I feel sorry for the devs- but this game shows a common problem when a long standing industry mistake is made- namely mistaking a game for a movie.
I'm not literally talking about movie-like cutscenes where agency is stolen from the gamer, much to many gamer's disgust. The recent Metro game made this mistake- having all the cool stuff under computer control. No, I'm talking about the very concept that a game can be really be a movie that the player experiences from within.
But a movie is made in a very specific way, and the best games are created in ways that do not overlap the same skill sets in metrics that matter. Where there is overlap (characters, sets, lighting and so on) - these particular skills do not guarantee a great film or game.
No, they are so-called 'craft' skills whose quality tends to be propertional to budget (game or film)- but rarely determine if the game or film is well received. But many games have crashed and burnt on the naive belief that Hollywood craft skills alone are good enough.
The smartest game designers never start from scratch. They look at what their game wants to do, and then examine the best pre-existing games most like the new project, and learn from them. Pre-existing game mechanisms are then ruthless copied and ideally given improvements. Evolution.
Stupid producers do not do this. Instead they go "this is a really cool idea" (redneck hero RPG in post apocalypse backwoods USA), and set to work getting great art assets crafted. The gameplay mechanisms and gameloop are literally bottom of the priority list, since the idiot producer thinks that anything that is not part of the Hollywood skillset is 'trivial'. So it is more important to have a dynamic weather system than satisfying gameplay.
However, games have one thing in common. If they are *not* fun to play, they are no good. All the production values in the world cannot change this. Oh, for sure you can have more basic gameplay if there is enough of an unfolding story- but even so the balance must be correct.
Big game producers across the world cannot comprehend the success of Dark Souls and Shadows, for instance, for a game so purely focused on gameplay offends everything big game producers have been taught. But games are not movies- and as gaming budgets for certain AAA titles explode, much to the inconvenience of producers of trash like Anthem, this truth remains.
Oh how Activision, Bethesda, Ubisoft and EA wish this were not true. Good game design is hard- even when you throw tons of money at a project. Good Hollywood values are easy- just a matter of money. Yet in truth there is no shortage of good game coders- just a growing lack of respect for the coders in big projects.
It's the development pipeline for AAA titles. New 'hard' code does *not* fit well in the pipeline. Art assets do. Voice assets do. Motion capture assets do. But good gaming code is the equivalent of good film scripts- very hard to coerce through simply budget mechanisms.
But as I said, this is mitigated when a project 'evolves'- clones already well-accepted gaming code, and perhaps seeks to upgrade the ideas a little. Like how the vast majority of Hollywood scripts really always rip-off earlier works- legally of course.
Of course many big producers will claim that 'good' coders are as unreliabe as 'good' writers when it comes to game play code (or movie scripts), but this is almost always down to said coders thinking they have to invent 'new' mechanisms- rather than being encouraged to clone. The best coders can look at any game and within hours create data structures and algorithms that will emulate the mechanisms- but they need to be told to do this. A project process that begins with analysis of similar types of game, and an active discussion of how they can be coded.
Without this guidance you get a situation as seen at Avalanche (Just Cause, Mad Max, Zero Generation, Rage 2). The Avalanche engine coders are the best- often contributing papers to SIGGraph. But as game mechanism coders, they are the worst- which is why iD took their Mad Max 2 game, when WB cancelled the project, and helped Avalanche convert it to Rage 2, by taking on all the game mechanism duties. Avalanche has some of the best low level coders, but they've never been taught the 'trick' of game mechanism success by cloning.
But it all comes down to that one thing. A game is either fun to play, or it a chore.
