Anthem developer BioWare was warned late that the live-service shooter would “come in on fire,” according to former executive producer Mark Darrah’s postmortem video. Darrah says EA shifted expectations toward a Metacritic target “in the 70s” around September, October 2018, only months before launch.
Darrah published a two-part series titled “What Happened on Anthem” that walks through the buildup to launch and why the game faltered. He points to multiple structural problems inside the studio and production pipeline, including what he calls a “misunderstanding about multiplayer games” and apparent fundamental storytelling problems. The videos sketch a project that shifted targets late and accumulated compromises rather than steady fixes.
One technical limitation Darrah highlights is a lack of dedicated processing resources, which blocks players from seeing detailed loot information and checking loadouts while out on the field. He says that discovery came too late and that “a lot of bridges were burned on assumptions that proved to be false.” The claim about those runtime limitations is presented in the “latest video” in the series and is backed by footage and commentary from inside the studio.
Darrah describes a change in expectations: leadership moved the visible target away from BioWare’s historic ambition of the 90s on Metacritic toward something “in the 70s.” Six years after launch, Anthem sits at a 59 Metascore, a figure tied to performance issues, thin endgame content, and the eventual decision to cease development. That number now reads like an objective summary of a project that never fully recovered from its late-stage pivots.
Share your thoughts in the comments and follow conversation on X and Bluesky.
