The head of Electronic Arts, Andrew Wilson, praises the success and quality of Dragon Age: The Veilguard at an investor conference. This marks a return to form for BioWare. At the same time, he takes the opportunity to point out the weaknesses of the 2019 released and failed SF-MMO Anthem.
This is what Wilson says about Dragon Age: The Veilguard: On October 29, Electronic Arts held their quarterly call with investors, presenting the quarterly figures for Q2 2025. Wilson praised the quality of Dragon Age: The Veilguard to the investors:
Dragon Age is a return for BioWare to the things that made the studio great.
The role-playing game represents a crucial turning point: BioWare has now returned to developing “typical BioWare” games and has found its old BioWare strength again.
The new game would show that BioWare has again gathered around what made BioWare a studio that fans love, with a brand that fans cherish.
Wilson resorts to superlatives: It is an “incredibly rich world, with incredibly nuanced characters, a truly powerful storytelling about camaraderie, friendship, and relationships, with choices that influenced gameplay.”
Anthem was a puzzle whose pieces never fit together
What does he say about Anthem? Wilson only speaks of the 2019 hyped and then abandoned MMO shooter Anthem as a negative example of how not to do it.
Anthem was the game people remembered when they think of games that didn’t really meet what a BioWare game should be.
BioWare did something with Anthem that was “completely, completely different” from what people normally expected from a BioWare game.
The shooter used really different mechanics and modalities that then played out in a BioWare world. But “the pieces of the puzzle never really came together, at least not in the way BioWare had hoped.”
Anthem was first hyped and then abandoned by EA
Why does it feel strange? Anthem was hyped by EA before its release and described as a game for 10 years. However, Anthem was quickly abandoned and was omitted from financial reports while new favorites like Apex Legends were praised.
Ultimately, fans of the game, of which there were many, hoped that EA would give the SF-MMO a second chance and let the BioWare team in Austin, Texas, develop an “Anthem 2.0”. However, EA decided in February 2021 to abandon these revival attempts after a year, effectively giving up the “10-year game” after just a few months.
Other studios, such as Bethesda with The Elder Scrolls Online, Square Enix with Final Fantasy XIV, or Ubisoft with Ghost Recon, were willing to invest many resources in live-service games that had a rough start. These games improved significantly over the years. EA failed to do this with Anthem and deliberately focused its resources on other games like FIFA, The Sims, Apex Legends, or Dragon Age. That now, 5 years after disappointing fans, Anthem, which was treated so poorly by EA, has to suffer again is unfair: Anthem is dead – The short life and long death of EA’s “next big thing”
