Casey Hudson

Humans!

It’s been a super busy summer at the studio, but I wanted to get a note out to share some of the things we’ve been up to.

Anthem

Over the last few weeks we’ve been ramping up our Cataclysm events in Anthem – a season-long event with new arenas, enemies, challenges, and rewards.  We have a big team working on Anthem in both Austin and Edmonton, and while it’s been great to see the community response to Cataclysm, I know there’s a lot more work to do to bring out the full potential of the game.  We have plans for those more fundamental improvements, but they’ll take time.  While the team works towards the longer-term vision of the game, they will also continue to deliver updates to features and content.  I believe in Anthem and would love to see its world grow, evolve, and thrive for years to come.  Thanks for your patience and support as we do the work of constantly improving and expanding the experience.

Whew.  How’s everyone doing out there?  It’s been a wild ride these last few weeks.  On the one hand it’s been a rougher launch than expected.  But then as I think back we also knew that big new online games tend to hit some kind of problem once they go live, so as much as we tested and prepared to make sure everything was ready, we were also ready for the possibility that unexpected issues might arise at launch.  And we continue to be committed to responding to them.

We launched a game that so many of you tell us is really fun at its core, but we also had a degree of issues that did not reveal themselves until we were operating at the scale of millions of players.  We were of course very disappointed about that, as were many of you.  I’ve been in there playing with you since those early days (I’m a Ranger in Edmonton Oilers colors!) and it makes me sad to hear about any issues that would hold someone back from fully enjoying the game.  I take that very personally, a...

Well folks, this is it!  It was a little over 6 years ago that we first started working on Anthem, and we’re down to exactly one month left until launch.

Back in 2012 when we first conceived of Anthem (then codenamed DYLAN), we wanted to create a whole new fictional universe, full of BioWare quality story and character.  We also wanted it to be an experience you could share with friends, and to have a story that doesn’t just come to an end, but takes place in a world where things are happening right now.  

We knew there would be challenges.  People are skeptical of the idea of story in an online game, and for good reason.  Often, the nature of online multiplayer games tends to fight story agency and interesting character interactions.  And, even in the best online games, it’s easy to lose interest or run out of things to do when your friends aren’t online.

We designed Anthem to address these design challenges by trying something new and different.  With...