"It isn't Destiny. It isn't Borderlands. It isn't Mass Effect": Ex BioWare lead says Anthem's vision for "the future of storytelling" struggled to come together because it had "no one really clearly saying what it is"

Former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah has said Anthem's failure can be partly attributed to EA's reluctance to compare the third-person online shooter to existing successes.

In Part 1 of a series of videos titled "What Really Happened to Anthem," Darrah gives his perspective as someone who was working at BioWare when the game was conceived and through its launch. Anthem released as BioWare's entry into live-service in 2019, Darrah left BioWare in 2020, and the game will no longer be playable at the start of next year following an unsuccessful launch and consistently low player counts in subsequent years.

The downfall of a game as well-funded as Anthem will always be multifaceted, but in Darrah's mind, a big part of it came down to marketing. Specifically, he saw an opportunity to bill Anthem, at the time codenamed Dylan, as something of BioWare's take on a looter shooter like Destiny or Borderlands.

"One of the things that seemed really strange was that the project didn't seem willing to name its competitors," Darrah said. "Dylan was conceived in a pre-Destiny world, but the game that seemed to be slowly arising from this churn seemed an awful lot like Destiny or maybe Borderlands.

"And it seemed very strange that the project seemed very unwilling to say this game is Borderlands but with mech suits and flying, or this is Destiny with flying, or something to that effect.

"By being hostile towards drawing those comparisons, you were actually preventing decisions from being made, because a system that needed to be like Destiny's, because you're not Destiny, had to start in out in the wilderness and then make the long arduous trek through a million different iterations before finally arriving at what it obviously needed to be all along, which was Destiny," Darrah added.

"By being willing to say 'this part is like Destiny or this part is like Borderlands or this part is like Mass Effect', you are starting the conversation in known territory. You can evolve away from that."

Darrah hasn't been shy to pull back the curtain on life inside BioWare during Anthem's development and release, having previously said that the shooter's development had a big connection to Dragon Age's pivot to live service and that his team was "jerked around" because EA stopped caring about its tentpole RPGs when it started focusing solely on Anthem.

Late last year, long after Anthem's dubious legacy had been cemented, EA CEO Andrew Wilson hailed Dragon Age: The Veilguard as a return to form for the studio, but a few months later he said it underperformed sales expectations by about 50%.

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