In an interview, Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson recently spoke about Anthem. The action RPG is currently not what EA and players had envisioned. However, the core of the game is so appealing that BioWare and EA will continue to support it.
Who is it about? In a detailed interview, Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson spoke about the rocky launch of Anthem, among other things.
In his opinion, the biggest challenge of the game was to bring together two different groups of players:
- Players who love traditional BioWare stories
- Players who lean more towards action-adventure
BioWare fans expected something more along the lines of Dragon Age or Mass Effect. While players who enjoy third-person shooters loved flying in Anthem, they found that after a while, they had nothing to do in the game with their friends.
Wilson says that the different player groups targeted with Anthem had different complaints:
- “I am used to 100 hours of story from a BioWare game, and I am not getting that.”
- “The promise was that we could play together, and that’s not working very well.”
- “I expected to make significant progress in the action part of the game, just like I did in Destiny, and it doesn’t feel like that.”
However, EA did not give up on Star Wars Battlefront 2 before and would also give BioWare the time needed to address the issues with Anthem.
Anthem can become something great
What does EA say about Anthem? Wilson believes that, in the case of Anthem’s misalignment, one must remain committed to both the game and the audience. This includes fans who desire a traditional BioWare experience. At the same time, all EA brands need to grow because the market and players are becoming more mature.
„If we believed that the world [of Anthem] was not appealing to people at its core, if we believed that the characters were not appealing to people, or the Javelin suits were not appealing. Or if we believed that it wasn’t appealing to explore the world and be part of the world or if we hadn’t promised our players anything … we probably wouldn’t continue to invest.”
Andrew Wilson
But a franchise could run for seven to ten years, and when he thinks of Anthem in such a timeframe, it may have had a different start than EA, the developers, and players had hoped.
But Andrew Wilson feels that BioWare can transform Anthem into something great and special because they have already shown that they can.
What is the problem with Anthem? Shortly after the release of Anthem, reviews poured in that were mediocre. The developers celebrated the launch with chocolate bars with a cocoa content of 62%, which matched the metascore on Metacritic.
In April, an insider report from journalist Jason Schreier shed a grim light on the development of Anthem. Instead of seven years of development time, the game reportedly only came together in the last 18 months before release.
Due to bugs and issues, the whole roadmap and planned new content had to be postponed.
The major Cataclysms, which were supposed to change the world of Anthem, can currently be examined by players on PC on the test servers:
