A former BioWare employee shared that the team was aware that the game wasn't ready for release.
Last week, Daedalic Entertainment released The Lord of the Rings: Gollum. However, shortly after its launch, the game quickly gained a notorious reputation as the lowest-rated title of the year. In response to Gollum's troubled launch, developers from different studios took to Twitter, initiating a movement to express solidarity with the creators at Daedalic by sharing their own poorly received releases.
Among those developers was Ian Saterdalen, a former BioWare employee who had held the position of QA team lead for the studio's online multiplayer RPG, Anthem. He shared his experience of working on the title, revealing that the team was well aware that the game was not prepared for release.
Saterdalen explained that Anthem had been developed in an astonishingly short span of just 15 months. When asked about how the team managed to finish the game within that timeframe, he revealed that many developers worked overtime in the year leading up to the game's launch. According to him, he and numerous other developers often put in as much as 90 hours a week.
Anthem came under intense scrutiny when former Kotaku writer Jason Schreier published an in-depth article revealing the troubled development journey of the game. In his investigation, Schreier highlighted multiple challenges and setbacks faced during the game's creation shedding light on the negative effects it had on the developers involved.
In his tweets, Saterdalen acknowledged the credibility of Schreier's findings, however, he pointed out that the report only captured a limited portion of the complete story behind the actual events that took place during the game's creation. He also noted that the full story is unlikely to ever be revealed due to current and former employees still being bound by NDAs.
Saterdalen further expressed his belief that if BioWare hadn't launched Anthem when it did, the studio could have faced closure, jeopardizing any future Mass Effect and Dragon Age games.
As for the game's failure, he placed blame for it not only on EA but also on BioWare's top management.
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