EA’s Anthem is seen as one of the prime examples of a game that’s really promising when it comes to ideas but ultimately held down by lackluster execution, and after six years since it’s release, the game’s executive producer Mark Darrah has unveiled tons of details behind the development of Anthem and most importantly, why it ended up the way it did.
In the first part of a planned multi-part series of videos, Darrah spends nearly an hour sharing lots of development insights on Anthem and although he wasn’t directly involved in the making of the game, he was the executive producer for the final 16 months of it’s development and that certainly gives a lot of credibility to his perspective.
If you are someone who has played Anthem or even some of the more iconic Bioware games like the Dragon Age series, you’ll find a lot of what Darrah says in the video to be particularly revealing and one of them being EA’s intervention in the games that often leads to be downright detrimental for those titles in the long run, with a fine example being the recent Dragon Age Veilguard.
Darrah opens the video by taking ownership of Anthem’s failings as a game: “Some of this video is going to look like I’m trying to shift blame around, but ultimately the responsibility for this game does mostly rest on me,” he says. “I have a list of people that I won’t share that I also feel share blame on this project. Almost everyone on that list is more senior than me. The team worked really hard on this game, the team put a lot of excellent work on this game, and there are things that are amazing in this game even now.”
Some of the highlights regarding the development details that stand out from the video are when Darrah mentions EA’s push for all its AAA franchises to be “billion-dollar franchises”, which would have required Dragon Age releasing a game every two years and this is also the direction that had cemented Anthem’s fate as a live-service title.
It’s not hard to see the flaws in this approach as most games by their nature, do not have that sort of enormous scope to be appealing to the majority of the gaming demographic and trying to turn them into multi-billion franchises would clearly require injecting a lot of elements in them which would definitely compromise their identity as a series, alienating a huge part of their fan base as a result. This is something that has been the case with Dragon Age Veilguard as well, as the Action RPG has also been reported to shift genres multiple times, thereby ending up the way it eventually did.
