We don’t want to say that the mood of the Anthem fanbase is fatalistic at this point, but it’s certainly not predicting that all is well in the game or in development. But surprisingly, a recent interview with EA CEO Andrew Wilson at this year’s E3 involves him restating his commitment to the game, with statements that both this particular project and BioWare as an entity remain in the good graces of EA despite some stumbles:
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.
Wilson explained that the core issue with the game at launch was the disconnect between players who wanted the depth of story experience and developing a game that could be played as a consistent long-term persistent experience. He compared overall faith in the studio to Steven Spielberg, however; even if Spielberg makes a movie that doesn’t happen to do as well, you’re still going to bet on the next movie he makes because he has such a long and excellent track record. So it seems that talks of BioWare’s demise may be more than a little premature.
What the BioWare teams are thinking about is that we’re going to build a lot of different types of games. We’re going to have our core BioWare audience that’s been with us for a really long time. There are kids today who are 12 years old who weren’t around when BioWare started making games… and they have different expectations of what a BioWare game should be in the context of the world they’ve grown up in. As a result of that, BioWare has to evolve and has to expand and has to test the elasticity of that brand. The teams at BioWare will continue to come to work every day and listen to their players old and new and seek to deliver on the promises they’ve made to those players. That’s what you’re seeing with Anthem today.
