Anthem

On the eve of Anthem’s shutdown, Adam and Austin dig through BioWare’s most soul-crushing failure. Is there actually a good game buried underneath that 59 on Metacritic? Did this live service bomb end BioWare as we knew it? Join them as they attempt to answer these questions, and more, about this infamous 2019 disaster.

Link to The Schreier Article:
https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964

Link to "The Darrah Files":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_QY8F8z_4c

--------------------------------------------------------
Follow us on social media @thegamesgonebypodcast
Contact us at gamesgonebyradio@gmail.com

Chapters

• 0:54 Intro
• 4:53 What Is (Was) Anthem?
• 11:11 Your Mission, Should You Choose To Accept It...
• 12:00 Gameplay - Taking Flight
• 18:03 Gameplay - Traversal and Fort Tarsis
• 25:46 Gameplay - Bland Weapons and Uninspired Powers
• 29:44 Gameplay - Choose Your Iron-Man Suit
• 36:07 Gameplay - We Swear, We're Not Destiny
• 38:22 Aside - Mark Darrah vs. The Ghost of Casey Hudson
• 45:46 Gameplay - Loading Fun... Please Wait Forever
• 52:58 Story - A 'Classic Bioware Story'
• 54:58 Story - Where The %#$! Are My Companions?
• 58:53 Story - 'Left Yes' and 'Right Yes'
• 1:01:20 Story - Sci-Fi Dragon Age
• 1:06:42 Story - Fan Expectations
• 1:14:47 Live Service - No Content, No Variety
• 1:19:21 Live Service - Dopamine, Dopamine, Dopamine
• 1:22:39 Live Service - It's The Economy, Stupid
• 1:28:37 Live Service - Servers And Single Player
• 1:31:06 Live Service - Anthem N.E.X.T.
• 1:36:38 Aside - No, Seriously, Where Are My Companions?
• 1:40:48 Art Direction - The Javelins Look Awesome!
• 1:41:24 Art Direction - ...But Nothing Else Does
• 1:45:24 Development Woes - Parallels To 'Play Nice'
• 1:50:39 Development Woes - What's In A Name?
• 1:53:25 Development Woes - Running Out Of 'Bioware Magic'
• 1:56:29 Development Woes - Edmonton vs. Austin
• 2:00:32 Development Woes - Warning: Not For Bioware Fans
• 2:06:10 Eulogy - Is Bioware Dead?
• 2:08:41 Eulogy - Studio Casualties
• 2:12:10 Eulogy - So... Is There A Good Game Here?
• 2:13:10 Eulogy - Cascading Effects
• 2:16:50 Eulogy - Wasted Potential
• 2:21:03 Eulogy - Electronic Arts
• 2:24:35 The End

Transcript

0:00

Let's see how it goes. No matter how bad the episode goes, it can't be worse than its source material. Oh, got him. Jesus. Potential cold open material there. And welcome back to another episode of the Games Gone By podcast. It is January 3rd at the time of this recording. I'm your host, Adam, and joining me as always, the gaming expert and enthusiast, Austin. Austin, buddy, are you ready to discuss the ultimate cautionary tale, BioWare's eternal albatross, the veritable live service disaster known only as Anthem? Talk about disaster, am I right? I love talking about Anthem a lot more than I loved playing Anthem. We'll just leave it at that. Yeah, and we should probably go ahead and just preface it with this. This is not the first time you and I have talked about this on air before. Back on my old college radio show, shout out, Cyberpunk, FM, Harry, and Shereen, you and I recorded an episode, God, it must have been three weeks after the game came out, where we just lament the sorry state of this game. I mean, it was just like an hour and a half of me. There were multiple times where I just like raged out. I was like, you have to talk now because I can't even think straight. And the original plan for this month of January was to kind of just add like a short 20-minute addendum, like, we went back to the game for a little bit. I went back for way longer than I ever planned to. And then just kind of released that episode. But there ended up just being so much to say. And that was primarily because of what I'm going to be referring to as the Dara files throughout this episode, which is Mark Dara, who ended up coming onto the project with about 18 months left before release, kind of took over the project to get it launched. And he did a bunch of like Dev Diary video blogs on YouTube talking about Anthem in the process. And like, oh my God, there's just so much. There's just so much to say. There's just so much to talk about there. And it also, it just makes it all make sense, right? Like it sucks, but I'm no longer confused at why things happen. I'm kind of confused at how they were let to happen, how they were made to happen. But we now understand what happened. Yeah, I was very surprised by how much you put into your return to Anthem here. I was expecting you to like boot it up one time, try it out, and then be like, all right, well, this game's shutting down and so am I. I'm done. But you have put so much effort into this episode, and I love it. I'm here for it. But I was very surprised by what this turned into. Well, the gameplay itself, I really binged for like eight or nine days. I haven't actually touched it since like, I don't know, the week before Christmas now. But yeah, part of it was that like there was just enough improvements to not make it the absolute miserable experience that it was. But also, knowing that it was going to die in like a month and a half, I was not worried about becoming addicted to some lifestyle. I've served a slop that I kept playing because of dopamine instead of actually enjoying the game. But yeah, so what we'll probably end up doing is releasing the old episode as like a bonus episode. But it's interesting because like you and I were very critical in that one, but perhaps like cautiously optimistic that it would turn around. Oh, man, that didn't quite happen. No, the like long-term trajectory of Anthem is... It's clearly not doing well considering this game shuts down in eight days from the time of this recording. So we will permanently lose Anthem forever very soon. It did not have the turnaround we hoped for. Yeah, kind of a tangential fun fact. The same day that EA announced this game was shutting down was the same day that the EU petition for stop-going games crossed a million signatures. Like, it was just really funny timing. Yeah, and this game would be so hard to keep alive with kind of the server structure and everything that it has, which will... We'll probably talk a little bit about as we get deeper into it. But this is a great example of why that movement had so much weight behind it. Because like this will now be a thing you can never play again. And I mean, look, it's a disaster and we have our problems with it for sure. But like the fact that it just no longer will exist in any format that you could play it is kind of crazy. Like we both bought this game. We spent $60 or whatever it was at the time on this game. God, I hope it was only $60. I have a feeling we both... That's probably true. BioWare, right? BioWare game. Yeah. So it's crazy that a thing that we paid money for will no longer exist in any way, shape, or form and that we cannot play it in any way, shape, or form. At least you and I didn't spend any money on microtransactions. Those are the people I really feel sorry for. Yeah, no kidding. People would drop like $500 in Anthem. Like, oof. I mean, why would you do that in the first place? But still. Who knows, man. For those of you who don't know, what Anthem is, first off, like, thank you for letting us be the ones to take you through the journey of this utter train wreck. But it is BioWare's 2019, quote, shared world co-op shooter. The idea is you and three friends are going to suit up in these exosuits called javelins. They very much feel like kind of an Iron Man suit in a way. Different variants on that. And you run missions to fight bad guys and chase loot. You know, get on that gear grind treadmill. All while the game tries to deliver a classic BioWare style story. Emphasis on the word. The word tries there. And more on that later. You kind of alluded to this earlier. We, like, talking about Anthem at this point has become more fun for a lot of people than even playing it. And it's very probable at this point that Anthem's story of, like, outside of the game itself, the story of the game, is significantly more well-known than the story within the game. This is for a few different reasons. One of them is, you know, we said we did that episode, well, like, four weeks after it came out. Six weeks after it came out, Jason Schreier of Bloomberg, at the time Kotaku, wrote this huge exposé about the production process. And it had all kinds of insider quotes, you know, but, like, remain anonymous. I am convinced half of those were Mark Darrow quotes. Because when you go through the Dara files, so much of the stuff that's mentioned in the Schreier article is, like, expanded and elaborated upon in Darrow's videos. Some of it, like, strikingly similar phrasing as the words in the Schreier article. So I'm like, dude, this guy felt completely... Fucked by the position he was put in, and, like, had to tell someone about it. That would make sense. I mean, Schreier's such a good journalist, as far as, like, as far as video games go. Like, he's the guy. So, like, it would make sense to keep him under wraps, and, you know, especially because he was still at Bioware at the time and all that stuff. But I can definitely imagine he was like, I need to get out the disaster of this game. It's, guys, like, you need to know the story of what happened here. And the kind of thing where... As early as six weeks after the game came out, everyone suddenly knew this story of this incredibly messy development cycle. The extremely long pre-production, the late decision-making, sometimes no decision-making, the constant resets of core ideas, and just, like, a huge, massive identity crisis between this sort of, like, we want to be a co-op looter shooter, but also tell a Bioware single-player RPG story. And so everyone kind of had this in their head almost immediately. Like, the game's not out a month and a half. Like, this game sucks, and it's not just that it's not fun to play. It's very clearly that it did not get the kind of process it needed to be fun. And then six years later, we get the DARA files that kind of expand on all of that. Yeah, the story behind Anthem, I think, like you said in the intro, right? It's the cautionary tale, right? It's like, here's what you don't do in game development. And a lot of that starts with even just the very beginnings with Casey Hudson and, like, the concepts and the ideas behind it. It just never had the identity that it needed to coalesce into the experience it was supposed to be. And I'm not sure the version of Anthem that they were trying to put out ever could have been a great game. But, yeah, there's just so much here. There's so much to chew on as far as, like, the development process. I'm definitely excited to dig into that stuff. Yeah, and we're going to get into a lot of detail about a lot of those specific things. But just to kind of round out the intro. This story here. When Anthem comes out, it's February 2019. It is a 59 Metacritic score on launch. This is the lowest score BioWare has had for anything by a large margin, right? I think Mass Effect Andromeda was the worst before this. And that was still a 71. So this was bad. A 59 by, like, AAA video game metrics is awful. It's basically a zero. I mean, there's no difference. It really is. And so they have this ambitious plan. To kind of fix the game called Anthem Next, but unfortunately, never takes off. They give about a year worth of updates and then quite literally a year later, right? They say this game like Anthem Next has been canceled. This game's updates are done forever. We're putting it in maintenance mode in February of 2020. So exactly one year to the month after the game came out, some people were really kind of hoping for a No Man's Sky turnaround did not happen, did not happen. And that brings us to today where the timing of this episode is kind of perfect in a dark, unfortunate, way EA announced, you know, back in July that the servers are going to shut down permanently on January 12th of 2026. And if all goes according to plan, that is the same day that this episode is going live. So if you are listening to this, this game is gone forever and you cannot play it. Sorry to tell you about all the, all the, you know, cool, some cool things, not, not too many, but, uh, yeah, you can't play it anymore. Sorry. Yeah. If anything in the next hour and a half sounds cool, you'll just have to take our word for it. Go, go watch some videos. Unfortunately. Uh, you know, if you've ever been to like, um, anyone's like wake in the last few years and everyone wants to call it now, like a celebration of life, uh, that is not what this is. This is a funeral. This is a eulogy. This thing is dead and we are not going to pretend that it ever lived. Uh, that, that is truly the, the kind of story behind it here. And, and not only is it dead, but some of the things that killed it, we just weren't addressed. You know, uh, some of our takes on this game have barely changed from our 2019 episode. Right. I kind of went through and made a chart and it was trying to look at if anything had changed drastically. And for the most part, it hasn't, we'll get into some of it, but during the episode, Austin, you made this analogy of what this game felt like. I thought was so perfect. Do you remember what it was? Yeah, I definitely, I remember talking about, uh, this game is like dumpster diving, right? Like there's, there's a couple of, of hidden gems down. If you dig really deep down into all the trash, you can find a couple of gems, but man, you gotta wade through it. A lot of trash to get there. You really do. And I, and I was thinking about that the whole time I went back and revisited it because like every time I would have a few minutes of fun, I would immediately think about, man, what did I have to do to get there? And what is about to lay on the other side of this five minutes of fun? And it's dumpster diving every time. But here's the mission today, my friend, we're going to talk about our experience revisiting Anthem over the last few weeks. Maybe mostly my experience. I played a couple of times. You did. You did. We played a couple of missions together. I think there's a clip of you in one of the. Shorts I made. So yes, let's go. There is evidence that you played it with the gameplay, the story, the live service reality of the in-game, all of that. We're going to compare our takes to the 2019 episode. We're going to crack open the DARA files. We're going to look through the Jason Schreier article. And all of this is in service of trying to answer the question, like, is there a good game buried under all of this? Or is it just an incredibly costly train wreck that kind of deserves its studio destroying legacy? And it's. A 59 Metacritic score. It's the question of the day. And I'm excited to dig into it and figure it out. So let's start with the gameplay because it is a video game after all. And regardless of how much they want to tell a story and have a cinematic this and that, it needs to be a game that is fun to play. And elements of it really were. What's the best thing about this game? What is everyone's best thing about this game? The resounding praise of this game is 100% the flight mechanics. I mean. It feels so good. I don't think I've ever played a game where it feels as good to travel, but just the raw like movement mechanics are so fun. The flight feels so good. It's exactly what I imagine, like an Iron Man game would feel like. It has one pretty major flaw in the flying, but for the most part, that flying just feels so good. You know, at one point in the DARA files, he just talks about how, like, it just feels so good to jump off a ledge. And you're, like, free falling. And then right before you hit the ground, you, like, hit those boosts and you pull up and you, like, soar over the landscape and you see all of the waterfalls and the trees. And it really is just like, I mean, it's an epic feeling. Like, I think with all the stuff they talk about how this game was supposed to be big and you want, you know, it's like the next big era of Bioware and this and that. Those moments, you get it. You feel that. But, man, that's like the first time you're going to feel that and the last time you're going to feel that for a long time playing this game. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The thing about the big kind of thing that brings the flying down is the overheating system. And, you know, you expect there to be some limits on the travel. But when this game first launched, it was awful, the limits on this. Do you remember how bad that felt? Oh, it was terrible. And it was one of the things that we probably complained the most about because it hampers the one really good thing about the game and makes it bad. It's like, oh, like, you were right there. And I'm definitely with you, right? Like, you need to have some. You need to have some limit. But when I'm just roaming around the world and, like, trying to get to my objective, I should not fall out of the sky and have to run for, like, 30 seconds because I need to rebuild my boost or, like, my boosters. Like, while I'm traveling to mission objectives, just let me fly. Like, if you want to limit my flight in combat, that's fine. But traveling the world, like, why can't I just fly around? Like, it just felt so – it felt like the grand epicness was now dragged down because you're being, you know, plummeted from the sky against your will. Yeah, I think you said it perfectly. Like, it is one thing to say, okay, you can't just fly away from every combat encounter. Of course, totally understand that. I had no problem with the fact that, like, you overheated faster when you were taking fire. But the problem comes is that, one, you just still overheat pretty fast just flying around. So you would have to land so often even just getting somewhere. And two, sometimes you were just trying to fly over a shitty little encampment that had nothing to do with your objective. And you would get shot at and you would overheat and you would fall to the ground. There's a couple things they put in to mitigate this, right? Like, if you fly over the little rivers, you heat up slower. If you fly through a waterfall, you lose your heat. But it felt kind of awkward because it's like the freedom of being able to fly wherever I want is constrained by having to fly on a little path on the ground. I'm really mad about it in the first episode we did on this. I'm like, that's a fucking car. Dude, like, if you have to follow a set path on the ground, that's not flying anymore. That's fucking driving. Right. It's what it does is it takes this big grand world and all the cool stuff around it and basically says, don't go look at that. Don't go explore that. Just follow along the path. Just just follow on these rivers. Oh, go underwater where you can't do anything. You can't shoot. You can't do anything underwater. Once you go underwater, you're just all you can do is swim. Like, it's. Yeah. It's just like they want you to use. They want you to use the water, but they give you no, like, good way to do that without it feeling incredibly limiting. And that's just, like, unfortunate. And even just like, I mean, there's no part of this game we can talk about without there just being like a crazy behind the scenes story. So there this is a mechanic that was really tough to design around. Right. So Dara talks about how, like, yeah, flying is obviously one of the best parts of the game, but it causes a lot of problems because it really limits, like, the type of enemies you can have, the type of terrain. And combat arenas you can have. And that's why so many of the damn missions are just like, no flight zones. Like, you can't even fly in them because they basically would go back and forth between the game even having flight. And so, so many of the missions and combat areas were designed without flight in mind. And this was something that an EA executive that they're pitching the game to or they're showing the progress for, he comes in and he plays it and he's like, this is awful. This is not what you promised me. What is this? And so they're like. Well, we got to figure something out. Let's put flight back in. Then when he plays it the next time, he's like, this game is fantastic. This is what I'm talking about. Like, this is what you guys promised me. So that point it was like, well, I guess there's no going back now. But there also