I’m beginning to wonder if perhaps it isn’t the healthiest thing in the world for people to wrap their entire identity and core of their being around the act of consumption of a specific product.

I’m just taking a stab in the dark that these self described Gamers™ and Consumers™ would probably benefit from backing…

For someone who was strictly a 3DS owner or for a gift for kids this is a great, lower priced option

Flipside I have some friends who want the switch only for something to do on trainrides/travelling and have absolutely no interest in ever using it docked.

The funny thing is my impression of when they brought up the map in the first demo was “Oh, that kind of looks like Metroid Prime’s map!” I’m surprised more people didn’t pick up on that.

Glad to see someone acknowledge the greatest game on the DS. And that’s saying something when TWEWY, Ace Attorney, and EBA were on the same system. It’s THAT good.

I would love to ask him all about it, but EA/BioWare declined my requests for an interview with him or anyone else on the leadership team.

The game that emerged from a six-and-a-half-year development cycle was the result of a number of difficult, complicated factors, ones that won’t be quite as easy to fix as Anthem’s loot drop rates or loading screens.

Maybe one of the best pieces of gaming journalism that I’ve read in a long time. Frankly, BioWare’s response is a failure of public relations. They should absolutely have read the article and noted how fair it was to BioWare while also telling hard truths. Promise to be better and take steps to be better. I hope that…

EA had a canned attack response lined up for the inevitable story, and they couldn’t even get that right.

Jason, a powerful and awesome article. You hit it on the head.

I think other studios/publishers would have killed the project quicker or never let it come close to scaling up until they had something fun and playable they could build on.

I saw the Destiny thing more as them saying “we’re not looking at Destiny because we don’t want to be influenced by the game and thus add credence to the yells of ‘Bioware is doing Destiny!’” I definitely don’t think it was the right route to go, though.

Were EA not in the picture, it’s very possible Bioware would’ve worked on Anthem until it were actually ready, and most of the launch issues would’ve been eliminated.

It was never magic, and calling it that was probably the most disrespectful thing the leadership of BioWare and/or EA ever did along the way to this and similar stories. The “BioWare Magic” can easily be summed up as extremely capable and experienced developers with a strong vision of the product they are building…

Based on what i saw here i would say the much bigger hurdle here was not frostbite but pride.

why is training every damned development studio on how to use the engine not priority #1?

The thing I don’t get is that if EA is mandating that everything has to use the Frostbite engine, why is training every damned development studio on how to use the engine not priority #1? They must have the budget for it, and it seems like a short term expense to curtail what would be a whole lot of long term expenses…

That was my impression as well.

I teach effective team strategies in the context of an introductory composition course, and this article is a case study of how to mess up a team project. There is so much to highlight, but I want to sit with the first point where I thought, “You’re up the creek without a paddle”: