 This is Game Chat 1, episode 133, A Tale of Two Rants. Oh boy. Game Chat with Buona. Welcome to the show. Now here's your host Buona McCall with all the gaming news of this week. By the way, that's me. Greetings, folks, and welcome to episode 133 of Game Chat with Buona. We got a great show lined up for you. Welcome to the show. Today is April. Well, March is over. I warned you guys. April 3rd, 2019 and always, man, every I've been doing this a long time. And every time I do a show close to April Fools, finding stuff to talk about is always difficult because there's so much jokes and gags and just fake news out there. But today's show is actually it's going to be easier in a kind of way. We're only going to focus on two stories. And the reason why I'm doing this because they're so beefy and juicy that it's just going to warrant the entire time. I had some other stories lined up. We were going to talk about some stuff with Valve and Artifact and they're they're reimagining of that. You can go look that up. Minecraft broke, you know, they posted some numbers about their sales. We were going to talk a little bit about that a couple other stories. But today we're only going to focus on two major topics. The first being the Borderlands 3 announcement and all the stuff surrounding that that can go on that could be a long conversation. And the last is going to be even the longer one is about Anthem and what possibly went wrong. A big, big post on Kotaku is going to be probably the main focus of this show. So sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee, tea, water. Something and enjoy the show. Let's do it. And for our first story, we're going to talk about Borderlands. Borderlands has been unleashed upon the world. Borderlands 3, that is a long awaited title this past week. We've both both heard about the announcement of the series coming out and yesterday actually, I think it was today. The official release date has been announced. So Borderlands 3 is going to be in the same vein as the other Borderlands games. It's been a long time coming. A lot of hype surrounding this, a lot of anticipation, especially behind the lackluster release of the prequel pre-series prequel thing that a lot of people don't feel was a very, very great Borderlands game. Some people like it. Well, you know, that's that's a whole opinionated thing. But Borderlands 3, the announcement trailer came out. It is officially coming out on September 13th of this year on the Epic Game Store exclusively. Yeah. And that's what we're going to focus on this topic a little bit more. It's something that's going to be a little bit tiring. And some of you are probably like, oh my God, he's going to talk about it. Yeah, I am. Because I feel like I feel like this needs to be discussed because it's a problem. It is a problem and it may not be the problem that you think I'm going to talk about. And it is going to be a six months, six month exclusive on the Epic Game Store. And it'll be available in other stores in April 2020. This story comes about we have the Verge.com, but it's all over the Internet. It's everywhere. So OK, Borderlands 3, we kind of saw it common. I mean, they do use the Epic Engine. They do use Unreal. And I do believe that, you know, anybody that uses Unreal these in this day and age, they're going to be looking at the Epic Game Store as a very attractive offer, not just publishers, not just people who write the checks, but I think developers in tandem will be saying, hey, maybe we should seriously look at this Epic Game Store as a possible option. Now, with that said, I agree with a lot of the naysayers on the Internet, and I'll try to keep the naysayers and the court of public opinion and just the wild varying opinions out there. I'll try to keep that at bay and just talk about how I feel about things rather than a reaction to the nonsense. I think I'll just talk about how I feel about it mostly. I can understand and I'll try to keep it to this. I can understand why people don't like the Epic Game Store. It is very feature bear at the moment. It reminds me of the very, very early days of Steam back in 2004 when I joined it. Yes, it's been that long and Steam was very bare, basically had two or three games on it, no features, nothing. It was just a bare launcher slash storefront. You barely call it a launcher. It was just a storefront and it had a lot of DRM and back then DRM didn't exist with a lot of stuff with video games. It was frowned upon quite a bit for a lot of different reasons and that took a long time. It took probably five to maybe 10 years for people to ease up on Steam and even to this day, people still don't like Steam that much because of the DRM. Epic Game Store is something that you, is there's reason not to prefer it? I should say not. I wouldn't say not like it, but not to prefer it because it doesn't have a lot of the things that you're used to, especially if you're been using Steam your whole life. And your whole viewpoint of video games on PC surrounds Steam, it doesn't have a lot of the features. It doesn't have forums. It doesn't have a workshop, which I think is a big deal. Steam Workshop with mod supports why we want the best things about Steam. It doesn't have a peer review system, which, you know, that could be argued as being a good or bad thing. I don't know, depending on your viewpoint. And it doesn't have as a robust friend and community system. With that said, Epic has committed to building out these things in the future, but you know, gamers are looking at the now. They're not looking at the future. So when you hear about Borderlands 3 being on the Epic Game Store and not on Steam, immediately people point to the things that will possibly be missing. They go Borderlands 3 ain't going to have any kind of mod or workshop support. Borderlands 3 is not going to have a community forum built in. Borderlands 3 is not going to have good multiplayer. And some people argue, again, I'm going to try to keep this as minimal as possible about the naysayers, that the Epic Game Store has bad account security. And I just laugh at that. I don't know if it could be a short term memory thing or something. But over the years, Steam and security issues and account stealing and loot boxes and Counter-Strike stuff and Dota stuff and people's accounts being hacked via messages and accounts being hijacked and scams has been off the freaking charts. So I'll just I'll just lead with that. That Steam's account security ain't all roses and gravy either. I mean, we recently got two factor on Steam like in the past couple of years, right? So people argue that the Epic Game Store has poor security. They also argue that Epic Game Store has poor customer support of which I can agree. Having been a victim of their customer support with my wife's Fortnite account being banned for no reason and pretty much being tossed out. Yes, I agree with that point. So there I definitely agree with the customer support being terrible. There's no refund support right built and