Nintendo has IP lawyers. They have to, at their scale, because they will constantly be bombarded by patent trolls, licensing companies etc. trying to extract profit out of Nintendo. So, like any other large business, they hire IP lawyers to protect themselves.
Most patent disagreements are resolved by cross-licensing. That’s where one business says, in response to a law suit, “oh, but you’re actually using 6 of our patents, so maybe we can come to an agreement”. A patent is both a shield and a sword. Even against trolls they can be useful, as they can be used to argue against troll arguments, if it gets to court, or pull in other business to the defense, if helpful.
IP lawyers know this. So they extract every patent they can out of everything a company does, as a way to build up the IP bank.
So, I highly doubt “Nintendo wants to prevent others” bla bla. It’s just IP lawyers doing their job.
I’ve sat in MANY discovery sessions with IP lawyers where they push and prod at software I, or my team, have written. “So, what you’ve effectively done is written a unique data structure to connect elements in memory?!”, “no, it’s a linked list, next question please”.
I remember watching an interview of one of the developers of DA2 and I could tell that he had no idea what people liked in video games. It killed my interest.
I mean, the first one was good. It was all downhill from there, sadly. The second was decent, but suffered from a ton of re-used assets and a dumbed-down combat system. By the third, it seemed like they were trying to make a single-player MMO, which just made no damned sense to me. Never played the 4th. Maybe I’ll get it for free at some point and check it out.
I’d imagine these comments are being made as a some thought experiment kinda deal. I play tested one of their concepts for Anthem Next. It was unremarkable, and the majority of the session was them trying to narrow down why people played Destiny. It was obvious what audience they wanted. The guy running it was visibly annoyed that my looter shooter of choice at the time was The Division.
It wasn’t going to be anything without a lot more work. The flying was nice. Everything else was still painfully generic. There’s a reason it got canned.
Honestly Anthem was so fucking good. It’s a victim of the internet hate machine.
My hobby is video games, but some people’s hobby is hating things, and those people decided that Anthem was the next thing to hate. The hate was insanely disproportionate to the actual problems that Anthem had.
The endgame grind needed some work, but that’s always the case with a live service game. Comparing it to Destiny, which had been out for five years at that point, there wasn’t a lot of content. Comparing it to video games in general, it was fine. Easily worth the cost of a new game.
Graphics-wise? Top notch, triple-A.
And as far as gameplay, the actual most important part of a game? Anthem was a fucking masterpiece. The combat was fun and varied. Classes were distinct.
And the traversal was the best I’ve ever played. Soaring through the air like Iron Man and dipping into a waterfall so my suit doesn’t overheat is one of the video game highlights of my life.
But the internet ruined it. The same outrage machine that was built to respond to things like “a sense of pride and accomplishment” was turned on Anthem, not because it was that bad, but because there wasn’t anything else particularly hate-worthy that week.
I don’t think we played the game because Anthem was boring. I enjoyed being Iron Man but after an hour. But after that, it was kinda same ol’ for the next few hours.
I had more fun with Suicide Squad, because the city was awesome and the story was at least passable.
I did like the first hour - no question. But I think Anthem needed to cook some more. A lot more.
I think the worst thing BioWare did was ban people for loot exploiting when all they were doing was flying around in a loop collecting chests as they spawned. The players weren’t doing anything the game didn’t allow and banning them really created vitriol in the community. When added to the lack of end game, the player base just never got any growth momentum. It was really sad, because I was a huge BW fan and that game plus the loss of the Doctors really wrecked them (thanks EA /s). You could see the potential in Anthem, but it felt like a a great game engine waiting for the game to be written for it (honestly similar to pre-Forsaken Destiny 2, but even that had more content).
I’ve watched a few videos on the game and with this claim, I think they would have needed the ten years that NMS had, but there just isn’t as much of a unique idea underneath. Unless I was missing something Anthem was just a really pretty looter shooter with a cool suit.
It’s a pretty game, I’ll give it that, but they would have had to strip and rebuild the gameplay loop pretty much from scratch to make it that much of a success story.
NMS kept listening to feedback for years before it turned around, slowly building up good faith with each free release.
But let’s say Anthem Next magically turned it around. All that good faith will be gone when EA will try to shoehorn more looter shooter microtransaction BS and fuck everything up over and over again.
“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.
“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.
Fuck, man…all the reasons to do so are spelled out right there.
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