wasn't time and resources to reshape a lot of the game. So Dara just talks about in his videos how there's a lot of conflict between the flight mechanics and the actual gameplay. And you kind of alluded to it with, like, you can't really fight in the air when you're flying. You can do the hover thing, but that's different. There's nothing. There's nothing going on underwater. You're basically just flying slowly in the dark. It's a really weird feeling. And I think that the craziest thing to me is, you know, the suits have their ultimates. Every single one of the suits' ultimates stops you while you're flying so that you can use it. Except the rangers, which just keeps you flying. But you're supposed to target things and then let go so it, like, shoots the missiles. But you just fucking fly by everything. And it's the only one. And it makes no sense. So it's just crazy to me that even the best part of this game is just riddled with, like, contradictions. And identity crises. And very clear, like, conflicts of game design. Like, it's insane. That is definitely going to be a recurring theme as we go through all of the, like, identity crisis and, like, design crisis issues they have with this game. Unfortunately, like, the other forms of travel in this game, such as, say, walking around the instant single-player story area, is so slow, dude. I don't, like, we complained about it in the first episode, but I'm reading. I'm reading over the Schreier article, and I'm watching all seven hours of the Dara files. And they don't complain about the walking speed in the fort, which blows my mind. Because to me, that was such a huge hurdle when we first played this. Because there's not, like, now, thank God, they've changed some of it to where a lot of stuff is just accessible from a menu. But when the game first launched, you, like, had to do everything by walking around the fort and, like, interacting with something. And there were so many loading screens. And thank God they've gotten rid of a few of those. But it was, like, man. Man, this is already awful, but it would at least be a little bit less awful if I could, like, sprint in this first-person exploration mode or even just walk faster. Nope, nope. You are snail's pace walking around this thing. Dude, I, like, I'm getting to that point now where I'm getting too mad that I can't think. Because, like, God, it's so slow. It's so slow. And I think a bigger problem with that is not only is it slow, but, like, it's just boring. Like, there's not a lot of interesting things to look at. All of the areas feel the same. Like, the area is not huge, thankfully. It's big enough to be frustrating. But it's not, like, a massive area. Yeah. But none of it's interesting. Like, there's characters littered around, but they don't say anything particularly interesting. You can't interact with them in any particularly interesting way. So, not only are you walking at a snail's pace, but the thing that you're walking to does not give you any sort of satisfaction once you get there. It's just, like, I walk at, like, a mile per hour. And I can't see or talk or do anything that makes me, like, excited now that I'm there. So, it's just, like, it's a frustrating experience all the way around. All of Fort Tarsis, in my opinion, is just an incredibly frustrating experience. It's just, it's so lame. I think that's the best way to put it. Especially when you read about, kind of, the background and the lore of this game and what this is all supposed to represent and the themes that are supposed to be coming through. It's, like, this is, like, one of the last bastions of humanity in this part of the globe. Um. You know, it's supposed to be, like, the world is dangerous out there and this is where you feel safe. No, this is just where you feel bored out of your mind. You feel way safer when you have a suit that can fly with guns and rockets and electricity powers. Like, that is, that feels way safer than the vulnerability of being the slowest motherfucker on the planet inside of this fort that doesn't even have, like, a ceiling to it, by the way. Like, there are enemies in this game that fly and the fort is open. So safe. It's just. It's just crazy. So safe. And so, that's, that's two of the big gameplay things. Some other things that really frustrate me is that, you know, you have your typical, like, invisible wall going on in games. You can't go beyond the edge of the map. Well, they, they have this to a point as far as verticality goes. It's, like, if you fly too high, you're sort of forced to fly back down. And that part's fine. But, god, dude, there's actual spots that you can go land on. But they're, I guess they're decided they're just too high to be on. So, you just start taking damage. Like, the sky is too, I don't know. Is oxygen running? Is oxygen running out? I'm not sure. There's no explanation for it. It's just like, oh, this looks like a rock I could perch up on and maybe snipe some enemies down there. No, sorry. You're too high in the air. The game that is all about flying, you're too high in the air. Go back down. It's just, it's just like what you were saying, man. I can't, I can't go three sentences without mentioning two mechanics that just butt heads. Because it's like, why are you doing this to me? You want me to explore the skies. But not, not too much of the sky. Maybe just the lower sky. Oh, god. Well, and, and correct me if I'm wrong. But when the game launched, there was no fast travel? There may have been, like, if you go into free play, there was like the four little striders scattered around the map. Okay, yeah, yeah. That you could fast travel to. But that was it. I know. I think they've added a couple since, right? They've turned the, all the like little tombs around into fast travel areas. Yes. Although it's still annoying as hell because you don't fast travel right outside the tomb. Right. Like, it makes sense. You fast travel after a loading screen. You go into the tomb. So that's. And you can then turn around and hit another loading screen. To get out of the tomb. Because why would I want to go into the tomb if I'm just trying to fast travel? And, and, you know, I think of something like, like Insomniac Spider-Man games, right? Those are games that I never really wanted to fast travel because it was so fun to, to swing around the city. So, like, I didn't even use fast travel that much. But Anthem, again, like, by giving you the overheating suits, traveling becomes. It becomes a struggle when you're trying to get from one side of the map to the other. It's, it stops being as fun because you know that you're going to have to, like, land on the ground and run for two or three of, like, you know, you're along your path. You have to drop to the ground two or three times to run. So, like, I just want to get over to the other side of the map. And it's a big map. So it's like, why would you do these things? And there's no waypoints. Like, no, no custom waypoints, at least. No. And not even, like, multiple. You can have your missions. Selected. And that's it, right? And that's the worst part is not only there's no waypoints, and the map is huge, but when it first launched, and this was addressed a little bit, too. But when it first launched, when you press the map button, the actual topography of the map didn't display for, like, four or five seconds. And you have to check the map a lot because there's no fucking custom waypoints. So unless you're heading to the one mission, like, you have to keep checking it because despite the fact you can fly, the whole thing is these valleys that kind of confine you to certain paths. And you can't fly above the mountaintops, right? So, yeah, man. All of the travel outside of the just, like, second-to-second flight was just such a pain in the ass. Some of it has been improved, but it was definitely too little too late. And probably even if this is the kind of thing that they had done in the first, like, two weeks, I'm not sure it would have been quite enough. Yeah, I think there's still just too many, like, inherent flaws with some of the design decisions. And it's just, like, not – you're not going to be able to fix it, you know? Mm-hmm. Yeah. And do the craziest part about all of this? The craziest part about all of this is that there is a – I think it starts in, like, the beginning of December and it lasted until the end of January. And I say that. I think it only happened once, really, because the game was really only online for, like, a year. But it was a winter event. And so a lot of the free play areas are snowy. And a lot of them have a permanent buff to where it's like you're flying above the water on the ground. So you have much less – a much reduced rate of overheating throughout everything you do. And it makes the game feel so much better that it's, like, this – these numbers should have just been the default values. It's so clear to me. Like, playing through the winter event, it's, like, it feels so much better to fly around. It's just fucking crazy that these weren't the default numbers. Yeah. I never – I don't think I ever got to play the winter event. I guess you didn't either if it only happened in a – Well, I mean, sorry. I guess it happens, like, every December and January or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they were going to have more seasonal events. They just never actually got around to putting any of the game before. But I think this one, for the past six years, kicked off every December. Has always kicked off in December, yeah. So then we must have phoned around with it a little bit. I didn't notice it being that much better, but I guess maybe I don't remember the exact pain of the original. It didn't apply in missions, right? Unless that mission was also outdoor. So I can remember one of the missions I was playing with you. You were complaining, like, I can't even get up to the objective here without falling down. And it's like, yeah, because we're inside, so it's not cold, so you don't get the buff. Ugh, God. Anthem. Anthem! So, as if we haven't had enough things to complain about with just the flying, let's get into, you know, another really important part of a looter shooter, the combat. I thought it was overall pretty fun. The problem, though, is, like, for me, you don't get access to all of the javelins at the start. You get, like, one at the very beginning. Then you have to gain a few levels. And then you have to get, like, ten levels above where we were before we quit the game to even get the last javelin. Yeah. So, I really hope you like the first couple you pick, because you're going to be stuck with those for a minute. And beyond that, like, the gear, so basically the abilities in this game, right? The spells, whatever you want to call it. They're called gear in this game, so you equip a couple things to your gear slot. The storm, who's sort of the magey one, has some cool, like, elemental things. And the big colossus has some big rocket launchers. Those felt pretty cool. But I thought, like, 90% of the guns themselves just sucked. Like, they didn't look cool. They didn't sound cool. They didn't feel cool to use. My favorite was probably the autocannon. The autocannon on the big colossus, that really felt like a minigun properly. It sounded like one. But, man, so many of the guns in this game just did not feel fun to play with. And I'm sure when you got to higher level variants, there was, like, more effects on them and stuff. But a lot of them didn't have that toward the beginning of the game. And so, it was like, which color assault rifle do you want to use is basically what it felt like. Yeah, the guns are awful. Pretty much every gun is just no fun. And BioWare's never been, like, the best at gun play, right? That's not their primary thing. I thought Mass Effect was serviceable. But, like, I don't go to Mass Effect and think, like, ah, man, they designed some really awesome guns. Like, that's not necessarily the thing that comes to mind. You look at something like Destiny or Borderlands and, like, those games, I think, like, man, good guns. Like, the gun play is great. And, again, this kind of goes back to the identity crisis thing where it's, like, they didn't want to be a looter shooter. They didn't want to call themselves a looter shooter. They didn't want to design around, like, looter shooter mechanics. So, thankfully, like, I picked the Storm as my first Javelin. So, I had all of the cool, like, ice attacks and lightning stuff and, like, fire magic and crap. And it was awesome. Like, that stuff was really cool. And I loved running around as the Storm. But any time it needed me to use a gun or, like, any time my gear was on cooldown, and I had to get a gun, I was like, oh, God, this is terrible. Like, I was – there was a Reddit post last night where it was just basically talking about the end of the game. So, a lot of people were coming to the comments and, you know, like, reminiscing and whatnot. And there was this one comment from a guy named HawkRokuTofu. And he said, And I think this is so spot on. And we even mentioned this in the first episode. But, like, it was as if someone said, hey, hey, hey, if any ability looks remotely like it came from Mass Effect, get rid of it. Yeah. Because there's just nothing in the way of the physics manipulation. Like, things can ragdoll. With the Colossus, you have the shield charge. And it's kind of fun to, like, charge into the little enemies and watch them kind of ragdoll away. But for the most part, the abilities don't really have enough oomph to them in the physics engine to send a lot of things ragdolling. And a lot of things are such bullet sponges anyway. You're not going to notice it. And there's no, like, levitation things. There's no stasis type things. I mean, maybe freezing the enemies with the ice stuff. But it just really seems like all they took out of Mass Effect was the combo thing. So, you know, if you freeze someone and then someone else hits it with, like, a rocket launcher, you can do a little combo explosion. That's fun. That encourages you to, like, coordinate with your teammates. But it really just feels like they didn't learn anything from their Mass Effect abilities. They got no inspiration about how to make fun abilities from a trilogy they made that had really cool abilities. It just blows my mind. Yeah. It really is crazy. And I think some of that stems from kind of what Mark Darrow was talking about with the suit design being a middle-out design. Instead of, like, instead of starting from the extremes of, like, what are the cool things we can do? And then kind of working into the middle, they started with, like, let's make the most basic character and, like, kind of put everything into that one character. And then we'll expand out from there. So, what ends up happening is they make, like, one javelin with a billion abilities, it feels like. And they're like, okay, what can we pull away from it to make into other javelins and kind of other class types? So, you get the Colossus that has, like, this cool, like, ground pound. And, you know, the Interceptor is, like, the speedy one, can do triple jumps and, like, is really fast. Storm has all the cool abilities. And what does Ranger? Have? Dude, yeah. He, you know, he mentions that there's, like, a legitimate reason you may want to start with your middle case. Because it allows you to just explore all of the game without a whole lot of constraints. Like, it allows you to explore different mechanics and different encounters without, like, worried about, oh, I'm never going to be able to do this on my own because I picked this hyper-specialized suit. And that's, like, a good reason. He's like, but, you know, the downside is everything you just said. And, dude, it really rears its head in this game. Because no matter what we are talking about, jumping, sprinting, dodging, does not matter. It is so much cooler on everything that's not the goddamn Ranger, which is really your middle ground suit, right? So, there's really the four suits, right? You have the Ranger, which we talked about. You have the Colossus, which is your big hulking tank kind of thing. You have the Interceptor, which is kind of, like, a thief, ninja, rogue type thing. And then the Storm, which is essentially your mage, right? So, in anything, literally take anything. Jumping. Okay. Ranger. Sorry. We'll leave the Ranger for last. Interceptor, triple jump. Pretty cool. Does little flips while he does it. Looks cool. Feels good. Useful. The Storm. It reminds me of Princess Peach from, like, Mario 2, where you kind of go up and kind of hover at the apex of your jump and then slowly fall down. Really cool. You can also hover longer as the Storm. Like, everyone can kind of do a hover where they shoot, but the Storm gets, like, extended time to hover, and their shield's more powerful while they're hovering. And then you have the Colossus. It's kind of just a big double jump, but he's so heavy that whenever you land from being in the air, it's an automatic ground pound melee attack. So, I think that's pretty cool, because you're a giant hulking thing. Right. Makes sense. The Ranger double jumps. Doesn't flip. Doesn't jump a third time. Doesn't smash. Doesn't glide. Doesn't float. He just double jumps. It is a double jump in every third-person action game you've ever played, right? This extends to everything. The sprinting, same deal. Everyone's got a little flavor to it, like the Storm's hovering off the ground, and the Interceptor looks like Naruto. The Ranger just looks like he's sprinting. The dash, the dodge, same thing. The Storm kind of teleports. The Colossus pulls out a big shield. The Interceptor can dodge three times. The Ranger just does a little dodge to the side. It's literally everything you can think of. The Ranger just feels fucking lame compared to the other three. And, dude, they thought they were going to get six. They told EA executives they were going to get six suits. They barely got four. Yeah, and again, this would be less of a problem. It would still be a problem, because it would make Ranger no fun. But it's a bigger problem, because if you pick Ranger as your first suit, you're stuck with it. You're stuck with it. You're stuck with it for a good chunk of the game where you can't do anything else. So you can't explore any of the other fun suits until you level up a bunch and get to pick another suit. So you're stuck with this really boring character while all your friends are running around as the Storm or the Colossus or the Interceptor or something cool. And you're stuck with the lame one that's like every third-person shooter. It's like, why would you make that choice? And I really feel like if they had had better direction and more time, they would have come up with better ideas. But they just... I mean, and we'll get into this later, but they just really backed themselves into a corner with a lot of this. One of my favorite things to do in the game was to take the Colossus and pull out the shield and just charge through things. And so I was glad to have picked the Colossus as my first one. But I'm pretty sure I picked the Ranger as my second one. And that was a huge mistake, because it's quite a bit of time between your second and third one. And it's a really long time between your third and fourth one. Right. I never even unlocked the fourth one, which thankfully I left Ranger for the end. Oh, I didn't miss much. You missed nothing. Yeah. I remember Connor was the Interceptor when we were playing. And he's doing all this super cool dashing and jumping around, and you're the Storm floating through the air. And I was like, I don't want to be slow and lame. And I didn't mind the slow of the Colossus so much, because at least there's a purpose there. But then I wanted to switch to just something that felt better than that occasionally, as far as mobility and speed. And the Ranger barely does. It almost feels as clunky as the Colossus compared to the Interceptor and Storm. Right. With no cool bonuses, though. Yeah. So the idea, you know, Dara mentions that he thinks the number six, first he says, like, this number came out of someone's ass. But what was probably happening is the idea was that you're going to have too light, too medium, and too heavy. And so the too light shipped with the game, Interceptor and Storm. He said the too heavy, you have the Colossus was one. And