Out with the new, and in with the old!
How Respawn’s confident use of old ideas and tech have freed them from the limitations of innovation, and how doing what people want has backfired for Anthem.
This is a small (way to long) op-ed I've spent a few days tinkering with. Its also my first one of these so if you have feedback on my writing style/content, I'd love to hear. Lets talk about cool developer tricks that keep things feeling fresh, monitisation and how weird EA is as a company right now!
EA released two games in February; Apex Legends and Anthem. Now, they find themselves with an overnight smash hit with Apex while the reaction to Anthem has been legions of angry comments and ‘mixed’ reviews. How did this happen? It’s clear there’s something in the water at Respawn. How can they do no wrong in gameplay, presentation and even monetisation while Bioware (and many other EAs studios) flounder at each step? I believe it’s due to Respawn’s unorthodox approach; while EA tries to appear like they’re constantly listening to fan feedback, Respawn have the confidence to back themselves and to rely on their own precedents. Respawn uses tried and true gameplay philosophies, which create subversive experiences rather than follow genre norms. Using tools, they understand and can manipulate as needs be, rather than serve the master of evolving technology. Finally, and somewhat nefariously, they obfuscate shady monetisation practices, using old casino tricks while other EA studios get hung out to dry for their attempts at transparency. In this way, Respawn’s willingness to re-utilise old philosophies of game-making have allowed them to succeed while it feels, to most gamers, like other EA studios are simply chasing trends.
Critically acclaimed Respawn are best known for being the sales equivalent of an expertly crafted sad trombone, no matter how Titanfall was it just couldn’t shift enough units. They’ve also made and cancelled a mobile game, are doing something with Oculus VR and have made Vince Zampella not talk about a Star Wars game in an E3 audience. But, people love their gameplay. Every mechanical choice made, level designed, and gun programmed gets a loving video essay dedicated to them. A beleaguered Bioware, on the other hand, has had every core mechanic compared and usually disparaged against Destiny, Warframe and the Division. Respawn’s games are simply seen as better products at day’s end.
The company is headed up by the architects of Call of Duty’s soft-reboot as a bombastic, modern military shooter, after spending its early entries literally stuck in the trenches. Their last game, Titanfall 2, featured a robust multiplayer offering, so smooth it still retains a dedicated player base, and yet two years later, it is still most fondly remembered for its expertly directed and paced single-player which is so out-and-out fun it is appropriately compared to Half Life 2, as if it were a sequel.
Titanfall’s masterclass in campaign design has been dissected by those far more insightful than I. However, I still feel it’s still worth taking note of. Like its engine, which it shares with Half-Life 2, many of the most popular aspects of Titanfall 2’s campaign and Apex’s take on BR aren’t new or ground-breaking. The tech which powers Titanfall is going on a decade old, but it remains a well understood tool. Flexible enough to allow the developers the freedom to jump from gameplay idea to gameplay idea, like a John Wick movie going from headshot to headshot, with spurts of creativity and set pieces in between. In the first mission, you’re a weak foot soldier under fire. Soon you’ll be wall-sliding, jumping and shooting. By the end of the game you’ll jump into your Titan, blow some mechs up and punch some dudes with your giant mecha-katana, like xXxGokuxXx, not to mention being thrown through wall running segments reminiscent of a physics-based puzzle-platformers like Portal, not traditional shooter campaigns. The pace at which mechanics are used, and are never over-used, is a testament to Respawn’s confidence in its directional skill. See the missions ‘Effect and Cause’ with its time bending euphoria or ‘Into the Abyss’’ nightmarish idea of a future Ikea.
While over in Apex the ‘contextual ping system’ is eerily comparable to team indicators (pings) found in many RTSs. Here in a tactical FPS it is hailed as a revolution especially on a controller where real-estate is already limited, and you’re dealing with the infamously clunky military Battle Royale genre, allowing firefights to feel competitive and fluid on every platform.
All this in comparison to Bioware and Anthem. Brad Shoemaker of Giant Bomb recently described the missions as ‘fly to the objective marker, kill the enemies, activate a thing, fly to the next objective marker, kill the enemies that are there… do that like three times per mission’, a criticism which was commonly levelled at Bioware’s last game, Mass Effect Andromeda. Such criticism was served with shock at the time, due to Bioware’s tradition of rich diverging questlines with meaningful and different (to a point) outcomes, not just semi-beefy combat mechanics paired with tedious audio-logs. It’s great seeing Bioware explore gameplay but the fact that they went from making RPG-series’ with slowly improving combat, to a shooter where compared to its competition the shooting feels ‘kinda mushy’, is a disappointment.
