BioWare has published a vague rebuttal to a lengthy report on Anthem’s troubled development. The tone of the reply is generally dismissive, and it went up within minutes of the report’s publication. “We don’t see the value in tearing down one another,” the response reads, “or one another’s work. We don’t believe articles that do that are making our industry and craft better.”
The report on Anthem’s development was published by Kotaku earlier today, and the site sought comment from BioWare prior to publication – as is standard practice in these types of features. BioWare writes in its blog post that “We chose not to comment or participate in this story because we felt there was an unfair focus on specific team members and leaders, who did their absolute best to bring this totally new idea to fans.”
One of the key issues identified in the report is that BioWare leadership was often dismissive of feedback from developers on what was going wrong with the game and, early on, wasn’t making effective decisions to shape the game’s direction.
According to the report, developers were suffering under so much stress that they were often mandated by doctors to take weeks or months of ‘stress leave.’ To that, BioWare says “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 postmortems.”
While the 19 developers who spoke with Kotaku remained anonymous, former senior designer Manveer Heir, who worked with the studio on Mass Effect 3 and Andromeda, says the report mirrors his own experiences. He tweets that “it literally just sounds like the same shit we dealt with on MEA.”
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After BioWare published its blog post, Jason Schreier – the author of Kotaku’s report – tweeted “to those still at BioWare fuming at the company’s statement… wishing you the best.” While the blog post is attributed to BioWare as a whole, it seems not everyone at the studio shares the sentiment.