EA and BioWare’s Anthem is regarded by many as one of the most disappointing games of 2019 so far. Gamers have a wide variety of problems with Anthem ranging from a surplus of bugs still present in the game today to a lack of any worthwhile endgame content to keep players around.
CEO of EA Andrew Wilson spoke with GameDaily about Anthem’s troubles and why the game has had such a rocky start so far. Wilson attributes some of these issues to combining two separate types of players. One group that bought Anthem for the BioWare story-driven experience and the other that wanted to play your classic looter-shooter:
“We brought together these two groups of players who were making this emotional value calculation on two different vectors,”
“One was traditional BioWare story driven content, and the other was this action-adventure type content. About the 30 or 40 hour mark they really had to come together and start working in on the elder game. At that point everyone kind of went, ‘Oh, hang a minute.’ Now the calculation is off. It’s off because I’ve got a friend who sits in this other category of player. They want to play the game a certain way. I want to play the game a certain way. The promise was we can play together, and that’s not working very well. Oh, by the way I’m used to 100 hours of BioWare story, and that’s not what I got.’ Or, ‘I expected that this game would have meaningfully advanced the action component that we’d seen in games like Destiny before, and I don’t feel like it has.’”
According to GameDaily, Wilson compared Anthem developer BioWare to director Steven Spielberg and doubled down on the developer, stating that he’d bet on BioWare “every day and twice on Sunday”.
The EA CEO then touched on the future of Anthem and why EA isn’t giving up on the IP:
“If we believed that at the very core the world wasn’t compelling people, if we believed at the very core that the characters weren’t compelling for people, or the Javelin suits weren’t compelling, or traversing the world and participating in the world wasn’t compelling then provided we hadn’t made promises to our players… we might not invest further,”
“IP lives for generations, and runs in these seven to ten year cycles. So, if I think about Anthem on a seven to ten year cycle, it may not have had the start that many of us wanted, including our players. I feel like that team is really going to get there with something special and something great, because they’ve demonstrated that they can.”
If you haven’t already, go check out the full interview with GameDaily by clicking here.
Anthem is a game that has the potential to be great. Optimistically, you can look at this as EA standing behind Anthem and BioWare. This could potentially lead to a resurgence for the game in the future akin to Rainbow Six: Siege, No Man’s Sky, Sea of Thieves, and even The Division. Realistically, however, this is just another example of EA being out of touch with their consumers (along with those ridiculous loot-box “surprise mechanics” statements from last week). Anthem has issues and putting some blame onto their own player base is not a smart way to go about improving everyone’s outlook on the game.
What are your thoughts on Wilson’s comments? Are you still playing Anthem? Let us know in the comments below!
