It goes without saying that Anthem permanently shut down its servers on January 12. This has sparked numerous debates about the project and the decisions made by BioWare at the time.
In an interview with Destin Legarie on YouTube, Mark Darrah, who was executive producer on Anthem, responded to criticism that BioWare should never have tried to make an online game. In his opinion, this argument is unfounded since, since its founding in 1994, the studio has always tried new things. Anthem was just one evolution that unfortunately didn’t pan out.
“I’m sure there are probably things that need to be set straight, but I think it’s easy to blame EA. They certainly deserve a fair share of the criticism for Anthem, but it’s not entirely their fault.
There’s one thing worth mentioning. I think, at the time, some people loved to come out of the woodwork and say, ‘See, I told you so,’ and [say], ‘Well, BioWare should never have made Anthem because it’s a single-player RPG studio.’
But I feel like BioWare has always evolved. In other words, if we follow that line of reasoning, we should never have made Neverwinter Nights because we were a 2D RPG developer. We should never have made Mass Effect because we were a tactical RPG developer, not an action RPG developer.
So I’m not convinced by that argument. For me, it’s more like: yes, studios evolve and try new things. And was Anthem too ambitious a project? Yes, without a doubt. But could you have guessed that at the time? I don’t know. I don’t know if it was possible.”
