Anthem was one of BioWare's first big missteps, and the failed looter shooter arguably began a domino effect that today sees the studio developing Mass Effect 5 with only a skeleton crew, as many of its veterans have been shipped off to other EA-owned studios.
The tumultuous development cycle of Anthem is back in the news following the permanent shutdown of the game's servers earlier this week. Mark Darrah—Dragon Age co-creator and executive producer on Anthem during the final eighteen months of the game's development—recently released a comprehensive video outlining his perspective on Anthem's development.
Darrah was only brought in to lead the project during the last year-and-a-half of Anthem's development, which meant he had to quickly diagnose some of the issues that had been plaguing the team on the project over the past few years.
One thing Darrah highlighted as a major problem was a refusal from the development team to acknowledge Anthem's closest comparisons. Ultimately, Anthem should have resembled something like Destiny or Borderlands. However, the team avoided obvious solutions to problems in a conscious effort to avoid resembling those games.
"The reality is, is that Anthem wasn't actually unlike anything that came...
