Darrah immediately admits its share of responsibility, while stressing that dysfunctions go back well before its direct involvement. The starting point? A blurred ambition: Anthem was to play a turning point for Bioware, hitherto accustomed to solo RPGs, towards the online service game model, at a time when Electronic Arts lost all hope in solo games for the benefit of online titles. This strategic pressure has caused a constantly changing development, without clear direction, and often slowed down by the lack of resources, team changes and a certain internal secrecy which has harmed the overall coherence of the project.
First of all, Darrah explains a real problem of human workforce. After attending a presentation ofAnthem Intended for EA executives, many employees then lost motivation in the face of the desire for a service game perfectly to the opposite of the studio know-how. To add oil to the fire, the staff put on Dragon Age Inquisitionwhich had just been released, was then put on Mass Effect Andromeda. Result of the races: Casey Hudson, the director of the studio, did not have the desired team to truly start the work ofAnthem.
One of the most telling examples of this disorder concerns “javelins”, these exoskeletons in the heart of the gameplay. Initially, an internal document mentioned six javelins, a figure that had been a little balanced “like that”, in the way, because it made sense in an earlier era. The problem is that this number was quickly communicated to EA leaders. When the team realized that six javelins, and therefore create six different archetypes, was unrealizable and that it could only deliver four, this decline caused strong tensions and a loss of confidence of the hierarchy. For Darrah, this story of javelins could even be the starting point where “Everything changed in 2017, with massive changes.” He even adds: “Once again, this number of six was not based on anything, but it was perceived as the collapse of the team.”
Darrah also evokes conceptual round trips around the positioning of the game. Anthem was at the base wanted to be perfectly new, but without real comparison to give to his team, the game then identified with titles like Destiny or Borderlandsthen moving away from the initial vision. The absence of internal communication, especially after the departure of Casey Hudson, also amplified the feeling of isolation between the teams, preventing a unified vision of taking shape.
Finally, Darrah regrets that her attempts to postpone the release date to stabilize the project have been refused several times by EA. Anthem Finally was released in February 2019, with a very lukewarm critical welcome and a rapidly declining players’ base. EA even had somewhat impractical objectives, wishing to transform all its AAA licenses into “franchises at a billion dollars “.
In the next videos, Mark Darrah promises to come back in more detail on the continuation of development and the lessons learned from this painful failure, somewhat traumatic for a studio that has not shone with either Dragon Age The Veilguard Last year.
