Games
The game’s producers discuss the long road to Anthem; from inception, to development hurdles, to its arrival as one of 2019’s most anticipated games.
Ben Irving and Thomas Singleton have been working on Anthem for a long time. As producers, they've had the job of bringing Anthem together over the course of its six-year development. It's been the focus of every working day. They've experienced highs and lows, revisions, reworks and the unenviable task of creating a brand-new IP with the pressure of BioWare’s storied history behind them.
Now, with just a matter of weeks before launch, the two find themselves thousands of miles away from BioWare’s home base, at Red Bull’s Gaming Sphere in central London, presenting a near-final build of Anthem to the press. It’s one of the final tasks they have to complete before it actually launches, and they seem to be enjoying the opportunity to show off their work and talk about Anthem at length.
From the outside, it almost seems like this should be a relaxing end to a massive journey. Waxing lyrical about the project you’ve devoted countless hours of your life to is probably easier than trying to pull together a AAA game, but in reality they, and the rest of the team woking on Anthem, still have a lot to get done before the big day on February 22.
“You know, the final few months are pretty polarising as a developer,” says Irving. “You'll have certain parts of the game that are on fire that you have to really knuckle down and fix, but it's really also about getting people out of the pool. You have so many people making so many changes, and in order to stabilise you have to focus that down. So it's really about saying, what are the top five or six things we wanna do that we need to make better about the game, and then everyone else needs to move on and we just focus on those things so we can make a stable game and be ready for launch.”
But for now it’s the other members of the development team that have to deal with whatever fires may spring up back at home base, while Irving and Singleton have a rare opportunity to reflect. Both are veterans of the industry, with Irving having worked on Star Wars: The Old Republic prior to Anthem, and Singleton having stints at Ubisoft and Deep Silver as well as over 20 years inside EA. Neither have worked on a game quite like Anthem, though.
Not only is Anthem a new kind of game for the BioWare team, one that combines the traditional storytelling-based RPG style they have become so famous for with a multiplayer aspect and the goal of becoming a live game with content updates for years to come, but it’s also a completely new IP. This means there was no lore to base things off, no rules that had to be followed and no ideas they could borrow from elsewhere. With what was effectively just an idea of what they wanted to create, and a completely blank slate, Anthem’s initial vision was born.
“The original concept for Anthem happened a long, long time ago,” says Irving. “You think back through BioWare's history, it's kind of famous for creating these really immersive worlds and amazing single-player stories, relatable characters, but there was always a sense of wanting to do multiplayer. Even looking way back with Neverwinter Nights – that had a multiplayer mode. And the Mass Effect franchise has a multiplayer mode. And Dragon Age has a multiplayer mode. And Star Wars: Old Republic is this huge online world. While story has been so important, there was this real desire to create this shared world experience. To have an immersive and amazing story that you share with your friends. Both the story itself and the experiences that you have while out in the world.”
Despite what many people may think about AAA game development, the initial team for Anthem was actually quite small. Since day one everyone knew this would be a massive undertaking that would require thousands of man hours to complete across years of development with a sizeable team. However, with no reference points to work from in terms of previous games in the series or established lore the team had to be kept small. The rules of the universe had to be created so that everyone knew what they could and couldn’t do within this world. Without that, it would have been easy for wires to be crossed and people not to be on the same page.
“The game's been in development for six years, but that's kind of a misleading time frame, because at the beginning there's very few people,” says Irving. “It's a brand-new IP, so you're trying to work out the rule set. We really wanted to make a new IP to add to BioWare, but doing so is really complicated and takes a lot of time. So the first little bit it was very few people [working on Anthem]. Then, most of the development happened in the last few years.”
Once development did start to ramp up after that initial stage was complete, the team had a pretty clear idea of what they wanted to build and now just had to execute that idea. Something which is certainly easier said than done. No game in history has been developed without a few issues along the way, and sometimes those issues make it into the final version of a game and become the main talking point – something every developer wants to avoid.
When you have the experience of BioWare, you can often work out many of the kinks, especially when it comes to the actual moment-to-moment action in the game. You can say a lot of things about BioWare games, but it’s hard to deny that most of them are fundamentally fun to play when it comes to combat and interacting with the worlds they've built. Anthem seems to be no different, even if some aspects did prove more of a challenge than some internally were expecting.
“Yeah, there were lots of issues early on that were challenging,” says Irving. “I think a great example is flight. Most people who play the game are like ‘whoa! Flight's really cool’ or ‘I haven't played flight like this in a game before.’ There's probably a good reason for that. In a normal situation, flight breaks every part of a game. You can just now fly past all the creatures to the objective, and skip everything. You can abuse the creatures because they can't shoot you in the sky, so when we added flight, it created all kinds of problems. But it's one of my favourite examples because it was also the thing the team rallied around the most. To make flight be great in this game, we had to build a world that was very vertical. So that was all the world building.”
Of course, the team were always confident they could fix this issue. They're masters of their craft, and with flight being such a key component of Anthem, they had little choice but to continue to focus on it until it worked. Now flight is seamless, you can go from jetting across huge ravines to hovering above a swarm of enemies and engaging in a fight within a second. Then you can drop to the ground to raise hell with melee attacks, before quickly leaping into the air to move on to another part of the world entirely.
There were other issues during development that the team had less experience with, though. Sure, many of the dev team hadn’t specifically worked on fixing the intricacies of flying in a game before, but most had experience of tidying up, or reinventing entirely, the core systems within a game. However, what was new for the BioWare team as a whole was developing this idea of a live game that was always going to be online.
“One of the challenges throughout development, when you're developing a product that's always online, having the game always online while you're still building it,” says Singleton. “All of your infrastructure, all of your systems are a moving target yet you're still trying to evaluate and play that content on that moving target. [That was] definitely one of the big challenges.”
Despite the issues that the team faced during the long development, everything is finally coming together as intended. With the release date quickly approaching, Anthem is almost in its final launch state. There are things that have been left on the cutting room floor, half-baked ideas that were never going to make it into the final game, and there are some features that the initial team drawing out the roadmap for Anthem all those years ago could never have pictured. There’s little doubt that Anthem will be a hit, but there's always the question of what could have been, those extra ideas that were cut midway through development, or the things that had to be pushed back to prioritise getting a shippable product ready to launch.
“We always want more time,” jokes Singleton. “The beautiful thing with Anthem is the fact that we're a live services game. Time is infinite. We're always bringing more content, new missions, new stories into the fold later on. So, one of those challenges for us was how much content do we actually ship, on disc, at launch. Do we have the time to do all of the things that we wanna do? Because quality is always king, right? Our thing with Anthem is quality over quantity absolutely. Do we have enough quantity, we believe so. But the quality is definitely what we shine on.”
The initial part of the journey to Anthem is tantalisingly close to coming to an end. There may be years of post-release support planned, but the core development of Anthem is all but done at this point, and it feels like a good time to reflect. Throughout the highs and lows of development the team have continued to work towards this result. Despite a few bumps along the way, it's clear from speaking to Irving and Singleton that they really believe in the game they've created along with the rest of BioWare, and this really is a massive achievement.
“It's been an amazing ride,” says Singleton. “The team at BioWare and all of our studios, and the support that we've gotten from EA overall, is amazing. It's a privilege to be a part of a new IP. It's not very often in our industry that new IPs get launched. I think if there's something for me, and I'll speak for the entire team, what we're most proud about is the fact that we're launching this new IP and we're super-excited about it.”