baked into the shop. You have to actually, you know, you have to I think it's request a customer support ticket to get a refund. So it's kind of sloppy. So Epic Game Store is like Steam in the early days. It's a point I'm making here. It's like Steam in the early days and in some ways better in some ways worse. And it's an evolution, evolution process. If you've watched Fortnite, if you've watched how they're treating a lot of their things at Epic now, it's a very iterative, very, very agile development type of environment where they iterate quickly. They add features quickly based on customer feedback, but they start small and they build up from that based on their GDC talks. That's what they're going to go in the future. They're going to slowly add features on an as needed basis and not throw everything in the kitchen sink at once. So it's easy to say that when Borderlands 3 has been announced as an exclusive on the Epic Game Store that, man, we're going to miss all these things, but you're forgetting. If you think of that way, you're forgetting a giant part of video games. And that's the video game itself. PC gaming right now is in the battle with console exclusivity, which means that games like The Last of Us, games like God of War. We don't even see those games on PC, period, which frustrates me as a gamer that I am stuck behind hardware exclusivity. PC gaming today has a multitude of stores. We have the Epic Gaming Store that we're talking about. We got Steam, we got Uplay. These are storefronts. We got Origin. We've got a bunch of different ones. Bethesda had their launcher for a while, but they gave up on that. We've got all these different stores, but the bottom line is at the end of the day, I can play on my PC hardware, which is choice. Not only do I have choice of peripherals, inputs, a bunch of other stuff, but I have choice of which storefront I want to use and which choice of games I want to play and how I want to play them. Now, these different storefronts and these different ecosystems have their own separate friends list, which is annoying. They have their own separate launchers, which is annoying and they have their own separate DRM principles and customer support, customer stores, refund policies, which is annoying. But at the end of the day, I can play the video game I want to play on my PC. I really think gamers need to ground themselves and think about it from that perspective. Oh, no, I can't play this game because it's not on Steam is a really, really shallow and narrow-minded view of where we are today in a gaming as a whole. Like I said, look at console exclusivity versus PC. That's something to be upset about. Having to download a mediocre and less feature rich store to play the game, which is why you're doing this to play the actual game, not the things surrounding the game, not the friends list, not the forums, not the mods, but they actually played the game. You can play the game period. That should be it. And it's so frustrating to hear to hear a lot of complaints about Epic in particular where Steam does the same thing or has done the same thing in the past and are doing worse things. When the term anti-consumer comes up in this conversation, I think about loot boxes and I think about keys and I think about cosmetics on Steam. I think about the marketplace. You know what I also think about, which is probably the most anti-consumer thing on Steam. I'm sorry, the most anti-consumer thing that I can think of in PC gaming today is the Steam marketplace. If you buy and sell on the Steam marketplace, your money is trapped. It is literally held hostage. You can't use it on anything else. But what's on Steam? When you fill your Steam wallet, that money is trapped. You can't do anything else with it. You can't withdraw it. You can't you can't get it back. Like, oops, I want this money back. I bought the Steam card, but I want the money back. No. You got to request a refund on the whole thing. If you sell something on there that they have valued as real money, it's stuck and trapped on that marketplace, which to me is not a good thing is you really shouldn't want that elsewhere on other systems. Sure. I mean, I could get behind like loyalty point systems like you play does you play. Yeah, you play the loyalty point systems where you if you do things on their ecosystem, you get rewarded with points that you can use to read to redeem rewards to get discounts on games. I can get behind that. That's okay. That's that's something to get me to use the system. But when you start talking about freaking real dollars and you trap it behind a marketplace, that's something to complain about and I don't like it about steam. But here is the thing. If I don't like something about that part of a ecosystem or marketplace, it does not affect me playing Securo. It does not affect me playing Warframe. I still can play those games at the end of the day. I am a gamer. I am not a market place or I am not a community here. I am not a workshopper. I am a gamer. I want to play the video game. Nothing in the Epic Game Store that I've been using that for quite a while has prevented me from doing that. Like I said, I had a couple of spats with the customer service and it's not like I haven't had that on Steam. Steam has had their problems. Origin has had their problems. Let's go back in time. Shall we? Origin and Uplay. They had some really bumpy launches. I mean Uplay, the reward root kit comes to mind. You remember that? The Uplay DRM was found to have a root kit on it twice. We forgave them and moved on. I really believe that the reasoning that people put forth to say they're limiting my choice. Therefore, it is bad. On the PC platform, it is all about choice. Okay. What people are complaining about is not choice to play a game because you can play the game. That's the big deal here. You're buying a game. You can play the game. They're talking about the ecosystem that they play the game in, the environment that they play the game in, the walled garden that their game that surrounds their game by offering an exclusivity clause to developers. They believe that Epic, the Epic Game Store. I'm trying to limit all these through buttock arguments, but they believe that the Epic Game Store is anti-consumer and limiting their choice. Now, certain facets and parts of that, I can agree with the concern and the dislike. What I don't agree with is the elevated amount of hatred and the justification for boycott because one of the most popular games on PC right now is called Apex Legends. You can't play Apex Legends on Steam. One of the other popular games that you can play on PC that you can't play on Steam is called Fortnite. These are games that you cannot play. FIFA, one of the most popular games in the entire world, you can't play on Steam. So why has the Steam walled garden become so important now? It's been elevated to a new status that it should not be in, honestly. Steam is not that good. I hate to break it to you. Steam is not that good. You may have invested