the other one was going to be almost like a Paladin thing. Just something like the Colossus that was less focused on firepower and more focused on support. And you can kind of feel that, because the Interceptor just has a very weird. Variety of support abilities that do not feel like they kind of fit the rogue, thiefy thing. Like, there's one that just gets rid of status effects of all your teammates around you. That's not an Interceptor thing in my mind. Right. That would have definitely been a big Paladin thing. And then the sixth one, he's like, I literally have no idea. And that kind of explains why the Ranger is so bad. Because, like, imagine coming up with a second medium jack of all trades thing when you've already given everything cool to the other three. He's like, there was just no way we were ever going to hit this. And he even mentions, like, the way I got this. And what I got the executives off my back is I told them, oh, now we have subclasses. So, technically, we actually have eight suits, right? Brother, I have no idea what he was talking about. I was like, I don't know what those subclasses are, dude. Like, I. Having now finished this game, I don't know what he's talking about. But the executives were like, yeah, yeah, sounds good. We love subclasses. And something we're going to bring up again later, but I'll go ahead and drop here. Part of why all of this feels so bad. Is that. The leadership insisted that this game was not Destiny. And it was not Borderlands. And the reason they said that is because they, like, they first start coming up with the ideas for this game before Destiny is a thing. Or at least before it's publicly a thing, right? So, in their mind, it's like, no, no, no. We had this idea before Destiny. We're not just copying Destiny. We have, like, our own original idea. And that's fine, man. But as the game started to shape up, as stuff started to come out about it to the public, it looked like fucking Destiny. And they decided that rather than learn any of the lessons that Destiny. Had with its launch. Because its launch was a little rough. And it ended up, like, fixing some things and getting a lot of people on board. They were just going to keep denying that they were anything like Destiny. Which all that really means is that the guns were boring as shit. That's exactly it. Like, there was such an insistence on not being like this other thing that they chose to not learn anything from those other things. Like, you can still say, we're doing our own thing. And internally be like, here's the lessons that we learned from those other things. But they didn't even do that. Like, not only publicly did they deny it, but internally they were denying it. They were like, no, no, no. We're not Destiny. We're the new Bioware, right? Like, that was kind of one of the big preaching points from Casey Hudson as he's developing this game. It's like, this is a new era of Bioware. We're doing a new thing. We're new Bioware. Like, we're going to kind of tackle this project together with a clear vision. Blah, blah, blah. And, like, none of that panned out. Like, the vision was never clear because Casey Hudson just leaves. But instead of, during this process, kind of pivoting and going, okay, I guess we are making a looter shooter here. Like, that's kind of what we're doing. And we can put our own Bioware touch on it. But, like, this is a looter shooter. Instead of ever doing that, they were just like, no, no, no. This is an Anthem game, right? It's like when Kojima said it was a Strand game for Dash Stranding. Bioware was like, no, no, no. This is an Anthem game. Like. Like, we're doing our own thing. And it's like, that clearly didn't work because you're just copying all of the other stuff from other companies and doing it poorly. And then not acknowledging that. You mentioned the Casey Hudson thing. This is something Dara talks about in his videos. Where basically, like, after Mass Effect 3 comes out, Hudson. So, for those that don't know, Casey Hudson was, like, the creative director of the entire Mass Effect trilogy. KOTOR 1. I think Balder. He did something on Baldur's Gate 2. But he's been around at Bioware forever. You know, one of the leaders. And he makes this pitch to EA that's basically like, we're entering the new era of Bioware. Where we have figured out a way with our genius, the geniuses behind Mass Effect and KOTOR, to be able to tell a high quality classic Bioware story in a live surface game. And this was, of course, like music to every EA executive's ears, right? And Casey Hudson makes this pitch. And then two years later, when the game is barely in ID. And he leaves. He went to Microsoft. I can't remember what he even did there. But he went to Microsoft for a couple years. And the executives never let go of this pitch, right? Mark Dara talks about fighting with the, quote, ghost of Casey Hudson in front of these executives constantly. Because every time he'd be like, well, here's the state of this. They'd be like, well, you know, Casey said that. He's like, yeah, yeah. I know what Casey said. He left three years ago. Right. Like, this is now a different thing. And this is not to diss on Casey Hudson necessarily. No. Because, I mean, KOTOR and the Mass Effect trilogy are some of both of our, like, all-time favorite games. So, like, Casey Hudson has done amazing work. We're very excited for his next game that we talked about in the Game Awards episode. Like, new Star Wars Old Republic project. Give it to me, Casey. Give it to me. Right. But, right, it's impossible to look at the disaster that Anthem became and not look at Casey Hudson and say, dude, you had this grand pitch. Right. Right. And you just left. Yeah. And I think it's, right, I mean, Dara talks about it a little bit. And, you know, Casey never could really, he had these grand ambitions and he could never make them materialize either. So, it was like, well, I'm going to do something else. Like, this isn't working. What I want isn't happening the way I expected it to. So, I'm just going to go do something else. Yeah. And I do want to make it clear. I have a lot of respect for Dara because one of the first things he says in these videos is he's like, look, when you go to the credits, what's the first name you see? It's mine. Like, this is my responsibility. Ultimately, this game comes down to me. I actually, I saw a YouTube comment where someone was like, holy shit, man, you immediately took full responsibility for the mistakes as the lead designer. We need more people like you in the industry. And he just says, I pushed the let's ship Anthem button, so it's kind of hard to pin it anywhere else. Like, he's really upfront that he's like, look, I ultimately like this is on me. But he's also very clear that he's like, dude, whatever ideas Casey had left with him. And it just does not seem to be the case that anyone inherited them. And one of the things he talks about is that when Casey was there, there was a lot of secrecy amongst the executives, amongst the leadership. But Casey was really good at knowing when to leak things out, both to the rest of the team and to the public, to improve morale, to improve hype, to make sure people were on the same page. He's like, so the people that worked with Casey got really used to not having to do that themselves because Casey was going to do it. Well, Casey leaves and all of these other leaders keep operating with the same secrecy. But no one is taking Hudson's role of leaking any of this to the press or to the fans or to the rest of the company. I say leak. I don't necessarily mean that. But sharing, right? Right, right. And so it ends up just becoming a case where no one knows what's going on in the leadership's head because they're not talking about it. And, you know, a quote from it from the videos is he says that the Anthem team developed a dysfunctional relationship with decision making, which is just not a sentence you want to hear. In regards to anything, but much less a, you know, $100 million game, seven years in development. Right. It's such a great quote to to kind of summarize what happened to this game. But it's like very bad that that's the summary of the game. Like, and I think that's one of the things that you you see throughout all of both the Schreier article and Dara's the Dara files, as you put it. It's just this this complete lack of picking a path. Right. People are like, ah, we'll do it this way. And then it's like, no, we'll do it this way. And now we'll do it this way. And it really is a credit to Dara for coming in and finally just making decisions. Right. Like, when did he join the game? It's like 18 months before launch that he joined a year and a half before this game shift. Yeah. He is first put on the project. He was the lead of a Dragon Age franchise. So he and he basically begs them. He's like, because actually the way it ends up happening is like Casey Hudson kind of comes back around 2017. And he's not put back in charge of Anthem. He's doing something kind of higher up at BioWare and EA or whatever. Dara goes to someone at EA and he's like, listen, when Casey gets here, I'm going to tell you what's going to happen. He is going to come in and he is going to tell you how important it is that Anthem, like his Anthem is BioWare's future. And it's this and that. It's the most important thing we'll ever do. And therefore it needs all of the resources. He's like, I do not want to strip Dragon Age of more resources. And it's already been stripped. And I do not want to work on this game. I want to work on Dragon Age. And all the executives are like, yeah, of course, dude. Dragon Age is important. Like I promise you, like we value Dragon Age. A month goes by and that's exactly what happens. And they ask him to be the one to lead it. And he says like, I really didn't feel like I could say no. It was basically insinuated that if I did not take on this project and make it ship, that someone else's job would be on the line, which then meant that my job would be on the line. But he still takes responsibility. He's like, I suppose I still could have just said no and seen what happened. I didn't do that. I said, yes, I will get this game into a shippable state. But yeah. Like you were saying, 18 months before the game launches is when he joins the team, which is just crazy. And the, you know, it's one thing to come into a game 18 months before launch. It's another thing to come into a game that really the way he described it basically had like nothing done on it. Yeah. Like, I mean, it's just people like constantly making different decisions, not having a vision, not going a certain way, like debating what the game should even be. Like, I mean, it's just people like constantly making different decisions, not having a vision, not going a certain way, like debating what the game should even be. As early as a, or as late, I guess, in development cycle as a year and a half before launch. Like, it's insane. And, you know, it's a real credit to Dara for coming in and actually making decisions. Choosing, like, okay, we're going to do this and we're going to do this. And, like, we need to just go in a direction and we need to make progress on this game so that we can ship something. Yeah. And, like, look, we've gotten a little bit off track here just because there's so much to this. And there's not one sentence you can say about it that doesn't make you immediately fire off 17 questions in your head. But I'll kind of bring this back around. The next thing I wanted to talk about was some of the, like, UI design and just the quality of life and the readability of things. One of the things Dara talks about, the team at Edmonton. So you had Bioware Edmonton. This is, like, considered the A team, right? This is the original Bioware. You have Bioware Austin, who is doing Star Wars The Old Republic, the MMO. And then you have Bioware Montreal, who is what people call the MMO. And then you have what people call the B team. And this is the people who ended up working on Mass Effect Andromeda while the quote-unquote A team is on Anthem. But basically, Edmonton has it in this idea that, like, we make these great single-player games. We know what we're doing. We're going to make it this awesome thing. And then we'll pass it off to the losers over in Austin who can do all their fancy live service stuff. But this just caused so many issues because the people at Edmonton did not know how to optimize a live service game. And that just led to some of the... One of the most brutal loading screens I have ever experienced in my entire life. Now, some of these were cleaned up. But, dude, do you remember just, like, how these things hit when we first started playing this game? Oh, dude. It was one of the worst. It was almost definitely the worst part. It's, like, the thing that we complained about right out of the gate in the first episode. It's just, like, why am I loading so much in this live service game? Like, it just doesn't make sense. And even now... On a PS5, like, I still find these loading times, like, unacceptable. Yeah. They are just too long. There's a lot less of them now. But the ones that are there are still, like, 15 to 20 seconds longer than you would expect a game on a PS5 to be loading. And it was so bad at first because, you know, we did the whole bit in the first episode. We were talking about how fucking awful it is to, like, equip a new item that you get in a looter shooter. Yeah. In order to shoot your loot, it is a pain in the ass. And this just feels like, you know, something you shouldn't overlook so easily. But it was, like, you would get the item on the ground, and you don't even know what it is. All you know is it's, like, it's rarity. Then you have to finish the mission, which is a loading screen. And then you have to, like, walk your slow first-person ass from the back of Fort Tarsis to the forge. And then open up the forge, which is a loading screen. And then you can equip the item. And then you leave the forge, which is a loading screen. And then you go into a mission, which is a loading screen. And then finally... Finally, you get to shoot the loot. And if you don't like it, that sucks. Because you're doing all of that all over again, right? Right. Because you cannot, at least at launch, change any of your equipment during the mission. Now, I'm going to give big praise to Bioware Austin. Because they get it when the game launches. And over the year of updates they're allowed to make, they really do clean up some fundamentally terrible decisions that were made by Bioware Edmonton. Right? They managed to get rid of those two load screens going in and out of the forge. Which just made playing the game, like, way less of a pain. They managed to make it to where you still can't look at the things you just looted in a mission. But you can go into the forge and change your gear in the middle of a mission. So if you did end up equipping something that you didn't like, you can swap it without having to restart the mission. Those changes on their own made, like, so many things feel so much better about this game. But it really was, like, a too little too late situation. And just the fact that it got to launch that way was insane. And on top of that, some of this stuff, they end up kind of improving the quality of the game. The quality of life of, by just putting it in menus instead of having to go to places in the fort. But now what that means is, dude, you press the options button, start button, it's a menu with six things across the top. You press the middle touchpad button, it is a different menu with six different things across the top. And I was all, it didn't matter what I was looking for, I always pressed the wrong one first. Like, every single time. Yeah, because there's no way to know. It's just like, unless you just memorize it, right? But, like, it's not, there's no, like, it doesn't feel like it's cohesive. Like, ah, yes, the touchpad does, like, this sort of thing. And it's like, no, I need both of them. Like, ugh. Dara gets into why some of this he thinks is the case. Now, some of this he has to speculate on because some of these decisions were made before he got there. But he's like, I can't remember the numbers, but I remember looking at the budgets and it was like, Andromeda spent, like, 20% of its technology budget on tools, right? It was like, Dragon Age would usually spend 25 to 30. He's like, Anthem spent five. He spent five. He spent five percent of its budget on tools, which basically meant they were doing way too many things from scratch that were wasting a lot of time and then turned out to not even be very good. And some of that, too, was also the fact that EA was kind of doing this top-down thing where, like, everything needs to use Frostbite now, our proprietary engine Frostbite. And there's logic to this, right? If everyone's using the same engine, people can work across different projects. People can help each other across different projects. You don't have to, like, go to third parties to troubleshoot things. But the problem is that, like… But Frostbite is a great engine for a game like Battlefield, right? And that's about it. Yeah. It's not a great engine for RPGs, you know? So much of the stuff that's going on in an RPG, you're kind of not seeing it. It's behind the scenes. But that math has to be done. Those calculations have to be done. The CPU has to be running it. And so the sort of, like, technology of Frostbite did not lend itself to loot systems and progression systems and all these things behind different loading screens and little caverns. And the ground, right? It was like, it's used to having 120 players in one map shooting each other with guns and helicopters. And that's it, right? There's nothing else but what you see there. And it just did not work for this game. And it seems like they basically tried to make it work. But the quote Dara uses is that Frostbite was full of razor blades. So, yikes. You know, and that's… We've seen that, I think, with Andromeda as well. I remember Schreier's article about Andromeda mentioned that, like, Frostbite was… It was a problem for Andromeda as well. Like, every time EA forced any studio to use Frostbite that it wasn't designed for, it became a massive pain in the ass. And this is something that, you know, BioWare and other studios at EA struggled with. And now we've seen them kind of go away from that. And, you know, they're using Unreal. They're using whatever. But at this time, like, that was a huge issue. And I want to give another shout out to BioWare Austin. Because… Yeah. A lot of this stuff they recognized early. And, you know, I remember one thing that Dara was talking about was the, like, in-game… Just the entire, like, currency and, like, the market and everything… Oh, yeah. Like, in-game loot was just, like, not there. It was not in a good place. And BioWare Austin keeps going, like, hey, guys, this is a problem. Like, we've built an MMO for 10 years now. Like, we know that this is an issue. And MMOs are like, ah, no, it's fine. And it's like, no. Like, listen to your MMO team. Like, what are you doing? And it was all just so un-user friendly. You know, they have this crafting system that, like, at the end of the day, it's just if you want to be able to craft better things, use that thing more often. But it's really unclear that that's the case. Because the game says is, like, if you want, like, in order to craft better gear, complete challenges. And that's, like, that's basically what it tells you. And you're like, okay, well, what are those even? But you go into the challenge menu, which is buried under either start or the middle pad button. And then you go through seven more submenus. And it turns out, dude, all the challenges are just to kill things with the weapons. It's like, okay, why didn't you just say that? And so it's just, like, really convoluted. Once you understand that, I mean, it works fine. It's, like, pretty straightforward. It's just they do everything they can to make it confusing as possible. So I mentioned in the intro that one of the big pitches about the next BioWare is that you are going to be aware. You're going to be able to experience a classic BioWare story in this live service game. Oh, my God. So let's get into the story a little bit. And I noticed, I'm looking at the notes here. I realize I don't even have anything about