After the launch of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum went less than smoothly, and the developers issued an apology. In addition, other developers have come forward with their stories of development hell.
One notable tale came from developer Ian Saterdalen, who is currently a lead producer at Mythical Games, and previously worked in various roles at Crystal Dynamics, Blizzard, Riot, and then BioWare at the time of Anthem’s development.
When Anthem was released, there had been months of hype from EA touting it as the next big thing in gaming. However, all that hype was lost on release when the game debuted clearly unfinished and lacking a definitive endgame. In reality, Anthem only had 15 months of development time, a deadline imposed by EA, who wanted the game shipped.
Ian Saterdalen took to Twitter to give his account of Anthem’s development. “I learned a lot on this project,” said Saterdalen. “We knew it wasn’t ready, as this game was literally created in 15 months, which is unheard of for a game that scope. Anthem 2 would have been great!” While he clarified that concept work was started on the project a few months before he joined the team, the time for his joining and the game shipping was 15 months.
According to Saterdalen, the dev team had to “pay the price” for the strict deadline imposed by the publisher. That price ended up being 90-hour weeks for 15 months. “It wasn’t sustainable and not even a position we should have been in […] I’m fine now, but not without damage. Contributed to the cost of my marriage, and I needed therapy for a while after that endeavor.”
He also discusses the audience’s reactions to the game upon its release, including several team members receiving death threats. He also touched on the problems of working with Frostbite, the demoralizing crunch, and how the publisher interfered with the development process. According to Saterdelan, “…besides no endgame and replayability, was that during development, management was putting in gating mechanics to ‘lengthen’ the time it took to complete the story,” said Saterdalen. “IIRC it was removed from the final version after backlash from devs.”
The proposed sequel was also touched on, with Salterdelan revealing it was well into development before getting canceled. “On Anthem 2.0/Anthem Next, the game was really fun and was going in the right direction, said Saterdalen. “The team had hit a really great milestone when EA canned it. It was a different development team driving Anthem 2.0. The team was gutted when it was canceled.”
