Former BioWare Developer Discusses the Potential for Anthem as a Single-Player Experience
Anthem has officially been taken offline for two days, and Mark Darrah, a former BioWare producer who contributed to both the troubled looter shooter and the Dragon Age series, has shared a nearly four-hour deep dive into the game’s downfall. If you’re interested in the RPG developer’s unusual venture into live service, it’s worth a watch. One key point to highlight is that Anthem could have had local servers, which might have allowed it to survive even after EA pulled the plug.
Towards the end of Darrah’s video, he hints at a potential revival for Anthem, suggesting it could follow a redemption arc similar to No Man’s Sky, which BioWare had hoped for when it announced a revamp in 2019.
He estimates that his proposal would “conservatively” cost EA around $10 million, and if it sold over 400,000 copies, it could be beneficial for everyone involved. His first suggestion is to transition Anthem to current-gen consoles instead of keeping it on PS4 and Xbox One, while also utilizing locally-hosted servers. Darrah mentions that BioWare had local servers operational in a development setting “up until a few months before launch,” and while he’s unsure if they still function, the code is recoverable.
“The reason you do this is it reduces the cost of maintaining the game,” Darrah explains. “Instead of needing dedicated servers for the game to run, you let the server operate on one of the machines that’s playing the game.”
Learning that BioWare once had the means to save Anthem from its fate evokes a mix of sadness and frustration for both the developers and fans who wished for the game to continue, even without future updates. BioWare’s justification for shutting down the game without an offline mode was that it was “designed to be an online-only title,” but now it’s clear that there were tools available to alleviate server costs, which they chose not to utilize. While ending the game is certainly the simpler option, it’s also far more destructive.
Darrah further suggests that a significant portion of the hypothetical $10 million budget would be allocated to transforming Anthem into a single-player experience, which would involve creating AI companions to handle the game’s combat scenarios designed for multiple players. He proposes either elevating some NPCs to companion status or introducing three to five new characters to accompany players through the existing storyline, each with their own narratives. He even mentions that if EA wanted to keep costs low, they could limit the new party members to just three to complete the four-player party.
“If you can implement those two changes and activate the local servers while providing some unique storytelling, what you essentially create is a BioWare game without romances, featuring a solid BioWare-style narrative with companions that can be enjoyed as a single-player experience,” Darrah states. “I believe there’s a significant audience who appreciates BioWare stories but didn’t engage with Anthem because they weren’t interested in a multiplayer looter shooter, and they might be intrigued enough to explore that story.”
As appealing as this idea sounds, Darrah expresses skepticism about EA taking such a step, even if it would be a relatively inexpensive alternative to maintaining servers indefinitely. It’s frustrating to realize that Anthem could have continued in some capacity, but at least we now know for certain that EA and BioWare misled us about the game’s future.
