It wasn’t even supposed to be called Anthem.

Just days before the annual E3 convention in June

of 2017, when the storied studio BioWare would reveal its newest game, the plan had been to
go with a different title: Beyond. They’d even printed out Beyond T-shirts for the staff.

这部作品最初的名字甚至都不是《圣歌》。2017 年六月，著名的 Bioware 工作室计划在一

年一度的 E3 展会上公布他们最新一部作品，而就在展会开始前几天，这部作品他们的计
划中还有另外一个名字：《超越（Beyond）》。他们甚至还为工作人员准备了印着“超
越”这个词的 T 恤。

Then, less than a week before the Los Angeles press conference held by BioWare’s parent
company, Electronic Arts, word came down that securing the rights to the trademark would be
too difficult. Beyond was ruled out. The leadership team quickly switched to one of their backup
options, Anthem. But whereas Beyond had been indicative of what BioWare hoped the game
would be—you’d go out beyond the walls of your fort and into the dangerous wilds around you
—Anthem didn’t really mean much.

在那之后，距离 BioWare 的母公司艺电在洛杉矶举办新闻发布会只剩不到一周的时候，开

始有消息传来，要维持商标的相关权利恐怕困难重重。“超越”被排除了。领导团队很快
决定改用另一个后备选项：《圣歌》。然而，“超越”这个名字原本代表了 BioWare 希望
这个游戏呈现出的样子：你要越过要塞的高墙，进入周围危机四伏的荒野。而“圣歌”就
没有这样的意味。

“Everybody was like, ‘Well, that doesn’t make any sense—what does this have to do with
anything?’” said one person who worked on the game. Just days before their game’s
announcement, the team at BioWare had a brand new name that nobody really understood.

Such a major last-minute upheaval might seem strange to an outside observer, but on Anthem,
it was common. Very few things went right in the development of BioWare’s latest game, an
online cooperative shooter that was first teased in mid-2012 but spent years floundering in pre-
production. Many features weren’t finalized or implemented until the very final months, and to
some who worked on the project, it wasn’t even clear what kind of game Anthem even was until
that E3 demo in June of 2017, less than two years before it actually came out. Later, they came
up with an explanation for the name: The game’s planet was enveloped by something called the
Anthem of Creation, a powerful, mysterious force that left environmental cataclysms across the
world.

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.

Perhaps most alarming, it’s a story about a studio in crisis. Dozens of developers, many of them
decade-long veterans, have left BioWare over the past two years. Some who have worked at
BioWare’s longest-running office in Edmonton talk about depression and anxiety. Many say they
or their co-workers had to take “stress leave”—a doctor-mandated period of weeks or even
months worth of vacation for their mental health. One former BioWare developer told me they
would frequently find a private room in the office, shut the door, and just cry. “People were so
angry and sad all the time,” they said. Said another: “Depression and anxiety are an epidemic
within Bioware.”

“I actually cannot count the amount of ‘stress casualties’ we had on Mass Effect: Andromeda or
Anthem,” said a third former BioWare developer in an email. “A ‘stress casualty’ at BioWare
means someone had such a mental breakdown from the stress they’re just gone for one to
three months. Some come back, some don’t.”

EA and BioWare declined to comment on this story. [Update: See note at the bottom.]

Illustration for article titled How BioWare's Anthem Went Wrong

Among those who work or have worked at BioWare, there’s a belief that something drastic
needs to change. Many at the company now grumble that the success of 2014’s Dragon Age:
Inquisition was one of the worst things that could have happened to them. The third Dragon
Age, which won Game of the Year at the 2014 Game Awards, was the result of a brutal
production process plagued by indecision and technical challenges. It was mostly built over the
course of its final year, which led to lengthy crunch hours and lots of exhaustion. “Some of the
people in Edmonton were so burnt out,” said one former BioWare developer. “They were like,
‘We needed [Dragon Age: Inquisition] to fail in order for people to realize that this isn’t the right
way to make games.’”

Within the studio, there’s a term called “BioWare magic.” It’s a belief that no matter how rough
a game’s production might be, things will always come together in the final months. The game
will always coalesce. It happened on the Mass Effect trilogy, on Dragon Age: Origins, and on
Inquisition. Veteran BioWare developers like to refer to production as a hockey stick—it’s flat for
a while, and then it suddenly jolts upward. Even when a project feels like a complete disaster,
there’s a belief that with enough hard work—and enough difficult crunch—it’ll all come
together.

After the high-profile failures of Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem, it has become clear to
current and former BioWare employees that this attitude is no longer working. In recent years,
BioWare has done serious damage to its reputation as a premier RPG developer. Maybe the
hockey stick approach is no longer viable. Or maybe—just maybe—that sort of production
practice was never really sustainable in the first place.

One thing’s for certain: On Anthem, BioWare’s magic ran out.

At the beginning, they called it Dylan. In late 2012 and 2013, while finishing up the Mass Effect
trilogy, BioWare director Casey Hudson and a small team of longtime Mass Effect developers
started work on a project that they hoped would be the Bob Dylan of video games, meaning
something that would be referenced by video game fans for years to come. Even within
BioWare, it was a mystery project—you needed a password to get into the wiki, according to
one person who was on it. For a while, the team stayed small. Most of BioWare’s staff were on
Dragon Age: Inquisition, which needed all hands on deck in order to ship by the end of 2014.

The early ideas for Dylan (which we’ll call Anthem from now on for clarity) were ambitious and
changing constantly, according to people who were on the project. As is typical during this sort
of “ideation” phase, nobody knew what the game would look like yet—they just wanted to see
what might be cool. It would be an action game, certainly, and you’d be able to play it with your
friends. The goal was to get away from traditional sci-fi and fantasy, so the game would feel
distinct from Mass Effect and Dragon Age.

One concept that quickly emerged was the idea of a dangerous, hazard-filled planet. Anthem
would be set on a hostile alien world, and in order to go out into the wilderness, you’d need a
robot suit. A realistic, NASA-inspired robot suit. The pitch was simple: Iron Man, but less
cartoony.

Early iterations of Anthem’s javelins were less Iron Man, more NASA.

Early iterations of Anthem’s javelins were less Iron Man, more NASA.

Image: Don Arceta (ArtStation)

Over the months, a core concept started to crystallize: Anthem’s planet would be sort of like the
Bermuda Triangle of this universe, with an inexorable gravity that was constantly pulling in alien
ships and hazards. As a result, the world would be lethal and full of dangerous creatures. ”You
are the bottom of the food chain, and everything is significantly more powerful than you,” said
one person who worked on the game. When describing these early iterations of Anthem,
developers have made comparisons to Dark Souls, Darkest Dungeon, even Shadow of the
Colossus. There would be big, scary creatures out in the world, and your job would be to see
how long you could survive. One prototype allowed the player to attach themselves to a giant
monster; others centered on the atmosphere, the weather, and environmental effects.

