Mech modifications will continue, though.
EA CEO Andrew Wilson has admitted that Anthem’s ambition to let players experience its story-focused gaming and looter-shooter mechanics in a shared world is “not working very well,” but he vows that the publisher will stand by both the game and developer BioWare in hope of improving Anthem’s multiplayer features.
Talking to GameDaily.biz, Wilson said of the two player demographics Anthem attempted to bring together: “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.”
“The promise was we can play together, and that’s not working very well,” he admitted, explaining that some players were expecting 100 hours of story, while others were hoping for an advancement on games like Destiny.
But while Wilson recongnises that Anthem has had a poor start in life, he’s not ready for EA to give up on it yet. “I feel like that team is really going to get there with something special and something great, because they’ve demonstrated that they can,” he said.
“If we believed that at the very core the world wasn’t compelling people, if we believed at the very core that the characters weren’t compelling for people, or the Javelin suits weren’t compelling, or traversing the world and participating in the world wasn’t compelling then provided we hadn’t made promises to our players… we might not invest further,” he explained.
He also points to BioWare testing the “elasticity” of their brand, across both long-term fans who expect Baldur’s Gate-style experiences, and those who began to follow the studio much later on. “The teams at BioWare will continue to come to work every day and listen to their players old and new and seek to deliver on the promises they’ve made to those players. That’s what you’re seeing with Anthem today,” said Wilson.
Our own Anthem review recognised the problems that the game launched with, but the industry has shown on a few occasions that continued development can help turn a game’s fortunes around. In the same genre, we saw both Destiny and Destiny 2 radically improve with their first expansion packs a year after launch. And then there’s the famous case of Final Fantasy XIV, which went from being a total mess to perhaps the best MMO available.
This post’s original headline mischaracterized Andrew Wilson’s quotes as speaking to issues with all of Anthem, when he was in fact specifically saying the ability to play together was not working well. IGN regrets this error.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer. You can follow him on Twitter.
