I wrote a lot about Anthem. There are many reasons for that, mostly due to the pedigree and seeming simplicity of the genre. BioWare had some jank in their games, but they still knew how to put pieces together and actually think things through. If you’ve ever played D&D with a friend who loved to ‘think outside the box’, the DM who navigated that is the exact same type of person Bioware used to hire. (They probably work at Larian now…)

Anthem was promised to be many things, but at the core was a 3D looter shooter, which is an advanced version of an ARPG – most of us think of Diablo in that vein. There was some story promised, but frankly that mattered little in the moment to moment gameplay portions. Boiled down to the basics, it was slot machine with pretty graphics. It’s the slot machine part that really threw Bioware out of sorts.

I also wrote a whole lot on Diablo 3, including guides on making real world money back when it launched. I’m time travelling back 10+ friggin’ years here, but there was a time when you played Diablo not by killing monsters, but by sorting tables in an auction house. I did it as an experiment, and the $ per hour was honestly much higher than expected. The main reason the auction house worked there was because the actual game didn’t actually optimize the slot machine part. The game was overturned in difficulty, and undertuned in terms of rewards. It took much less time/effort to farm gold in-game and to buy the gear than it ever would to actually get a decent drop in-game. The incentives were broken.

Anthem launched in a buggy state in 2019. Today, we would call that Early Access. It also launched on the EA game service, and nearly everyone I know purchased it that way as it was ~$20 instead of full price. Bugs aside (one locked you out of all content and took 2 weeks to patch), the gameplay itself had challenges.

Combat had 2 parts, one was focused on exploration and emergent gameplay. Unfortunately this mode was in a massive map with no indicator of your teammates, and a max of 4 people on a map that could fit 50. The second part was mission based, and while mechanically fun at the start, it became obvious quickly that core shooter mechanics were missing, notably how cover/line of sight seemed to not really work. The balance between classes also wasn’t working, were tanks were the be all/end all with other classes being relegated to glass cannon status.

The loot portion came out even worse. Loot was 100% random, with nearly 10 rolls per item. Sure, rarity is always there, but the real issue was the items themselves. You could roll any item, even if you couldn’t use it (which was 75% of all items). If you did get an item you could use, the stat rolls on that item could be for any class, so you could get a gun you could use that boosted skills/stats you didn’t have. And if by chance you did get an item you could use, with stats you could use, the range of stats was absolutely massive. More to the point, you could easily get a legendary item that was much worse than a regular version.

It took a few months and stat weights came into being, as well as quite a few quality patches. Next to no one returned to the game, and the idea of Anthem 2.0 was born. The ideas in that pitch were really good, with a very strong focus on what makes those games successful. Unfortunately, it was a skeleton crew of ideas and EA made the choice to cut their losses.

I won’t even get into their cash stop. Good news, it was cosmetics based! Bad news, no one used it.

I bring up Anthem for a few reasons. First is that the looter shooter genre appears to be well past expiry now. Destiny 2 is arguably content rich and it’s still not enough to keep people coming back for a 0.1% stat increase. It’s the only successful one left – I’m still kind of ticked that Outriders couldn’t find a footing… that game is incredible. Second is that Bioware made a game really outside their wheelhouse, using an engine that wasn’t made for multiplayer. They bet the farm on something they had never done, and lost big. They managed to alienate a die-hard user base that would have bought anything, effectively impacting their long-term stability. Third, there was a general lack of awareness of the market needs and listening to player feedback.

Looking back at 2024, does that not seem to ring a bell? Kill the Justice League, Concord, Skull and Bones are all very high profile games that have suffered tremendously due to all three of those pieces. Star Wars Outlaws is almost exclusively in the third point (somehow, BG3 sold more copies in 2024 than Outlaws did, what?!) The challenge for larger companies is that the details don’t matter, everything gets summarized by the time it hits the decision makers. The genres are defined by the games, not the other way around. We use the genre terms to explain similarities, but the games themselves are so complex and integrated we never do them justice.

Would Anthem have been successful it it was more than a looter shooter? If it moved from the abstract and really nailed down the core systems? We’ll never know. But perhaps, just perhaps, there’s a chance that the next big wig looking to make a buck actually thinks about what it means to make a successful product being more than just a label.