Last month, EA announced it would shut down BioWare’s Anthem on January 12, 2026. And now, after a rocky six years for the game, its executive producer Mark Darrah has come forward to share details on exactly how Anthem came to be, and what went wrong in the process.
In part one of a planned multi-part video series, Darrah spends an hour walking viewers through Anthem’s development as he understands it from 2011 through the moment he took over as executive producer in 2017. Admittedly, his perspective isn’t 100% complete, as Darrah was not working directly on the game throughout much of this time. But as a higher-up at BioWare and eventual executive producer, he was nonetheless positioned to see a lot more than most.
Darrah was only executive producer for the final 16 months of the game’s development. Even so, he opens the video by taking ownership of Anthem’s failings and struggles:
“Some of this video is going to look like I’m trying to shift blame around, but ultimately the responsibility for this game does mostly rest on me,” he says. “I have a list of people that I won’t share that I also feel share blame on this project. Almost everyone on that list is more senior than me. The team worked really hard on this game, the team put a lot of excellent work on this game, and there are things that are amazing in this game even now.”
Darrah goes on to walk through the first six years of development, outlining a number of pitfalls Anthem ran into along the way. He talks about Anthem’s original conception at a time within EA where its executives believed single-player games were no longer desirable, leaving BioWare in a challenging position as an historically single-player-focused studio. BioWare lead Casey Hudson’s early vision of Anthem, he says, was to do BioWare storytelling in a live service, always online format, and he proposed they come up with a new, never-before-seen business model to do it. That’s how Anthem initially got momentum internally among EA’s executive leadership. As Darrah puts it, “What if BioWare game, but it could do FIFA numbers?”
However, early on, Anthem ran into trouble because it struggled to get personnel to actually work on it. At one point, BioWare workers were shown a presentation intended for executives that outlined the game’s more live service-y vision, and this put many developers off the idea. Additionally, as BioWare shipped Dragon Age: Inquisition, staff kept being moved to Mass Effect: Andromeda, leaving Anthem without the staff Hudson wanted.
Another trouble with Anthem highlighted by Darrah was the repeated shifting of what the game actually was. While the original pitch was to make something wholly unique, Darrah talks about how difficult that actually is when you can’t offer reference points to developers or explain it to executives via familiar touchstones. So over time, Anthem did actually become more like familiar games such as Destiny and Borderlands.
And yet another issue, says Darrah, was the level of secrecy involved. While he acknowledges it’s important to keep things locked up to avoid leaks, there’s a certain level to which he believes it’s good to share details more widely. In the early days, he recalls Hudson would strategically share certain elements of Anthem within the wider organization, which allowed him to create excitement and gather feedback. But when Hudson left, no one stepped into that role, and Anthem became aggressively secretive. As a result, Darrah says, it was easier to hand-wave issues, tailor messaging to a very small group of people who were more susceptible to groupthink.
Darrah also tells a pretty pointed story about how being too specific about expectations too early on can lead to disaster. Here’s his full recounting of why Anthem didn’t have six javelins when it launched:
In a pretty early design document, Anthem stated that it was going to have six javelins. Where did this number come from? It basically got pulled out of someone’s ass. I guess to be more fair, it was effectively broken down like this: We’re going to have light, medium, and heavy javelins, so we’re going to have two of each kind…and unfortunately this number, six, got presented in early 2017 to EA executives, that Anthem was going to have six javelins.
Pretty close to that presentation, the team realized that it couldn’t do six javelins, for two primary reasons. One, because it couldn’t completely figure out how to differentiate six different kinds of javelins, but also because it realized that it didn’t have time to make six entirely different archetypes of gameplay. So now, the team is forced to present that no, in fact they’re going to have four javelins at launch, and even though that six was based on nothing, was based on a number we said because it kind of seemed pretty logical at the time, but there’s nothing behind that, became a source of immense pressure and anxiety from the executives.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that one of the reasons that everything came to a head in 2017, with the massive changes that occurred on the project in 2017, culminating in me taking over the project, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this was triggered by this change from six javelins to four. Again, that number six was based on nothing, but it was seen as the team falling apart.
Darrah goes on to say that he remembers one of the cut javelins was a tanky paladin javelin that was more of a support class, while the other was a medium-class that he cannot remember at all — highlighting how nebulous the idea was to begin with.
Toward the end of his video, Darrah talks about a push at EA in 2016 for all its AAA franchises to be “billion-dollar franchises”, which would have involved Dragon Age releasing a game every two years. This push is also what sealed Anthem’s fate as a live service game.
Darrah also cites three different occasions where he told leadership he thought they should push Anthem’s release date out further, let Anthem define itself more, ship Andromeda first, and then bring Andromeda people over to finish Anthem. All three times, he says, he was turned down.
You can watch Darrah’s full video here. He says he has at least a part two, and perhaps also a part three planned.
Anthem eventually launched in February of 2019 to middling reviews, with our own reviewer giving it a 6.5/10 and criticizing the grindiness, lack of polish and variety, and mismatched story. It fell short of EA’s sales expectations, and EA ceased active development in 2021. EA will shut the game down entirely on January 12, 2026.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