a lot of time and money. You have a lot of games on Steam. You have a lot of investment, but that doesn't make it good. It has a large feature set because it's been around for 15 years. And you know, that's time-based. That's not really quality. Steam is a pile of garbage and Valve is just now starting to fix it up. Whether you agree to that or not is an opinion, but that's mine. That Steam is just terrible right now. And hey, the Epic Game Store is no better, right? But look, they've got competition and this is something Tim Sweeney said that I want. I want to emphasize a little bit on the only way to combat the Steam monopoly because there is a monopoly. That's not a debatable point. Steam dominates the entire PC market and margins that are unfathom. When you when you're faced with a monopoly like Steam, if you want to compete with that, you have to go with exclusives because given the choice given the choice of Steam and something else, the vast majority of gamers are going to choose Steam. Now I'm not talking to you, the user of GOG. I'm not talking to you, the user of Origin. I'm talking about the vast majority of gamers out there will use Steam. You can have the better store. You can have better features, features, better features. And this has been argued many times. I mean in DOJ and Department of Justice hearings with Microsoft and their monopoly trials and everybody, you can have better features to combat. These monopolies, these monopolistic practices. You can have a better store. You can have a better experience. It can be so much better, but given the choice between that better experience and Steam, which is the market leader, gamers are going to choose Steam. Having a better product is not enough. You can disagree with me all day. As a consumer, I want a better product, but it's not enough. Just look at Twitch. Let's look at Twitch as an example. Twitch is not the better product. When it comes to features and experience and and how live streaming is done, YouTube and Twitter do a lot of better things than Twitch. It is not the better product. It isn't. But it has the market share. It has the mind share. It's not necessarily monopolistic as a Steam, but Twitch is lacking in a lot of ways, but people still use it. The better product doesn't always win. Anybody with any kind of business savvy knows this, the better product doesn't always win. You have to do other things. You have to get people to use your product instead of your competitors. Now software exclusivity is not as evil as I think people think it is. Hardware exclusivity requires you to buy an entire machine like look at Apple. Look at look at Apple and Android and look at Sony and Microsoft. That requires you to buy a specific piece of hardware in order to use software. That combination I do not like. Okay, I don't like that, but software exclusivity, which can run on my PC with a small download and I can run it alongside something else. I have no problem with that. I've been do I was do building my computers with Windows and Linux and all kinds of other stuff for a very long time. There are stuff that only works in those platforms in those gardens in those in those areas, but it's software exclusivity. You got to understand software exclusivity is not that evil if your PC can run both without one tainting or hindering the other. If one product is not tainting or hindering the other and they can run perfectly alongside each other, I don't see anything wrong as long as I can get to the product. Again, the walled garden of the Epic Game Store, the walled garden of the Steam Marketplace is what's driving people crazy right now. But we're gamers. Shouldn't the game matter? So what? You don't get Steam achievements. You can get achievements right in the game. You don't get anything special for having Steam achievements other than cloud. So what? If you don't have those achievements, you can have achievements right in the game. Borderlands 1 gave you a ton of XP if you got achievements. So what? You can't have your workshop right off the bat so far. I mean, it's a kind of a good argument, but so far you can't so what if you can't have full blown mods? Day one. What game ship with with mod support day one these days? Not a whole lot. There are some, but not a whole lot of ship with mod support on day one. So what? You can't have your forms, your built-in forms. I'll be honest. Hand up right now. I never use Steam forms. If I have a problem, I never use Steam forms. I go to the subreddit or I go to the company's forms that they have. I never use that. So if you have to have that, I don't understand why that's such an important thing. I really don't. So if you don't understand my viewpoint on this, I think the emphasis is being thrown around and a lot of misinformation. Listen here. People are making up stuff every new year. They're making up new things about Epic Game Store. That's just it's just mind boggling and appalling. It's like borderline politics type of arguments. It's fear mongering. You're scaring people off the platform calling the calling the Epic Game Store spyware. Talking about your account will be compromised if you use the Epic Game Store. When it happens on Steam billions of times a year, people's accounts get compromised all the time to get TF2 hats to get to get counter-strike skins to get knives to get all this anti-consumer stuff that Valve does. People's accounts get compromised all the time. But yet now is super important on the Epic Game Store because it's threatening your precious flowers and gardens in Steam. You've got four hundred and fifty dollars in Steam monies from selling all kinds of cards and trading skins and you don't want that to be compromised. You can't spend that trapped money from Steam on something else. So you're going to blame Epic because you're trapped on Steam. Your money is trapped, but it's Epic's fault. No. No. This is about video games, everybody. This is about video games. You can play the games. You can't play God of War. You can't play. You can't play The Last of Us on your PC. That's a reason to be concerned. That's a reason to be a little bit, you know, perturbed. You can play Borderlands 3 on your PC. And guess what? You'll be able to play cross-platform with consoles thanks to the Epic Game Store. This is something that Steam has been moving very slow on for years to get cross-play. Remember, remember they were trying to put Steam on the Xbox and Steam on this? It was like moving really slow. Outcomes Fortnite, they do it in less than a year. Suddenly we got cross-play. But everybody hates that. Everybody wants cross-play, but we hate Epic because they're giving developers the ability to have cross-play just by using their bare storefront that doesn't have the wall garden that Steam has. But yet and still, your gaming experience will be enhanced by 10,000 times because you'll be able to play with PS4 and Xbox players that don't have a PC. But you're mad because you don't have your workshop. You don't have your