"What if it's a BioWare game but it could do FIFA numbers?"

Former BioWare Producer Details What Went Wrong With Anthem

"What if it's a BioWare game but it could do FIFA numbers?"

According to Darrah, a lot of what Hudson initially conceived didn't really make it into the end result, but it's "why Anthem was able to generate this much momentum within the organization, because what Casey was essentially pitching was, 'What if it's a BioWare game but it could do FIFA numbers?'"

The former executive producer even went as far as saying that Hudson and his team weren't just pitching a game, but a new BioWare. He spoke of a video he believes was "intended to be shown to executives," that was "very much presented in, if you imagine the typical early vision video from a slick tech company, it’s very much like that video."

Darrah continued, "In this video, however, it talks about how a lot of what BioWare has done in the past is old-fashioned and its time has come and gone and that BioWare needs to change and BioWare needs to be something different for what I believe to be the originally intended audience. This is exactly what they want to hear. Executives want to hear that BioWare believes that it needs to change, that BioWare needs to be something different. This is what they wanted to hear in this time period."

Anthem was being pitched as a game that could continuously bring in revenue at a time when live-service games were gaining steam, but ultimately, it struggled to come together. Hudson himself left BioWare during development, something Darrah noted as a big reason why the game struggled to find an identity.

Hudson pitched it as "the future of storytelling", but no one still at the studio when he left really understood what that meant. "It’s not even clear if Casey knew what that means," Darrah said. "But even if he did, he’s not around to clarify that statement, to be involved in the process of discovering what that actually means."

Darrah also said that he would often argue in favour of delaying Anthem to give it more time, even suggesting that Dragon Age 4 should be released first. This obviously didn't happen, with Dragon Age: The Veilguard only releasing last year.

Darrah's video doesn't answer every question about why Anthem went wrong, and his perspective is only one side of it, but he did share his intention to make more videos detailing the game's production in the future.

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