the plot itself because it's just not interesting. And I almost just don't even care to discuss it. Like, I would say the, like, 30-second Adam summary is, like, the freelancers are a group of people who use these javelin things to defend civilization from both, like, an evil empire and wild beasts. And there's... There's these little cataclysmic events that happen that they have to go shut down. They fail horribly. Two years passes. Now the freelancers are just a joke. And you're, like, a rogue freelancer that's trying to build his reputation back up and do some missions. And you end up getting reunited with some of your teammates from the first failure cataclysmic event. And then there's a big bad guy who's, like, trying to get to the same cataclysmic event in order to take over it. Because apparently once you get there, it's just, like... I don't know. A Mass Effect 3 option. Red, blue. Destroy or not. To control or destroy. And so, dude. And eventually one of your guys betrays you. But then he unbetrays you. And you get to the end. And you kill the big bad. And you stop the cataclysm that you failed to stop two years ago. There's almost nothing else going on here story-wise. Yes, there's a couple of cool characters with a few cool conversations. There's a few cool backstories with some of them. There's a character called Dax who's, like, the long-lost noble daughter of, like, a fiefdom. Like, miles away. And I'm like, okay. They clearly had some ideas to expand the universe. But it never really goes anywhere. And the actual plot, like, the end campaign leaves off on a huge cliffhanger that nothing is ever done with. Because this game never gets a story update. It's just... Yeah. Sorry. A little more than 30 seconds. But trust me when I say you're missing nothing by having not experienced this game's story. Just nothing. I think, for me, what makes a BioWare story so compelling... Right? The things that... I get... I go for in a BioWare story is your companions, your party, the crew that you're traveling with. Like, that is always the core to me for a BioWare story. I mean, Mass Effect, KOTOR, even, like, Jade Empire makes an emphasis on the crew that you're with. And, like, talking to them and getting to know them and forming these bonds and relationships. And Anthem's, like, idea behind that, I guess, is to let you do that. With your friends, right? Like, your friends are now your party members. But the reality is that just doesn't work. Multiplayer stories don't work. Like, it's so... To make a deep, elaborate, like, complex world and all these, like, different characters... And the game wants you to listen to their, like, comm chatter. And it wants you to listen to all of these, like, people talking at you. But you're trying to talk to your friends. And it's like... I don't care about what you're saying because I'm talking to my friends about, like, what I ate for dinner last night. Because that's just what happens. Like, that's just... That's how every game has ever gone. Which is why most multiplayer games don't have a crazy emphasis on story. Especially when they're designed like this. BioWare Austin even brought this up to them. Like, hey, constant comm chatter in your ear when you're talking to your friends. Like, it's not gonna work. And they were literally just ignored. Yeah, it's... It's insane because, for me, the core of what BioWare does so well is having the BioWare companions. And you just can't do that whenever your companions are supposed to be your friends. Like, you already know everything about them. They're your friends. Like, it just doesn't work. The idea doesn't work for me. And I think that's why, like, I don't care about the game story. Because I never paid attention to it. Because I was talking to my friends. And the game isn't nearly as fun to play. You can't play it by yourself, so... Right. I'm not gonna play it by myself either to give the story because it's not fun. So it just... Again, it's the identity crisis problem. Yeah. And the multiplayer aspect truly screws up so much of the story. And not just from the standpoint of, like, it not being told well. But he... Dara talks about this idea that they were calling internally as the shitty mentor. Ideally, if someone has played a piece of content you've already played and you're playing it with them, that should be a boon. Like, they should be able to, like, give you some hints. Give you some tips. Help guide you through it. Instead, it just becomes, like, if you haven't experienced this mission yet, you probably want to see the story. If they have, they don't. They're there for the loot. They're there for the XP, whatever it is. And anyone in your party could trigger the next story beat if they went far enough in the level. So he's like, you ended up with this shitty mentor effect where you would go into a game and you'd get matched with someone that already played the mission. And they're killing everything faster than you because they've already played it to their higher level. They're skipping through all the story beats because they're just breezing through the little trigger points. And it's just totally ruining your experience. He's like, so instead of it actually being, like, this mentor-mentee relationship, it's the shitty mentor relationship where they make everything worse despite having already been through it. And it's just another thing where it's like, when you do get to the cutscenes and then you have the option to skip them, but people are trying to watch, you're just sitting there waiting for someone to skip the cutscene because you've already seen it. So you're having to rewatch. You have to rewatch these, like, unskippable cutscenes over and over again until everybody chooses to skip them. And that's annoying. So it's like, there's no good way to deliver both of these things. And it makes for a bad story experience, even when it's told well, which I personally find it's not told well often. It's not. And then, you know, maybe some of this could be saved if when you went into Fort Tarsis, if anything was good. But specifically, there's various characters. You're walking around the fort, and some of them have, like, some interesting things they're trying to talk to you about. Remember, there's this one old woman who's convinced you're, like, her long-lost son or daughter. Like, you talk to her in between a mission. It, like, furthers the little story a little bit. And eventually, she, like, unlocks some cosmetic if you talk to her enough. But classic conversation options from past Bioware games are just not there. And I'm not—definitely nothing like the KOTOR or Baldur's Gate where you have five or six options you can pick. But not even the tone wheel of Mass Effect, right? The joke that I'm— The joke that I made in the old episode is that you have left yes and right yes because that's basically what it fucking is. It's two options that every time might change the very next line, and that's it. I'm not even convinced it always changes the very next line. I think sometimes your line just makes sense regardless of which one you picked, right? It's so bad. There was literally even a particular conversation—I can't remember if I sent you a screenshot of this—where the choices were no and nope. Like, literally left no and right no. I was losing my mind. It's just so sad, man. And it's—it makes you, like, stop and think, like, did no one think, maybe let's just remove the option of choice altogether. Yeah. But again, it's, like, the lack of decision-making and the kind of internal battles that the development staff was having. Like, they probably just, like, whatever. A conversation system is fine. It's stupid, but, like, it's not hurting anything. Let's actually make a mission. Like, it's—they just didn't have time, and no one can make a decision. And this feels like a thing that early on you go, eh, maybe we're not going to do this because conversation system doesn't make sense in the context of this game. Exactly. And it's like you said, it's the constant identity crisis. It's—despite the fact that the game they're making is not a traditional Bioware game, in the back of their heads, they're just convincing themselves over and over that it is. Therefore, we have to have conversation choices. But all of these conversations— All of these conversations would have been so much better if you just wrote one line through that was actually interesting conversation coming out of your character, too, instead of it mostly being the other person talking, you saying one variation of no or yes, and then them continuing to talk. Like, it's just not good. And in regards to all of this, Schreier had mentioned in his article that David Gator, who was a writer early in the project that eventually left over creative differences and, like, gee, I wonder why, he was trying to push them toward more traditional storytelling. But he just kept facing this resistance where they were like, well, we don't want to be sci-fi Dragon Age, and we want it to be different. But they never really defined what different is. That's something Dara mentions, is he's like, everyone knew what this game wasn't. No one could tell you what it was. And that became a huge problem, like, philosophically, story-wise, design-wise. I mean, just it reared its head constantly. When you look at something like Mass Effect, you have the codex, and it builds out, like, all of the world. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And you can dig deep into the lore if you want to dig through all the codex stuff. And that's really cool, but you don't need it. Like, so much of the story is given to you through, like, context clues in the world and through character dialogue and just, like, engaging in the story in a natural way. And, you know, single-player game, it makes sense. But this game has its own version of the codex. It's called the Cortex. It's very, you know, super inventive from Bioware on that one. Yeah. Sci-fi. Dragon Age, bro. Exactly. Also, like, the idea of calling it Sci-fi Dragon Age whenever you already have Mass Effect. Like, why not just say, we don't want to create Mass Effect again? Like, anyway, the idea of, like, burying all your story in a multiplayer game and a bunch of, like, you know, side notes that you have to go dig in and read is just insane. I'm sorry. I'm not going to go and read your Cortex. While I'm flying around missions with my friends. That's insane. And it was often never in a timely manner. Like, we talked about before, in Mass Effect, the first time you met an Asari, you got a codex entry on Asari. So, like, if you were more curious about the thing you just experienced, you could read some more detail. Dude, I'm, like, max level. I'm walking around the fort. And I go to a corner I haven't really explored. And I see an item and I pick it up. And it's the Cortex entry to the ranger suit. The first thing I ever fucking picked up. And I was like, what? Why? Why would I not just get this when I unlocked the suit? And that was my problem with this one is, like, all of these things were just scattered so randomly. And then there was, like, these kind of, you know, they're trying to flesh out some of the lore. So, you'd have these diary entries of different factions. But a lot of times it would just be, like, underwater where there's nothing down there but that. There's maybe a couple of entries you get during the campaign missions where it makes sense. Like, the Anthem of Creation, yada, yada, yada. But I would say 90% of them are just, did you stumble across it? And did you stumble across it at a time where it might have made any sense? And that's just not, like, an exciting collectible because the story doesn't invite you into, like, at least for me, right? The story never invited me into wanting to know more about it. So, it wasn't like when I found them, I was like, oh, yes, a Cortex entry. Let me read all about this because I didn't care. So, it's like, not only am I not getting it in a timely manner, not only do I have to hunt it down, but even once I find it, I'm like, well, I don't even care about it now. Like, the story isn't engaging me in any way. Like, why am I? Why am I going to hunt these down at all? Do you remember last time we were playing, you were suddenly just like, why the hell would this pop up in the middle of combat? It's terrible. Because, you know, they do the little thing that's like, oh, hold options or whatever to get the thing. But it's like, when Mass Effect would do this, it's because you got it from, like, exploring something or a conversation. And so, you're not in imminent danger. Right. This one's like, you want to read about our universe during combat in a game you can't pause? Like, so dumb. Right. It's like, I can't collect this without it popping open. And then, I don't want to, like, I don't want to read it in the middle of combat. Yeah, it's terrible. Terrible design decisions on a lot of this stuff. And they have, like, some cinematics in the game. And they're, I mean, they're well done enough. Like, there's nothing necessarily wrong with them. But some of them literally don't make any sense because they cut certain, like, missions and plot points. Some of them just, like, there's this one dude where you're flying with that Dax chick I talked about earlier. And you're both in a suit. And she's literally in the game with you. And you're flying to this location. And you get in there. And you enter it. And then a cutscene starts. Neither of you are in your suit anymore. And this bad guy comes out in a suit. And you have to, like, flee from him even though he has the thing you want because you can't fight him because you're not in your suit. But it's like, brother, why the fuck did we get out of them? Like, we were just in them. There's no reason to. And then the guy that comes in and saves you is chastising you about, like, you want to be like Dax and lose your suit too? You're like, what are you talking about? What are you talking about? So it's very clear they cut some stuff. And they just never really made it make sense. But the way they tell the story, you know, you have the weird first-person conversations. You have the cutscenes. You have the comms chatter while you're talking to your friends. None of it feels like it's even from the same game. It never really feels good together. And it's just, like, the incongruency between most of the gameplay and then the hub and then the cutscenes. I mean, it just feels like you're playing three different games. None of them are good. None of them feel like they fit. It's just a disaster, man. There's a lot of things to talk about in this game being a disaster. But I truly think the failure to land a halfway decent, compelling story is just one of the worst. One of the big things Dara talked about was expectations of, like, giving the audience a certain expectation. And I think they really struggled with that throughout due to their own internal identity crisis, obviously. But also the projection of how they wanted to describe the game, right? Like, this is not... This is not... This is not your old Bioware. It's new Bioware. But we're still trying to give you a Bioware story. But this game, you know, has, like, better combat and, you know, is a live service. And, like, they could never figure out how to deliver the messaging of this game. And it shows in the story that they could never figure out internally either, obviously. But I think a lot of people were put off by the way they talked about it not being traditional Bioware. And the people like us that did come into it... That kind of still hoping to see some of that Bioware story that, you know, they're known for. Just... It never delivers. And it's short. It's... Oh, it's so short. Yeah, like, we... So, it's so funny because we played the game. And I remember listening to the original episode. And towards the end, we're like, yeah, we may come back and finish this story. And we never did until six years later, whenever we go. And there was, like, two missions. And we were like, what? But part of that is because... So, because it was so short, they put in two just totally lazy time-gating things. One was, like, there was these four tombs of legendary freelancers. And they all had challenges you had to do. Or a trial. And when we were first doing it, it was like, you know, go 10 melee, 100 headshot kills, whatever. And I was thinking, okay, we're going to do this checklist. It's going to open up the tomb. And then there's going to be some, like, cool fighter encounter. No, nope. Just the checklist. Just four checklists. And the... In the middle of the damn story, to halt all sense of, like, momentum that you felt that the story was possibly carrying or the game was possibly carrying is just dead in its tracks. And then toward the end, and this is the thing that we only got through a few weeks ago, like, the second time we came to it. Like, you have to craft this thing called the Shield of Dawn in order to get back into the area from the start of the story so you can shut down the cataclysm. And it requires, like, this material that can only be found by Titans, which is this big enemy in the game. And the only way to guarantee... The only way to guarantee that is to go play a story mission with Titans. But, like, you're already past that at that point. So all you can do is go into free play, fly around, and hope you run into one, which was just more artificial time-gating, right? So this game's story is already, as it stands, like, barely 10 hours. And that's with those two time-gating things. Without it, this is a six-hour game. And that's just crazy for Bioware, man. That is, like... Even if the story didn't end up being great, if it was in that 30-hour range where you at least have a... A chance to maybe get to know some of these characters, have a chance to, you know, be compelled by some of the politics or the lore, you never even get that chance. Because not only is there not much great stuff there, it's over before you know it. I don't want to continually rag on Anthem, like, super hard, because there are some good things in here. But I will say the story, at least to me, is not one of them in any way, shape, or form. Like, nothing about this game's story compelled me in any way, shape, or form. Coming back and playing it recently, like... Like, who are these characters? None of them mattered to me when I played it. They didn't matter to me coming back to it. Like, I just... And I know there's probably some defenders of the story out there. I can't imagine there's too many. But I'm sure there's some. And if it worked for you, great. And I'm happy for you. But to me, it's just, like... Nothing about this game compelled me to engage in its world. And, like, that's just such a shame coming from the team that made Mass Effect and Dragon Age and KOTOR and, you know... Even, like, Jade Empire has a lot of depth and lore and stuff in it. And it's, like... Nothing in this game made me care about it at all. Whereas, like, Mass Effect, within... Within, you know, five hours of that game... Which is, I mean, to be fair, the entire length of Anthem's campaign. But... Within five hours of Mass Effect, I'm just so completely engrossed and sucked in. Like, as soon as you land on the Citadel, it's like... I want to know everything about this universe. And Anthem is... It's just the complete opposite. It's like, I can care less about anything that you're telling me. And that's just such a shame for a Bioware game to me. Well, Mass Effect is just so brilliant at exploring all of the things about its universe through its characters and through the plot that you're going through. There is really a lot to Anthem. It's just all hidden in the codex. And... Or it's just not there at all. Like I was saying, the cliffhanger ending basically references the fact that, like... Humanity has been living on top of, like... Sort of the ruins of an ancient race. Not necessarily using its technology and stuff, like Mass Effect style. But, like, something was here before us. And we've never seen it. And that's something that you find on the... Like, a scout comes back from the edge of the known territory that's like, look at this creature. And someone's like, God, I don't... You know, humanity hasn't seen one of these for 10,000 years. We thought they were all extinct, yada, yada. So it's like, they're setting some stuff up. You know, I talked about the noble house that Dax is a part of. It's like, they had some ideas here. But they do just such a miserable job. Of exploring any of that through meaningful encounters and meaningful conversations. Because there are no companion conversations. And meaningful missions. Because there are no meaningful missions. And it just sucks. Like, you know, one of the things Mass Effect's great about is, like... You kind of learn about the Turians. And then you get Garrus. Who in the first game doesn't really act the same, like, by-the-book, hyper-militaristic way that a lot of Turians do. He's more of kind of, like, a rogue cop that wants to go after this Hartman guy. And same with Liara. She isn't as, like... Sort of... Sort of composed as a lot of the Asari you run into, right? She's really kind of scattered brain and nervous. You meet people of that race. You experience their culture. And then you get a companion that kind of undermines it. And you see the contrast. And it's just... It's all so well laid out. This game... I mean, it's only humans. So they can't... They couldn't fall back on any of that, right? They don't really introduce anyone from any other factions to you. Because it's only, like, the main faction, off-screen factions, and bad guy factions. So there's just... They just didn't give themselves... They didn't give themselves the opportunity to explain a lot of the lore and the universe and the atmosphere and whatnot to you the way they did it in Dragon Age and Jade Empire and Mass Effect. And so it just doesn't happen. And so you just never care. And if this were a looter shooter, right? If this were advertised as a looter shooter. If this was in... You know, if this were trying to emulate a looter shooter style, that might be okay. But with the emphasis on story and how they try... And, you know, put the story in your face, when it falls so flat, it just gets even more frustrating. Because it's like, I just don't care. Bottom line, story is not good. The way it's presented is not good. I'm sure we'll talk a little more about it as we continue to go through this episode. But I do want to move on to just some of the, like, game-as-a-service and kind of in-game content issues this game faced. Because, you know, as we mentioned, Edmonton had no experience doing this. And their idea is that they were just going to be able to pass off to a single-player game to Austin. And Austin will handle the live service stuff, right? I mean, the way Dara and Shire both described this made it seem like there were, like, senior employees and leadership at Edmonton that truly felt giving a shit about what the game is going to be after it launched was, like, beneath them. Which was just a crazy thing to think when the game is being built as a game that you were supposed to play forever. Right. It's absurd. It would be like... It would be like, like, at least with Destiny, and it had its problems, but, like, at least there was a roadmap and it felt like there was a plan. And, like, Bungie cared about the live service elements of Destiny. Yeah. Because that's the core of the game. That's what it's all about. Like, it's, you know, Dara talks about that no one ever has enough in-game content in their game. Like, there's never enough because people will just blow through it too quickly. Right. But not only was there not enough, like, there just isn't any variety in this game. Like, there's just none. Like, there's, like, four mission types, and they're all pretty boring. Defend the point, collect the thing, and bring it to the point, and then defend the point. Collect the thing without defending the point. Yeah, I think that's it. I think that's just the only three types of things. Kill the guy. Kill the guy on the point, maybe. Kill the guy on the point. There you go. There you go. Bam. Four. Like, the... So, going through the Dara files, right, one of the things that stuck out to me the most, and the thing that, like, I really clung on to with kind of this section, was the idea that only one mission existed for, like, a majority of this game. Like, there was the Den of Wolves mission, which is, I believe, a pretty early game, an early mission in the game that remained in the game. It got changed a little bit. But throughout the time that BioWare Edmonton was working on this mission, they just continued to tear down the mission and rebuild it over and over again to, like, make it the best it could be. Because of this, they didn't realize until way too late in the game that they didn't have any sort of mission types. Like, they had no other content because they just spent one time, like, all their time building one mission out. And Dara was like, this is so antithetical to the way I would have led this. And as I joined, I was like, we need to get better at this. We need to get better at mission design by making more missions, not just reiterating this one mission. And he continued to kind of preach that idea, but it was just too late by the time he got there. And I thought that was fascinating. Absolutely. You know, and he mentions that, like, even while he was there, he was like, it took him a few months to realize, like, oh my God, they're just blowing it up and rebuilding it every time. Like, what are we doing? Like, we've had this conversation six times and you guys keep doing it. Yeah. And, like, he was like, you get better at something by doing it. So the more you do it, the better you get. And that doesn't mean that you can't eventually go back and address those missions, change those missions, improve those missions. But it just means that you have to make more of them. Like, you have to have more in the pipeline than the one mission you've spent four years burning down and building back up over and over and over. 100%. And it was one of the most fascinating parts of the discussion to me because it really shows, like, how game missions, like, how they get created. And this was not it. Like, this was not the move. Yeah. Another interesting thing he mentions is he was talking about game demos. You know, so game demos used to be a big thing in, like, the 90s, early 2000s. Kind of in the late 2000s and all the 2010s, companies kind of stopped making demos. And I think a large part of that was it just felt like it was high risk, low reward. Because it was, like, the idea that someone that wasn't going to play your game would seek out the demo and then decide to buy it was actually pretty low compared to just... Someone being excited about your game, playing the demo, and then deciding they weren't excited about it anymore. But he said he actually likes demos because even if it ends up being, like, a build of the game that isn't final, even if it ends up being a bunch of, quote-unquote, wasted time, it forces decisions to be made. And even if they end up being decisions you want to reverse later, it's, like, the phrase he uses is, like, it involves some simulacrum of completion to actually exist and to actually be there. Yeah. That is a huge step. Even if you just use it as a launching point, even if that demo ultimately gets completely changed and never sees the light of day, just having something down like that is a great first step to getting things done. And he's like, I wish we had been forced to make a demo for this game or that the, you know, the Anthem team before I joined had been forced to make a demo because that would have given them a much better starting point, especially when their leadership's telling them, no, no, no, you're not Destiny. No, no, no, you're not Borderlands. These poor bastards had no idea where to start half the time because there's just no decisions being made. They're not allowed. They're not allowed to make comparisons to other successful games. And it's just, no, we're Anthem, Anthem, Anthem. It's ridiculous. Right. It's literally shouting into an echo chamber of, like, Anthem. And it's like, okay, what is Anthem? And it's like, I don't know, it's Anthem. It's like, that is it. It's the next Bioware. It's a new Bioware. Right, right. And that just isn't helpful in designing a video game, clearly. Dude, this next point I'm going to let you talk about a little bit because we've been joking about it so much. But I literally laughed out loud when, I got to this part of the DARA file. I was like, thank God I had just put my coffee down because it would have been all over my keyboard. Just the complete absurdity of this whole three dopamine hits idea. Yeah, so DARA at one point in this video talks about how their loot and progression model, they wanted to kind of go for a three dopamine hits model, right? So you see the type of loot, you see the rarity of the loot, and then you can take it back to Tarsus and you see the actual item. And so these, there's supposed to be three separate hits. You see the loot and bam, dopamine. You see the rarity, bam, dopamine. Then you see the item and you're like, wow. Boom, purple diamond, boom. Right, and now you see the item and you're like, the ultimate dopamine. But what this clearly does to anybody with a brain is, no offense, DARA, but what this does to anybody who can think is you just don't have enough information with the first two. Like it just, it doesn't give you any dopamine hit because like, like you said, purple diamond, okay, cool. What is that diamond? What is, what am I getting excited about? You can't know until you get back to Tarsus and you can't see it in the mission. So you have to wait until the mission's over to see it. It's crazy, dude. And the worst part is it's like, okay, if I, if I was gonna go at this three dopamine hits idea with the first one, okay, let's have a different symbol for gear, a different symbol for guns, a different symbol for components. No, they're all a diamond. You can't tell what it is. You literally can only tell that it's an item, but I didn't need to be told that. I picked it up off the ground. I know it's an item. Then you see the rarity, which is, I mean, a little more exciting. Cause it's like, oh, I just got a purple or an orange. Like I haven't gotten one of those before. That's, that's kind of exciting. But then you still don't know if you're actually gonna be able to use it because it might be like a purple auto cannon and you're the storm. So that doesn't help. And you don't unlock your Colossus for other, you know, 10 levels. So it's really not until you get out of the mission back into the fort and then walk all the way to the forge and then sit through a loading screen that you finally get to see what this item was. And by that point, even if it's good, you're so over the mechanics of this fucking game and the load screens and everything else, there's nothing to get excited about. And half the time, until you got to the higher levels anyway, it wasn't exciting. It was like a few percent more damage. Cool. A few percent, like the higher rarity start to get more passive effects, but it's really not until the last couple levels of rarities that you actually get really interesting passive effects on these guns. So it ends up just being like, I don't have the information to theory craft anything. I can't think of any cool builds I want to make until I get back, go through all that bullshit to finally find out what the item is. And then it's an auto cannon from my store. So I, there was no, like not only was there not three dopamine hits, there wasn't even one. Yeah. And you're now sitting on this thing, waiting to get excited about it. And then when you get there, you have a decently high chance, like you said, of not being excited about it. So it's, it's just like, you can't think about what your builds can be. You can't do any of that stuff until you get back to Tarsus. And by that point, you're just, you're, you're pretty sick of it, in my opinion. Yeah. And, and all of this is made worse by the fact that you kind of mentioned earlier, we're late in development, Bioware Austin's like, Hey, so have you guys tested like the economy at all, the end game parts of this? And it's, again, it's just one of those things that being a single player RPG studio, Edmonton just like thought they were above, didn't think it was important. And it's crazy. Cause it's like, no, actually, this is so fundamentally important to the end game because you have to make sure people are collecting things at a rate slow enough to not burn through all the content, but fast enough to be exciting and want to keep going. And, you know, you find out that in quarter three of 2018, this is four months before the game is coming out. No one has tested any of this. And then Bioware Austin is like, all right, we need to figure out a way to do this. What have you guys done? And they're like, oh, well, we've been having a bunch of people rotate through the same single save file 24 seven. Just trying to basically like speed run the game. And they're like, what, what? Like, this isn't going to help you. Especially if it's like, you're, you know, you're just playing through the game in order. So you're not like repeating any part of the game to make sure certain things work. You're not able to get a feel for drop rates on any particular part of the game. Dara says that he really wanted a beta test, but there was basically just no time because the game wasn't even in the state to where a beta test was possible until like way too late. Right, right. Like a beta test couldn't have happened until like two weeks before. Before it launched. And that wouldn't have done a lot of good by that point. So, so going off the whole economy thing, you have this whole idea of like, all right, it's a live service. There has to be monetization somehow. And you need to have some sort of social hub, right? Because if, if our thing is to sell you cosmetics to look cool, other people need to see your cosmetics. Well, dude, half the game takes place in the single player instance of Fort Tarsis where you're in first person. So you can't even see your own damn suit. So they ended up coming up with something called the launch bay, which was something that you were going to be able to, instead of going back to the fort after a mission, you could go to the launch bay and it would match you up with three random people. And you would kind of run around this little area with other people. You could show off your suit and then you could join the party and do missions with them or just go back to the fort. They said that they did not start working on this until October of 2018. Was that February? So four months. Yeah, four months before the game released. And he says like, I've been in a lot of game developments. I've done a lot of these late additions. It's like, this is the most miraculous one. I've ever seen because there was nothing. And that's, that's just insane. Considering again, this is a live surface game and you know, I don't want to keep reusing the words identity crisis, but I will because you should, because that's what it is. Right? I mean, BioWare wanted to make a single player game that you could play with your friends, but also wanted it to be a live service game, but didn't think about any of the things that made a live service game, a live service game, like not having any social hub at all until four months before launch is crazy. Because even in like, even in like missions, it's only the four people that you're teamed up with. So if you're only playing it with friends, you're only seeing your, your three friends' stuff. And in like free play, other people are flying around, but like not many. Yeah. It's only ever three other people. I, you know, as I'm playing some of the late game content, there's, there was this cool seasonal thing you could queue up for where it was like, you had to disable certain things around the map and people would have to like activate something while someone went and did something else. So it really encouraged teamwork, but brother, I never really got to play it because I couldn't find a match with other people in it. It was like, everyone was just trying to play the story because the game is about to die or they were just grinding loot on like lower or on normal missions and stuff. Right? So I kept queuing up on every difficulty level for the seasonal thing, just to try to get one other person to play it with. And I couldn't, but yeah, it's such, such an identity crisis, like you said, nothing. They, it's the ultimate story of like Bioware wanted to eat its cake and have it too. They wanted all the benefits of a single player game with an Epic story and an audience that appreciated those while still be able to make a billion dollars selling you pink suits. And you just can't have both of those. Like you can maybe have some elements of both of those, but you can't have the entirety of both of those. And it feels like that's what they were trying to do. And they just basically ended up with a terrible version of each instead of a decent version of one. I, yeah, I think you nailed it. We want to tell you the Bioware story, but we don't even know how to make this game function as a live service. Like the only thing we really care about telling you the, the, the Bioware story without actually thinking about how we're going to monetize this or how people are going to come to enjoy it or what content we're going to keep giving you or any of that stuff. And that's kind of the lesson I think here that, that Dara talks about a lot too, is just like, it felt like Edmonton didn't know how to make a live service game and they didn't even really try. It's, it's funny you kind of mentioned that, right? Cause I'm listening to some of Dara's other videos. I think it's Dara. I keep saying Dara. Mr. Mark, I'm listening to, to Mr. Mark's other videos. And he was talking about how, so the first iteration of Dragon Age 4, like the thing that would eventually become Veilguard after it fundamentally changed twice, he's working, he's heading that up in like the middle of Anthem's development. And EA is basically like, we need this to be a live service game. And he, and instead of him like making some fucking abomination, he says, we literally can't do that. We will have to start over. Do you want us to start over? And EA says, yes. And he says, fine, we'll start over. Right? I kind of feel like Anthem from the beginning, they were like, we can do that. We can make our single player game a live service. Dara was smart enough to be like, we can't do that. We need to fundamentally recreate this from the ground up, which really sucked because when he left to go be on Anthem, it got changed again to no longer be a live service because Anthem flopped. And that third version is eventually what we got, Veilguard, right? But, but anyway, it's, it's just such a crazy thing that they, they thought they were going to be able to do both of these at once. And I, I just can't get over it. So Dara talks about the server costs and, you know, they kept going back and forth because if this game were ever to make a decision, we wouldn't be where we were. So they were constantly going back and forth between, should this be sort of a peer to peer type set up or a client server set up? And eventually they decide on, you know, like, you know, like, we're going to make a decision on, on a client server, but there was someone inside of, of Bioware or EA that was basically really concerned about like, okay, if we're, you know, if we're say we're spinning up a Amazon web service server, every time someone starts a game, if, if we expect to have this many games, all of them do it at once, like we're going to bankrupt like the budget basically, like it's, it's way too much. And so they're panicking about this and Dara ends up making this decision that he flat out in the video says was a terrible one. And he wished he hadn't made, but when you go to start a game and it's set to private, it basically, he asked you like, are you sure you want it to be private? Except it, it kind of asked it backwards. It's more of like, don't you wish you would just wait around for someone to join your game instead? And so the, the way he describes it is like, did we by doing that prevent some amount of servers from being spun up, spun up, like probably a small amount. He's like, but did we annoy the hell out of everyone who went to play the game? Yeah, definitely. Like we definitely did that. So it was, it just ended up being a terrible