Exactly a week ago, Electronic Arts took down the official servers of Anthem, BioWare's failed live service game, as the publisher had announced back in July.
A few days ago, YouTuber Destin Legarie hosted a 40-minute video interview with Mark Darrah, a BioWare veteran who worked on practically all of the studio's games since the first Baldur's Gate (1998) to Dragon Age: The Veilguard (as a consultant, after leaving the company), with the notable exception of the Mass Effect series.
This includes Anthem, on which Darrah worked as an Executive Producer. The developer acknowledged a number of shortcomings, such as:
- The game was originally inspired by Diablo, but Darrah says the team should have realized that, as a looter shooter, it should have really taken a lot more inspiration from Destiny instead. This is partly why the loot, endgame, and retention were all failures.
- The flight mechanics were by far the most enjoyable for players, but they also caused several issues. For example, virtually every enemy unit had to have ranged attacks, since players could just fly away otherwise. Also, Darrah says that in co-op, three experienced players could drag a new player through the story at breakneck speed, disrupting the narrative flow.
- BioWare even tested a version of Anthem without flight before E3 2017, though the goal was always to reintroduce it as they did in the final version.
- In the interview, Darrah wonders if the developers should have proposed a 9-month public beta, keeping the entire team working on live iterations. This would have meant shipping the game, calling it "beta," and doing what happened in the first year, but before the official launch.
- The industry veteran also believes BioWare Austin, which had much more experience with live-service games (it made Star Wars: The Old Republic), should have been handed the reins much earlier than they were. They were working on Anthem Next, which was supposed to introduce new ways to play beyond cataclysms and missions, new events, and other content. However, the team was understaffed, and Anthem Next was ultimately canceled in February 2021.
Toward the end of the video interview, Darrah adds that EA was partially but not entirely to blame and also addresses one of the common refrains you might have read on forums and social media: that BioWare should never have made Anthem in the first place. On that count, he doesn't really agree.
I think it's easy to blame EA, and certainly, they deserve a bunch of blame for Anthem, but it's not all their fault. But one thing that actually is worth mentioning, I think, is that there are some people that at the time loved coming out of the woodwork and saying 'see, I told you so', and it's like, 'BioWare should have never made Anthem because they are a single player RPG studio.' But my feeling is that BioWare has always been changing. By that argument, we should never have made Neverwinter Nights because we were a 2D RPG maker. We should never have made Mass Effect, because we were a tactical RPG maker, not an action RPG maker. So, I don't know that that argument holds a lot of weight for me. To me, it's like, yeah, your studios evolve, and they try new things. And was Anthem too big of a reach? Yeah, for sure. But could you tell at the time? I don't know. I don't know that you could.
Mark Darrah did provide a bit of hope for the future of BioWare, which is even more in jeopardy after Dragon Age: The Veilguard also largely failed to meet the company's financial projections. Everything hinges on the next Mass Effect game, but the developer said there's a silver lining: now BioWare is a single-project studio that is entirely focused on this title, instead of splitting itself across multiple projects, which happened with Anthem, Mass Effect: Andromeda, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard for parts of the respective development phases. Will that be enough to create a successful game? Only time will tell.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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