Intro: A Puzzling Departure
When BioWare announced Anthem, many fans were left baffled. Why would a studio known for popular single-player RPGs like Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, KOTOR, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age venture into the territory of a multiplayer-focused looter shooter? The outcome, if not inevitable, wasn’t entirely surprising: the game was deemed “deeply flawed and frequently frustrating” in our 55% review. Just two years after its 2019 launch, BioWare halted its future development, closing a challenging chapter in its history.
The Lessons of Failure
As the adage goes, you learn more from failure than success. For BioWare, the struggle with Anthem offered crucial insights. In a recent Edge magazine feature on BioWare’s upcoming Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Creative Director John Epler emphasized the importance of understanding and leveraging the studio’s core strengths. “We’re a studio that has always been built around digging deep on storytelling and roleplaying,” Epler remarked. The missteps with Anthem reinforced the need to focus on what they excel at and avoid spreading themselves too thin.
Refocusing on Core Strengths
The allure of games like Anthem lies in their potential for long-term monetization, a feature less common in single-player RPGs. However, the significant failure of Anthem underscored the enduring appeal of self-contained, story-focused games—a point aptly demonstrated by Larian’s success with Baldur’s Gate 3. BioWare initially toyed with live-service elements for The Veilguard but eventually reverted to its traditional strengths. Epler noted, “The form The Veilguard has taken is, in a lot of ways, the form that we were always pushing towards. There was that moment where we really settled on, ‘this is a single-player, story-focused RPG—and that’s all it needs to be.'”
Commitment to Single-Player Excellence
Corinne Busche, Game Director, echoed this sentiment by emphasizing that BioWare aims to make The Veilguard