decision. And the way he talks about it is like, you do not need to plan for the worst case scenario. There was literally never a possibility where every single person who was playing this game was going to, at the same time, start a game by themselves. It wasn't going to happen. Right. And that's what we planned for it. And it was stupid. And, and it did, it did have some benefit to doing that model because it allowed the, the Austin team and their efforts to kind of improve the game early on. They were able to push updates a lot quicker because not every person had to update the game. Like they just updated it through the client server model. And so when you booted it up, it was like, bam, the, the updates are there. So it was able to push through a lot of, a lot of important updates, a lot quicker than if it were peer to peer, it would have been a lot more difficult to get a lot of those updates out, which, which ended up probably helping out early on, but also it's possibly why, you know, the game's in a state now where it's like, we cannot afford to keep this game going. Yeah. I, I do think it was probably the right choice because good God, if this was already like loading screens, the game half the time, every time I went to play it, there was also an update. Oh, I just, you know, I think, I think that would have been even worse for the game. So it probably was the right choice at the end of the day. So speaking of Bioware Austin though, and all these improvements Anthem Next, which we kind of mentioned earlier, it was really supposed to be this big like no man's sky level project, right? Cyberpunk level project. Like, Hey, we know this launched in a sorry state. We're going to fix that. We're going to put all of our resources into fixing that. It just doesn't really happen. And part of that is because with the way EA and Bioware functioning is Anthem has shipped. That means everyone who's working on Anthem is now going to be brought over to Dragon Age because Dragon Age has been waiting for years. Oh my God, can we get the attention we need to make this damn game? And so, but that's, but that's not how live services work, especially if they're successful, right? Like one of the things I thought was really interesting that Dara talks about is he's like, look at Epic. With Fortnite and look at Riot with League of Legends. It took those guys a decade to get around to releasing something else because it is no longer a problem when your live service is hyper successful. It's not, do we have enough people? It's how many people do we have? Because you never have enough people in every single resource you possibly have. Every developer, every person, every piece of budget has to go to the live service because it's bringing in too much money to justify really spending money on anything else. And it just requires constant maintenance. Constant content updates because gamers are, you know, constantly churning through the content. You have to have balance stuff all the time because gamers are constantly complaining about the state of the balance. Like, like you have to be working full force on live service all the time. So it's like, it's almost a good thing that Anthem wasn't successful because that might've meant that we literally never saw anything from Bioware ever again. Now, in retrospect, that was fine. I was about to say, we basically, we basically live in that reality as it is. Yeah. But. Yeah. But yeah, I thought that was extremely interesting. Cause he's like, yeah. I mean, how long did it take Riot to put out anything else? And even then they made a couple games and then said, we're not doing that anymore. And it took them a few more years to come out with a 2x KO. Cause like after they released a couple of random games in the universe that didn't sell super well, they were like, why weren't those people just, you know, working on League of Legends? Right. Right. And, and that makes sense. And it's, it is kind of interesting that Bioware in general, right. And obviously EA at this time was like, everything needs to be a live service. We need to swim in money for the rest of time and like money, money, money. And I mean, it's not that they aren't still like that to a degree, but at this time it was definitely a very heavy emphasis on like everything needs to be a game that you can play for the rest of time. It is interesting to look back and say like, well, even if it had worked out, would it have been able to be supported? Like Edmonton didn't know how to make a live service game. Right. Bioware, Austin. Austin clearly didn't have the people that it needed because they're the ones who tried to turn it around in the first place and they didn't have enough staff because they're busy working on the Old Republic and maybe they could have pulled Montreal to it. But like Montreal is in disarray because Andromeda sucked. Like it's even if, even if Anthem had worked out, would it have succeeded as a live service? Like, like even if the launch had worked out. Yeah. It, you know, it may have gotten a much better start as far as like box units sold and everything else, but you're right. You'd have gotten to the point where like the player base was going to blow through the content. There was not going to be enough coming out of the pipeline. And a lot of those people who really are playing your game for like four years, because you never stopped giving them, you know, dopamine hits and new content, they don't have any of that. So they're going to fall off your game and go play Destiny or go play something else. So yeah, I don't think, I don't think this game was in the position to succeed even had it succeeded, if you know what I mean. Right. And it's, it's interesting. Cause you're right. About Riot and Epic, but another one is Bungie with Destiny. Like Bungie, Bungie hasn't put out a single thing that isn't Destiny expansions since Destiny and, and those expansions have been good by and large, from what I understand Destiny is not really my cup of tea, but like the people who've played those expansions have said they're really good expansions and it's really good content, but it's all been Destiny all the time. You know, it is possible to put out something else, but I don't think BioWare was in a position to do that. And, and Anthem Next, I think shows that because it's like, well, we thought about it, we tried, but we just, we, we don't have the staff. We don't have the people. Yeah. And so ultimately, you know, a year after the game comes out, they're just like Anthem Next, canceled. Yeah. I mean, I'm really shocked they kept the servers on as long, as long as they did. And I have to assume it's because like enough people were still buying the cosmetics to justify the server costs. I mean, cause at that point, probably the only people still playing it are people who would spend money on the cosmetics. Right. That, that would, yeah, that would track. But eventually they got tired of it too. And, and I think Dara in his video, Dara, Dara, whatever, uh, hadn't, hadn't Mr. Mark, he had an interesting, um, plan about keeping Anthem alive potentially that he kind of wraps up with his video list. And it's, it's neat. Cause he says like, take a $10 million. Budget, which is relatively small on the grants. I mean, 10 millions, I think what Claire obscure costs and everybody's like, how did they do that for only 10 million? So relatively small of the grand scheme of video game budgets. And he says like, switch over to P2P servers. You'll cut, it'll cut down your server costs and, and do the thing that I think people know Bioware for, and that is add in some AI companions and, and make this basically a, a single player experience. That you can, you can choose to do with your friends, but if you want to play at single player and you want to kind of get that traditional Bioware feeling, you can have companions with you that give you more of the background, more of the lore, more of the, the world, and kind of do what you were saying that Mass Effect does right. Give you characters that you can interact with that helps expand the world and, and makes the world feel more fleshed out and more interesting. And that's an interesting idea. They would never do it. But it's an interesting idea. I really liked what he was saying about that. Cause he was talking about, he's like, you know, there's maybe a couple characters in this game. You could turn into companion characters. The first that come to mind are the Dax character I mentioned earlier. Like they do a little bit of a backstory set up for her. It's a pretty good voice performance. She's like a kind of a funny character, like a good personality. So like she could have been one. There's the Owen guy that betrays you that I think could have been interesting because you know, they could have had you had them leave your party at some point and then maybe come back if you made the right choices or whatever. Yeah. But ultimately like they would have to come up with probably three to four more characters. Cause he was saying one dangerous thing with, with systems like this is like, you don't want to make enough characters to where the person has no choice because no one is ever going to like every character you make and you have to give people options. Right. Yeah. Not only that, but that allows you to create more extreme characters. Right. So you can have someone that maybe some people might find extremely annoying because it's something that kind of only appeals to a particular type of person, but that's okay. Cause you have six to pick from and you only need three. Right. So he was like the most important thing you would do here is you would spend most of your budget coming up with AI that could be in combat with you. But then a lot of it would really be like getting some good writers in there and some voice actors to just make like five or six companions that are fun and you actually care about. Cause this game just doesn't have that at all. And that's like, you've been saying this whole time. That's Bioware. Bioware without companions is like, what are we doing? I mean, all the way back to Baldur's Gate 2, like that's what it was. Yeah. It's, it really is. The, the, I think the death knell for me and the story is like, Bioware stories are good because you have a party that you, you bond with and become friends with and like, can really relate to and, and understand. And like, you get to know them on an intimate level because that's what Bioware does so well is give you the opportunity to really know its characters. And by not giving you that in this game, it makes the rest of the story just kind of fall flat to me. So I'm like, Dara's idea is interesting. And, and I don't know if it could save Bioware or Anthem's story, but at least it would give you the opportunity to have new characters that you could fall in love with the way that, you know, Mass Effect does or Dragon Age, or, you know, even, even back to Baldur's Gate and KOTOR, like give you those characters that you remember for years and years to come. Yeah. And it's just such an important part of their life. It's a legacy because I mean, when I think of a game like the KOTOR games, I mean, I love those games, but like when you're playing it for the third time and you're really close to the end of the game, it's like the combat is really not what's keeping you there. It's you're curious about like, oh, I want to see what happens this time. If I do this thing in this conversation with this character and get like a slightly different thing going on here, like that's really the part I'm interested in exploring. Like I didn't make all the same choices I made in my last playthrough. That's the stuff that I think really keeps you going in their games. And that's the reason I've played Mass Effect five or six times. Right? I was about to say that. I was like, you've probably beaten Mass Effect a dozen times. So like. And don't get me wrong. I, part of that's the gameplay too, because it's like, oh, I've never played the Mass Effect three infiltrator and yada, yada, yada. Right. But ultimately so much of that is like, no, I want to see what it's like if you do side with the geth. No, I want to see what it's like if you do side with the quarian, et cetera. So all of the things involving your, the companions in the world are, I think really what draw people to these games and they, they just somehow convinced themselves that those were suddenly totally unimportant. And it's just, it's just crazy. Uh, and another thing is, and I want to talk about the art direction a little bit up front, the game, like it looks good graphically, like the graphic goal fidelity is high. It's fine. But man, other than the suits, which all look super fucking cool, by the way, like I think the suit designs are incredible. The art direction on those four are great. Fantastic. Almost everything else in the game is so bland. The faces. I mean, you know, there's sort of Bioware face. Like that's a thing. It's always kind of been a thing. Yeah. But I feel like the NPCs in Fort Tarsis are as boring as Bioware face has ever been. Like it's worse than KOTOR, I swear to God. It's certainly worse than Mass Effect. The environments like they're fine. I think you and I were talking the other day and you were like, it just kind of feels like generic sci-fi half the time. Like it's really bland. They're pretty like flying in the world is pretty, you know, like, like the, I kind of like that. Like everything has like vegetation, there's like a lot of plant life and, and like all the waterfalls and stuff. Like look really pretty, but all of the like interiors and, and everything like outside of the big open, like hub area, it just feels like very generic and boring and it all feels the same. And like Fort Tarsis is just kind of like very unmemorable. The, you know, you go into some of these structures and it's, you know, it's got that vibe of like sort of futuristic technology, cause it's like a long lost civilization or whatever. And like Bioware has done this four times, right? I mean, I think that's at the end, that's definitely Mass Effect, right? I think that's at the end of Jade Empire. Is there maybe some of that at the end of that? A little bit, maybe. Yeah. So, so, so they've kind of done this, like it's an ancient civilization thing before, but it goes back to the whole idea of they didn't know what it was. They only knew what it wasn't. So they were like, wait, if we're going to do these ancient ruins of civilization, it can't look like Mass Effect. It's not Mass Effect. It's like, okay, well what is it? I don't know. Future stuff. Future stuff. Like it just seems so directionless. But then again, you know, they, one thing Dara mentions is they were really willing to talk about some of the influences on their aesthetic design. There's a film from the eighties called The Abyss, where I think it involves a lot, like I think the underwater sections are very reminiscent of that. So they were super willing to talk about, hey, like aesthetically in kind of the general atmosphere of the game, we're pulling from this resource and that resource, but don't you dare think for a second that mechanically we are taking from anything. That exists. And I think it's just so apparent throughout the whole thing. And yeah, the art direction is a little bit of a letdown outside the suits. I mean, I think I still think like the suits are so cool and the animations of the suits are so cool and the flying around and hovering as the storm, all of that looks so great. They absolutely nailed that, but everything else is just like seven, 10 at best, I feel like. Yeah. I feel like the, the flying around and like looking at that world can be cool at times, especially the first couple of times you go out. Um, but, but it's. It starts to feel very samey because that hub world is just like one environment the whole time. Yeah. It's just like plants and waterfalls. There's like, you know, and, and I know it's like the video gamey thing to be like, here's a lava area and here's like a, you know, snowy area or whatever, but like just having a little bit of variety could have really benefited from, or the game could have benefited from that. Just having a little bit of variety in areas, but it really feels like everywhere you go, it's just some variation. Of like building structure with some vegetation and water around it. And it's like, that gets really boring after the first 20 times you see it. And then when you go inside of a building, it's like, oh look, another kind of dilapidated, like lost civilization thing. Cool. And I, I do wonder if that's because maybe this was just supposed to be one small area of the game, because something that Schreier mentioned in his article is it's like the original plan was there's gonna be like three cities and five outposts and it became like three cities and three outposts, and then one city and three outposts. And then it basically gets all the way down to where it's one outpost and like, that's basically what we ended up with was Fort Tarsis. So I do wonder if maybe where some of these other planned cities going to have very different environments because you know, you get, you get a little bit of like snowy mountain area, you get a little bit of swampy area, you get some mountainous areas, but you don't necessarily get like a whole lot of like volcanic areas outside of the one final mission. You don't necessarily get like a kind of rainforest type vibe. So I think there were some more biomes. They maybe could have played with, I don't know if maybe they originally had planned to, but it just, they couldn't by the end, but yeah, the, the end result is just a world that feels very uninteresting visually most of the time. So before we get to the eulogy here, before we put Anthem's rotting carcass on a side of a cliff for vultures to pick at like the Tibetans do, we're gonna go through some stuff that I just kind of labeled miscellaneous development woes. I didn't know exactly where else to put it in here, but I do think it's a lot of stuff that's either interesting or important to talk about. And the context of this game, and then we'll get into the end where we're just gonna discuss like, ultimately what is this game's legacy and more important, what did it do to shape Bioware's legacy? But one of the first things I want to talk about is just, you know, we did that episode on Blizzard's Play Nice. And as I'm reading the Schreyer article, and as I'm going through the Dara files, I kept getting so many like deja vu moments with Play Nice and particularly with the development of Titan, right? Because when Dara talks about just the total dysfunctional relationship with decision-making and how, like, what is it? Like, one leader would make a decision, but since this project switched leaders so many times between him and Casey, that the other leaders would come in and just completely change things. It reminded me a lot of when Rob Pardo and Chris Metzen were in charge of Titan, and it's like one of them was convinced, like, this was gonna be a very low fantasy thing, and it was gonna be really grounded. And the other was like, no, this is gonna be more like steampunk almost, like kind of a futuristic element. And just the way that these guys could never get on the same page, and so you had people drawing concept art. Putting it in, like, the archive, because they didn't think it was gonna be used. And then nine months later, someone else drawing the same concept art, only to find out it's already been done. Because there was so much of the just, like, lack of decision-making and contradictory decision-making that reminded me of that aspect of Play Nice. Another part of that is I just remember the scene where, like, Bobby Kotick is at, like, a Patriots game or something, and he's up in the booth, and he's telling all the people up there, like, oh, this guy, because I think, like, Moore-Hames went there or something, and he's like, this is the WoW guy. Oh, these are people who made WoW, and dude, they got some, like, they got some even better than WoW coming. Like, just you wait. Like, just you wait. And I don't know exactly – I can't remember exactly how that happened with him. Like, did he just sort of convince himself it was that great, or did they tell him it was gonna be great? But it really – it was just another case where it's Casey Hudson telling the EA executives that this is the new BioWare. And it turns out that having someone high up really attached to a specific vision of your project is just horrible. Because it just pigeonholes you. And to it having to be a certain thing – and, you know, Dara mentions, like, never tell anyone numbers. You should never say a fucking number out loud about anything until you have nailed that feature down. Because the six suits came back to haunt them. Right. The – something to do with the maximum level and some other – a couple other things that, like, all these suits – or all these executives get, like, attached to. And then it's, well, where's the other two javelins? It's like, well, actually, we have eight, because this up – you know. Yeah, right. You have to bullshit your way out of it. So he was real particular in the Dara files of being, like, never tell the people above you hard numbers when you can help it, because it will never be to your benefit. Promising. You know, you mentioned unfulfilled promises here in your Titan comparison. And like, that really is Dara hitting so many, like – not Dara, but Hudson and people around him going, like, we're going to do this, we're going to do this, you know. Even the grand statements that were made were like, what? Like, way over-promising. Like, this is the new Bioware, we're going to give you the magic of Mass Effect for the next 20 years in a game that will print money for the rest of time. Right. And it's like, maybe don't lead with that. Like, maybe have – Just promising the world. Right. Like, have an idea before you get there. Like, yeah, it's so – it's so indicative of, kind of, anthropomorphism. Yeah. M.O.D.E.M. project kind of came down to, is just this constant lack of decision-making, and this hope that Bioware magic will come in and just, like, we're Bioware, we'll figure it out, it'll work. That was such the energy behind – and I feel like Blizzard had a similar mentality during Titan, right? It was like – Yeah. It's the Blizzard magic. We'll figure it out. We're Blizzard. And it's like, you need a little more than that. Yeah. It turns out that actually, like, unlimited time – Yeah.