Anthem hasn’t been very successful, and there is nobody who understands that more than EA CEO Andrew Wilson. He recently admitted to GameDaily.biz that BioWare’s online RPG didn’t live up to its potential and gave his thoughts as to why.
Wilson believes Anthem’s biggest mistake was trying to cater to very different types of players, which inadvertently drove the community apart. His theory is that classic, story-driven BioWare fans didn’t mesh at all with other players (e.g., the action-oriented Destiny crowd).
“We brought together these two groups of players who were making this emotional value calculation on two different vectors,” Wilson explained. “One was traditional BioWare story driven content, and the other was this action-adventure type content. About the 30 or 40 hour mark they really had to come together and start working in on the elder game. At that point everyone kind of went, ‘Oh, hang a minute.’ Now the calculation is off.”
“It’s off because I’ve got a friend who sits in this other category of player. They want to play the game a certain way. I want to play the game a certain way. The promise was we can play together, and that’s not working very well. Oh, by the way I’m used to 100 hours of BioWare story, and that’s not what I got. Or, I expected that this game would have meaningfully advanced the action component that we’d seen in games like Destiny before, and I don’t feel like it has.”
Despite the incredibly rocky start, Wilson says EA is “committed to the game and its audience.”
“I feel like that team is really going to get there with something special and something great, because they’ve demonstrated that they can.”