When Anthem launched in February of 2019, it was panned by fans and critics. Today, it has a 55 on the review aggregation site Metacritic, BioWare's lowest score since the company was founded in 1995. The developer once known for ambitious role-playing games like Dragon Age and the original Mass Effect trilogy has now released two critical flops in a row, following 2017's disappointing Mass Effect: Andromeda. Although hardcore fans have put their faith in BioWare to continue fixing Anthem's bugs and improving its mechanics—especially since Bungie's Destiny, a similar game, had a rough launch and eventually recovered—few were happy with the initial release. Anthem wasn't just buggy and thin on content; it felt half-baked, like it hadn't been play-tested and tweaked enough by developers with experience playing other loot shooters. In the weeks after launch, there appeared to be a major new problem every day.
Fans have speculated endlessly as to how Anthem went so awry. Was it originally a single-player role-playing game, like BioWare's previous titles? Did EA force BioWare to make a Destiny clone? Did they strip out all of the good missions to sell later as downloadable content? Is the loot system secretly driven by an elaborate AI system that keeps track of everything you do so it can get you to spend more money on the game?
The answer to all of those questions is no.
This account of Anthem's development, based on interviews with 19 people who either worked on the game or adjacent to it (all of whom were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about Anthem's development), is a story of indecision and mismanagement. It's a story of technical failings, as EA's Frostbite engine continued to make life miserable for many of BioWare's developers, and understaffed departments struggled to serve their team's needs. It's a story of two studios, one in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and another in Austin, Texas, that grew resentful toward one another thanks to a tense, lopsided relationship. It's a story of a video game that was in development for nearly seven years but didn't enter production until the final 18 months, thanks to big narrative reboots, major design overhauls, and a leadership team said to be unable to provide a consistent vision and unwilling to listen to feedback.
https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964
