BioWare did something completely different when they took on the online world with their latest IP Anthem and though many are enjoying the free-flying title, the launch and subsequent silence has been less than pleasant for the studio. Though many updates have gone live since the game launched, there is still concerns about the title’s support and whether the promised content is still coming down the pipeline.
Our sister site GameDaily.biz recently sat down with EA CEO Andrew Wilson to talk about a wide variety of topics about their company, public perception, and all of the bumps in the road through the years. One of the topics that came up was Anthem and how the publisher is working with BioWare to ensure its future.
“We brought together these two groups of players who were making this emotional value calculation on two different vectors. One was traditional BioWare story-driven content, and the other was this action-adventure type content. About the 30 or 40 hour mark they really had to come together and start working in on the elder game. At that point everyone kind of went, ‘Oh, hang a minute.’ Now the calculation is off. It’s off because I’ve got a friend who sits in this other category of player. They want to play the game a certain way. I want to play the game a certain way. The promise was we can play together, and that’s not working very well.”
Improvements though, as exciting as they are, will take time and Wilson added that the goal was always to have a long-term support plan in place. According to the CEO: “IP lives for generations, and runs in these seven to ten year cycles. So, if I think about Anthem on a seven to ten-year cycle, it may not have had the start that many of us wanted, including our players. I feel like that team is really going to get there with something special and something great, because they’ve demonstrated that they can.”
Transparency is key, especially in an age where misinformation is accessible by a click of a button, so the developers taking to social media to address concerns is very important for their player base. Since a big issue previously in Anthem’s shelf life were features not being ready in time and promising too much too soon, it’s important that both the publishers and the developers are open and honest about what’s going on behind the scenes.