– and resources with people who think they're a fucking genius is not always the best combination because they just don't arrive at decisions because it's – it hasn't fit their vision yet. It's not perfect. But when you – but reading about so many of those early Blizzard games, dude, so much of the decisions came down to, like, just constraints of budget, of time, of resources, of whatever else. And it was like, all right, well, we – I mean, we don't really have a choice. Like, we have to cut this and we have to retool this. But when you have this executive who has bought into your shit and is like, whatever you guys need. Whatever you guys need, then you can spend seven years not making a game. Right. Right. You know? And at least in Titan's case, they eventually were able to rework it into Overwatch. Anthem's just – it's just about to be gone forever. Right. I mean, and, you know, you say seven years in development. And it was, but they only actually worked on the game for, like, a year and a half. Right. Yeah. Like, you spend all this time and – what's the story? Remind me a little bit. Remind me a little bit about the story revolving around the name change, because it was, like, right before that initial E3 presentation where they made the name change to Anthem, and they had no clue what Anthem meant. Right? So, I'm trying to remember exactly how it worked. It was like, they were trying to come up with a name, and the people inside the studio at Bioware were okay with the name Javelin. It was the name of the suit. They said that it sort of fit, like, the triangle motif that was present in a lot of, like, the structures and the designs. But EA was like, that just feels small. Right? Like, it doesn't feel big and epic. So, they ended up deciding on Beyond, because the whole idea is that, like, you know, it's symbolic of Bioware. We're going, like, beyond the traditional Bioware thing. But it's also supposed to fit in that, like, you go beyond the gates of safety into the wider world to experience what's out there, and it's such a dangerous world. Right? I mean, the way Anthem's universe was described is, like, a dangerous world, like, 400 times. Right. Even if you don't really see it, it's super dangerous. Even if you can't leave. God, dude, the gameplay demo, they flew out of the fort, right? Like, they flew out of the fort, which is then something you never were able to do. And I think that would have done so much for making the world actually feel alive, right? But anyhow, they end up with Beyond, but it turns out that, like, a few months down the road, they find out they're, like, Sony has filed for Beyond as a trademark. Yeah, because of Beyond 2 Souls. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so, at the last second, they end up having to switch to something, and they end up going with Anthem. And he was like, see, at this point, Anthem literally means nothing. You know, that's not a huge deal, necessarily. Like, he was telling me in the Dragon Age videos he does, he's like, Dragon Age was called Dragon Age, like, a year and a half before there was a dragon in the game. You know, we made that work. We came up with a way for there to be dragons in the game, because it turned out that, like, everyone really liked the name. We really liked the name. Yeah. And it wasn't that hard to make dragons kind of an ancient part of the lore and have, like, a couple dragon encounters. Right. Right. Yeah. So, ultimately, like, you can retcon some things. You can reset some things. But it was just so emblematic and so symbolic of, like, all of the decision making in this game. It was just, it's going to be this. No, it's going to be that. No, it's going to be that. But why? I don't know. It just is. Okay, well, I guess we'll make that work. So, they come up with the whole bullshit about the Anthem of creation, like, in the months leading up to the damn game. Right. Like, I actually like the name Anthem. Yeah. I like the name. I think it works. But, like, to have coined it with nothing in mind and, like, just, like, yeah, we need a name. Anthem sounds big. Ship it. Like, is insane. We're going to announce the game with a name that we picked, like, a week ago that means absolutely nothing. It's just crazy. Yeah. And then, you know, you kind of talked about the Bioware magic thing, which turns out all Bioware magic ever was, was, like, people really passionate about the game. They were crunching their ass off. And you ended up with a situation where no one was fucking passionate about this game. And I think he was saying there wasn't even that much crunch on it by the end, but he's like, but even if there had been, I don't think we'd have gotten much out of it. Because, like, crunch really only works when the people crunching actually really want this thing to succeed and they're passionate about it. And, like, he says, it's not to defend the practice necessarily, but, like, it is a practice for a reason and it does work for a reason. And if those reasons aren't present, it's not going to work. And that combined with just the constant, like, he mentions in there, like, talking to his underlings when he first gets the job and they're like, we're just so impressed that we ended a meeting with you having made a decision. Because the amount of meetings we went through where, like, we were just still on the same topic as the last four meetings and no decision had been made. It was basically the first five years of this game's development. So. Well, and I think, you know, what you said there about crunch is a big testament to the way people felt about the game. Again, not just the game. Not to, not to necessarily talk bad about Casey Hudson, but he, he pitched a bill of goods to EA executives and he had a vision. And I don't think any of the people who were working on the game actually cared to work on that type of game. Like, this is Bioware, like, it's like joining a company and then the next day the company's like, yeah, all the things that you joined us for that you really loved, we're not going to do any of that anymore. We're going to do this other thing. And it's like, well, why am I here? Yeah. And it really feels like, uh, you know, Dara talks about this video early on that passed around from, from Casey Hudson and the kind of the leadership team talking about the old Bioware is dead. We are the new Bioware and like that doing the exact opposite thing that, that they wanted it to do because morale like cratered because everybody's like, well, we liked the old Bioware and just the delivery of it was not good. You know? Yeah. Yeah. So imagine getting a writing job at Bioware Montreal, like right after mass effect three and just being so excited for what that means and then spending years on parking and stuff. Right. It would be awful. And, and that's what I'm sure happened to several and even the people who didn't get a brand new job, right? It's the people who've been there for years and years and have this legacy of like writing deep elaborate companions and all the stuff that comes with that. And then being told like, yeah, you need to find a way to make a, you know, multiplayer, game, story, work, have fun. And, you know, he, he mentions at one point that he just, he's like, if anyone has a copy of that video, please let me have it because I'm pretty sure Bioware like locked it in a vault and buried it under a volcano. It's just, it's basic. It was basically such a disaster in retrospect that I didn't want to pretend that video was never shown to anyone. It would be interesting if someone leaked that I would love to see. I'd love to see what that sounds like. Yeah. Because it, it sounds like it did a real number to staff morale for sure. Yeah. Including the whole like Bioware Edmonton versus Austin disconnect, you know, we talked about how the, the SW tour team was warning about like, you know, co-op storytelling when your own voice is not really gonna work if you have voice characters and like the economy and all of their warnings just really not being heated was really unfortunate. But another, another big thing that really comes up during this game's release is, you know what, it comes out in 2019. We wrap back around. And by 2020 they have ended the games like support and then COVID hits and Dara kind of talks about like, it would have been cool if we'd gotten a little more of a chance with this because a lot of games were able to like reach a new audience during COVID because everyone is inside. But he ultimately says like, I just like, I don't think even under the best of circumstances with the way the game launched, this game would have never been in the state come the COVID boom to take advantage of it. Anyway. Like it just, there just wasn't a possibility. And a lot of that has to do just the, the horrible leadership and post-launch plan. And do you remember some of the stuff he was talking about with like, you can have one person remote, but you can't have random people scattered about remote. Yeah. That, that was interesting because he was talking about like the having a whole team remote in Austin worked well enough because there was like a leader there and having one person remote. Yeah. I think that was interesting stuff. I mean, I think that was interesting stuff because you could just give that one person instructions, but like when you have multiple people scattered around, scattered around remotely, the things get really hard to like give direction and like leadership ambiguity. Like you start to not know, like who you're supposed to take direction from and all these things get kind of tricky and you're kind of left on an Island on your own. So that was some interesting stuff that he was talking about with like how the dynamics weren't working well. And I think what he was also saying is like a lot of those dynamics weren't working well. started to make a lot more sense in COVID, you know, people started to figure it out out of necessity. They had to figure out how to work remotely and, and different tools and different, you know, ideas of, of management developed out of that. But because they were working before COVID, like they weren't fluent yet in working with remote teams and like, especially remote, like groups of people. So it was, it was tricky to, to give instruction to a lot of the remote staff, which was, which was pretty interesting stuff. Yeah. It's almost like if this game had, if the entire timeline of this game had just shifted forward one year, do you think maybe like with COVID hitting, they figure out some of this communication system before the game shifts and they figure out some of this leadership ambiguity before the game shifts, and maybe it ends up, you know, they're able to delay it another six months because everything got delayed during COVID. So it's like, I do wonder, man, if you could just shift this one year forward, like, do things look completely different? Right. I mean, I mean, I think it's, I think it's, I think it's, I think it's, I think it's, I think it's, well, and Dara had said that he wanted to shift Anthem into the Dragon Age spot, which was supposed to come out, you know, a year later and, or like two years later or whatever it was, right. He was like, let's get, let's put all of our effort on Dragon Age and get Dragon Age out and we'll keep working on Anthem to make it a better game. And they were like, no, no, no, we need Anthem out now. Yeah. And I get it to a certain extent because like, and you've given someone seven years to make something and they have, I get it. It's been a large part of that not making it. And the things they have shown you have been incomplete or not what you discussed. And I think like these, these EA executives that were all hyped up on the Hudson train probably eventually came around to like, just get it out. Like we just need to take these people and have them doing something else because this isn't, now I don't think any of them thought it was going to be as much of a flop as it was. Right. But say, I imagine if you ask those EA executives now, they have a different answer, but. Yeah. Their answer might've been, I'd go back seven years and say, no. Right. I mean, hindsight is 20, 20, obviously. And just a couple of last things before we get into the Viking funeral here is you, you had kind of mentioned this earlier where the messaging about the not traditional Bioware thing was just so overemphasized. And what I think what they, cause Dara even talks about how him and Casey kind of arrive at this conclusion at the same time that we, we need to communicate to people that their expectations maybe shouldn't be exactly what they are for a mass effect. But all that did was just make the people who were interested in that kind of game, not even give this one a shot. They were like, if we had just sold this as an original game, um, or like a typical Bioware game, maybe people would have like come in and given it a shot and found something to like, but a bunch of people just never even bought it because they were like, well, you've basically spent months telling me I'm not going to like it. So I'm going to believe you and I'm not going to buy it. And while that's insane, like you would think that then they would at least lean heavily into the looter shooter audience, but they didn't do that either. So. Because they, they wanted to still have this insistence of like, we're not a looter shooter. And something I really liked from what Dara was talking about was the metacritic expectations of certain genres and like how an RPG gets a little bit more forgiveness for poor mechanics or things of that nature, because you're going for the story. You're trying to get invested in the characters and you get a little bit of forgiveness in those mechanics. Because, you know, you're really excited about the story and the characters. Why if it didn't have that? So the, the looter shooter genre that it really ended up kind of falling into those games are really supposed to be mechanically sound and really tight. And like, that is what gives those games their leg up and metacritic scores and review scores. And that also wasn't there and present in Anthem. So they really like roped themselves into a bad situation. And so I think that's a really good spot when talking about how their metacritic, uh, cause I mean, right. Every, every developer, every publisher has like metacritic targets and scores that they kind of tie to their game. So, so that I thought was really interesting. And he, he brought up another thing about metacritic that I know you really liked. Oh yeah. Just the whole thing about like, you cannot make a game that is impossible for someone to give you a 10. Right. And what he means by that is like, if you find the biggest Anthem fanboy on the phone, someone who's just totally in to all the lore and is in love with Dax and everything else, but he can't even give you a 10 because he has to say, yeah, but the loading screens are horrendous and the crashes are constant and the bugs are all over the place. So even though I loved all of the, you know, game part of this game, it's so bad technically that I have to give it a nine. Like he said, that really hurts your metacritic score because you're looking for those obsessed people. To cancel out the people who maybe were critiquing something out of their normal wheelhouse. They didn't like it as much and gave you a six or a seven. He's like a 10 gets rid of a six a lot better than an eight gets rid of a six. And so if you give someone the ability to not give you a 10, then you're screwed because you won't cancel out the underperformers. And Anthem was a game that gave everyone every reason to not give it a 10. It's a, it's kind of a testament to, you know, Nintendo's, you know, Nintendo's, you know, Nintendo's, you know, Nintendo's, you know, Nintendo's longtime motto of like, and obviously this doesn't hold up today because of like patching and stuff of that nature. But Miyamoto's famous, like a bad game is bad forever kind of quote. I can't remember the exact quote, but it's like Nintendo is a company that puts in even to this day, right? Like even in all the, all the maybe like mediocre games that they release or whatever, something you'll never see from them is a game that is like unpolished. Like, every game they release technically is sound. It is a, it is a experience that you will not find a bunch of bugs. You won't be, you know, sitting through 800 loading screens. Like it is a sound mechanical, technical experience in, in all of their games. And that was something that, that Anthem could have really benefited from and granted, right. Time constraints, the, you know, there was a lot of problems with Anthem's production that it was never going to happen that way. But it's an interesting lesson that, that Dara points out and like something that I think other developers will hopefully keep in mind as they, as they develop games. Cause I'm hoping that a bunch of developers listen to this cause it's really cool from like a development standpoint. Yeah. And you know, Nintendo, it's not just that they have all of the resources to not have to delay a game if they don't want to. They're also just, they have very strong leadership and a very coherent vision for their games and they have very efficient production processes. It's not, it's just never a case where they're spinning their wheels for eight years, not making a thing. So it's like, yeah, you could argue, oh, it would have been better if this, if Anthem could have been delayed. But the real problem was it spending so long, not making progress. Right. I think Anthem had enough time and resources if it hadn't spun its wheels for three or four years before really nailing down even like playable concepts. Right. It needed an additional year at the 18 months point when it had already been in development for seven years. So like, yeah, it's like you can only give it so much time. And I think another year in the pipeline with Dara in charge and, you know, the team making decisions finally could have led to a much better game. But kind of like you said, it's too little too late at that point. So the moment we've all been waiting for, the funeral, the eulogy, I just, I kind of want to