Anthem's core problems stemmed from an ingrained belief at BioWare that everything would work itself out in the final stages of development. Internally at the studio's parent company, Electronic Arts, this is called "BioWare magic," Kotaku says, and it's simply how games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect are made.

But this time around, relying on crunch (or "BioWare magic," if you're in the marketing department) doomed Anthem. Though the game has been a twinkle in BioWare's eye since late 2012, developers didn't implement a single playable mission until the final year of development in 2018. When BioWare revealed Anthem on the EA stage at E3 2017, complete with a 2018 release window, the game was actually still in pre-production. The E3 build was thrown together in the previous weeks, only after BioWare head Patrick Soderlund panned a completely different internal Anthem demo, Kotaku says.

Essentially, Anthem never found a consistent leader and developers struggled to piece together a coherent game with little direction and varied resources, according to the report. Team members were moved to and from projects like Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda, both of which experienced crunch and launch during Anthem's development. Over the years, leaders, programmers and writers left the studio in droves, fed up with an unclear vision and poor communication. Despite all this, the notion persisted that crunch would save the game, just like it always did.

When crunch time kicked off for Anthem, BioWare was out of fairy dust. Too much had gone wrong, and the team was entering production with less than a year to complete a full game, Kotaku reports. "Stress leave" became a common refrain among developers.

"I've never heard of people needing to take time off because they were so stressed out," one Anthem developer told Kotaku. "But then that kind of spread like wildfire throughout the team."

Today, former BioWare magician Casey Hudson is back at the studio and he's in charge of cleaning up Anthem. He's apologized, laid out a roadmap of bug fixes and improvements, and promised to keep working on the game, now in real-time. BioWare also responded to the Kotaku report, publishing a blog post just minutes after the story went live. It reads, in part, as follows:

We put a lot of focus on better planning to avoid "crunch time," and it was not a major topic of feedback in our internal postmortems. Making games, especially new IP, will always be one of the hardest entertainment challenges. We do everything we can to try and make it healthy and stress-free, but we also know there is always room to improve. As a studio and a team, we accept all criticisms that will come our way for the games we make, especially from our players. The creative process is often difficult. The struggles and challenges of making video games are very real. But the reward of putting something we created into the hands of our players is amazing. People in this industry put so much passion and energy into making something fun. We don't see the value in tearing down one another, or one another's work. We don't believe articles that do that are making our industry and craft better.

Long-term, mentally torturous, physically ruinous, career-ending crunch is not inherent in the video game development process -- it's a symptom of mismanagement. AAA teams are massive, with hundreds of creative, driven professionals often communicating across countries or continents; they have budgets in the millions and their timelines are years long. Wrangling this system into a coherent, innovative game requires clarity, tenacity and for a million tiny things to go right every day. Even in an ideal production scenario, developers will probably have to work extra hours at the tail end, hopefully just fine-tuning and polishing the final product, and not imploding their personal lives in the process.