It Seems EA Still Has Big Plans for Anthem and Bioware Moving Forward
There’s no denying that Anthem did not quite live up to the expectations of the fans when it launched earlier this year. With that said, Bioware recently stated that they still believe Anthem could be an amazing game and now it seems EA also agrees. In a recent interview, EA laid concerns to rest about the future of Anthem, as well as their partnership with Bioware and stated that although the developer needs to evolve, they still believe in them immensely.
Talking to GameDaily, Andrew Wilson, CEO of Electronic Arts commented on one of the biggest problems that Anthem has faced. According to Wilson, Anthem is dealing with clashing sides of one identity. One one hand, it’s trying to deliver a traditional Bioware experience and on the other, something that’s modern and action-driven. As it’s stuck in between, it doesn’t deliver strongly on either, much to the disappointment of fans both old and new. “We brought together these two groups of players who were making this emotional value calculation on two different vectors. 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.”
Andrew Wilson continued stating, “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.'”
Regardless of the current issues, EA says that they still believe in Bioware but that in order to cater to the changes in the industry, they too need to grow and evolve. “We’re going to have our core BioWare audience that’s been with us for a really long time. There are [also] kids today who are 12 years old who weren’t around when BioWare started making games… and they have different expectations of what a BioWare game should be in the context of the world they’ve grown up in,” said Wilson. “As a result of that, BioWare has to evolve and has to expand and has to test the elasticity of that brand. 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.”
And as for how long both Bioware and EA would like Anthem to stick around the industry for, Wilson says that their aim is for another generation at least. “So, if I think about Anthem on a seven to ten year cycle, it may not have had the start that many of us wanted, including our players. I feel like that team is really going to get there with something special and something great, because they’ve demonstrated that they can.”
What do you think about what Wilson had to say? Are you hopeful for both Anthem and Bioware? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below and don’t forget to keep it locked for updates!