8
votes
Anthem has removed all references to timeframes and future content in it's new redesigned roadmap
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- Anthem - Acts and Updates - EA Official Site
- Authors
- Electronic Arts
- Published
- Aug 24 2018
- Word count
- 216 words
The entire things seems very contrived. They're literally advertising the fact that they have a refreshing store.
The story of Anthem has always been very interesting to follow along, even if I never had any interest in the game, as the genre of looter-shooters doesn't really interest me at all, save for Borderlands, but we'll see how BL3 turns out 6 months after release when I'll even consider buying it.
I think Anthem will go down in video game history that dealt a major blow to one of the most beloved developers in gaming. Bioware isn't the same company they were when they made Mass Effect and Baldur's Gate. It could very well be that they won't be able to recover from this, especially with the worrying news that they want to take the next Dragon Age into the same direction of Games As A Service (GAAS). What I find so surprising about this that instead of focusing on a deep and interesting world they've built with Mass Effect, they decided to do something new but at the same time stay in the same genre of Sci-Fi that ME already inhabited. Why the decision was made to make such a drastic change, instead of keeping working on ME, will for ever be a mystery to me.
Regarding the link, it's been obvious that Anthem was on life-support since day 1, when everyone realized what a failure the game is. The decision to make the game go into maintenance mode (not officially announced, but essentially what this is right now) was probably made fairly soon after the first few patches when people who played the game realized this wasn't going to get fixed post-launch.
I suspect whoever is making the decisions here has opted to let Anthem wither away, hoping people will forget when DA4 gets released a few years down the line, and so they can shut down servers and cut their losses completely when everyone leaves.
Along those same lines, I think EA is too tied to their bottom line to successfully produce a GaaS title. I personally feel they have a long history of eliminating things that don’t immediately make them a lot of money rather than putting in the effort to fix what is broken and support it in the long run. Examples of this are things like Sim City and all the studios they’ve acquired, had produce a couple games and shutdown.
Additionally, servers for EA games multiplayer seem to get end of life’d and shutdown regularly, presumably so EA can sell its next game. Along that same vein consider BioWare, it was occasionally patching Baldur’s Gate 2 years after it came out— I doubt you could find any EA title still being maintained multiple years after its release, unless it prints money (like Sims 4). I suspect the death of Apex Legends and Anthem are not far away because EA isn’t willing to commit resources to make them successful in the long run, and overall I doubt EA will ever be successful in the GaaS with the way they handle games, servers, and developers.
Reports make EA seem way less antagonistic than they are perceived by the gaming community I think. They just seem to have unrealistic expectations and push for large profits instead of consistent output and franchises. See Dead Space, instead of being content with a successful horror franchise, they decided to have it turned into a huge multi media thing and switch focus from horror to action adventure. That failed, because Dead Space 3 was a game which the devs wanted to be horror, but the publisher mandated to be action.
It wouldn't surprise me if the failure of Dead Space made EA more laid-back. It was Bioware that made all the decisions regarding Anthem, the turning into GAAS, the constant changes in focus due to a undecided senior team, etc.