Anthem has been officially wiped off the face of the Earth for two days now, and Mark Darrah, an ex-BioWare producer who worked on both the ill-fated looter shooter and the Dragon Age series, has released a nearly four-hour postmortem on the game and how it all went wrong. If you care at all about the RPG developer’s odd live-service detour, it’s a pretty interesting watch, but there’s one thing of note we’re going to focus on: Anthem could have had local servers that would have allowed it to live on even after EA had abandoned it.
At the end of Darrah’s video, he starts to give a soft pitch for how Anthem could live on and maybe even see a bit of that fabled No Man’s Sky redemption arc that BioWare was hoping for when it announced it was revamping the game in 2019.
He says that his idea would “conservatively” run EA about $10 million, and if that should sell more than 400,000 copies, it could actually work out for everyone involved. To start, he suggests moving Anthem to current-gen consoles, rather than leaving it on PS4 and Xbox One, and using locally-hosted servers. Apparently, BioWare had local servers running in a development environment “up until a few months before launch,” and while he doesn’t know if they still work, the code is there and can be recovered.
“The reason you do this, it pulls away the cost of maintaining this game,” Darrah says. “So rather than having dedicated servers that are required for the game to run, you let the server run on one of the machines that’s playing the game.”
Hearing that BioWare, at some point in development, had the tools in place to save Anthem from its fate actually gives me a mix of sadness and anger for the devs and fans who wanted the game to go on existing, even if it wasn’t going to be supported with future updates. BioWare’s reasoning for shutting the game down without an offline mode was that it was “designed to be an online-only title,” but now we know that there were, at one time, tools in place to remove all the server costs from EA’s shoulders, and that it just chose not to use them. Killing the game off is certainly the more straightforward approach, but it’s also far more destructive.
Darrah goes on to suggest that most of the hypothetical $10 million budget would go into making Anthem a single-player game, which would require creating AI party members to accommodate the game’s combat encounters which are balanced for multiple players. He suggests either promoting some of the NPCs to companions, or just making three to five new characters that could go through the existing story alongside you with their own stories. He even says that if EA really wanted to do it for cheap, go with the bare minimum amount of new party members by capping it at three so they just fill out your four-player party.
“If you can do those two things and turn the local servers on and give them a little bit of their own storytelling, that what you have essentially reverse-engineered is a BioWare game without romances with a decent BioWare-style story with companions that can be played as a single-player game,” Darrah says. “And I think there are a significant number of people who enjoy BioWare stories who did not play Anthem because they didn’t want to play a multiplayer looter shooter who would be interested enough in seeing that story to pick that game up and give it a try.”
As nice as it sounds, Darrah says he has no faith that EA would do something like this, even if it were a relatively cheap lift compared to running the servers forever. It’s annoying to know that Anthem could still have lived on in some form, but at least we know definitively that EA and BioWare pissed in our ears and told us it was raining.