“The idea was going to be that there were all these levers that could be pulled internally so
there’d be different events happening at all times,” said a developer. “You’d be out somewhere,
and an electrical storm would happen at random, and you had to survive it. We had an early
demonstration of this where the environment was dynamic and by pulling levers we could
change it from summer to winter to fall. You’d see the snow hitting the ground, hitting the
trees… There were states of the build where that was being demonstrated, and that we could
see this was something you could actually accomplish.”
We saw a small glimpse of these prototypes at E3 2014, when BioWare showed a teaser trailer
for the as-yet-untitled game that would eventually become Anthem:

The final game would have nothing even close to those teases.

Anthem was always envisioned as an online multiplayer game, according to developers who
worked on it, but it wasn’t always a loot shooter, the kind of game where you’d endlessly grind
missions for new weapons. In these early versions, the idea was that you’d embark from a city
and go out on expeditions with your friends, staying out in the world as long as you could
survive. You’d use a robotic exosuit, and you’d fight monsters with melee and shooting attacks,
but the focus was less on hoarding loot and more on seeing how long you could survive. One
mission, for example, might take you and a squad to the center of a volcano, where you’d have
to figure out why it was erupting, kill some creatures, and then fight your way back. “That was
the main hook,” said an Anthem developer. “We’re going out as a team, going to try to
accomplish something as a team, then come back and talk about it.” Along the way, you could
scavenge or salvage alien ships for parts and bring them back to your base in order to upgrade
your weapons or enhance your suit.

“It was really interesting,” said one person who worked on it. “It really struck a chord with a lot
of the people who were working on it originally.”

What remained unclear during this process was how many of these ideas and prototypes would
actually work at scale. Dynamic environments and giant creatures might perform nicely in a
controlled environment, but would the Anthem team really be able to make those features work
in an online, open-world game played by thousands and thousands of people? And would
Frostbite, the volatile video game engine that BioWare was now using for all of its projects,
really support all these features?

As these questions lingered, the Anthem team faced a major shake-up. In August of 2014, as
they continued to prototype and dream about their game, they lost their leader. Casey Hudson,
who had directed the beloved Mass Effect trilogy and was supposed to be creative director on
Anthem, was departing. “The foundation of our new IP in Edmonton is complete,” he wrote in a
letter to the studio, “and the team is ready to move forward into pre-production on a title that I
think will redefine interactive entertainment.” Jon Warner, a relatively new hire who had
worked for Disney before joining EA in 2011, took on the role of game director.
BioWare veterans liked to describe Casey Hudson’s Mass Effect team as the Enterprise from Star
Trek: They all did what the captain said, and they were all laser-focused on a single destination.
(By comparison, they called the Dragon Age team a pirate ship, meandering from port to port
until it reached its final destination.) Now, the Enterprise no longer had its Jean-Luc Picard.

Still, members of the Anthem team say they remained happy. Dragon Age: Inquisition shipped at
the end of 2014 to critical acclaim, and many of those developers moved over to Anthem, where
they found a team full of high hopes and ambitious ideas. “EA had these team health reports,”
said one. “Anthem’s morale was among the highest in all of EA. It was really, really good for
quite a while. Everybody saw there was so much potential in those early prototypes. ‘Potential’
was always the word there.”

One BioWare developer who hadn’t yet moved to the Anthem team recalled hearing those
colleagues talk about how much better they had it than the people who were stuck on Mass
Effect: Andromeda, which at the time was going through serious struggles thanks to technical
challenges and significant directional changes. Surely, they thought, that couldn’t happen to
Anthem. “We took so much time to get the experience correct,” said another person who
worked on the game. “I think that’s why morale was so high. I knew we had taken the time to
really refine what we wanted the game to be about. Now we just had to go and produce it.”

“EA had these team health reports. Anthem’s morale was among the highest in all of EA. It was
really really good for quite a while. Everybody saw there was so much potential in those early
prototypes. ‘Potential’ was always the word there.” - BioWare developer

Question was, how would they do that? As development progressed, it became clear that some
of the Anthem team’s original ideas either wouldn’t work or weren’t quite solidified enough to
be implemented. Take traversal, for example. The mandate was that Anthem’s world would be
massive and seamless, but how would you get around? The team played around with
prototypes, exploring different ways in which your exosuit could move vertically across the
world. For a long time they thought it’d be climbing up the sides of mountains and ledges, but
they couldn’t get that quite right. Early iterations of flying—which, developers say, was removed
from and re-added to Anthem several times—were more like gliding, and members of the
Anthem team say it was tough to get the system feeling all that fun. Every time they changed
the traversal, it meant changing the world design accordingly, flattening and stretching terrain
to accommodate the latest movement style.

There were experiments with procedural encounters, where dynamic creatures and
environmental hazards would spawn randomly from the world, but those weren’t working too
smoothly, either. “That took a long time,” said one developer. “The game was super reliant on
this procedural system that just wasn’t fun.”

The story started changing drastically, too. In early 2015, veteran Dragon Age writer David
Gaider moved over to Anthem, and his version of the story looked a lot different than the ideas
with which they’d been experimenting for the past few years. Gaider’s style was traditional
BioWare—big, complicated villains; ancient alien artifacts; and so on—which rankled some of
the developers who were hoping for something more subtle. “There was a lot of resistance from
the team who just didn’t want to see a sci-fi Dragon Age, I guess,” said one developer. Added a
second: “A lot of people were like, ‘Why are we telling the same story? Let’s do something
different.’”

When asked for comment on this, Gaider said in an email that when he’d started on the project,
Anthem design director Preston Watamaniuk had pushed him in a “science-fantasy” direction. “I
was fine with that, as fantasy is more my comfort zone anyhow, but it was clear from the outset
that there was a lot of opposition to the change from the rest of the team,” he said. “Maybe
they assumed the idea for it came from me, I’m not sure, but comments like ‘it’s very Dragon
Age’ kept coming up regarding any of the work me or my team did... and not in a complimentary
manner. There were a lot of people who wanted a say over Anthem’s story, and kept
articulating a desire to do something ‘different’ without really being clear on what that was
outside of it just not being anything BioWare had done before (which was, apparently, a bad
thing?). From my perspective, it was rather frustrating.”

Gaider left BioWare in early 2016—“As time passed, I didn’t feel keen to play the game that I
was working on,” he told me—which led to new writers for Anthem and a total story reboot.
This led to even more chaos. “As you can imagine, writing for BioWare sets the foundation for all
the games,” said one developer. “When writing is unsure of what it’s doing, it causes a lot of
destruction to a lot of departments.”