Its fine for gameplay to not be the star of your live-game, MMOs have played like Microsoft Exel spreadsheets for over a decade. However, when your mission finales include moving random orbs to X, turning on and protecting X, Killing X (the differently coloured X, that’s bigger and has a second bar above its head), ad nauseam and the story beats that carry you there are only tolerable at best, you have nowhere to hide how inconsequential your gameplay loop is. While Respawn was handcrafting moments for people to reminisce over, Bioware was building a world filled with familiar guns and tasks for people to share boring stories in, but, hey, you get to do it together… Unless you move too far away and everyone in your party hits a loading screen… Respawn’s gameplay loop and pacing has been refined over the years, its fun for 5 seconds every 10 seconds and feels great all the time. Anthem’s feels like Bioware are simply ticking boxes off a genre checklist, only to reward you with a level 57 jockstrap every 20 minutes, it feels like you’ve done it before, because you have, and it’s still boring even if you’re getting a level 59 jockstrap. Respawn’s gameplay changes every few minutes, challenging your expectations, whereas Anthem’s is the same for a countless number of hours in the hope that seeing some green numbers go up will sate any desire for real progression.
Does favouring tried and true precedents over innovation for innovation’s sake extend to a game’s engine as well? At the beginning of the 8th generation it was decided by some EA exec(s) that most all their 1st party teams were to shift from their preferred current inhouse or licenced engines to EA’s proprietary Frostbite. It looked bad for them to use other companies’ tech and cost plenty in licencing fees. This however didn’t apply to Respawn, who at the time were contractors and not owned by EA, allowing them to continue to use their modified-Source engine. What’s so great about Respawn ‘getting’ to use an almost decade old Frankenstein-patchwork engine? It’s more important to ask why it’s so great they weren’t constrained by innovation.
Bioware was forced to drop the versatile Unreal Engine 3, that’d served them through the Mass Effect games and RPG engines all their Star Wars and Dragon Age games had run on. Despite this change and Dragon Age: Inquisition’s comparably short turnaround for the PS4 and Xbox One, the team managed nothing short of a miracle, delivering a game which tidied up nicely during the 2014 awards season (even if 2014 is remembered as a weaker year for big releases). However, all was not well behind the scenes.
Bioware’s troubles have been well documented (see Raycevick’s retrospectives on the Mass Effect franchise, especially Andromeda). Upon, investigation of their game’s development you find a common thread; massively ambitious design documents, forcefully scaled down. Mass Effect was retrofitted into a connected trilogy after the first sold gangbusters, gaining a ravenous fan following, Dragon Age: Origins was a strong continuation but even as someone who’s never engaged in the franchise, even I can look at Dragon Age II and understand the anger in it change in direction. So, it made sense that Dragon Age: Inquisition would be the studios largest game (at the time) with an aim to return to the studios more open RPG design.
With the new consoles moving into living rooms, the Frostbite engine made its way into many of EA’s studios. Popularised by DICE’s expertise creating impressive, large, destructible multiplayer FPS maps, with cacophonous soundscapes there is no arguing that Frostbite can be a real looker and symphonic treat. However, when it leaves DICE’s doors horror stories tended to follow from the game dev trenches. Perfect for DICE’s military shooters, the same cannot be said for other studios projects. Powerful yet unintuitive; Frostbite. See the development of Need for Speed: The Run which spent much of its development time wrestling with physics for fast and arcad-ie cars, a dis-obedient camera and crafting a speedy road development tool, only to be told to tone down the selling point of the engine, its destructibility, due to car licences. While Ghost Games eventually seemed to have gotten a handle on the engine, claiming to help the Battlefield devs with their ‘road tech’ (if that’s a thing). Teams like EA Canada working on FIFA seem to be trapped in a tangled mess of overlapping code from yearly releases that’s tried to force a simulation engine to allow for playful controls.
Bioware’sDragon Age team struggled with Frostbite more than most though. Unlike Ghost Games’ large environments and some car physics or EA Canada’s realistic soundscapes and multiplayer interface almost nothing - knowledge or assets - could be carried over from DICE’s realistic, multiplayer background to Bioware’s fantasy, systems, mechanics and menu driven RPG. Everything had to be redeveloped from the ground up by Bioware. Frostbite couldn’t support skill trees, companions, the tracking of multiple quests, dialog trees or even a third person camera which allowed the player to see their own character model. Bioware had to do it all again, in the name of fidelity. Fidelity wasted trying to recreate the art stylings of previous games fighting Frostbites usual realistic sheen. Culminating in plenty of particle effects, but character models and animations that look… uncanny (a word Andromeda would become very familiar with). Neither Inquisition nor Andromeda are limited in their systems or mechanics, they strive for branching narratives with interesting companions, but many feel like they clearly received more time and attention. From what I see from fans of Dragon Age it feels smaller in scope than it presents itself to be. And if you want to talk about experiences which are a mile wide and an inch deep just look at the dry swimming pool of ambition that was Mass Effect: Andromeda.
