Anthem could be revived as a trad BioWare singleplayer RPG for $10 million, says former Dragon Age producer

BioWare’s misbegotten mech-me-do Anthem died this week after EA pulled the official servers. It’s a sad day for people who saw promise in the game’s sci-fi world and flight mechanics, however spoiled by the always-online looter-shooting, and a happy day for people who really hated being called “freelancer” in community bulletins. I was an actual freelancer when Anthem came out in 2019, and I didn’t get no mech suit. At least when the Destiny developers call you a Guardian, it feels sort of romantic, rather than like rubbing your nose in your own economic precarity.

Anyway, ‘officially unsupported’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘gone for good’. In one of his many tell-all videos, former Anthem executive producer and Dragon Age/Mass Effect kingpin Mark Darrah has outlined a plan for bringing Anthem back as a single-player RPG, with a “conservative” budget of $10 million.

Darrah makes his case for an Anthem re-release at the end of a gigantic new video “The Truth About What Happened on Anthem”, as reported by Eurogamer. The first step, he says, would be to update the game for current gen consoles, introduce the latest graphics features and lock it to 60 frames a second. “You’re going to spend some engineering probably making that be pretty solid,” Darrah explains. “But it’s not too difficult because you’re getting there to a large degree by throwing better hardware at it.”

Hmm! I feel like I need a third-party programmer’s opinion on this. I’m not used to seeing the words “not too difficult” in connection to updating games to run on new hardware. Then again, I didn’t preside over the development of a bunch of Mass Effect and Dragon Age games, so what do I know.

“Two, and this is a big one, you move to locally hosted servers,” Darrah goes on. “Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months before launch. I don’t know that they still work, but they the code is there to be salvaged and recovered.” Local server support would, of course, eliminate the publisher expense of keeping the game online. Presumably, the game’s operating costs would need to rely on player donations, as with the formerly NCSoft-run City Of Heroes.

The lion’s share of the work in Darrah’s proposal consists of “[pivoting] to something that’s more about single player storytelling”, once you’ve got Anthem running on local servers.

“This is a game where the combat is designed around a group of four people,” he acknowledges. “So where most of your $10 million needs to go is in the creation of AI party members. And since this is BioWare, go all the way and make them companions. There are some existing characters that you could potentially promote into companions, but I think you’re you would find that there is actually a lower friction route by making three to five new characters with dialogue, with plot arcs that are brand new to the series that are people who would go with you through the existing story of Anthem, as well as their companion content.

“You could go as low as three,” Darrah continues. “That’s basically just enough to fill out your party. By going beyond three, you’re able to have stronger personalities and people can potentially like or dislike them. Or if you want to tie the characters to specific Javelin styles or combat styles, it allows you to go into that as well.” I have to confess, I don’t quite follow Darrah here – surely if you have more characters, those personalities will get fewer resources apiece, and be less memorable?

“Writing those characters, not very difficult,” the elder BioWayfarer asserts. “Making the characters be able to move with you, that’s where a lot of your work is going to have to go. You are essentially going to have to figure out how an AI-controlled Javelin pilot can stick with you out in the world. There are lots of Creepy Watson style tricks and cheats that you can use to make it easier, but a big amount of your work is going to have to go into the design of making those characters stay with you out in the world, making them be able to fight in a meaningful and useful way.”

Quick round of applause here for the drive-by mention of Creepy Watson, who is very much my favourite point of overlap between Sherlock and Slender Man.

Darrah feels that if you can accomplish all this, “what you’ve essentially reverse-engineered is a BioWare game without romances with a decent, BioWare-style story with companions that can be played as a single player game.” He observes with 100% correctness that this would appeal to the many who didn’t play Anthem because they hate multiplayer looting and shooting. But he cautions that you “probably” wouldn’t be able to sell it for the current triple-A price of $70 a pop, and even then, he can’t see such a game selling “five, six, seven million copies”.

Needless to say, Darrah doesn’t expect EA to be keen, commenting that his plan “is very antithetical to what was being investigated in terms of fixing Anthem in the past”. The reference here is to Anthem Next, EA’s abortive attempt at a live service reboot.

Darrah washes all this down with some thoughts on game preservation at large. “We’re entering into a period where we have disappeared media – media that becomes unavailable through direct intentional actions by the rights holder,” he says, drawing parallels with Disney’s now-unavailable Willow TV series and DC’s reportedly near-complete, yet unreleased Batgirl movie.

“Should companies be required to make their games playable indefinitely?” Darrah muses. “I think there’s a conversation to be had there. The things that would have been required to make Anthem playable in its entirety from the beginning back in 2019 were are substantial and they would have compromised parts of the game. But you can imagine different forms of a playable Anthem. Like we just discussed, there is a possible path to a singleplayer version of Anthem that doesn’t require dedicated servers. So maybe there’s a version of legislation that could be imagined that keeps games playable in some state beyond their intended lifespan.”

Darrah throws in a shout-out to Stop Killing Games, the consumer movement to introduce laws requiring publishers not to render games unplayable by taking their servers offline. “Their goals are a little bit more ambitious than simply having a conversation,” he notes. “But at least now the conversation is actually happening.”

SKG are certainly making headlines. Recently, a handful of UK Green Party members proposed an amendment to make support for the group’s objectives official policy. The SKG petition has also been debated in Parliament, with one Labour MP arguing that “the warning signs are here in this industry and to act now would be far less painful than to wait until this practice has become entrenched.”