At the edge of the EA Play event, Laura Miele gave an interview; she is the “Chief Studios Officer” at EA. She talks about the launch of Anthem and Apex Legends – and has a clear favorite. Miele explains what went wrong with Anthem: It should have been playable much earlier for internal testing.
Who is speaking? It is Laura Miele. She has been with Electronic Arts for 23 years and is currently responsible for what the dozens of development studios of EA around the world are doing, from Respawn to DICE to BioWare.
Thus, in her first 100 days in the new job, she traveled to more than 20 studios around the world and exchanged ideas with them.
She speaks in an interview with Venturebeat.
Respawn played Apex Legends for 18 months
This is why Apex Legends did so well: Miele is a strong advocate for teams to intensely play their game themselves before releasing it. According to this method, she would have worked earlier at Westwood.
There, they would stop working every day at 4 PM and play their own game for a few hours, Miele recounts.
At Respawn, they followed the same approach with Apex Legends. The head there, Vince Zampella, is a strong proponent of getting a game up and running and playable as early as possible.
Therefore, the team would have played Apex Legends for about 18 months before it was released. This shows discipline and a great approach. This is how games become great.
The feedback from real gameplay with real players would influence every design decision.
This is the big lesson from the success of Apex Legends. While Apex Legends offers “only” one map with 8 legends and one mode, and Anthem had completely different dimensions, EA must learn from the principle applied with Apex Legends.
Anthem should have been tested for a year
This is what went wrong with Anthem: Miele says: “This approach would have helped us tremendously with Anthem.”
Anthem was supposed to have a massive world with many characters, systems and story, but all these parts came together later than they should have.
The game should have been playable a year earlier before it hit the market. And that was simply not the case.
This is how EA wants to solve the problem: The plan now is to bring players into games earlier.
Like previous MMOs, they want to conduct betas; they are currently working on this.
The challenge with a game like Anthem is that it goes to market and competes against games that have been supported for years and offer an incredible amount of content.
These games have already been polished and perfected according to player feedback. Therefore, it is incredibly important for EA to get early feedback from its players.