forums. You're mad because Epic Game Store used a local file to import your Steam friends rather than go into the Steam API. So you've dubbed it spyware. You're mad. Not because of the game, but because of the freaking storefront and the freaking wall garden. You need to take a step back, gamer. I'm talking to you, gamer. You need to take a step back and look at what is actually being offered here. A video game, a wall garden and an ecosystem. People get invested, man. It's like, it's like Mac versus PC. It's like, it's like PS4 versus Xbox. It's like, it's like iOS versus Android. They get invested in their ecosystem so much that it becomes a religion cult type of thing where I can't use anything else. And like I said, those situations, I can understand hardware exclusivity being an issue because that's a very expensive decision. You make that decision. You're thousands of dollars in a hole to go try something else. We're talking about a free download of a game store. Our free download people free. They're not charging you anything. Seriously. This culture of just overreaction to the most meaningless things, it's okay to be passionate. It's okay to express your disdain or concern with the company and how they're doing something, but we are focusing on the wrong things. These are very minor things that are being propelled as being super important. There are much bigger issues than this. Much bigger issues and valve is behind a lot of them. But we give them a pass for some reason. It's okay for valve to have loot boxes, but it's not okay for EA to have them. This is what I'm talking about. Oh man. All right. I'm down for my soapbox. Check it out guys. Borderlands 3 on the Epic Game Store exclusive for six months. I'm going to buy it. I'm going to play it. Use the code Buona when you check out on the Epic Game Store to help your boy out. Okay, let's move on to the next thing. I this is why I warned you. This is why we're only doing two stories. Let's talk about Anthem BioWare is Anthem. If you don't know what Anthem is, it is a looter shooter created by BioWare came out earlier this year. It's competition to Warframe competition to the Division 2. I've talked about both of these on my YouTube channel YouTube.com slash want to check it out. I got reviews of Division. I got the first 20 hours of Warframe first 20 hours of Anthem review and I do believe I have a initial impression video for Division 2. You can check both of those out on the channel. Kotaku put out a massive post and I don't generally read Kotaku. You probably noticed that on my on my outlets that I don't talk about. I don't use Kotaku stuff because I don't have a lot of respect for the site. I have my reasons. But this this article by Jason Schreyer. Schreyer Schreyer. You know, it's a good article. It's very long. That's my issue with is very long-winded. It could be cut by a third and say the same thing. It's basically a mini novel. It's like a mini documentary in text form. And it's gotten a lot of press and even caught the the it even caught the attention of the BioWare executives. So much so that they had a rebuttal within minutes. It's called how about how BioWare's anthem went wrong. And if you just as a excuse me just as a preface, if you haven't followed my my my journey on Anthem, I had a generally good impression with the game. It was to me, it was like average to above average in a lot of ways and that reflects its 55 score on Metacritic. To me, that's like that's like barely above average, even though people think 55 is terrible. To me, that's like above average 50 should be average, right? That I mean, that's the way I do math. And I praised the game's loop in terms of combat. I praised its general story. It was a decent story, but it was plagued with a lot of of this of just just disjointed systems and bugs. And I got a lot of bad things to say about that on my blog post on one of that TV slides blog. I talk about why Anthem is the way it is, you know, why I think of the way it is. And just one day I was playing it, even with all these issues I was playing it. And then one day on stream, I think it was a patch day or one day of a patch days. I just I got fed up. I was like, well, I'm just going to wait. I think I remember what it was. I encountered a mission bug where we kept getting teleported back to the beginning after we hit a spot where it was telling us to go for the mission. So it was a mission bug. And I said, that's it. I can't play this game anymore. I just can't play this game anymore. I'm going to wait until they fix it and I uninstalled it and I haven't played it since except to test my new video card and my new system. So that's where I'm at. I'm not playing Anthem right now. I think it needs to bake some more. And that's kind of what this article alludes to. It is a great story. Let me tell you if you got time, sit back and drink some coffee or some tea and read this post over on Kotaku. I will link it. It goes way back to to when the whole thing was conceived and what was called beyond. That was the name of the game way back when and this article goes and interviews 19 current and former Bioware employees to get information. Okay. And the the people are anonymous because they're really not supposed to be doing this. There's a lot to this and it stems from the whole lack of focus. I'm trying to summarize this as much as possible because there is so much in this. It goes back to when the game was first conceived and nobody really knew what they wanted to do. They just wanted a game where you can go out with friends, do stuff in a harsh environment and then come back and talk about it. That's what the article kind of pitches as the original anthem thing. But all the little details in between that changed dramatically over the years shifted focus. People left the company leadership was changed multiple times and I have experienced this first hand in my workforce experience. I have experienced this exact thing. I was on the project management shifted multiple times on a seemingly unfixable thing and it was a train wreck just continuing to move and just never stopped. And that seems to be what this this anthem thing turned out to be. There's just there were so many problems with the development process with lack of focus. Okay, let's talk about the lack of focus thing first so many times as this article points out nobody knew what they were building. They had no idea what the game was going to be about. They couldn't they could if you asked them what the game was they couldn't tell you because the focus of the game kept shifting. And it's one of those one of those situations where if you're working on something and you don't know what you're building and management can't make up the mind what they're building. You go into this cyclical loop of uncertainty and just meaningless work and time just continues to move on next thing you know six years have passed. We got a release in six months. Oh my God, what do we do? That's what happened with Anthem. They were in this loop of just uncertainty and just nothing was getting done. No decisions were being made and then all of a sudden they had to release in the fall of 2018 and they were not ready. So they went through a I believe it was 6 to 12 months of just extreme last minute. Oh my God, let's ship it. And it kind of makes sense if you look at the state of the game there are so many unfinished and and so many incomplete systems in Anthem that it kind of it speaks to that. And a big big big bullet point of this article is just the work atmosphere that was at Bioware. Here's a quote that says many say that their coworkers had to take stress leave. A doctor mandated period of weeks or even months worth of vacation for their mental health. One former Bioware developer told me that they would frequently find a private room in the office shut the door and just cry. People were so angry and sad all the time. Depression and anxiety are an epidemic within Bioware. I can't. I actually cannot count the amount of stress casualties. We had a Mass Effect Andromeda or Anthem set a third former Bioware developer in an email. A stress casualty at Bioware means someone has such a mental breakdown from a stress from the stress. They're just gone for one to three months and they don't come back sometimes. Wow. So I mean different takes you know is some people may see it as that some people may see it as a party because I've been in stressful environments and some people thrive off that stuff. But that's that's harsh. If you can if you can justify that that's true. That's something that's actually happening in that people get so stressed. I mean it's a documented fact that so many of the original Bioware developers have left not just the big names. A lot of people that work there from the early days are gone. They left that kind of backs up the story. And another big thing about this this whole Anthem stories well something that we gamers kind of propagated gamers like to compete. Let me tell you man. There could be anything going on in gaming and a lot of video gamers choose sides. Whether it's a side to an argument whether it's a platform whether it's a game Warframe versus Destiny whether it's War the Warcraft versus Final Fantasy is Battlefield versus Call of Duty. We just have to choose sides man. Epic Game Store versus Steam. I just talked about that. And one of the things that we gamers propagated with this whole Bioware thing is the development studios. We even gave them names. We got the A team the B team and the C team. We got the Edmonton studio which is the A team. These guys made Mass Effect and Dragon Age I believe right. Yeah. Then we got the Austin team which made Star Wars the old Republic and then we got the Montreal team I think is Montreal which is like the C team. So essentially when you refer to the A team those are supposed to be the good developers. Oh Montreal didn't work. I'm sorry Edmonton didn't work on that. So that's why the game sucks. And the problem is right now in this article that kind of attitude was propagating in throughout Bioware itself internally the Edmonton team essentially were cocky and arrogant according to the article that they looked down upon the Austin team. They looked at them looked at them as grunts and when you talk about what they think about with the C team that's kind of messed up and a lot of the creativity and the ideas and the design decisions from this article seem to come from Edmonton and much I'm not Montreal the guys over in Austin were screaming hey listen guys we found out that in Star Wars your Republic this didn't work. We noticed that you're doing the same thing in Anthem. Maybe we should learn from that mistake that we found out and not do this. And that fell on deaf ears. So this article goes into group. It's just so much detail about where it's really long and that's why it's hard for me to really focus on any one part of it. I'm trying to talk about the bullet points that I received out of it from how it was called beyond to what the ideals were to the pitch. This is another thing I want to talk about the one of the pitch to the executives. This is something that the buyer were do every every year they they create a demo for the employees to take home and play and come back with the comeback with feedback. So in 20 I think it was 2016 they sent everybody home with the demo of Anthem one of the executives came back and said that it was terrible. And he thought it was boring. So what they did was get this they they tried to spruce it up to impress this guy and they added flight because it was the big differentiator between it and other games. So they added flight to impress this one guy and he liked it. So flight stayed in. This is like year five or six into development and they kept talking about this. They kept adding a removing flight many times throughout the entire development life cycle but they wanted to impress this one guy and they added flight and he liked it. Therefore it stayed. So flight was added really late in the development cycle which kind of explains why flight sucked in the beginning when we got our hands on the demo flight felt really bad because it was added late and that's another theme of this article is that Bioware just ran out of time. They really started development in the last six months of the development cycle. So six months leading up to the launch. That's when development really production development. They call it pre production and production production development really began really really began six months leading up to it and one of the biggest issues they talk about and this is not the first time I've heard this. Is a frostbite frostbite is the engine used by it's made famous by EA and dice main namely with the battlefield series and as an end user of frostbite I'm a fan because frostbite really looks good and it performs reasonably reasonably well in a very very large setting. So it was perfect for battlefield. I can't really say this is also perfect for battlefront to I think those types of games that works with the well I can't say that there is a frostbite RPG that I really thought was great. So this article goes on to say that frostbite is full of razor blades as one former Bioware developer put it. This engine is so bad in terms of just documentation and how things are written and how things are structured that anybody outside of dice who tries to use it. I mean is I think the word is a lot of terms for this where there's undocumented engines and stuff that people try to take a take over and use that they can't but they just could not could not cut it and the people behind Dragon Age Inquisition in 2011 said the same thing said that trying to use frostbite to do anything takes twice as long. So here's a here's a compounded issue that's happening. I think that's the word of the day for the situation is a compounded issue. Here you have a really bad development process. You got shifting leadership. You've got lack of focus. So let's say you have a bug or a software hurdle or hurdle to get over not only do you have all these problems process and procedure wise but now you've got a really really really convoluted engine to use and it takes twice as long sometimes three times as long to fix a small bug. This is what this is what we talk about the story man you kind of feel sorry for the developer for the employees that had to go through this you kind of feel sorry for him because this is like the worst case scenario for a lot of development teams out there. You've got this big overbearing pressure from EA to release in the fiscal year because that's what you committed to you're doing everything wrong you're taking way too long to do it and you're using bad tools on top of that that kind of leads credence to the whole stress sleeve thing that's that's a very bad situation to be in. Here's a quote Frostbiker is like an in-house engine with all the problems that entails is poorly documented hacked together and so on with all the problems of an externally source engine. Nobody you actually work with designed it so you don't know why this thing works the way it does why this is named the way it is this is from a developer throughout the early years in development the anthem team realized that many of his ideas they've originally conceived would be difficult if not impossible to create own frostbite and I like I said I've heard this from other people that the engine is not as flexible as unreal and I think that's what this executive here I keep referring to him as the executive let me get his name here is Peter something I think I'm probably going to mess up his name I'll find it at some point there's so much to talk about here guys I'm sorry it's kind of hard it's like it's like and it's like anthem it's hard to stay focused he put out a directive this executive he put out a directive that every game at EA should use the same tech we're not going to license any more engines we got frostbite frostbite can do anything apparently that's what he believes I believe personally frostbite can do shooters massively world's big world shooters like like battlefront to and it can do things like battlefield but I don't know if it can do a looter shooter and I think that's what the team and anthem found out that you know you've got a lot of static stuff in those situations you you got some progression but it's not like a looter shooter progression here's another great quote it's hard enough to make a game it's really hard to make a game where you have to fight your own two set all the time I think that that kind of sums up the whole frostbite thing so moving on it's so much more man this game was in pre-production for four years pre-production for four years the last couple years I think the lot I think I said this the last six months is where production actually really kicked in I don't know what to say man anthem is is a cobble together mess that has some bright points it has some really good bright points you can tell where the work went in from the developers but it's like putting together seven different puzzle puzzles let's say you get the same picture right you get the same picture but you've got four different versions of that picture in four different puzzle boxes and you toss all the pieces on the table and you tell the gamer to put the picture together you're gonna have some duplicate parts you can have some things that don't fit you can have some things that are outside the boundaries is gonna have different shapes and sizes it's really really really disjointed this game and honestly it's sad to see because it has such great potential who in the world who in the right mind wouldn't want to play an Ironman looter shooter like honestly that's just that sounds good Patrick Sutherland that's his name Patrick Sutherland he's the one who I think is a tall guy he's the one who said that everybody's got to use everybody's got to use everybody's gonna use frostbite oh man so it's really really sad to talk about this because I know that the team at Bioware is working hard well I'm not gonna say I know I assume that the team at Bioware is working really hard on Anthem to make things better to improve what's there for the players who are still playing which I gotta say I have respect for you guys you players who are still playing right now and are remaining true I gotta say I'm impressed because that game is broken on all kinds of levels all kinds of levels I'm not gonna talk about much more because there's so much I just don't I just don't remember there's just so much in this article I'm scrolling through it right now it's just miles and miles and miles and miles of text but if I could summarize this in a couple sentences I can say that Anthem had a really troubled development with with shifting management shifting focuses and they realized it way too late that we need to ship this thing and they brought in this guy who said they brought in this on this executive I think is that producer they brought in a head to head head guy who yeah executive producer Mark Dara who basically got them to ship he just said just finish what you're doing stop changing your mind he made decisions and the game shipped in a broken state that's why I mean some people say all EA didn't give Bioware enough time this article really summarizes how I feel about this statement it's not always EA publishers give you deadlines they give you they give you reasonable deadlines and you can't blame it all on them this is a broken dev shop period we're seeing it with Bethesda as well and we're starting to see the cracks at Blizzard this is a broken dev shop you can't blame that on the publisher okay you can't blame that when they're fighting each other internally when you've got the high and mighty Edmonton people looking down on Austin people you can't blame EA for that when you've got okay you can't blame the frostbite stuff on EA because if they're pushing frostbite on everybody that could definitely hurt things you can't blame that on EA but still man it's it you can't you can't fix something like this to say that they if they were given more time I really think they just would have spun their wheels until the last minute again they have this thing called Bioware magic that they mentioned in this article where they don't worry about anything because they'll all come together somehow I kid you not they don't even it's like magic they go well I don't know what we're gonna do but do the Bioware magic will happen somehow things will work out and I haven't been in the middle of a crunch it takes a lot of personal sacrifice stress and stuff to make that happen and to just shrug it off as magic is not only it's not only disrespectful for the people who sweat blood and tears to just call it magic and not hard work but it's also really really short-sighted and irresponsible to even rely on something like that when things are bad they say well at least we've got Bioware magic that's irresponsible that's really bad and I would leave the company too if somebody said that