Anthem had the might of EA and the talent of Mass Effect's team at BioWare behind it, so why didn't it work out? Well, former EA executive producer Mark Darrah says a lot of the things that are wrong with the game "come from a misunderstanding about multiplayer games."
In a new video posted to his YouTube channel, Darrah reveals a lot about his time working on the game. "This was the team that made Mass Effect. Mass Effect 1, 2, and 3. They've been together a really long time," he explains.
"They have a particular way of working together. And for most of that time, they worked for and with Casey Hudson. This is a team that knew how to make single-player action RPG storytelling games."
It certainly seemed odd when the developer, known for Mass Effect and Dragon Age, both single-player RPGs, announced it would be making a live-service multiplayer title. Naughty Dog actually scrapped its Last of Us multiplayer game specifically because it didn't want to transition to a live-service company.
"When you look at some of the things that are wrong with Anthem, they come from a misunderstanding about multiplayer games and live-service games versus single-player storytelling games. The way that storytelling is structured in Anthem doesn't understand that there are other people along with you that can mess up the storytelling."
This is a big issue I've often had with a lot of MMOs and multiplayer titles. How can I be the chosen one who's going to save the world when there are a dozen people queuing up in front of the same NPC as my character?
As well as the storytelling, "The economy doesn't take into account that it needs to be able to last for a very long time. That balance matters in a live-service game a lot more than it matters in a single-player game."
Darrah notes that these issues were eventually discovered, but "because, in classic BioWare style, the game was only coming together in the last few months, they weren't obvious in the code until it was often much too late to fix it."
Darrah also claims that developers in Austin were "screaming" about these issues for a long time, trying to draw attention to the end game, too, but "because the leadership had become dysfunctional because these communication channels have been damaged between Edmonton and Austin, that wasn't really being heard."
That's not the only thing he blames leadership for. He also says that while the core leaders were clearly skilled, since they'd made Mass Effect 2, BioWare's highest-rated game, "there was a conflation of expertise in game making, which they had, and understanding games they had played, which they had, into a belief in an expertise in game-making for a kind of game they had never made but had played."
All of this, combined with the scale of the project and the fact a lot of things simply weren't written down meant that by the time Darrah joined, he had to make a lot of assumptions about how it all worked.
But hey, at least we can all agree the flying was great.
In the meantime, check out the best online games that are still alive and kicking.
