After being in development for over six years, the troubled game known as Anthem launched earlier this year to less than stellar reviews from both critics and fans. While BioWare continues to release fixes, content, and improvements to get the game back on track, a recent article has managed to shed light on just how strenuous and difficult the development was for BioWare employees. Suffering a number of reboots and changes, some of which were made at the last minute, BioWare had to make some tough decisions in order to hit EA's fiscal target release. Unfortunately, one of these decisions came back to haunt the studio once players got their hands on the title.

Upon launch, one of the more controversial elements within Anthem were the Challenges of the Legionnaires, a set of four trials that players needed to complete first in order to advance the story forward. The trials themselves needed to be done inside of Freeplay mode and included somewhat tedious tasks like performing a certain number of multi-kills, finding a certain number of treasure chests, reviving teammates, killing legendary enemies, and more. Considering these mandatory challenges gated off story progression until fully completed, they were met with plenty of backlash from the community and ultimately changed in a post-launch update.

"That mission was controversial even within BioWare. The reasoning was to definitely throttle player movement."

As fans have long since theorized, anonymous developers at BioWare confirmed that these challenges were added mainly to throttle player progression and pad play time through grind heavy tasks. While these remained a controversial addition even at the studio, they were added out of a sense of necessity towards the end of 2018 as BioWare leadership felt that the game wasn't going to launch with enough content on day 1. Shockingly, there was even a plan to add time-gated missions where players would have to wait a certain amount of real time in order to complete them. Thankfully, this was removed prior to launch.

The post has seemingly revealed many of Anthem's development secrets, but BioWare has continued to struggle with post-launch updates. While the developer has introduced plenty of patches and updates since the game launched, additional glitches and bugs have also been added ranging from bossing going invisible to an issue that made the level 1 rifle deal as much damage as a masterwork level weapon. The biggest issue that has been a consistent thorn in the side of players has been with the loot drops. Essentially, loot drops have fluctuated wildly, typically changing or getting worse following a major update to the game. It's an area that BioWare is still looking into, though it remains a major source of frustration for players.

Anthem is available now on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

Source: Kotaku