Concept art for BioWare’s Anthem

Concept art for BioWare’s Anthem

Image: Eric Wong (ArtStation)

Instability had become par for the course on the Anthem team, as Hudson’s departure left a
void that proved tough to fill. The job of steering Anthem now fell to the creative leadership
team, a group that included game director Jon Warner, design director Preston Watamaniuk, art
director Derek Watts, animation director Parrish Ley, and a handful of other Mass Effect
veterans who had been on Anthem since the beginning. Some current and former BioWare
employees feel a lot of resentment toward this group, and in interviews, many who worked on
Anthem accused the leadership team of indecision and mismanagement. “The root cause of all
this was that lack of vision,” said one former BioWare developer. “What are we making? Please
tell us. The recurring theme was there was no vision, there was no clarity, there was no single
director saying, ‘This is how it all works together.’”

“They never seemed to settle on anything,” added that person. “They were always looking for
something more, something new.” Said another: “I think most people on the team felt like we
didn’t know exactly what the game was or what it was supposed to be because it kept changing
so much.”

The most common anecdote relayed to me by current and former BioWare employees was this:
A group of developers are in a meeting. They’re debating some creative decision, like the
mechanics of flying or the lore behind the Scar alien race. Some people disagree on the
fundamentals. And then, rather than someone stepping up and making a decision about how to
proceed, the meeting would end with no real verdict, leaving everything in flux. “That would just
happen over and over,” said one Anthem developer. “Stuff would take a year or two to figure
out because no one really wanted to make a call on it.”

“Keep in mind,” said another Anthem developer, “everyone had hard decisions to make that
we’ve never done before. New IP, new genre, new technology, new style, everything was new.”

Throughout 2015 and 2016, it appeared to the Anthem team that they were accomplishing very
little. They struggled with the online infrastructure, they hadn’t figured out how missions would
work, and while they had built a few environments and creatures, it still wasn’t clear exactly
what the basic gameplay might look like. The story was changing constantly, and progress on the
game grew sluggish. One early idea was that there would be multiple cities, which eventually
turned into one city and player-created outposts, which eventually turned into one city and a
mobile Strider base, which eventually turned into a single fort. Those earlier survival ideas
melted away. “They were still figuring out core parts of the IP, like [crafting material] Ember,
how technology worked, that sort of thing,” said one former BioWare developer. “The whole
back-end architecture and everything wasn’t figured out yet.”

At the same time, BioWare’s studio leadership had to focus much of its attention on Mass Effect:
Andromeda, a game that was causing headaches for just about everyone and whose rapidly
approaching release date was set in stone. Put another way: Anthem might have started to look
like it was on fire, but Andromeda was already nearly burnt to the ground.
Complicating these problems further was the fact that sometimes when the Anthem leadership
team did make a decision, it could take weeks or even months for them to see it in action.
“There were a lot of plans,” said a developer, “where by the time they were implemented it was
a year later and the game had evolved.” The explanation for this lag can be summed up in one
word, a word that has plagued many of EA’s studios for years now, most notably BioWare and
the now-defunct Visceral Games, a word that can still evoke a mocking smile or sad grimace
from anyone who’s spent any time with it.

That word, of course, is Frostbite.

“Frostbite is full of razor blades,” one former BioWare employee told me a few weeks ago, aptly
summing up the feelings of perhaps hundreds of game developers who have worked at
Electronic Arts over the past few years.

Frostbite is a video game engine, or a suite of technology that is used to make a game. Created
by the EA-owned Swedish studio DICE in order to make Battlefield shooters, the Frostbite engine
became ubiquitous across Electronic Arts this past decade thanks to an initiative led by former
executive Patrick Söderlund to get all of its studios on the same technology. (By using Frostbite
rather than a third-party engine like Unreal, those studios could share knowledge and save a
whole lot of money in licensing fees.) BioWare first shifted to Frostbite for Dragon Age:
Inquisition in 2011, which caused massive problems for that team. Many of the features those
developers had taken for granted in previous engines, like a save-load system and a third-person
camera, simply did not exist in Frostbite, which meant that the Inquisition team had to build
them all from scratch. Mass Effect: Andromeda ran into similar issues. Surely the third time
would be the charm?

As it turned out, Anthem was not the charm. Using Frostbite to build an online-only action
game, which BioWare had never done before, led to a host of new problems for BioWare’s
designers, artists, and programmers. “Frostbite is like an in-house engine with all the problems
that entails—it’s poorly documented, hacked together, and so on—with all the problems of an
externally sourced engine,” said one former BioWare employee. “Nobody you actually work
with designed it, so you don’t know why this thing works the way it does, why this is named the
way it is.”

Throughout those early years in development, the Anthem team realized that many of the ideas
they’d originally conceived would be difficult if not impossible to create on Frostbite. The engine
allowed them to build big, beautiful levels, but it just wasn’t equipped with the tools to support
all of those ambitious prototypes that they’d created. Slowly and gradually, they started cutting
back on the environmental and survival features that they’d devised for Anthem, in large part
because they just weren’t working.

“Part of the trouble was you could do enough in the engine to hack it to show what was
possible, but then to get the investment behind it to get it actually done took a lot longer, and in
some cases you’d run into a brick wall,” said a BioWare developer. “Then you’d realize, ‘Oh my
god, we can do this only if we reinvent the wheel, which is going to take too long.’ It was
sometimes difficult to know when to cut and run.”

“Frostbite is full of razor blades.” - former BioWare developer

Even today, BioWare developers say Frostbite can make their jobs exponentially more difficult.
Building new iterations on levels and mechanics can be challenging due to sluggish tools, while
bugs that should take a few minutes to squash might require days of back-and-forth
conversations. “If it takes you a week to make a little bug fix, it discourages people from fixing
bugs,” said one person who worked on Anthem. “If you can hack around it, you hack around it,
as opposed to fixing it properly.” Said a second: “I would say the biggest problem I had with
Frostbite was how many steps you needed to do something basic. With another engine I could
do something myself, maybe with a designer. Here it’s a complicated thing.”

“It’s hard enough to make a game,” said a third BioWare developer. “It’s really hard to make a
game where you have to fight your own tool set all the time.”

From the beginning, Anthem’s senior leadership had made the decision to start from scratch for
a large part of the game’s technology rather than using all of the systems the company had built
for Inquisition and Andromeda. Part of this may have been a desire to stand out from those
other teams, but another explanation was simple: Anthem was online. The other games were
not. The inventory system that BioWare had already designed for Dragon Age on Frostbite might
not stand up in an online game, so the Anthem team figured they’d need to build a new one.
“Towards the end of the project we started complaining,” said one developer. “Maybe we
would’ve gone further if we had Dragon Age: Inquisition stuff. But we’re also just complaining
about lack of manpower in general.”

