Anthem has had a tough time since its launch. Plagued with gameplay issues, delayed, and general ambivalence from the gaming public has left BioWare with a game that has a large hill to climb before people get drawn back to it, if that is a possibility. While some have given the opinion that BioWare should move on the team at BioWare itself is working to improve the Anthem experience.
Christian Dailey, BioWare Austin’s Studio Director, posted an update about the state of things regarding Anthem. In this update he has confirmed that the team, around 30 of them, have moved onto an incubation aka prototyping stage of content and updates that may be added to Anthem. He has stated that going forward BioWare will be more open with the community and show content that is being tested, though not all of it will be added into game through what is being dubbed by people as update 2.0.
Christian’s statement can be read below.
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.
We really want this experience to be different for the team and our players, but we know we have some tough challenges to tackle. We want to include you as we go and be open and honest with where we are at and what the expectations are with where we are going. The reality is you will see things that look awesome but end up on the cutting room floor or things that you might think suck that you feel we are spending too much time on – but in the spirit of experimentation this is all OK. We really want to provide you all the transparency we can because of your passion and interest in Anthem. But, with that comes seeing how the sausage is made – which is not always pretty by the way.
We also want to start putting together some regular comms out to everyone to show/talk about these changes and our progress. This blog is one example, but we also want to include you in more of the day to day and hopefully get you some real interactions with the team. These updates could come in the form of an ad-hoc live stream, or some cool concept art posted on social media, or the occasional feed of me curled up in a ball crying in the corner…
We will get back to everyone on what our update cadence will look like soon, as we start looping you into our progress.
In our review for Anthem, Stefan wrote:
