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“Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months before launch,” Darrah continued. “I don’t know that they still work, but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered. The reason you do this, it pulls away the costs of maintaining this game. So rather than having dedicated servers that are required for the game to run, you let the server run on one of the machines that’s playing the game.” This, he added, could have worked alongside an additional move to add AI party members to the game, allowing people to play it like a single-player game.
Ok, this is even more heartbreaking now. I loved the concept of Anthem and had a fair bit of fun with the game in its current (prior to shutdown) state and was hopeful that the “Next” project would overhaul it into something great. I still don’t blame EA for their decisions in this case; Bioware fucked around for way too long during development and the overhaul project was most likely seen as too little, too late… or too expensive.
This looks a lot more practical (but less amusing) than his previous iteration, which shocked his arm muscles into aiming at the correct spot.
Video is way off base. The game’s map is based off maps from the TTRPG, so they were going for accuracy to the source material. Also, having a smaller, denser map doesn’t necessarily equate to more story/gameplay. You still need writers and programmers to do their thing, even if the artists don’t need to make as many assets.
Also, fast travel was in the game since launch. Sure, you had to unlock each fast travel point, but that’s pretty standard in open world games.
Personally, I liked Night city as it was. It’s probably one of my favorite game worlds to exist in. More often than not, I found myself hopping on my bike and riding to my next destination while listening to the radio, rather than fast traveling. Screw cars though, lane splitting is much faster.
One streamer dropped over $100k on Diablo Immortal when it released. His gear was leveled so high, he couldn’t match against anyone else in pvp.
https://gamerant.com/diablo-immortal-100000-cant-get-into-matches/
Starcraft 2 for me. I haven’t had an optical drive in my pc for probably 10 years or so. The last “physical” game I bought was Mass Effect Andromeda, and it was just a box with a download code inside.
PC gamers were incentivized to move away from optical media asap, since optical drives read slowly compared to HDDs, and SSDs are even faster.
The Steam controller was definitely interesting. I bought two, one shortly after they released, and another when they were clearing them out. I never could get the hang of using the trackpad in place of an analog stick, though, and eventually bought an Xbox controller to game with on the pc. I still use one of them with my Steam Link when I stream tv shows from my pc to the tv.
Probably more floundering. An EA exec told them at one point that their demo was crap (and based on word from other devs, he was probably right), so they reintroduced flight, which IMO was one of the best aspects of the game. EA didn’t force a new story or concept on Bioware, though. All that was Bioware’s own fault between lack of leadership and staff burnout.
A long read, but this article goes pretty in-depth on what happened during the development of Anthem: https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964