Anthem represented a dark day in BioWare’s otherwise illustrious history. It emerged to pretty poor reviews and managed to scrape a Metacritic score of just 59 or so, hampered by fractured development, issues with the game’s engine, and a broken gameplay cycle that didn’t lend itself well to the genre. It also marked a step outside the realms of what BioWare was used to, which didn’t help.
I recently caught up with Mark Darrah, a former BioWare veteran of ten years who was an executive producer on Anthem, coming over after several years of leading development on Dragon Age. I asked him if there was any ‘one thing’ that could have been done to save Anthem, but his answer unveiled a world of pain.
Sadly, just days ago, the news dropped that BioWare had been shut down after 30 years of creating top-tier titles, a revelation that arrived after I’d spoken to Darrah.
Anthem’s Failure Was BioWare’s Biggest Blunder
Anthem was supposed to be a next-generation looter shooter title, set in a post-apocalyptic world and inviting players to explore together, fighting all kinds of creatures, embarking on raids, and upgrading suits of armor (called Javelins) that made you feel like Iron Man. In many ways, it looked great, but under the surface, far too many issues were brewing.
For instance, it had a flawed looting and combat system, which, for a looter-shooter game, is tantamount to success. It received poor reviews at launch, and a haphazard marketing loop put people off before they could invest. The endgame mechanics were slim to nil, and the journey to get there was fraught with issues handling a janky UI and dealing with a buggy engine.
When I sat down with Mark Darrah, who was an executive producer on Anthem, I asked him if there was a single thing that led to Anthem’s failure. In his words, it was the culmination of many glaring issues, and it all started with an identity problem:
If the game had been willing to be a little bit more upfront to what it was ultimately trying to be earlier, that would have helped. It was a franchise that didn’t want to admit that it was making a looter shooter, partially because it was envisioned before looter shooters really were seen as a genre.
As BioWare was taking a risk and stepping out into new territory with Anthem, it would have made immeasurable sense to test the playing field and set up a lengthy beta, gathering feedback and assessing the audience. But that didn’t happen, leaving BioWare to wade into waters unknown with little direction.
Anthem had a beta, but it wasn’t widespread enough by far:
Really what it needed was an actual beta. That’s the only thing. The only thing I can see from the time I took over to it coming out is an actual beta.
The only way BioWare specifically navigates that is by entering into a long beta period. I’ve talked about this before. The way that Anthem does better on the trajectory it was: It enters into beta in February of 2019 and it stays in beta for six months at minimum, with a fairly large group.
And we acknowledge our economy wasn’t quite there, but it’s actually worse than we realized, that the balance is a little off or is worse than we realized. We knew we didn’t have enough activities, let’s make a few more activities. We know that our storytelling is bad. I don’t know how you fix the storytelling in Anthem other than maybe making the story an actual single-player experience. Maybe that’s what you actually do.
Just get it out in the wild. Watch.
Unfortunately, Anthem’s critical problems started at the top and cascaded down, with BioWare’s leadership team insisting that they could weather Anthem’s failures as long as the wins were more substantial. That wasn’t the way to go, Darrah insisted, as in the genre they were breaking into, you couldn’t do things the same way you could with an RPG, for instance.
We knew all of these things. They were just all more impactful than we realized because all of the leadership experience said, ‘Yes, these are problems, but it’s okay. We can survive all of these things being B minuses or even C pluses because we have a few things that are As and A pluses.’
And not really understanding that no, for this genre, that’s untrue. So, it isn’t one thing. There’s not one thing you can just fix to make it better. You have to actually make a whole bunch of things a little bit better because each of those things takes your 90% looter-shooter and drops 10% off of its Metacritic (score) until you’re a 50% looter-shooter.
Darrah wasn’t all doom and gloom about Anthem’s failure, though. He stressed it did have great features, but the overall execution just missed the mark considerably. He compared it to Electronic Arts’ Medal of Honor Warfighter, which Danger Close developed and released in 2012. It was a substantial flop that was seen as a nail in the coffin for the legendary FPS franchise.
This was what happened when the last Medal of Honor game that EA made was exactly the same thing. It is a competently executed shooter. In a genre where competently executed is 50% (on) Metacritic. And that’s Anthem. Anthem is a competently executed looter shooter in a genre where competently executed means 50%.
Ultimately, Electronic Arts’ servers shut down in January 2026, marking the end of the relatively short lifecycle of BioWare’s ambitious live-service looter-shooter. Given that BioWare has also been shut down, it seems impossible that the series will ever be mentioned in a meaningful capacity again.
Were you sad to see the back of Anthem? Let us know your thoughts on the Insider Gaming Discord server. Thanks to our friends at Eldorado.gg for facilitating this interview.
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Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
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