After its pledge to completely overhaul the game, BioWare has provided a brief development update on its progress with Anthem in a blog post by studio director Christian Dailey. While stay-at-home measures as a result of COVID-19 are clearly making life difficult, the big takeaway is that BioWare has an “incubation team” actively prototyping new features and content in an effort to improve areas of the game where it “fell short.”
You can read the full blog post here, but here’s the most notable paragraph pertaining to the incubation team and what they’re up to:
“Incubation is a term we use internally – it essentially means we are going back and experimenting/prototyping to improve on the areas where we believe we fell short and to leverage everything that you love currently about Anthem.
We are a small team – about 30-ish, earning our way forward as we set out to hit our first major milestone goals. Spoiler – this is going to be a longer process. And yes, the team is small but the whole point of this is to take our time and go back to the drawing board. And a small team gives us the agility a larger one can’t afford.”
Dailey then explains that the team is particularly interested in involving the community with its efforts to improve Anthem. He acknowledges BioWare has “tough challenges to tackle,” which is why it’s essential from their point of view to involve player feedback.
“The reality is you will see things that look awesome but end up on the cutting room floor or things that you might think suck that you feel we are spending too much time on – but in the spirit of experimentation this is all OK. We really want to provide you all the transparency we can because of your passion and interest in Anthem”
Further to consistent blog posts, the plan is to involve the community actively in livestreams:
“…we also want to include you in more of the day to day and hopefully get you some real interactions with the team. These updates could come in the form of an ad-hoc live stream, or some cool concept art posted on social media, or the occasional feed of me curled up in a ball crying in the corner…”
Dailey concludes by reaffirming his belief that the team is moving Anthem in the right direction.
It’ll certainly be interesting to hear how development is progressing post-COVID-19 and once the team is able to move forward at full steam.
