Anthem’s servers have been shut down for a week now, marking the end of a pretty tragic chapter in developer BioWare’s history. The live-service looter shooter’s crash and burn reportedly nudged publisher EA to let the studio strip out the reported multiplayer elements from the game that would go on to become Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which signaled to some that the studio was “returning” to its roots. However, as Anthem has been dropped down into an abyss, ex-BioWare producer Mark Darrah is disputing the notion that the game was that far out of left field for the studio.
In an interview with YouTuber Destin Legarie, Darrah talked at length about the life and death of Anthem, and in the closing minutes, Legarie asks if there’s anything Darrah wants to “set the record straight” on regarding the game. Darrah replies that while many people want to point fingers solely at EA for mandating that the historically single-player RPG studio shift into making an ill-advised cooperative loot shooter, it wasn’t “all their fault.” He also said that, at the time, the prospect of making Anthem seemed like just the latest evolution for a studio that had evolved many times before, so he says he is less swayed by arguments stating that the company shouldn’t have even tried.
“My feeling is that BioWare has always been changing,” he said. “I mean, 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.”
In a perfect world, developers would be able to make mistakes like Anthem without risking going under, but reports about Anthem’s development indicate that it did some seismic damage to BioWare internally that it’s still recovering from. The company was downsized last year as a small team works on the next Mass Effect game. We’ll see if it’s enough to get the studio back on track after a decade of strife.