Anthem he is officially dead. The servers were shut down and the entire experience was lost, like tears in the rain. In hindsight, its executive producer, Mark Darrah, isn’t sure that either he or the studio never truly “recovered” from that experiencewhich has been traumatic for many developers.
Even though it wasn’t a masterpiece, many felt that Anthem had a lot of untapped potential and wanted to say goodbye to it before its final farewell.
Huge damage
Executive producer Mark Darrah, who previously worked on Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2 and Dragon Age: Inquisition (he was also director of the first two) has always been very honest about Anthem and its development problems. At the moment of farewell, he returned to talk about it in a long video, stating that he believes it “has caused permanent damage to the careers of many developers”.
“To be honest, I’m not sure I’ve recovered from Anthem. And I think that’s true for a lot of people. Anthem has caused lasting damage to a lot of developers’ careers, and a lot of developers’ mental health. I think even BioWare itself can be traced back to some of the problems that have emerged in recent years at that time.”
Electronic Arts didn’t believe Anthem would receive high ratings, aiming for 70/100 on Metacritic
He clearly said that he doesn’t think “that Anthem is 100% responsible for everything that happened from 2019 onwards, but certainly from that moment on, seeds were planted that continue to grow.”
Since the release of Anthem, the only completely new game published by BioWare (thus excluding Mass Effect Legendary Edition) was Dragon Age: The Veilguard. The development of Veilguard was also not without difficulties: the RPG was initially known as Dragon Age: Dreadwolf and the team had even experimented with a multiplayer component, which was later discarded. Unfortunately, sales did not meet expectations, and EA CEO Andrew Wilson concluded that despite a “high-quality launch”, the game “failed to connect with a large enough audience in a highly competitive market”.
Mass Effect 5 appears to be the last resort of Bioware, which hopefully will be able to recover from the number of debacles of recent years.
