Anthem will still become ‘something special’ says EA CEO, game is on 7-10 year cycle
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Of Electronic Arts’ failures over the years, Anthem is certainly one of the biggest. Star Wars Battlefront 2 still managed to shift a boatload of copies and is supported and improved to this day, while Anthem has practically faded from the face of the Earth. EA didn’t even deem it necessary to talk about the game at E3 2019.
According to EA CEO Andrew Wilson though, BioWare’s Anthem will one day become “something special”. It may not even be this game which becomes special though, with Wilson talking up a 7-10 year plan for the franchise, rather than the individual game.
“Making fun is hard,” Wilson admitted during an interview with GameDaily.biz. It’s even harder when you’re on tight time limits to make the aforementioned fun, and your publisher is forcing you to hurry your game out ahead of the end of the fiscal year. But we digress.
“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”, explained Wilson.
“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 can name a single character from Anthem then you’re a more attentive person than I, let alone one that’s “compelling”. Still, BioWare has demonstrated over the years that, given enough time and enough belief, it can produce fantastic stories and engrossing adventures. Anthem isn’t it though, and there’s a heck of a long way to go if BioWare hopes to turn this particular game around. Bungie managed it with Destiny, but even that core game had a more substantial base than Anthem currently does.
Anthem’s post-launch roadmap has now basically been killed off for the short term. Dates for planned features and content came and went without a sniff, and now BioWare has opted to shift focus to bug fixes and tweaks to the core game in an effort to salvage the title. We’re certainly interested to see how EA and BioWare can possibly turn this one around, if at all.
