Anthem was kind of baffling right from the start. Why would BioWare, a studio built almost exclusively on popular singleplayer RPGs—Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, KOTOR, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, let us not forget Jade Empire—suddenly dive into a multiplayer-focused looter shooter? It was weird, and the outcome, if not inevitable, was at least not entirely surprising: We called it "deeply flawed and frequently frustrating" in our 55% review, and just two years after it launched in 2019, BioWare pulled the plug, officially halting future development.
There's an old adage that says you learn more from failure than success, and that may be the one upside to Anthem's big bomb. In a new Edge magazine feature on BioWare's upcoming Dragon Age: The Veilguard, creative director John Epler said the studio's experience with Anthem taught it a tough but important lesson: Stick to what you know.
"We’re a studio that has always been built around digging deep on storytelling and roleplaying," Epler said. "I’m proud of a lot of things on Anthem—I was on that project for a year and a half. But at the end of the day we were building a game focused on something we were not necessarily as proficient at.
"For me and for the team, the biggest lesson was to know what you’re good at and then double down on it. Don’t spread yourselves too thin. Don’t try to do a bunch of different things you don’t have the expertise to do. A lot of the people on this team came here to build a story-focused, singleplayer RPG."
The attraction of games like Anthem—when they're successful, which is a relative rarity—is that sweet, long-term monetization, something you're not going to get out of a singleplayer RPG. But there's a real appetite for that kind of self-contained game, demonstrated most aptly (and ironically) by Larian's runaway success with Baldur's Gate 3. BioWare had experimented with live service elements in the early days of The Veilguard, but that was ultimately dropped in favor of a more traditional approach.
"We tried a bunch of different ideas early on," Epler said. "But the form The Veilguard has taken is, in a lot of ways, the form that we were always pushing towards. We were just trying different ways to get there. There was that moment where we really settled on, 'This is a singleplayer, story-focused RPG—and that’s all it needs to be.'"
Epler's words echo those of game director Corinne Busche, who said in June that BioWare is aiming to make The Veilguard "the most complete singleplayer game we possibly can," with no microtransactions or online requirements. I'm not a huge Dragon Age fan (and I will never not believe that Dragon Age: Dreadwolf is a far superior title to The Veilguard) but it's encouraging to hear that BioWare is so explicitly playing to its strengths: As the famed ranger Minsc famously said, "If we be adventurers, let us adventure!"
Dragon Age: The Veilguard doesn't have a release date yet, but we expect it to be out later this year—possibly in time for the 10th anniversary of Dragon Age: Inquisition, which arrived on November 18, 2014.
