Dragon Age veteran says scrapped Anthem Next "could have been" up there with No Man's Sky's legendary turnaround

Less than seven years after launch, Anthem is dead for good, and that's especially unfortunate when its executive producer reckons the plans to overhaul the looter shooter "could have" led to a No Man's Sky-level comeback before they were ultimately scrapped.

Speaking to Destin Legarie in a new interview, Mark Darrah – executive producer of Anthem, Dragon Age 1, 2, and Inquisition – is asked about Anthem Next (essentially Anthem 2.0) and what impact that could have had on the longevity and reception to BioWare's multiplayer romp. For context, Anthem Next was officially scrapped in February 2021, although at that point, the plan was to "continue to keep the Anthem live service running as it exists today" (a statement that hasn't aged well at all).

Legarie asks if Anthem Next would have "actually saved" the game, and "would it have been No Man's Sky [...] revolutionary-level updates," to which Darrah says: "It could have been."

Darrah has previously spoken about Anthem Next in his YouTube series discussing what happened with the game (which he's now handily summarized into one mega video compilation, below). He discussed that BioWare's decision to work on what would eventually become Anthem Next was "definitely the right call, and arguably if we had never announced a roadmap, maybe this decision could have happened earlier. The decision was made to set that act structure aside so that the project could focus on what needed to be done, not upon what it had announced beforehand. And arguably, this is what should have probably happened from the beginning."

The Truth About What Happened on Anthem - Complete (2011-2026) - YouTube

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Later in the video, he noted that Next was "in the process of trying to fix Anthem to make it have a broader appeal, to make it regain its footing as a live service," and shared that he thinks that EA's decision not to continue with that pursuit "was a mistake." With that said, he explained that to save Anthem, he would have suggested a different approach to Next that would have instead involved porting to current-gen consoles and crucially moving to "locally hosted servers."

"Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months before launch," Darrah continued. "I don't know that they still work, but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered. The reason you do this, it pulls away the costs of maintaining this game. So rather than having dedicated servers that are required for the game to run, you let the server run on one of the machines that's playing the game." This, he added, could have worked alongside an additional move to add AI party members to the game, allowing people to play it like a single-player game.

Alas, we'll never know whether Anthem Next or Darrah's own ideas could have saved BioWare's looter shooter, but it'll forever be a shame that it never really got a proper chance to reach its full potential like No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 famously did after their own rocky launches.

Anthem "did permanent damage to the careers of a lot of game devs" says Dragon Age veteran, and he's not sure he or BioWare ever "came back" from its spectacular failure.