of yours come across my feed and man, I’m impressed. Keep up the good work!
This came out in 2019? Forgot.
I forgot too
Now that Anthem is dead Matt should come back with a part 2.
Death of a Game and Wha Happun need to do a collab, I love both of their documentary style vids on how games died or became dumpster fires.
Your music choices are sublime, great video!
If we ever needed a “Wha Happun” update, it’s Anthem
Not now though, I feel like we still have a few more stories to beat out of this horse
That and Fallout 76.
Yeah like Anthem Next getting cancelled
Can anyone in EA just talk straight? Or do everyone there just trained to corporate talk like it's their first language?
It's never a good sign when your game director looks like a 90's stand-up comedian.
Matt couldn't say half these quotes without giving a hardy chuckle and for good reason
Love this format of videos and would love to see an update video on this and cyberpunk and others
My main problem with Anthem has and always been the smoke EA and BioWare was blowing up our ass before the game dropped. We were told to "Expect everything in Anthem that you would see in a Traditional BioWare game" and one by one we were told there was no romance options, less dialog options, few world shifting choices, and the whole time I was wondering, where is this Traditional BioWare game?
If they just started by saying this is going to be us focusing more on gameplay and multiplayer I would have been annoyed, but not pissed. BioWare had so much goodwill from its customers, EA and BioWare took advantage of that and lied to their customers to make a quick buck, and now its blowing up in their face. Fuck'em.
Before shutting down a studio, they always set them up for failure. How did they expect a bunch of people who are used to making rpgs, to make a world class, open world looter shooter? Then they release it when it's clearly not done, repeating Andromeda's mistakes.
@@Helvetica_Scenario its not consedence its ea startagy find promising dev lure them in with money and promises of freedom let them make two great games then put there foot fown and interfering and rushing the third normally murdering said franchise then they wait a few years find a new young dev shut down the old studio after drainging it of all staff and repuation and consuming there ip for mobile games then buy the young dev with money and promises and repeat over again
Welp..... Project Dylan is dead now. Good job EA, you did it again
oh man, your videos are criminally underrated, and your voice is awesome!
Hey Mat, keep them coming man! These videos are great!
I remember when the hype was so high, that when you mention anything that you think looked worrisome, you would be viciously be attacked in comment sections.
A wuh happun on Bloody Roar 4 : The Franchise Killer ? Great video, I like how you're doing modern stuff for this series.
I subbed to your channel because of that Scott Steiner clip. Bless you sir
Love the added touch of having the Mass Effect music in your video.
Oh man, I hope we get a follow up to everything that's happened since then.
I remember walking into a GameStop just after this came out and asking the guy working the store if it was any good. He said it was trash and he wished he could get it out of his store as soon as possible. I think I ended up buying Persona 5 Royal that day instead, so it’s safe to say I dodged a hell of a bullet there.
Your use of Mario RPG music in the background did not go unnoticed good sir.
This tale has a definitive end now LMAO
Meanwhile in the Warframe Community - "If you are happy and you know it clap your hands!" *clap* *clap*
(claps happily)
*Tencent looming ominously in the distance* Soon my pretty's.
The Mass Effect music just makes me sad now..
Loves these Matt; you keep doin what you do.
I worked at EA in customer support at the time and as soon as I heard which ppl were quitting, I knew the project was doomed. Sadly, I couldn't say anything to my friends who were hyped for Anthem bc of the NDA I signed.
And they just cancelled the Anthem 2.0/Next revamp today. We knew that was gonna happen eventually.
And now even the rebuild was cancelled, anthem is now well an truly dead and buried.
I LOVE how you sneaked in the FF7 music in here! ❤
This video brought me to the series, it's amazing.