Gaming
Anthem “Delayed” Until Early 2019, and That’s a Good Thing
BioWare has been in hot water recently thanks to Mass Effect: Andromeda. In one fell swoop, the company has fallen from grace, and the recent announcement about the “delay” of BioWare’s upcoming title Anthem does not help the situation. However, every cloud has a silver lining, as does this news.
EA’s finance chief Blake Jorgensen recently informed Wall Street Journal journalist Sarah E. Needleman that EA is moving back the release date of Anthem from 2018 to “early 2019,” although Jorgensen claims this doesn’t counts as a delay. “People are trying to create a story,” explains Jorgensen. More importantly, he claims the later release date is not “due to development being behind schedule” as reported by sites such as Kotaku but instead a conscious decision to “get more attention [during] a quieter quarter.” Given that EA plans to release a new Battlefield game later this year, the delay actually makes sense.
The release date of a game can make or break its success. Gamers who have played Overwatch have likely heard about Battleborn, a game very similar to Overwatch that was released around the same time. Overwatch completely overshadowed Battleborn, which made the game sell poorly. Releasing Anthem during a “quieter quarter” when few big games are scheduled to release could easily help the game sell more copies, as it won’t have to go up against stiff competition such as Red Dead Redemption 2, Metro Exodus, or EA’s upcoming Battlefield game; nothing screams embarrassing more than having your game under-perform due to competition from another game you published.
While I disagree with Jorgensen’s claim that Anthem isn’t being delayed (the Cambridge, Merriam-Webster, and Oxford English Dictionaries all define a delay as the act of being postponed, slowed down, or late, which is exactly what is happening to Anthem), I don’t disagree with his reasoning. Moreover, pushing back Anthem‘s release a few months will give BioWare a chance to improve the game with a little extra polish. The company’s previous game, Mass Effect: Andromeda, was a dud. It released in a horrid state full of bugs, glitches, and amateurish character animations. Even if the game had launched without those problems, gamers still would have criticized Mass Effect: Andromeda‘s writing, characters, open worlds, and missions as being the worst in the franchise. Many gamers and critics have pointed out that Mass Effect: Andromeda‘s problems were the result of the BioWare Montreal branch’s inexperience and a short development period. Technically, Mass Effect: Andromeda was in development for five years, but the Montreal team started over from scratch so many times only a year and a half of work made it into the final product. Essentially, Mass Effect: Andromeda was rushed out the door by developers who simply didn’t have enough experience to make a good game.
While we don’t necessarily have to worry about inexperienced developers working on Anthem, if BioWare uses the extra months to make sure Anthem doesn’t suffer from the same glitches and bugs that plagued Mass Effect: Andromeda, I will gladly wait. First impressions are important, and even though Mass Effect: Andromeda is a decent game, the abysmal release state left a bad taste in many gamers’ mouths. As a new IP, Anthem can’t afford to leave a bad impression.
EA sits in the unenviable position of “game publisher gamers want to hate,” which is not good for its developers who just want to make good games. Gamers are already skeptical about EA and BioWare’s ability to deliver a good product with Anthem, especially since loot boxes will be included in the game; people have been wary of any game that uses loot boxes since EA’s Star Wars Battlefront 2 debacle, and now almost everyone expects EA to rush out and gut its upcoming games, including Anthem, for the sake of pushing loot boxes and microtransactions. BioWare faces an uphill, if not sisyphean, battle if it wants to convince people Anthem is a good game. The company needs to take its time to polish Anthem, and it will have this time thanks to the delay. However, if BioWare doesn’t make the most of these extra months and instead turns Anthem into “My Face is Tired 2: Electric Boogaloo,” I will probably lose all faith in the company.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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