After Mass Effect 3 and then Dragon Age: Inquisition, the next game from Bioware was the less-than-inspired Mass Effect Andromeda. While all that happened, the studio was slowly – and then very suddenly – developing its first live service shooter, Anthem.
Anthem released in 2019, and had been in development for about seven years, but it was only in full production for the last 18 months-or-so ahead of its launch. It ended up being a massive flop, and something Bioware needed time to recover from.
Looking back on it in an interview with Edge Magazine, Dragon Age: The Veilguard creative director John Epler admitted that Anthem was a lesson in “know what you’re good at.”
“We’re a studio that has always been built around digging deep on storytelling and roleplaying. I’m proud of a lot of things on Anthem – I was on that project for a year and a half. But at the end of the day, we were building a game focused on something we were not necessarily as proficient at.
For me and the team, the biggest lesson was to know what you’re good at and then double down on it. Don’t spread yourself too thin, Don’t try to do a bunch of different things you don’t have the expertise to do. A lot of the people on this team came here to build a story-focused, single-player RPG.”
This puts Bioware’s return to Dragon Age and Mass Effect into even greater context, and one that players would likely be relieved to hear. Bioware is known for its incredible RPG’s. No one is saying studios can’t do new things, but those new things shouldn’t come at cost that Bioware had to pay with its reputation tarnished in almost glorious fashion.
Especially when you consider that if Anthem was greenlit seven years prior to its launch, that puts the project start date around the time where every publisher was trying to have a big multiplayer game under their belt.
EA forcing Bioware into chasing a trend it both didn’t fit and arguably didn’t need to chase (imagine, we could’ve already had Mass Effect 4) should’ve signaled as a bad idea from the start.
It’s good to know now that Bioware seems to have learned the right lessons from Anthem. And to give Anthem some credit, the flying in the game is the one thing that anyone who played it continues to single-out as the game’s best feature, so hopefully Bioware hasn’t forgotten that and it’ll re-appear somewhere else in the future.
Source – [Edge Magazine via 80 Level]