so it's okay if we're behind you guys will pull it together somehow haha I'm going to get a drink you know that's disrespectful he's like oh I guess I'm I'm not leaving the office for three months stress man is stressful so with all that said this article came out and then Bioware responded they it's a very PR heavy statement they really ran this through the PR thanks and they're praising the teams and this was a team effort we don't want to single out people blah blah blah but here's a quote right here that I think is why they're getting ridiculed for this because the general consensus from the court of public opinion is that this was a bad response I think it was a decent response until they got to this they said people in this industry put so much passion and energy into making something fun I agree with that we don't see the value in tearing down one another or one another's work we don't believe articles that do that make our industry or and craft better listen here man that is so that's such that's such a terrible thing to say that's deflection that's not taking responsibility that's basically calling Kotaku a villain for reporting what employers are saying employees are saying not once in this Kotaku article did I see anything personal or it was a very well written article I didn't see anything that was biased what I saw was a summation of what employees and former anchoring employees were reporting it was very very neutral from the Kotaku standpoint which is rare these days in journalism it's very very neutral so to kind of point the finger at Kotaku and go you shouldn't tear us down is a gross a gross stance of just ignoring what was what just happened over the past six seven years and there's a lot of deflection that they said that you know we put a lot of focus on better planning to avoid crunch time and it was not a major topic of feedback in our internal post mortems I okay well there's a problem there so what we see what I see here is a big wall of denial and a big wall of of just hand I think somebody called it hand waving like Jedi hand waving this is this is not the bio where you're looking for move along sweep it under the rug this is not this is not this is not what you're looking for our full focus this isn't from the article from the bio where response our full focus is on our players and continue to make anthem everything it can be for our community thank you to our fans of your support we do what we do for you that's probably true from certain perspectives but the way you're doing is is is it really deserves here's a point I'm making here this deserves to be addressed your development process on anthem needs to be highlighted and I think there's a quote in this yeah there is a quote that says that there are people that hope that that Dragon Age Inquisition would do bad because it would teach Bioware lesson as to not this is not how you do not how you build games so I don't think and I don't think they've learned that lesson because anthem sold so much it was successful from a sales standpoint and I don't think they're they're learning that this is not how you do it and here's a problem with entertainment here's a problem with entertainment a lot of people like what would you if you don't buy it they won't do it ain't that simple not with entertainment if we're talking about a household product like a faulty VCR or I said VCR a faulty refrigerator or faulty microwave or you know your your table falls apart you could easily vote with your wallet on that because that's pretty that's pretty that's static I mean that's that's like objective that's logical entertainment is not logical entertainment is opinion fund-based depends on a lot of emotional variables you can't just say don't vote with your wallet because somebody may want to play that crap that has stuff that's out there they want to play that they want to do that you can't just vote with your wallet because there's people out there that want to do it they may not know all the issues there's there's a lot of information that that's just not available when it comes to entertainment it's not like a hard hard core product like a table or an appliance you know where either breaks or it doesn't and you just go out but you know if you just it just develops a bad reputation and even then in those products there's a lot of gray area that people get around you can't just say vote with your wallet okay you can you can educate like what I'm doing in this podcast you can educate people as to what happened what's happening with the game what's wrong but to tell people to vote with their wallet is like saying don't go see that movie they're gonna go see the movie if they want to watch it or not okay boycotts that's why boycotts and stuff like that just don't work what does work is when a game is so bad not to not I'm not telling people to vote with their wallets but when a game is so bad and it's so broken that when the developer comes out with another game it doesn't sell because of that not because you're telling people to vote with their wallet but because it was just so awful that people who bought that game they see the next one I'm buying that look at war z war z is a perfect example that developer who developed war z everything he touches nobody buys is still a following but he has developed a reputation Sergey he has developed a reputation that whatever he touches is going to fail and that's not based on voting with your wallet that's based on just experienced people experiencing bad product really really bad product that's where the product speaks for itself and I think that's what needs to happen to Bioware I think they're really close to that Blizzard is experiencing it to overwatches on a massive decline Diablo is laughable now war the warcraft is already is ready to is ready to kill itself that they're ready to go is ready to go it's on his last legs they revive classic and it's ready to go so these big studios which once seem unstoppable are now starting to falter because people are starting to see through and then you got other titles like fortnight coming up from a studio that made unreal tournament you know that this new generation is latching on to and loving and the old guards like well we want to do for tonight to but you can't there when the hearts and minds of these kids so whatever epic does in terms of a store now the epic game store is building on that trust there they're betting on the future you guys who stuck on the steam steam wall gardener living in the past epic is betting on this this fortnight generation these kids they're going to grow up they're going to get jobs they're going to get degrees and they're going to have fortnight still installed and they're going to be playing stuff on the epic game store so the hearts and minds of people are one not at telling them to vote with their wallet but is their realization of a bad product and there's only so much fanboyism out there I mean you can only fanboy anthem so long before you go all right this game's