Bioware Talks Cost Of Being Transparent With Fans About Anthem And Other Games

In the modern gaming world, it takes a lot to keep things hidden from gamers, as leakers are all over the place, and dataminers too. But for some developers, the desire to be transparent through a video games process is paramount. They want the fans to feel like they’re there the whole way and that they know exactly what is coming and when. That was the approach that Bioware did with the game Anthem. They kept players in the loop, and as such, players were along for the ups and downs of the ride.

Yet, when Anthem arrived, it wasn’t exactly what they remembered seeing before. And according to Bioware’s Ben Iriving, that’s the cost of “transparency”:

“The short answer is that the cost of transparency is things change,” he mentioned in a recent Reddit post. “We did our best to be transparent on the journey to going live but with that we knew things would be different in some situations. Sometimes people would be happy and sometimes they would be upset. It’s the cost of transparency.

He went on:

“To elaborate – game development is full of change. There are a million reasons why you set out with an idea and it evolves over time. This is common in every game. We shared as much as we could. Some things change. So the cost of transparency is that some things we said become not true, not because someone was dishonest but because it changed over the course of development.”

It’s logical that this happens, as games often go through radical changes not just to make the game better, but sometimes to make deadlines. The fate of Anthem in regards to it being a success or a failure is still up in the air. Though the future of it now relies on the DLC and update content which Bioware promises to make good.