Over the past few months, BioWare has essentially transformed into a single-game studio as it harnesses its teams to work on the ambitious multiplayer action game Anthem, sources say. There are still small teams maintaining Star Wars: The Old Republic and piecing together the next Dragon Age, which was recently rebooted, but the bulk of BioWare’s staff in both Edmonton and Austin are now on Anthem. And there’s a sense among BioWare employees that the company’s future is inextricably tied to this game.
Anthem, which was announced at E3 2017, is now scheduled for release in early 2019, according to three people familiar with the project. The “fall 2018” window mentioned during that E3 announcement was “never realistic,” one source said. Exact dates remain in flux—and Anthem’s developers must also plan for a beta release, an
EA Access launch, and an ongoing schedule of patches and updates—but it appears unlikely to developers that publisher EA will allow BioWare to delay the game any further than March 2019, when the company’s 2019 fiscal year comes to an end. (EA, like most publicly traded companies, uses the fiscal calendar as a basis for all of its decisions, as those dates determine how investors will behave.)
BioWare, founded in 1995, has long been seen as one of the world’s most prestigious developers of role-playing games, thanks to hits like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the Mass Effect trilogy, and Dragon Age Origins. In 2007, EA purchased the studio, expanding it beyond its original office in Edmonton and putting BioWare studios in Austin, Montreal, and Virginia. (The latter two were later shut down.)
It’s not unusual for BioWare to pull staff from other projects as it enters the final year of production on a game. In recent years, BioWare has done the same for both Mass Effect: Andromeda and Dragon Age: Inquisition. But Anthem, the studio’s first new franchise in eight years and EA’s first big stab at a Destiny-style persistent online world, feels different. To BioWare staff, the stakes feel higher than they ever have. As one developer told me, there’s a belief that if Anthemdoesn’t live up to EA’s expectations, BioWare will look very different in the future, especially after the disappointment of Mass Effect Andromeda led to EA absorbing BioWare Montreal into the studio EA Motive.
Now, with a year left in development and a climate that’s grown more turbulent thanks to controversies over EA’s Star Wars Battlefront II and Activision’s Destiny 2, pressure is mounting for Anthem to be great. In the past few weeks I’ve spoken to more than half a dozen people close to the project, all of whom spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to talk about the game, and they’ve described feeling both optimistic and anxious—optimistic that they can make something good, but anxious at the number of forces that appear to be pushing against them.
Anthem has been in development since 2012, at first under Mass Effect director Casey Hudson, who left the company in 2014 (and returned last year to lead BioWare as studio head). The game remained in preproduction at BioWare’s lead Edmonton studio for a very long time. Some close to the Anthem team have criticized that fact, suggesting that the game’s development was floundering, but veteran Anthem staff point out that most big new franchises have long gestation periods. Destiny, most notably, was in preproduction for years as the developers at Bungie tried to figure out what a persistent multiplayer shooter might look like. At points during 2014 and 2015, I heard several rumors that the Anthem project was not going well, in part because of the long-running issues that BioWare has faced with its engine, Frostbite, and in part because making a game of this nature can be an excruciating process.
Over the last year, as Anthem’s production ramped up and BioWare began putting more and more of its staff on the project, things appear to have improved. When I asked one source recently whether Anthem’s struggles fell more into the category of “this game is screwed” or “game development is really hard,” the source said that over time, it had veered from the former into the latter. Other people close to BioWare have said similar things, although it’s not hard to find developers willing to complain about Frostbite, the game engine initially designed for EA’s Battlefield games, which has impeded
many of BioWare’s projects over the past decade.
The past year has been tumultuous for BioWare and involved some major changes to the studio. One was to reboot the fourth Dragon Age, which at the time was code-named Joplin, according to two sources. (There’s a running theme here—Anthem’s codename was Dylan.) The goal, those sources said, was to implement more “live” elements into the game, although two of those sources stressed that this next Dragon Age will still have a heavy focus on characters and story, whenever it does come out. It’s not clear what a “live” version of Dragon Age might look like, but EA has been public about its embrace of games as a service, and its lack of interest in releasing $60 games that do not have any sort of revenue tail, whether that means paid extra content, microtransactions, or something else.
BioWare has also discussed ending development on the multiplayer online game Star Wars: The Old Republic, those sources said, although one person familiar with the studio told me recently that plans are still up in the air.
What’s clear is that both BioWare studios, Edmonton and Austin, are singularly focused on Anthem, and will be until that game comes out. Even Mark Darrah, executive producer and shepherd of the Dragon Age franchise, was recently moved to Anthem. In June, shortly after Anthem’s reveal, Darrah tweeted that
he was not working on the game. But things have changed. This morning, minutes after we heard back from an EA spokesperson saying the publisher was declining to comment on this article, Darrah tweeted that he is
working on both Anthem and Dragon Age—his apparent first public acknowledgement that he is now on Anthem. “Anthem’s up next but there are people hard at work on both franchises and I look forward to sharing more in the future,” he said. The creative director of the Dragon Age series, Mike Laidlaw,
left BioWarelast year.
Even with both of BioWare’s studios all-in on Anthem, some developers have expressed anxieties, in large part because of 2017’s other events. First there was Mass Effect Andromeda, a high-profile failure that disappointed fans last spring and led to the closure of BioWare Montreal, as well as
Mass Effect getting put on ice. Veteran members of the Anthem team were thrilled to finally unveil the game at E3 in June 2017, but a month later, BioWare studio head Aaryn Flynn departed, to be replaced by Casey Hudson. Both men are well-respected at the company, but this sort of top executive shuffling often leads to worry.