ridiculous it's happening everywhere man look at look at like a I'll be on the lines trying to make a comeback right now they're trying to win the hearts and minds of people look what happened with our cage and how so many people just stopped playing they weren't voting with their wallet now they just saw what happened and they don't want it to happen they're not going to go through it again it's like a mind shift it's like you it's like a post-mortem rather than a preventative thing if people can remember what happened in the past they won't they won't repeat it in the future that's the point I'm making don't tell people to vote with your wallet say remember what happened you know focus on remembering what happened do you want to go through that again if you do then buy the game if you don't then don't because that's what that's the thing and that's what a lot of people that's why I didn't get really mad at people that say well this is a EA game so you know what's going to happen I mean he has a bad track record it's a valid point a lot of EA games have bad track records but then you got people like you got the response entertainment which is like the most anti EA company under EA which doesn't use frostbite by the way they use source which didn't use any a marketing pre-marketing when they made apex legends they nearly dethrone fortnight it's kind of shifting back to fortnight now but in terms of mind share and twitching and YouTube but they nearly dethrone fortnight off of no marketing pre- marketing and simply shipped a complete game who knew who knew that if you shifted a complete if you shipped a complete game that people would actually play it and like it it wasn't this early access have baked have done stuff it was a complete game so check this out guys why what went wrong with anthem how by where's anthem went wrong it was in complete it was nowhere near complete I don't think anybody out there who says that it was it was a complete game at launch knows what they're talking about that that should go without debate the game wasn't done still isn't done and by where magic just didn't work it didn't work and and players are hoping that they can pull off the magic post mortem but I think you're looking at you're looking at something that's beyond repair this is my opinion on anthem I think anthem is beyond repair I really do I think there's only so much you can do to a video game without just completely scrapping it look at final fantasy 14 that game was beyond repair final fantasy 14 was beyond repair had very similar issues they had the old guard had arrogant people that wouldn't listen and it shipped a crappy product and it failed and the only way they fixed it was that they shut the game down and they just wiped it clean clean and started over and honestly that's the only thing I think anthem can do right now that's the only thing I think they can do I think they should just shut it down it's closed down the live service give players who have access to the game access to the next one do exactly what final fantasy 14 did if you bought anthem you'll get access to anthem reborn heck even use the name anthem reborn shut down for three to four years and finish the game don't release I have released game just finish it and if he doesn't give you enough time then just don't do it because right now by aware is sitting at a point to where in time where they're either going to be made or or not made by the reputation they've got a good reputation for past games and that's starting to falter this new generation I called the fortnight generation this is like the the eight to 14 year olds this this eight to 14 year old generation they don't care about Bioware and when they get older Bioware is not going to be a name for them where it's going to be us old focus or I remember dragon age mass effect we're good good they were like one fortnight you know so they have to make the right decisions now and I had high hopes for anthem I was really disappointed with it really really disappointed with anthem I had really high hopes I'm a big fan of the little shooter genre you know me I play a lot of warframe I put quite a few hours in the vision to which turned out to be a really good game by the way it's like the opposite of what anthem was even though it has issues it's just a really sad story it says this is not this is not something you wish for this is not something I'm happy to report on this is not something that makes me feel good this is depressing this is a one great studio that's got that's got anxiety and depression issues ran running rampant throughout their organization and management just they just put up a blog post saying that they don't exist they just basically said that they don't exist so these these developers are trapped I feel really bad for them check it out guys cataco.com has the article is massive if you're going to read it make sure I actually had to pause reading this and go eat some food and then come back because I ran out of energy it was just that lengthy how bio whereas anthem went wrong check it out and that concludes episode game chat with game chat episode what is this episode game chat with one of 132 I don't even know what day it is that was really long episode 133 that concludes episode 133 game chat with Buona I told you man this is why I only limited to those two stories because they just they could be really long-winded please guys follow my stream at twitch.tv slash Buona I stream pretty much daily except for Wednesdays and Sundays and we play a lot of stuff we talk and we hang out so if you want to hang out with our community talk with me about various gaming topics stuff I've talked about in this podcast come by the stream at twitch.tv slash Buona also my over youtube.com slash Buona where I post a lot of short videos I post I cross post this podcast and tech talk with Buona and a bunch of other tech news and reviews over there instagram.com slash Buona for the occasional snap of my dog my dogged dog my shitsuit Kent you guys will love them over there on instagram.com slash Buona we're working on merchandise right now we're on spread shirt but I'm not going to I'm not going to promote it as much because I'm having problems with store but if you want to buy from spread shirt right now the URLs at shop.spreadshirt.com slash Buona TV we have some issues with international orders so we're trying to work that out with spread shirt and this podcast is at Buona.tv slash podcast along with game chat Buona subscribe on Spotify iTunes Google play good old fashioned RSS or just download the MP3 directly from my site over on Buona.tv slash podcast it's been a big one been a long time since I did an hour plus episode of anything but I thought these were two juicy topics that are really big in gaming right now and they really have some important points that I like to talk about it's my passion I love doing this stuff thank you all for listening this is game chat Buona episode 133 and I will see you all next time have a great day