Art creation has always been a collaborative process consisting of dozens, even hundreds of people to complete the job. Creating a video game is no different, as games get bigger in scope and size, going from one developer to a thousand in the case of Rockstar’s North division. With this, it takes a lot of time to get a game from its pre-production phase to the storefront. To address the issue of time, companies have resolved to overwork their employees.

A tragically emotional instance of this would be the development cycle of BioWare’s Anthem. In 2017, the company announced its next project at E3 with a fancy demo shown to convention goers. What was unknown was that the game was still in pre-production, which confused the team. “After E3, that’s when it really felt like, ‘Okay, this is the game we’re making,’” said an anonymous dev to Kotaku’s Jason Schreier. What followed after E3 was a torturous cycle of working that broke several employees to the point of breakdown. Some had to take time off for months, with only a few returning to work.

Unfortunately, this journey of emotional baggage and stressful work was all for nothing, with Anthem critically panned for its rocky launch and mediocre gameplay loop. The cause for the gameplay being bland because the team originally had less than a year to complete the game, with only a delay from Fall 2018 to February 2019. At that point during the E3 reveal, they were still working on getting one mission working.

According to developers, they believed this could’ve been avoided if their previous game, Dragon Age: Inquisition, had failed. The game had a maddening development cycle, being finished in only a year. It enforced a mentality in upper management that they had “BioWare Magic,” meaning that no matter the obstacle, they’ll get it done. This gamble cost the company its reputation and the suffering of many who tried their best to deliver a game they knew wasn’t good.

This isn’t an issue that plagues BioWare. It’s an incredibly common problem not only in the video game industry but also in the film and animation industry. It’s an epidemic that has no signs of slowing down. Likewise, it may be a pessimistic way to view this as the norm, yet there are still acts we can do to stop this from happening. A good start is to platform stories like this widely as a motivator to not reward studios doing

Work Cited
Schreier, Jason. “How BioWare’s Anthem Went Wrong.” Kotaku, 2 April 2019, https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964. Accessed 17 January 2024.