There are a lot of people currently enjoying BioWare’s latest IP, Anthem – but that doesn’t mean that the launch went live without a hitch and that the title’s release wasn’t shrouded in controversy. With the community being very divided on what Anthem has to offer and more and more media outlets claiming the doom of BioWare, one dev, in particular, is diving deep into what the current state of the game is while addressing the missteps of communication along the way.
Jesse Anderson is the Global Community Manager for Anthem and he took to his Twitter to provide a very lengthy – and truthful – insight into a day in the life of a dev working on this game. From every comment being the potential to being taken out of context, to where they themselves messed up with communication, his thread is one that is very insightful for those interested in learning more about Anthem and the culture surrounding it.
“To kick things off, I want to talk about why there hasn’t been as much communication on Anthem from me these past few weeks,” he began the lengthy thread with. “I have been wanting to talk about so many things because I don’t like going quiet, but there were reasons for this.
Sometimes when there are bigger discussions going on internally, I have to put communication on hold to avoid saying inaccurate things. A lot of this is explained in that reddit post I shared from the team. If I ever have to go quiet again, I will let the community know.”
Anderson added, “Moving forward, I should be able to talk more though. It might not always be about future content for Anthem, but I can talk about what just released, what’s about to release and issues the team is aware of and are fixing/investigating.”
He then opened up a bit about the current Anthem streams that have been going on, including the most recent one. “The last stream was rough for me, I won’t hide from that. I wasn’t able to answer questions people wanted the answers to, and it was very difficult to pull questions from the chat that were about what we were showing.
The plan was to have the stream go out the week before, so that we could share the new stronghold and the patch notes, but that freaking cable that was cut made my life hell. New info would have been shared as originally planned…”
“And when the chest was opened up on stream I did almost say “purple rain” but didn’t because I wasn’t sure how people would react and I froze, I was at a loss for words. Normal me would just laugh and joke about it, but things are sensitive right now, so I didn’t… I want to get back to a point where we can have fun together as a community on streams.”
He then vowed to be more conscientious in the future, adding: “I’m going to do everything in my power to avoid situations like that again because it’s not a great experience for players either. If we’re going to do a stream on story, combat, level design or something else, we’ll state that ahead of time so you can know what to expect.
I have seen people saying that we don’t look at other streams and questioning why we don’t just do what they do. We do look at streams from other studios; it would be silly not to. We’ll be evolving our streams as we go and are listening to the community feedback for them.”
There have also been a lot of comparisons to other games, and other games’ perceived failure. On that note he added:
“I want to say that I play other games that we’re sometimes compared to. I’ve played Destiny for years, have reached world tier V in The Division 2, 55 hours in Warframe and 95 hours logged in Anthem. We can all coexist! Let’s not spread hate.”
With more acts on the way to build upon the game’s story, and more endgame content also on the horizon, the journey for Anthem is far from over. While this might not change everyone’s opinions on the game, it is a unique inside look into the team that brought Anthem to life and a way to see that maybe not everything we’re seeing is as it seems.
You can read the entire thread right here, as well as his responses to fans of Anthem and their questions. As for the game itself, Anthem is now available on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.
If you’re looking to talk about Anthem, I’m currently loving it! Feel free to follow me over on Twitter @DirtyEffinHippy to gush over our Javelins and “sexy bad choices.”
