Anthem, BioWare's now-dead live-service game, got its fair share of flak at launch, but there's one thing pretty much everyone who's played it can agree on: the flying was awesome. Mark Darrah, a veteran BioWare dev who was tasked with getting Anthem over the finish line after a troubled development cycle, agrees that flight is the game's best feature, but it also made creating everything else way, way harder.
"Flying in Anthem is amazing," Darrah says in a new video breaking down the game's development. "It feels great every single time. It feels like you are throwing yourself into the void and then catching yourself before you fall to your death. It feels good. It lets you move around the world. It lets you explore this really large, really interesting space in a really cool way."
But, Darrah adds, "there are a lot of problems with flying. Not with the feature itself, but with the way that it impacts everything else in the game." The work of the environment artists means a lot less when players are speeding away miles above it all. Enemies need to have ranged weapons to hit players. Cover matters less.
"And because we're a multiplayer game," he continues, "that can become a big problem because it's going to impact the amount of world we need to have streamed in because your party of four could be in four totally different places and you are going to have to keep all of that world in memory all at the same time."
Given how integral flight ultimately felt to Anthem, it might come as a bit of a shock to learn that it wasn't always a part of the game. In fact, it was an "on again, off again" feature. "The team was having a lot of difficulty figuring out how to design combats with flight in place," Darrah says, "So, the decision made by the creative director was to remove it to try to encourage them to design combat in some environment with the idea being that once they figured that out, they could then be readded."
Darrah believes that "flying is Anthem's best feature, but I think you can also argue that in a lot of ways it's Anthem's worst feature because the consequences of flying aren't adequately taken into account in the game design. The game isn't integrating flight adequately into the creation and design of the other parts of the game around it. So when we are adding very innovative things into our games, that's awesome. That's something that we should be trying to do because that's how the industry pushes itself forward. But when we're doing that, we have to be prepared to commit to the amount of work that is required in order to adapt the other features that we're keeping to this new innovation.
"We can't build a game without flight, build systems without flight, and then add flight on top because those systems aren't going to properly take flight into account. And flight is the place where this happens on Anthem. But you see this in other games that add brand-new, interesting features, which is that often they maintain status quo on the features that aren't this new innovation, and sometimes that doesn't work."
Darrah acknowledges that "this isn't to say we shouldn't try new things," but "innovation does have consequence," and there are better ways to build a new feature than BioWare's process with Anthem's fight.
"Another way to go, and this is the way I think that the Monster Hunter team acts, is to introduce our innovation from the edges and then integrate it more and more deeply into the game over subsequent innovations. One of the advantages of doing it this way is it lets us be incredibly experimental. Try really crazy things, but isolate them to a large degree from the overall game experience. But then if they are enjoyable, if they are successful, we can move them ever closer to the center of the gameplay experience."
Of course, that requires you to get the opportunity to create a follow-up – a luxury Monster Hunter has gotten multiple times over, but Anthem very much did not. Still, flight ended up becoming Anthem's defining feature, so who knows what things might've looked like if BioWare had taken a different approach.
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