Someone high up at EA must've seen the writing on the wall in the months before Anthem launched, as former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah says the devs were told expectations were for a Metacritic score somewhere in the 70s - not bad, but a far cry from previous BioWare games.
At this point, with Anthem being pulled offline in January, it's safe to say the general reaction to the live-service shooter has been one of great disappointment, and it seems toward the end of the game's development, even BioWare wasn't entirely surprised.
Darrah has released two videos in a series on 'What Happened on Anthem' in which he provides insights into, well, what happened on Anthem. He's attributed the game's failure to a multitude of issues, from a "misunderstanding about multiplayer games" to fundamental storytelling problems.
In the latest video, Darrah adds yet another contributing factor to the pile, saying a lack of dedicated processing resources prevented players from being able to view detailed information about loot and and look at their loadouts while out on the field. Unfortunately, it wasn't until it was too late that BioWare realized "this was going to be a big problem. A lot of bridges were burned on assumptions that proved to be false."
"By September, October of 2018," just a few months before Anthem's launch," we kind of all know that this game is coming in on fire, really hot. And part of the process of this, is that the leader who controlled the umbrella under which BioWare fell, shifted the target for Anthem.
We didn't really have a Metacritic target before, but now it was very clearly being stated that we were targeting a game in the 70s. Historically, BioWare games always had a target of 90, of being in the 90s."
Darrah also points out that a target above 90 can be "really troublesome" and "really hard to achieve" because "in some cases, it's beyond your control."
"If I make a great game, and I get three reviews, two 95s and one 75, that single 75 is enough to drag me down out of the 90s. There's just not a lot of room up there. So, unless you get a ton of 10/10s, holding your score above 90 is really hard to do."
Six years later, Anthem now sits at a 59 Metascore, likely a reflection of discontent toward performance issues, a lack of endgame content, and ultimately the decision to end development and shut down the game, as much as it's a reflection on the game's core design.
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