It often felt to the Anthem team like they were understaffed, according to that developer and
others who worked on the game, many of whom told me their team was a fraction of the size of
developers behind similar games, like Destiny and The Division. There were a number of reasons
for this. One was that in 2016, the FIFA games had to move to Frostbite. The annual soccer
franchise was EA’s most important series, bringing in a large chunk of the publisher’s revenue,
and BioWare had programmers with Frostbite experience, so Electronic Arts shifted them to
FIFA.

“A lot of the really talented engineers were actually working on FIFA when they should’ve been
working on Anthem,” said one person who was on the project. There was also the fact that
BioWare’s main office was located in Edmonton, a place where winters can dip to minus 20 or
even minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit, which staff there say has always made it difficult to recruit
veterans from more habitable cities. (One also has to wonder: How many programmers heard
about Frostbite’s razor blades and decided to shy away?)

When a BioWare engineer had questions or wanted to report bugs, they’d usually have to talk to
EA’s central Frostbite team, a group of support staff that worked with all of the publisher’s
studios. Within EA, it was common for studios to battle for resources like the Frostbite team’s
time, and BioWare would usually lose those battles. After all, role-playing games brought in a
fraction of the revenue of a FIFA or a Battlefront. “The amount of support you’d get at EA on
Frostbite is based on how much money your studio’s game is going to make,” said one
developer. All of BioWare’s best-laid technological plans could go awry if they weren’t getting
the help they expected.

No matter how many people were involved, one thing about Frostbite would always remain
consistent, as it did on Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda: It made everything
take longer than anyone thought it should. “We’re trying to make this huge procedural world
but we’re constantly fighting Frostbite because that’s not what it’s designed to do,” said one
developer. “Things like baking the lighting can take 24 hours. If we’re making changes to a level,
we have to go through another bake process. It’s a very complex process.”

Frostbite’s razor blades were buried deeply inside the Anthem team, and it would prove
impossible to stop the bleeding.

By the end of 2016, Anthem had been in some form of pre-production for roughly four years.
After this much time in a more typical video game development cycle, it would have entered
production, the point in a project when the team has a full vision of what they’re making and
can actually start building out the game. Some who were working on Anthem say that’s when
they started feeling like they were in trouble, like the game was screwed, like they would soon
have to face the same sort of last-minute production crunch that their co-workers were
suffering on Mass Effect: Andromeda. Yet word came down from leadership that everything
would work out. It was time for BioWare magic. “You had to throw your prior knowledge out
and either go on blind faith or just hope things were gonna turn out well,” said one person who
was there. “A lot of the veterans, guys who had only ever worked at BioWare, they said,
‘Everything is going to be fine in the end.’ It was really hard on people who couldn’t just go on
that blind faith, I suppose.”

One former BioWare developer said that they and some of their co-workers would bring up
these concerns to directors, only to be ignored. “You’d come to management saying, ‘Look,
we’re seeing the same problems on Inquisition and Andromeda, where design wasn’t figuring
things out. It’s getting really late in the project and the core of the game isn’t defined.’ Basically
saying, ‘Hey, the same mistakes are happening again, did you guys see this the last time? Can
you stop this?’” said the developer. “They’d be quite dismissive about it.”

Over the months, Anthem had begun naturally picking up ideas and mechanics from loot
shooters like The Division and Destiny, although even mentioning the word Destiny was taboo at
BioWare. (Diablo III was the preferred reference point.) A few people who worked on the game
said that trying to make comparisons to Destiny would elicit negative reactions from studio
leadership. “We were told quite definitively, ‘This isn’t Destiny,’” said one developer. “But it kind
of is. What you’re describing is beginning to go into that realm. They didn’t want to make those
correlations, but at the same time, when you’re talking about fire teams, and going off and
doing raids together, about gun combat, spells, things like that, well there’s a lot of elements
there that correlate, that cross over.”

Illustration for article titled How BioWare's Anthem Went Wrong

Because leadership didn’t want to discuss Destiny, that developer added, they found it hard to
learn from what Bungie’s loot shooter did well. “We need to be looking at games like Destiny
because they’re the market leaders,” the developer said. “They’re the guys who have been
doing these things best. We should absolutely be looking at how they’re doing things.” As an
example, the developer brought up the unique feel of Destiny’s large variety of guns, something
that Anthem seemed to be lacking, in large part because it was being built by a bunch of people
who had mostly made RPGs. “We really didn’t have the design skill to be able to do that,” they
said. “There just wasn’t the knowledge base to be able to develop that kind of diversity.”

One longstanding BioWare tradition is for their teams to build demos that the staff could all take
home during Christmas break, and it was Anthem’s turn during Christmas of 2016. By this point,
BioWare’s leadership had decided to remove flying from the game—they just couldn’t figure out
how to make it feel good—so the Christmas build took place on flat terrain. You’d run through a
farm and shoot some aliens. Some on the team thought it was successful as a proof of concept,
but others at BioWare said it felt dull and looked mundane.
In the beginning of 2017, a few important things happened. In early March, Mass Effect:
Andromeda launched, freeing up the bulk of BioWare’s staff to join Anthem, including most of
BioWare’s Austin office. The Montreal office began to quietly wind down and eventually closed,
leaving BioWare as two entities rather than three.

Around the same time, Electronic Arts executive Patrick Söderlund, to whom BioWare’s
leadership reported, played the Anthem Christmas demo. According to three people familiar
with what happened, he told BioWare that it was unacceptable. (Söderlund did not respond to a
request for comment.) He was particularly disappointed by the graphics. “He said, ‘This is not
what you had promised to me as a game,’” said one person who was there. Then, those
developers said, Söderlund summoned a group of high-level BioWare staff to fly out to
Stockholm, Sweden and meet with developers at DICE, the studio behind Battlefield and
Frostbite. (DICE would later bring in a strike team to help BioWare work out Frostbite kinks and
make Anthem look prettier.)

Now it was time for a new build. “What began was six weeks of pretty significant crunch to do a
demo specifically for Patrick Söderlund,” said one member of the team. They overhauled the art,
knowing that the best way to impress Söderlund would be to make a demo that looked as pretty
as possible. And, after some heated arguments, the Anthem team decided to put flying back in.

One biome, based on a volcano, was eventually cut from Anthem.

One biome, based on a volcano, was eventually cut from Anthem.

Image: Don Arceta (ArtStation)

For years, the Anthem team had gone back and forth about the flying mechanic. It had been cut
and re-added several times in different forms. Some iterations were more of a glide, and for a
while, the idea was that only one exosuit class would be able to fly. On one hand, the mechanic
was undeniably cool—what better way to feel like Iron Man than to zip around the world in a
giant robot suit? On the other hand, it kept breaking everything. Few open-world games allowed
for that kind of vertical freedom, for good reason; if you could fly everywhere, then the entire
world needed to accommodate that. The artists wouldn’t be able to throw up mountains or
walls to prevent players from jumping off the boundaries of the planet. Plus, the Anthem team
worried that if you could fly, you’d blaze past the game’s environments rather than stopping to
explore and check out the scenery.

The leadership team’s most recent decision had been to remove flying entirely, but they needed
to impress Söderlund, and flying was the only mechanic they’d built that made Anthem stand
out from other games, so they eventually decided to put it back. This re-implementation of
flying took place over a weekend, according to two people who worked on the game, and it
wasn’t quite clear whether they were doing it permanently or just as a show for Söderlund. “We
were like, ‘Well that’s not in the game, are we adding it for real?’” said one developer. “They
were like, ‘We’ll see.’”

One day in the spring of 2017, Söderlund flew to Edmonton and made his way to BioWare’s
offices, entourage in tow. The Anthem team had completely overhauled the art and re-added
flying, which they hoped would feel sufficiently impressive, but tensions were high in the wake
of the last demo’s disappointment and Mass Effect: Andromeda’s high-profile failure. There was
no way to know what might happen if Söderlund again disapproved of the demo. Would the
project get canceled? Would BioWare be in trouble?

“One of our QA people had been playing it over and over again so they could get the flow and
timing down perfectly,” said one person who was involved. “Within 30 seconds or so the exo
jumps off and glides off this precipice and lands.”

Then, according to two people who were in the room, Patrick Söderlund was stunned.

“He turns around and goes, ‘That was fucking awesome, show it to me again,’” said one person
who was there. “He was like, ‘That was amazing. It’s exactly what I wanted.’”

This demo became the foundation for the seven-minute gameplay trailer that BioWare showed
the public a few weeks later. In June of 2017, just a few days after that last-minute name change
from Beyond to Anthem, BioWare boss Aaryn Flynn took the stage of EA’s E3 press conference
and announced the game. The next day, at Microsoft’s press conference, they showed a demo
that helped everyone, including BioWare’s own developers, finally see how Anthem would play.

What the public didn’t know was that even then, Anthem was still in pre-production. Progress
had been so slow that the demo was mostly guesswork, team members say, which is why the
Anthem that actually launched looks so drastically different than the demo the team showed at
E3 2017. In the real game, you have to go through a mission selection menu and a loading
screen before you can leave your base in Fort Tarsis; in the demo, it all happens seamlessly. The
demo is full of dynamic environments, giant creatures, and mechanics that bear little
resemblance to the final product, like getting to see new loot when you pick it up rather than
having to wait until the end of a mission.
“After E3, that’s when it really felt like, ‘Okay, this is the game we’re making,’” said one Anthem
developer. “But it still felt like it took a while to get the entire team up to speed. It was also kind
of tricky because there were still a lot of question marks. The demo was not actually built
properly—a lot of it was fake, like most E3 demos. There was a lot of stuff that was like, ‘Oh are
we actually doing this? Do we have the tech for that, do we have the tools for that? To what end
can you fly? How big should the world be?’”

“The abilities and all that were still getting decided,” said another developer. “Nothing was set in
stone at that point at all.” Said a third: “Going out of pre-production is never really a crisp thing.
You have to just look at the attitude of the team and what they’re doing. The fact of the matter
is, fundamental things were not figured out yet.”

At E3 2017, BioWare announced that Anthem would launch in fall 2018. Behind the scenes,
however, they had barely even implemented a single mission. And the drama was just getting
worse.

Until very recently, hardcore BioWare fans used to refer to the studio’s various teams using
derogatory tiers. There was the A-team, the B-team, and the C-team. Opinions may have varied
on which was which, but in general, “A-team” referred to the original BioWare, the office in
Edmonton, Canada responsible for Dragon Age and the Mass Effect trilogy. A couple thousand
miles southeast was the “B-team,” a studio in Austin, Texas that was founded to make Star
Wars: The Old Republic, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. (The “C-team” usually
referred to Montreal, the ill-fated studio behind Mass Effect: Andromeda.)

What fans might not have realized was that even within BioWare, some people thought the
same way.

“Anthem is the game you get from a studio that is at war with itself,” said one former BioWare
developer. “Edmonton understandably has the perspective of, ‘We are the original BioWare.’
Anybody not part of that brand is lesser, and does not garner the same level of trust as people
that are in the Edmonton office. And so I think that’s a little bit of an issue there.”

After shipping The Old Republic in 2011 and continuing to cultivate and support it, BioWare
Austin started a few of its own projects. There was Shadow Realms, a 4v1 multiplayer game that
was announced in the summer of 2014, and then there were some other prototypes, like Saga, a
multiplayer open-world Star Wars game that was in early development for a few months. (And
then there was the dream of a new Knights of the Old Republic game, which some BioWare
Austin staffers say was always dangled as a possibility but never really came close to getting off
the ground.)

Illustration for article titled How BioWare's Anthem Went Wrong

Image: Sean Obrigewitch (ArtStation)

By the end of 2014, those projects were all canceled, and BioWare had enacted an initiative that
it called “One BioWare”—a plan designed to get all of the company’s studios working in tandem.
Many of BioWare Austin’s staff moved on to Dragon Age: Inquisition downloadable content and
then Mass Effect: Andromeda. By early 2017, around the time Söderlund was demanding to see
that new demo, most of BioWare Austin was officially on Anthem, helping with just about every
department, from cinematics to storytelling.

Anthem’s lack of vision in Edmonton was even more pronounced in Austin, whose developers
suddenly found themselves working on a game they didn’t quite understand. Was it an online
loot shooter, like Destiny, or was it more of a role-playing game? How did you get around the
world? What would the missions look like? “One of the things we struggled with was, we didn’t
understand the game concept,” said one former BioWare Austin developer. “When Anthem was
presented to us, it was never really clear what the game was.”

“They were still finding the vision for the game,” said a second. “I saw multiple presentations
given to the entire studio trying to define what Anthem was about. The Hollywood elevator
pitch version of Anthem: ‘When we talk about Anthem, what we mean is X.’ I saw many, many
variations of that over time, and that was indicative of how much conflict there was over trying
to find a vision for this game, and over how many people were struggling to have their vision
become the one that won out.”

“One of the things we struggled with was, we didn’t understand the game concept. When
Anthem was presented to us, it was never really clear what the game was.” - former BioWare
developer

Even when they did figure out what was happening, it felt to BioWare Austin staff like they were
the grunts. Developers who worked both in Austin and Edmonton say the messaging was that
Edmonton would come up with the vision and Austin would execute on it, which caused tension
between the two studios. BioWare Austin developers recall offering feedback only to get
dismissed or ignored by BioWare Edmonton’s senior leadership team, a process that was
particularly frustrating for those who had already shipped a big online game, Star Wars: The Old
Republic, and learned from its mistakes. One developer described it as a culture clash between a
group of developers in Edmonton who were used to making single-player box product games
and a group of developers in Austin who knew how to make online service games.

“We’d tell them, ‘This is not going to work. Look, these [story] things you’re doing, it’s gonna
split up the player experience,’” said an Austin developer. “We’d already been through all of it
with The Old Republic. We knew what it was like when players felt like they were getting rushed
through story missions, because other players were on their headsets going, ‘C’mon cmon, let’s
go.’ So we knew all these things, and we’d bring it up repeatedly, and we were ignored.”

After the E3 reveal, in June of 2017, the Anthem teams in Edmonton and Austin were meant to
start moving into full production, designing missions and building a world based on the vision
they could now at least somewhat see. But that just didn’t happen, the developers say. “They
had been in idea land for four to five years, and nobody had actually gone, ‘Okay, we need to
decide what we’re making and make it,’” said one member of the team. “They were still going
back to the drawing board on major systems. Which is fine—part of game development is that
you iterate, and it’s like, ‘This didn’t work, let’s go again.’ They never got to the point of like,
‘This doesn’t work, let’s iterate on it.’ It was, ‘This doesn’t work, let’s start from scratch.’”

The story was still in flux under new narrative director James Ohlen (who would also leave
BioWare before Anthem shipped), and design was moving particularly slowly, with systems like
mission structure, loot, and exosuit powers still not finalized. A number of veteran BioWare
developers began leaving the studio that summer, and the untimely death of Corey Gaspur, one
of the game’s lead designers, left a massive hole in that department. Core features, like loading
and saving, still hadn’t been implemented in the game, and it became difficult to play test builds
because they were riddled with bugs.

“It came time to move from pre-production to production in June,” said one BioWare developer.
“June comes, we’re still in pre-production. July, August, what the heck’s going on?”

The Anthem leadership team and some other veterans continued to talk about BioWare magic,
but it was clear to a lot of people that something was wrong. They had publicly committed to a
fall 2018 ship date, but that had never been realistic. Publisher EA also wouldn’t let them delay
the game any further than March 2019, the end of the company’s fiscal year. They were
entering production so late, it seemed like it might be impossible to ship anything by early 2019,
let alone a game that could live up to BioWare’s lofty standards.
Something needed to give.

On June 29, 2017, BioWare’s Mark Darrah published a tweet that may seem odd today. He
noted that he was the executive producer of the Dragon Age franchise, then gave a list of games
he was not currently working on: ”Anthem; Mass Effect; Jade Empire; A DA Tactics game; Star
Wars…” The implication was that Darrah was producing Dragon Age 4. At the time, this was
true. This iteration of Dragon Age 4 was code-named Joplin, and those who were working on it
have told me they were excited by creative director Mike Laidlaw’s vision for the project.

But Anthem was on fire, and by October, BioWare had decided to make some massive changes.
That summer, studio general manager Aaryn Flynn departed, to be replaced by a returning
Casey Hudson. As part of this process, the studio canceled Joplin. Laidlaw quit shortly afterward,
and BioWare restarted Dragon Age 4 with a tiny team under the code name Morrison.
Meanwhile, the studio moved the bulk of Dragon Age 4’s developers to Anthem, which needed
all of the company’s resources if it was going to hit the ship date that EA was demanding.

Mark Darrah was then installed over game director Jon Warner to become executive producer
on Anthem. His role became so significant that he took top billing in Anthem’s credits:

Illustration for article titled How BioWare's Anthem Went Wrong

That the first name in Anthem’s credits is someone who started working on the game in October
2017, just 16 months before it shipped, says volumes about its development.

If Dragon Age: Inquisition hadn’t been so successful, perhaps BioWare would have changed its
production practices. Perhaps studio leadership wouldn’t have preached so strongly about that
BioWare magic—that last-minute cohesion that they all assumed would happen with enough
hard work and enough crunch. But it was ultimately Dragon Age: Inquisition’s executive
producer who steered Anthem out of rocky waters and into port.

When Mark Darrah joined the project in the fall of 2017, he began pushing the Anthem team
toward one goal: Ship the game.
“The good thing about Mark is that he would just wrangle everybody and make decisions,” said
one former BioWare developer. “That was the thing that the team lacked—nobody was making
decisions. It was deciding by panel. They’d almost get to a decision and then somebody would
go ‘But what about this?’ We were stagnant, not moving anywhere.”

“He started saying basically, ‘Just try to finish what you’ve started,’” said a second developer.
“The hard part about that was that there were still a lot of things to figure out. There were still a
lot of tools to build to be able to ship the game we were making. It was very, very scary because
of how little time there was left.”

At this point, that developer added, it felt like “player-based gameplay” was in a good spot.
Combat felt like a strong evolution from Mass Effect: Andromeda, which, despite its flaws, was
widely considered to have the best shooting of any Mass Effect game. Now that flying was a
permanent fixture in Anthem, it was starting to feel great, too. Other parts of the game were in
much worse shape. “It was level design, story, and world-building that got screwed the most, in
that things kept changing and they had to rebuild a lot all the time,” the developer said.

Illustration for article titled How BioWare's Anthem Went Wrong

By the beginning of 2018, by another former developer’s recollection, Anthem’s progress was so
far behind that they’d only implemented a single mission. Most of the high-level design had still
not been finalized, like the loot system and javelin powers. And the writing was still very much in
flux. “They talk a lot about the six-year development time, but really the core gameplay loop,
the story, and all the missions in the game were made in the last 12 to 16 months because of
that lack of vision and total lack of leadership across the board,” said the developer.

This final year was when Anthem began to materialize, and it became one of the most stressful
years in BioWare’s history. There was pressure within the studio, as many teams had to put in
late nights and weekends just to make up for the time they’d lost. There was pressure from EA,
as executive Samantha Ryan brought in teams from all across the publisher, including
developers from outside studios like Motive in Montreal, to close out the game. And there was
pressure from the competition, as The Division 2 was announced, Destiny 2 continued to
improve, and other loot shooters like Warframe just kept getting better.

Meanwhile, the gaming landscape was changing. Electronic Arts had gone all-in on regularly
updated “games as a service” but was struggling in several key areas, closing Visceral Games in
San Francisco and facing serious drama at its ambitious EA Motive studio in Montreal. The Star
Wars Battlefront II pay-to-win debacle led to a reinvigorated public hatred for all things
Electronic Arts and a publisher-wide reboot of all things loot box, even as EA executives
continually pushed for all of their games to have long-term monetization plans, Anthem
included. EA has been public about its distaste for linear games that can be easily returned to
GameStop after a single playthrough.

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And Anthem needed to be finished. By rebooting Dragon Age 4 and moving almost all of
BioWare’s staff to Anthem, the studio, now under new leadership, was doubling down.
Decisions had to be made that would get the game out the door, no matter what that meant
cutting. There was no more time for ideation or “finding the fun” in prototypes.