Raycevick’s video: https://youtu.be/D12n35evy0Y
Bioware and EA weren’t pushing out bad games at this time, they were doing what they could with Unfinished tech, which has proven itself in one field but is facing several trials by fire in other genres. Respawn’s success can partly be attributed to the fact that they use old tech to create brand new experiences we think we’ve never seen before when in reality they’re pushing the limits of old tech rather than trying to break new ground on the cutting edge. This all supports my theory that the reason why Respawn have been more critically successful compared to other EA studios is because they work within game precedents and technologies which they are comfortable with rather than struggling to work with whatever the latest technology or concept are.
Finally, that brings us to the reason everyone is rabbling and rousing. L O O T B O X E S BABY! Well, no, more like monetisation, well no less controversial again, UI design, what has Respawn done to prevent people from raising their pitchforks at their game’s monetisation, while everyone seems to be trying to burn down Bioware’s town hall? It seems only ardent Lootbox critics have taken issue with Apex’s lootboxes, while Anthem a game which does not feature the big ‘L’ has attracted countless Youtube Armchair Critic and their white thumbnails with red downward trending graphs decrying the way the game plans to milk you (often before it released) for the most peculiar of reasons. EA and Bioware have been too transparent, with Anthem. Every reddit-mathematician has ‘figured out’ how long it’ll take you to earn Anthem’s rarest Javlin skins and equated that to ‘how much do Bioware value your time’, but this hasn’t happened to Apex.
Anthem’s monetisation has many a skeevy things surrounding it; currency doesn’t translate from € to ‘Shards’ too cleanly (giving you bonus shards the more you buy) and the premium currency is designed to be awkward leaving you with change left over for more transactions. On the other hand, its exactly what we asked for from EA with Battlefront II; no lootboxes, no randomness, all accessible in-game. You are presented with a skin, shown its (in-universe) Coin price, you can earn through gameplay, on the left and its (premium) Shard price on the right and given the choice: grind or pay.
In Apex look at the rare tier skins (not even the Ultra-rare Wraith lootbox with its ludicrously low chance of being acquired). Again, only two sources; buy directly, like Anthem (currency skulduggery-and-all), or through gamepl—not quite, the only in-game way to get these skins is through lootboxes. These boxes are as bad as ‘cosmetic only’ boxes get. Firstly; capping you at 45 gameplay boxes, more will cost you money, secondly, after level 20 acquiring boxes becomes an arduous prospect and finally you have no control over the legendary you are guaranteed every 30 boxes (small fairness crumbs like this are thrown our way occasionally). Everything presented here has been proclaimed to be hated, so why have gamers not risen up? Because we don’t know what we want, and the maths is awkward.
In Anthem Coins=Shards and Time=Coins, therefore its pretty easy to see how much literal money your time is valued at. As soon as we arrived here Anthem had lost. Either people looked at the grind as being too long per € (e.g. 1hr=1 Shard and a suit costs 1000 shards) and say ‘HEY, the devs don’t value my time!’ or they view it as too short per € (e.g. 1hr= 500 Shards) and ‘HEY, you feel your gameplay is so unimportant you think I’ll pay €10 to skip it?’ Whereas in the Apex corner there’s too many variables; how long does it take for an average player to level up? What level are they currently? How many kills did they get? 1 hour of gameplay may on average work out at X amount of XP but what the hell does that mean when the rest of the conversion rate is so diluted. Like the casino taking the clock off the wall all Respawn had to do to make us complicit in parting with our money was add a few degrees of separation between us, what we say we want (transparency) and the reality of what we’re given (the illusion of honesty and a fair deal).
Personally, I don’t hate Apex’s lootboxes, nothing you get in them is cool enough for me to feel ‘left out’ but is it not hyper hypocritical of us to lambast the developers which honestly state how much they value your time, while praising the guys that try to BAMB-B-BAMB-bamboozle us into just saying screw it I’ll just buy the Mirage skin with my own money? Is it forgivable because Apex is a free-to-play? Because Anthem is story driven and might disempower your fantasy to not have the coolest materials on your javelin? I’m not sure but I do know it proves that Respawn is way ahead of the curve because they learnt all the old tricks and everyone else seems to have forgotten them.
PS.
On a separate note I'm looking into getting into writing about games(pretty casually at the moment); their culture and etc. Any recommendations on people/places to be following/reading/posting on etc. or any pointers, feedback or advice on my own writing would be greatly appreciated.
- Ollie
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