Heading into launch, Anthem was often called a “Destiny killer” – though that was a label assigned by press and enthusiasts, not by the devs at BioWare themselves. Yet by the time Anthem launched in 2019, it seemed clear that the devs had missed some key lessons from Bungie’s looter shooter. As veteran producer Mark Darrah explains in a new interview, BioWare was still trying to take lessons from the venerable Diablo series rather than Destiny.
“I think it took Anthem a very long time to admit to itself that it was a looter shooter,” Darrah tells Destin Legarie. That tracks with a 2019 report from Jason Schreier at Kotaku, where sources at the studio reported that leadership at BioWare pushed back on any reference Destiny at all, despite devs suggesting that they should be learning from the market leader in the genre.
Diablo’s DNA is easy to see in pretty much any game that focuses on loot drops – whether that’s Destiny, Borderlands, or Anthem – but, as Darrah suggests, it’s very much its own thing. Blizzard’s game established its identity in an era before players demanded MMO levels of content from their loot games, and the areas that Destiny got right – like bespoke raid and dungeon activities and rewards that define the endgame and remain essentially unmatched in the genre – could’ve provided good lessons to BioWare in their own game.
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