“I would say it ended up being quite a stressful time and a lot of people started to develop
tunnel vision,” said one developer. “They have to finish their thing and they don’t have the
time.” That, the developer added, is one of the explanations for some of Anthem’s critical flaws.
Consider its unreasonably long loading times, for example, which could take more than two
minutes on PC before the early patch. “Of course we knew loading screens would be
unpopular,” the developer said. “But we have everything on the schedule, hundreds more days
scheduled of work than we actually have. So loading is not gonna get addressed.”

Anthem was so in flux during 2018 that even some major features that were discussed publicly
that year never made it into the game. A Game Informer cover story on Anthem, published in
July of 2018, detailed a skill tree system that would allow players to build up their exosuit pilots
in unique ways: “Your pilot also gains skills that apply universally to any javelin you use. For
instance, the booster jets on your javelins overheat with continued use, but by investing in a
certain pilot skill, you can increase the amount of time you’re able to stay airborne in all of your
suits.” That system was cut before launch.

“I don’t know how accurate this is,” said one BioWare developer, “but it felt like the entire game
was basically built in the last six to nine months. You couldn’t play it. There was nothing there. It
was just this crazy final rush. The hard part is, how do you make a decision when there’s no
game? There’s nothing to play. So yeah, you’re going to keep questioning yourself.”
It’s not unusual for a video game to be in rough shape close to launch. Some of the best video
games in history, like The Last of Us, came out of rocky development cycles in which many of the
staff felt like they were screwed until everything coalesced at the last minute. Something about
Anthem felt different, though. Too much had gone awry; too many ambitions had not been
realized. “I think if just one thing had gone wrong, we would’ve navigated that,” said a
developer.

One mandate from Anthem’s directors had been to make the game “unmemeable,” a reaction
to Mass Effect: Andromeda‘s jittery facial animations, which became an internet joke in the days
leading up to that game’s release. For Anthem, the team used high-end performance capture in
order to ensure that the characters couldn’t be turned into embarrassing GIFs and plastered all
over Reddit. Since the bulk of the game’s story-telling would be told from a first-person
perspective in the hub city Fort Tarsis, players would spend a lot of time staring at characters’
faces. The characters had to look good.

Performance capture, or “pcap,” did indeed make for beautiful animations, but it came at a cost.
Because booking performance capture was so expensive, the team often had just one shot to
get things right, which was a difficult proposition when Anthem’s design was changing so
rapidly. Sometimes, the team would record and implement scenes that stopped making sense as
a result of design changes. “There are little bits of dialogue, little moments in some of these
performance-captured scenes, that if you stop and think, don’t make any sense,” said one
developer. “The reason this doesn’t make any sense is because they changed some of the
gameplay down the line, but it was impossible to change the performance capture.”

One mission involving the rebellious Sentinel Dax, for example, has a few lines of dialogue that
reference the destruction of her javelin exosuit, which never happens in the game. The
explanation is simple, the developer said. The mission was altered after they’d recorded the
dialogue, and there was no time or money to go re-record it. “They were just like, ‘Well it’s not
gonna be destroyed,’” said the developer. “Wait, that makes that line of dialogue make no
sense.”

Hardcore fans have spotted other examples of Anthem dialogue that seems incoherent or odd,
like characters talking about other characters as if they’re not present when they’re actually
standing in the same room. “That’s a really strong example of the types of problems that befell
us,” said another developer. “Why couldn’t they change this? It’s not that nobody wanted to.
It’s because when we set the course with these huge assets, we’re sometimes stuck with them.”
Because decisions were being made so rapidly and there was so much work left to do, Anthem
developers say they had a hard time looking at the game holistically. It was tough to zoom out
and get a feel for what it’d be like to play 40, 60, or 80 hours of Anthem when entire missions
weren’t even finished. How could you tell if the loot drop rates were balanced when you
couldn’t even play through the whole game? How could you assess whether the game felt
grindy or repetitive when the story wasn’t even finished yet?

Plus, the build could be so unstable, it was difficult to even log on to test for bugs. “I think there
was an entire week where I couldn’t do anything because there were server issues,” said one
person who worked on the game. Another said that the team had to test out and approve levels
offline, which was a strange choice for missions that were meant to be played by four people.

Just a couple months before Anthem shipped, decisions were still being finalized and
overhauled. At one point, for example, the leadership team realized that there was no place in
the game to show off your gear, which was a problem for a game in which the long-term
monetization was all based on cosmetics. You could spend money on fancy new outfits for your
robot suit, but who would even see them? The game’s one city, Fort Tarsis, was privately
instanced so that it could change for each player based on how much progress they’d made in
the story. So the team brought on EA’s Motive studio in Montreal to build the Launch Bay, a
last-minute addition to the game where you could hang out and show off your gear to strangers.

“I think there was an entire week where I couldn’t do anything because there were server
issues.” - BioWare developer

Back in Edmonton, as the crunch continued, BioWare employees say leadership assured them
that everything would be fine. The BioWare magic would materialize. Sure enough, the game
did continue to get better—one BioWare developer emphasized that the improvements were
exponential during those last few months—but the stress of production had serious
consequences. “I’d never heard of ‘stress leave’ until the end of Andromeda,” said one former
BioWare developer, referring to a practice in which BioWare employees would take weeks or
even months off for their mental health. On Anthem, the developer added, this practice just got
worse. “I’ve never heard of people needing to take time off because they were so stressed out.
But then that kind of spread like wildfire throughout the team.”

This also led to attrition over the course of Anthem’s development, and a glance through the
game’s credits reveals a number of names of people who left during 2017 and 2018. “People
were leaving in droves,” said one developer who left. “It was just really shocking how many
people were going.”
“We hear about the big people,” said another developer who left. “When [writer] Drew
Karpyshyn leaves, it makes big waves. But a lot of people don’t realize that there were a ton of
really talented game designers who left BioWare and no one knows. The general public is
unaware of who these people are.” Some of those people took off for other cities, while over a
dozen followed former BioWare boss Aaryn Flynn to Improbable, a technology company that
recently announced plans to develop its own game. That list includes many former high-level
staff—including art and animation director Neil Thompson, technical director Jacques Lebrun,
and lead designer Kris Schoneberg—some of whom were at BioWare for over a decade.

By the end of 2018, those who remained on Anthem wished they could have had just a few
more months. Under Darrah and the production staff, there was real momentum, but it became
clear to everyone that the game wouldn’t ship with as much content as fans expected. They
came up with some artificial solutions to extend the campaign, like Challenges of the
Legionnaires, a tedious, mandatory part of the main story that involves completing grindy quests
in order to access tombs across the game’s world. (Originally, according to two BioWare
developers, this mission included time gates that might force players to wait days to complete it
all—fortunately, they changed this before launch. “That mission was controversial even within
BioWare,” said one. “The reasoning was to definitely throttle player movement.”)

