EA CEO says Anthem isn’t dead, but only gives us vague promises of life

‘IP lives for generations’

Anthem is in a really precarious spot right now. We know that it sold well in some regions, but EA and even BioWare isn’t happy about the state the game was in at launch or the lack of post-launch support (or the ability to stick to the original schedule).

I enjoyed Anthem well enough, but always maintained that if BioWare and EA were going to be so insistent that the game was a live service title, they better deliver beyond the launch: they haven’t. Gamedaily caught up with EA CEO Andrew Wilson at E3 to talk about a number of subjects, and one of them was Anthem.

But we aren’t really getting good or bad Anthem news here: more like just…news. Wilson states that because multiple facets of the game are “compelling,” that they aren’t giving up. He (and many others) dig the world, the Iron Man-esque Javelin suits, and other concepts, so he brings out the big IP guns: “IP lives for generations, and runs in these seven to ten year cycles. 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.” That “generations” quote could clue us in that if, due to some hypothetical calamity, the first Anthem game dies because it couldn’t turn the corner, the IP could live on.

Wilson says that BioWare “has to evolve” (is that a threat), and start to make games for “kids today who are 12 years old, who weren’t around for when BioWare started making games.” He continues on, explaining, “they have different expectations of what a BioWare game should be in the context of the world they’ve grown up in.” And that’s definitely true to a degree: BioWare can’t coast on nostalgia forever, and as they get further and further away from their classic IPs and wheelhouse (Dragon Age on PC with its tactical viewpoint, was close to their original catalog of games like Baldur’s Gate), they need to prove themselves more in a way they never had to before.

So we’ll see where they end up, but Wilson is sort of overtly laying the groundwork for an age when BioWare is no longer an EA studio. Dragon Age: The Dread Wolf Rises (Dragon Age 4) is their next big test, and that currently doesn’t have a release window. Hopefully EA gives BioWare enough time to ship it the way they want it.

A candid conversation with EA’s Andrew Wilson at E3 2019 [Gamedaily.biz]