BioWare might very well have given up on Anthem already, according to recent reports. Over the past few weeks, news has come of three lead Anthem developers leaving that team and instead moving over to Dragon Age 4. Whether BioWare has given up on the game yet remains to be seen though.
The news of Anthem developers leaving hasn’t actually been old news. The various project leads that have been reassigned to Dragon Age include lead director Jonathan Warner, Mike Gamble, the lead producer, and Mike Darrah, who served as the executive producer.
Darrah revealed his departure on Twitter. Warner and Gamble had their own reasons: Warner said he had to take a sabbatical for family emergencies and Gamble admitted he was no longer a contact for Anthem.
Despite a lot of promotion from BioWare and EA (even getting Neil Blomkamp to make a short film), Anthem launched to a thoroughly lukewarm, if not outright hostile, reception from many gamers. Microtransactions, a lack of loot, technical issues, and general disdain for the game from the beginning have all played a factor in its failure.
While BioWare put the game’s post-release DLC roadmap on hold in order to help iron out the game’s many technical issues, with three different high-ranking Anthem developers leaving the team and going off to another game, people might get ideas. The most obvious being the most evident: that Anthem is a bigger failure than Mass Effect: Andromeda.
Anthem was also hit hard by a scathing article from Jason Schreier of Kotaku, which explained that Anthem’s horrendous development process was hampered by complacency, a lack of leadership, and a lack of any real vision for the title.
With the three most important Anthem developers leaving, we’ve got no idea what will happen to Anthem right now, but hopefully the game was enough of a shakeup that the studio will actually put time into Dragon Age 4, so that another beloved series isn’t forced down the drain by incompetence.
