Former BioWare exec hits out at suggestions that it should never have made Anthem in the first place
Mark Darrah says people who claim BioWare should stick to what it knows aren’t considering the studio’s history
A former BioWare executive has criticised player suggestions that the studio should never have made Anthem in the first place.
Last week, as Anthem‘s servers were shut down seven years after the game’s release, Anthem executive producer Mark Darrah released a video post-mortem lasting nearly four hours.
Following this, in a 40-minute interview with YouTuber Destin Legarie, Mark Darrah discussed the game’s development further and defended the decision to make the game in the first place.
As the interview concluded, Darrah was asked if there was anything he wanted to clarify about Anthem and its history. He replied by questioning anyone who said BioWare should never have made Anthem in the first place because it should have stuck to single-player RPG games.
Darrah pointed out that since its foundation in 1994, BioWare had tried numerous new ideas and that Anthem was simply another evolution and another of its numerous attempts to try something different.
“I’m sure there probably are things where I feel like the record needs to be set straight, but I think it’s easy to blame EA – and certainly they deserve a bunch of blame for Anthem – but it’s not all their fault,” Darrah explained.
“But one thing that actually is worth mentioning, I think, is that there are some people that, at the time… these people loved coming out of the woodwork and saying ‘see, I told you so’ and [saying] ‘well, BioWare should have never made Anthem because they are a single-player RPG studio’.
“But my feeling is is that BioWare has always been changing. I mean, by that argument, we should never have made Neverwinter Knights 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 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 I don’t know. I don’t know that you could.”
Anthem was an online-only multiplayer game developed by the Mass Effect studio and published by EA in 2019. The game, which was pitched as the beginning of a brand-new franchise from the people behind Mass Effect following the end of Shepard’s trilogy, was met with middling reviews when it was released.
Following a poor launch and the subsequent decision to abandon future updates on the game, Anthem’s servers were turned off last week.