There was no escaping EA’s fiscal targets, and Anthem had already been in development for
nearly seven years. They had committed to launching within EA’s fiscal year, which ended in
March of 2019. The game would ship in February. Even if they wanted a few more months, that
just wasn’t an option. “In the end,” said one developer, “we just ran out of time.”

If there was one reason for BioWare staff to be optimistic, it was the fact that unlike the studio’s
previous games, Anthem had room to evolve. Early mock reviews—critical assessments
provided by outside consultants—predicted that Anthem’s Metacritic score would land in the
high 70s. This was low for a BioWare game, but company leadership was fine with that, telling
staff during company meetings that with some last-minute polish in the months following those
mock reviews, they could get even higher. A few months after launch, maybe they’d have
something special on their hands.

“They had a really strong belief in the live service,” said one developer. “Issues that were coming
up, they’d say, ‘We’re a live service. We’ll be supporting this for years to come. We’ll fix that
later on.’”
It turned out the mock reviews had been too generous. By the time Anthem came out,
BioWare’s leadership would have killed for a Metacritic in the high 70s.

On February 15, 2019, Anthem launched in EA’s premium early-access services, opening the
floodgates as players and reviewers began to see just how flawed the game was. The loading
screens were too long, the loot system felt unbalanced, and missions were thin and repetitive.
Plenty of players liked the core gameplay—the shooting, the flying, the javelin exosuit abilities—
but everything around it seemed undercooked. As it turned out, this February 15 build was a
few weeks old, a devastating mistake for BioWare that likely led to far more negative reviews
than they might have received otherwise. A patch a few days later fixed some of the bugs, such
as audio drops and sluggish loading screens, that were highlighted in reviews, but it was too
late. By the time the Metacritic score had settled, it was a 55.

“I don’t think we knew what Anthem was going to be when it shipped,” said one developer. “If
we had known the shipped game would have that many problems, then that’s a completely
different take than, ‘Oh, it’s okay to get this out now because we can improve it later.’ That
wasn’t the case. Nobody did believe it was this flawed or this broken. Everyone actually thought,
‘We have something here, and we think it’s pretty good.’”

While talking to me, a number of former BioWare developers brought up specific complaints
that were voiced by players and critics, then shared anecdotes of how they had made those
same gripes to the leadership team throughout 2017 and 2018 only to be brushed off. It’s easy
for developers to say that with hindsight, of course, but this was a common theme. “Reading the
reviews is like reading a laundry list of concerns that developers brought up with senior
leadership,” said one person who worked on the game. In some cases, perhaps they just didn’t
have time to address the issues, but these former BioWare developers said they brought up
bigger-picture concerns years before the game shipped.

Illustration for article titled How BioWare's Anthem Went Wrong

As an example, two developers brought up non-player character dialogue. Most of Anthem’s

story is told through conversations in Fort Tarsis and radio chatter as you go through missions,
yet the game strongly pushes you to team up with other players. As anyone who’s played an
online game knows, it’s hard to pay much attention to NPC dialogue when you’re playing with
other people, whether they’re blabbing in your ear or rushing you to hurry up and get to the
next mission. Current and former BioWare employees say they brought this up with BioWare’s
senior leadership only to be ignored. Anthem developers say they anticipated other complaints,
too, like ones about the heat meter that prevents you from flying for too long without breaks,
and the fact that so many of those Fort Tarsis dialogue choices didn’t seem to accomplish much.
In the weeks after launch, BioWare’s Austin office began taking over the live service, as had
always been planned, while BioWare Edmonton staff gradually started moving to new projects,
like Dragon Age 4. Among those who remain at the company, there’s a belief that Anthem can
be fixed, that with a few more months and some patience from players, it will have the same
redemption story as so many service games before it, from Diablo III to Destiny.

Yet questions linger about BioWare’s production practices. Many of those who have left the
company over the past few years shared concerns about the studio’s approach to game
development. There’s widespread worry that the soul of BioWare has been ripped away, that
this belief in “BioWare magic” has burned too many people out. That too many talented
veterans have left. “There are things that need to change about how that studio operates,” said
one former developer. “There are lessons that need to be learned and the only way they’ll get
learned is if they become public knowledge.”

“I think Anthem might be the kick in the butt that BioWare leadership needed to see that how
you develop games has changed dearly.” - former BioWare developer

One big change that’s already been enacted at BioWare is a new technology strategy.
Developers still at the studio say that under Casey Hudson, rather than start from scratch yet
again, the next Dragon Age will be built on Anthem’s codebase. (We’ll share more on that game
in the near future.)

“I think Anthem might be the kick in the butt that BioWare leadership needed to see that how
you develop games has changed dearly,” said one former staffer. “You can’t just start fresh and
fumble your way forward until you find the fun. That doesn’t work anymore.”

Perhaps Anthem will morph into a great game one day. A few people who worked on it have
expressed optimism for the future. “A lot of us were screaming at the wall,” said one Austin
developer. “Over time, what builds up is, ‘Okay, when we get control, we’re going to fix it.’ Sure,
the game has all these problems and we understand them. It’s very much a ‘motivated to fix’
attitude.”

The game that emerged from a six-and-a-half-year development cycle was the result of a
number of difficult, complicated factors, ones that won’t be quite as easy to fix as Anthem’s loot
drop rates or loading screens. When the Anthem team started development back in 2012, they
hoped to make the Bob Dylan of video games, one that would be referenced and remembered
for generations. They might have accomplished that. Just not in quite the way they hoped.
UPDATE (11:30am): Minutes after the publication of this article, EA and BioWare put up a blog
post in apparent response. We had sent over a bullet-pointed summary of what was in this
piece, although they did not have a chance to read the article before publishing their post,
which makes it a particularly bizarre response.

The post explains the lack of comment for our article based on an assumption of what the article
would focus on: “We chose not to comment or participate in this story because we felt there
was an unfair focus on specific team members and leaders, who did their absolute best to bring
this totally new idea to fans. We didn’t want to be part of something that was attempting to
bring them down as individuals.”

While our article names some senior people at BioWare, and while we’d asked about the roles
of various leaders at BioWare during the game’s development, readers can judge for themselves
whether BioWare’s assumptions about our article were correct. We don’t think they were.

“The struggles and challenges of making video games are very real,” the post states. “But the
reward of putting something we created into the hands of our players is amazing. People in this
industry put so much passion and energy into making something fun. We don’t see the value in
tearing down one another, or one another’s work. We don’t believe articles that do that are
making our industry and craft better.”

We believe in asking questions and publishing what we can find out. We hope that in the future
EA and BioWare will see the value of that process.