The Inside Story of Anthem's Troubled Development: A Deep Dive into BioWare's Challenges

Former BioWare producer Mark Darrah has shed light on the turbulent development of the live-service shooter, Anthem, whose servers are slated for shutdown in January. In the second installment of his revelatory video series, Darrah recounts the project's tumultuous journey, particularly from 2017 when he assumed the role of executive producer. He details a deeply dysfunctional decision-making culture and significant communication gaps between BioWare's Edmonton and Austin offices. Darrah's narrative exposes how a lack of clear vision, coupled with the persistent re-evaluation and rebuilding of early missions, prevented the game from cohering into a shippable product. He also reveals that critical design issues, such as the implications of the game's signature flight ability, were not fully grasped until it was too late to implement effective solutions.

Darrah's account paints a vivid picture of a project mired in indecision and internal strife. He describes how Anthem, despite EA's high hopes and BioWare's legendary storytelling prowess, languished in a state of creative purgatory. Decisions were either perpetually deferred or repeatedly overturned, leading to a crippling inertia that stymied progress. The producer candidly admits his own missteps, acknowledging that he initially succumbed to the biases prevalent in the Edmonton office regarding the Austin team's effectiveness. This breakdown in trust and communication, he argues, prevented crucial feedback—especially concerning the game's economy and endgame content—from reaching leadership until it was too late to address. The story of Anthem's development serves as a cautionary tale about the perils of organizational dysfunction in large-scale creative endeavors.

The Stagnation of Anthem's Early Development

Mark Darrah's detailed exposé begins in 2017, a pivotal year when he assumed the executive producer role for Anthem. He characterizes this period as one where the project had developed a \"highly dysfunctional relationship with decision-making.\" Following the departure of Mass Effect creator Casey Hudson, Anthem drifted without a clear creative compass, sustained largely by BioWare's reputation and EA's ambitions for its live-service potential. This created a limbo where crucial development decisions were either endlessly postponed or constantly revisited, hindering any meaningful progress. Darrah emphasizes that game development thrives on decisive action, and Anthem's inability to commit to and adhere to decisions led to a perpetual state of flux, preventing the game from ever truly taking shape. Even after his intervention, the entrenched inertia proved difficult to overcome.

A prime example of this stagnation was the \"Den of Wolves\" mission, the sole playable mission when Darrah joined the project. Despite his efforts to encourage the team to move beyond it and develop new content, the studio repeatedly overhauled this single mission. This iterative rebuilding, Darrah explains, severely hampered their ability to identify and rectify deeper issues within Anthem's mission design, particularly the lack of engaging activities for players. By the time the pervasive problem of insufficient in-mission content became undeniably clear, it was far too late in the development cycle to implement comprehensive fixes. This cycle of indecision and endless refinement of a single component prevented a holistic assessment of the game's core gameplay loop and ultimately contributed to its critical shortcomings upon release.

Internal Discord and Design Flaws

Darrah attributes a significant portion of Anthem's ongoing dysfunction to a profound communication breakdown between BioWare's Edmonton and Austin offices. Upon joining the project, Darrah, based in Edmonton, found himself surrounded by leaders who harbored skepticism regarding the Austin team's efficiency. He confesses that he initially shared this bias, failing to invest the necessary time to fully understand the on-the-ground realities in Austin. This resulted in considerable missteps on his part, exacerbated by the fact that critical insights from Austin—particularly about the game's economy and endgame—were not effectively communicated or acknowledged by the Edmonton leadership. The damaged communication channels meant that fundamental design issues were often discovered only in the late stages of development, when it was too costly and time-consuming to address them.

The game's widely praised flight mechanic serves as a poignant illustration of this systemic dysfunction. While flying in Anthem was a highlight for many players, Darrah reveals it also epitomized the project's poorly conceived creative direction. Flight was periodically implemented and removed throughout development, constantly introducing design complications such as environmental art challenges, combat balancing issues for melee enemies and cover, technical hurdles for memory and asset streaming, and nightmares for mission and narrative design. Despite a previous decision to remove flight to focus on core mechanics, its eventual reintroduction occurred so late that the rest of the game failed to adequately integrate it. Darrah concludes that while flight was Anthem's best feature, it was simultaneously its worst, due to the team's failure to fully account for its far-reaching consequences on the overall gameplay structure.