pose this question to you Austin, like did this game more or less like end Bioware as we know it? Yes. Like, I think, yes. But like, like, I think unequivocally, yes, Anthem killed Bioware. And I think, you know, Andromeda started the problem, right? I mean, Andromeda was, was a, was a game that most people looked at and was like, this is not a great game. But you even said, I think you got what a 71, a Metacritic, you said, like, that's, that's not horrible. That's, that's redeemable. There was some good things in Andromeda. The gameplay was really solid. Some of the characters, were fine. Like, it wasn't the worst game ever. I mean, I finished that game. It wasn't the worst thing ever made. Right? Anthem, while maybe not the worst thing ever made, from the perspective of the money put in and the like, the the position that it was built up to be for Bioware, like it kind of is the worst thing ever made for the circumstances of what Bioware is and what they were trying to do. I really think that, you know, I think it's, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a There is no, like, Veilguard didn't do very well financially. It did okay critically, but I don't think it sold super well. Mass Effect is in eternal, like, who knows? Like, they announced a Mass Effect game years ago, and it's just who knows where it is now. And, I mean, we have a new Old Republic game coming out from a team that isn't Bioware. Like, I just, I don't see how Bioware can come back from this, honestly. You mentioned the B-team thing. That's what's, I think, why people still had some hope after Andromeda is because the whole idea was like, well, this isn't the guys who brought us Mass Effect. This is the B-team. So that's why Andromeda sucks. Like, all the people who were really good at this, they're working on Anthem. But then Anthem's results were just simply not A-team material. I mean, at all. They were F-team. I was going to say, they weren't even the B-team's material. And so, in Triangle, Dara both mentioned this multiple times. There's just totally, like, unwarranted elitism amongst the A-team. Even without the poor sales, it seems like there was already some sort of, like, culture crisis in the studio where there was too much division between the different teams. And it just really wasn't like a we're all in this together kind of thing. Another thing Dara talks about that's just really sad is he literally uses the phrase, like, I have still not recovered from Anthem, either mentally or professionally. Dude, it's been six years. Like... Yeah. That's really sad. I mean, he's basically saying, like, there are people who lost their jobs over this and who weren't able to find another one because people are like, you worked on what? Right, like, Anthem? We don't want to touch that. And just, you know, he was saying there was so much, like, mental health issues during the development of this because, like, the stress that is normally somewhat canceled out with by the excitement was just never there because the excitement was never there. A lot of people never worked on a game again after this because they didn't want to work on it. They didn't want to work on games again after this. You know, some of the people who were no longer here by the time Anthem even came around include, like, Mac Walters, lead writer of Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, Drew Karpyshyn, lead writer of Mass Effect 1. You know, the two founders, was it Muzika and Zeschik? They were Bioware's founders. They left during the Mass Effect trilogy era. Aaron Flynn, who was a general manager and he'd had a lot of leadership during the trilogy era, the Mass Effect trilogy era, he left before Anthem. Casey Hudson leaves in the middle of it. Corey Gasper, who was supposed to be Anthem's combat lead, unfortunately passes away in 2017. So, you know, you and I have talked about this concept before. What is a studio other than the collection of people who work there? And when so many people who worked on these past games aren't there anymore, it's like a ship of Theseus thing. At what point is this no longer Bioware? And there's still some people, right? Mike Gamble, producer on Mass Effect 2 and 3, still there. Preston Wadamaniuk. Preston. Close enough. Close enough. Lead designer on the Mass Effect trilogy, he's still there. The art director, Derek Watts, is director on all three Mass Effect games. Lead cinematic animator of Mass Effect 2 and 3, Parrish Lay, still there. So there are some guys, right? But I really do feel like so much of the names that we know and the leadership and the creatives have left. And how can we expect for Bioware to ever put out a Bioware-level game again if the people responsible for that aren't there anymore? Yeah, and sometimes I feel like you can get over that hump if you create like a culture and kind of bring your visions and your ideas down to the people below you and then they kind of go up and they kind of continue to rise. But with a game like Anthem, when you shift your entire identity for the last seven years, it's now a problem of like, well, what is the spirit, the identity of Bioware? What is it? What is a studio? Like, not only is there an identity crisis with an Anthem, but there kind of turns into an identity crisis within Bioware as a company. Because what are we? Are we the new Bioware? Do we need to go back to being the old Bioware? What is the old Bioware without all the people who made the old Bioware and now all the new people have just been working at the quote, new Bioware? So like, there becomes this problem of how do we recreate that Bioware map? How do we recreate that magic and that Bioware spirit if the soul of that is kind of gone? You know, like all those people are gone, but also we've been working on a game that doesn't have anything to do with Bioware for years, you know? And I think, you know, I kind of led with it at the beginning and, you know, you would pose the question, is there a good game buried under Anthem? And maybe there is. Maybe there's a good game somewhere in here, but I don't know if there's a good Bioware game in here, you know, without the core of, without the core of the companions and the world building and like the way that Bioware creates games, leaving all of that out and saying we want to do something new, we want to create a new era of Bioware. Maybe you could have created a decent looter shooter out of it, but I don't know if the, what Anthem is now ever leads to a good Bioware game, you know? Oh, I completely agree. I mean, I think the second they made the decision that there will not be companion characters and there will not be dialogue options, it was over. There was no chance this was going to be a good Bioware game. Like you said, maybe a good looter shooter, but without those things, I mean, it's just, it's just not a Bioware game. And, and this Anthem's issues really cascaded down to Dragon Age 4. And that's why I think I would completely agree with your assessment that like, yes, this game did end Bioware as we know it. But because Dragon Age had to get restarted twice because it was, first it was like, it needs to be a live service because that's what we're doing now. And then it was, now it can't be a live service because we don't know how to do that as we just demonstrated with this colossal fuck up of Anthem. So then the game goes through multiple leadership changes, right? I don't think Dara ever gets to be Dragon Age's leader under the third iteration, Veilguard, right? He does nothing to do with that essentially. I mean, maybe some of the work from the previous iterations carried over, but he quit shortly after, him and Hudson both left shortly after Anthem launches, right? So he's never really on the Dragon Age 4 we eventually know when he was on all of the other Dragon Age games. So it just had all these huge impacts across the company. Their reputation is not what it used to be, which means like, they're kind of like Blizzard where it used to be, you could get great talent for low cost because everyone wanted to work there. Well, now you're just another studio. You have to pay people what all the shitty studios pay people too. Like you don't have that advantage anymore. So you don't, you don't have a lot of the passionate people who used to work there. You don't have new passionate people coming in because they'd rather just work somewhere else. I don't know where you go from here. And that doesn't mean that whatever Mass Effect 4 ends up being will be bad. I mean, you know what? You and I already know we're going to buy that shit. Like I'm not going to front on that. Yeah, I'm buying that day one. I mean, duh, it's Mass Effect. But my expectations for it are just a little tempered. They're a little bit like, I just don't see it coming anywhere close to the heights of the first three games. And I won't expect it to, and I can still have fun with it if it doesn't. But I just can't imagine with how many people have left that the few people there are going to be able to pull in new, passionate, excited talent to make something of that quality. I hope I'm wrong, but I just don't think it's going to happen. I'm with you a hundred percent. I think there are people out there who would still love to work at BioWare and would love to like reclaim that BioWare essence, the magic that is BioWare and be like, there's probably people out there who are like, I want to go work for BioWare and I want to help turn it around and whatever. But by and large, I think you're right. And that it's just people aren't excited to work at BioWare because the reputation is tanked. I mean, when I saw a new Old Republic game being created by Casey Hudson and it not being at BioWare, to me, that's like, okay, I mean, there's your answer, right? Like BioWare is, and I know Coast War II was made by Obsidian. And I'm like, I understand, whatever. But like, I still think of KOTOR as a BioWare franchise, right? That is BioWare leading the charge on one of the greatest RPGs of the 2000s. And still to this day, one of the best RPGs that's ever been made, right? I mean, KOTOR is a fantastic game. It's in my top 20, my top 10, whatever. And to see a new one come out and it not be under BioWare is like, well, LucasArts and Lucasfilm doesn't trust BioWare to make it anymore. Why? Why should we trust BioWare to deliver what BioWare has done when clearly the people who've trusted them in the past don't trust them anymore, you know? I just, I don't think that that studio has what it takes anymore to put out those games. And I think Anthem and its culture shift, right? Anthem and what it stood for for BioWare really did a number to its reputation and its culture and the spirit of BioWare. Yeah, I think you're completely right. And if you, it's kind of sad. If you look at Casey Hudson's Wikipedia and you look at the first 12 years of his career, okay? He does MDK2 as a level designer. He then moves into programming for Baldur's Gate 2, does art on Neverwinter Nights, and then becomes director and producer of Knights of the Old Republic, does work on Jade Empire, all three Mass Effect games, even does a little bit on Baldur's Gate 2 Enhanced Edition. So that's the first 12 years of his career, okay? Tons of hits there. Neverwinter Nights, KOTOR, Jade Empire, all the Mass Effects, Baldur's Gate 2. The next 12 years of his career are as follows. Anthem, a game that never comes out under his studio that he leaves BioWare to go form, and now Star Wars Fate of the Old Republic. Like, damn. Yeah. He, this guy, I think he's good at what he does for the most part. I mean, I think his resume speaks for himself. Anthem wasted so much of his career. So much of his ability. So much of his talent. And it's obviously not just him, right? All the other people who worked under him. All the other people who worked alongside him. They spent nine, you know, what is this? Six years between, no, seven years between Mass Effect 3 and the release of Anthem. And then all he does is work on the Legendary Edition before leaving. Like, the last 12 years of his time at BioWare compared to the first 12, it just couldn't be more different. And I think it's sort of foreboding for BioWare as a whole. I think it's pretty representative. Of where they're headed to. And that just sucks. Because I don't, like, I don't want BioWare to be bad. I don't want them to not make good games anymore. I just don't know that they cannot be bad. If I were to look at my top 10 games of all time, I think, like, four of them are BioWare games. So, like, like, like, of course I don't want BioWare to be bad. I mean, they're responsible for some of the best games I've ever played and some of my favorite games of all time. And it's so sad to see. You know, I think it's a testament to that time in the industry and kind of what was going on in the late 2010s and the early 2020 of just, like, we need, I guess, like, really, like, the mid-2010s even of just, like, live service, live service. How can we monetize everything? How can we make the most money ever? And I get it, right? These are businesses. They need to make money. I understand. But it definitely feels like, like, the artistry had started to leave the industry in that time frame. There was such a focus on, like, how can we get players to play one game for the rest of their lives and that's it? And every game wanted to be that. I mean, you have Fortnite. You have all the other battle royales that have come out since Fortnite. You have, you know, the MMOs. You have the things. Like, Anthem, the Destinies. Like, all of these games are just, like, how can we make it, how can we make this game the only game you play for the rest of time and continue to give us money for the rest of existence? There is a certain, like, lack of artistry that comes from that, I think, from that nature of, like, how can we continue to pull money out of you? And I think that's why it's so, that's why it's been so great the last couple of years to see games like Astro Bot, Clare Obscure, you know, Baldur's Gate 3, like, really excel. And get a lot of recognition both sales-wise and critically of just, like, look at these really passionate teams making really passionate games. And it's unfortunate that I think BioWare had to suffer from the, you know, Anthem, the live service curse. And I think a lot of these companies have learned from that and said, we're not going to do that. And we're not going to just figure out how to milk you for every bit of money. Because we can create, like, a single-player game that will draw people in and get them to buy a billion copies or whatever and do really well. And it just sucks that BioWare had to be the one to, like, suffer the arguably death blow, you know, from it. Yeah, there's almost, like, no worse place they could have ended up. Because, so EA buys BioWare, like, after Mass Effect 1. I often wonder, like, I wonder a lot, my friend, what would have happened if Microsoft had purchased them instead? Because if you remember, Mass Effect 1 was an Xbox, well, at least console exclusive. Like, it was on PC. But that wasn't a PlayStation game. And Microsoft helped fund the development of that game. And they had the opportunity to purchase them, and they didn't. And Activision, or EA got to them instead. Like, two years after that would be when EA's Ultimate Team shit starts blowing up, right? So you have these games now that are just making billions of dollars off of these stupid-ass baby goat Tom Brady things. And... And now we're even talking about... We talked about how at one point, like, BioWare was just kind of reporting to the people under the sports division. And the CEO was like, I don't know what your weird nerd shit is, and I don't really want to. So you guys just sit in your corner and do your thing. And he was like, that was advantageous to us. But eventually we got people in there who were suddenly very interested in what BioWare was doing for all the wrong reasons. And that really started to mess with things. So I certainly don't want to make it seem like EA is blameless here. They're not. But at the same time, there was, I think, enough dysfunction internally. That I don't know that it ends up a whole lot different anywhere else. Like, I will tell myself that being under Microsoft instead of EA would be a little better. Because obviously, like, Microsoft's for-profit as much as EA is. But they didn't seem to have this just, like, everything must be a live service for everything going on. And I'll say this. EA eventually, I think, kind of figured out that there is value to good single-player games because they have the Jedi thing going on under Respawn, right? Yeah. So it's like, they understand. They just kind of weren't understanding it enough when Bioware was sitting there right in front of them, a golden goose. They kind of ruined that. They kind of, I shouldn't say ruined it, but they kind of, like, squandered that opportunity. And I feel like now they've maybe kind of figured it out with Jedi, but it's, like, too late for Bioware. Right. And not to, like, not to show on EA too much because, you know, everyone else has done that for the last 20 years. But I kind of think back to whenever I heard that Star Wars was going to be given to EA as, like, EA will make all of Star Wars properties. And I was like, oh my God, this could be perfect. EA has some great studios under it, like, Bioware's there and we could get a new KOTOR and, you know, like, look at all these talented studios that EA has under them. And in that time, we got, like, two kind of okay Battlefront games and the Jedi series and that's it. I think we got Squadrons. Was that right? Yes, yes. Yes, we did get Squadrons, which was fun. Yeah. But, you know, I think you're right. That's about it. Yeah, and that's in, like, 10 years of time that they had to develop games. And it's like, how did EA squander so much goodwill from companies like Bioware and, like, fans, like, goodwill from fans for companies like Bioware, you know? And, again, not to say that Bioware didn't have its own internal struggles because it obviously did as we talked about here. But, it's just a shame that it feels like EA missed such a golden opportunity with Bioware and these other studios. It's like as soon as EA lost their exclusive license to it, they were like, hey, actually, we'll make a really good single-player-focused Star Wars game. Yeah. Good enough to generate two sequels. Insane. Yeah. It's a sad tale overall, man. I think at this point we've probably discussed about as much as there is to say. I truly do recommend to anyone who's listening to this, go listen to those Dara files, the videos. You just basically search Mark Dara Anthem on YouTube and you'll find them. They're really good. This podcast we have just done is not a replacement for those videos. I can't possibly cover all of the details and with the legitimacy that he does having been there. They're really interesting. And if you're still in, if you're still not in that last stage of grief yet regarding Anthem, go give those videos a listen. I think you'll end up in the acceptance stage where me and Austin have finally settled. Yes. It's a sad tale and the game had a lot of people some, some, you know, good things about it. But I think ultimately, like it was never going to be at least in its current form. There was no saving it. You know that it ruined BioWare, unfortunately. And I just don't think there was any hope for Anthem. And that really sucks because BioWare is so talented at what they do. And yeah, it's, it's just a real shame. And I wish, I wish coming back to Anthem this time. I wish coming back to it for the last like two months and kind of trying it out again would have changed my impressions of it. But it really didn't. It just kind of further solidified that this, this wasn't the move for BioWare. This wasn't the game for them to do. I don't know if you can hear this sound, but that's me pouring one out for BioWare. Hear, hear. And that about wraps up our final farewell to BioWare's Anthem. You can find this episode as well as all of our other episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting platform. And of course, you can find everything we do on our website, gamesgoneby.com. Signing off for Games Gone By, I'm Adam. I'm Austin. Thanks for listening, everyone. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.