The legacy of Anthem’s multiplayer controversy is perhaps most evident in the reports surrounding other BioWare titles, specifically Dragon Age: Dreadwolf and Mass Effect 4. Given how reports indicate that both of these upcoming titles will possess single-player focuses, many are inferring that BioWare has taken many lessons from the reception of Anthem and the negative influence of its multiplayer constraints.
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The Struggles of Anthem and Its Multiplayer
Anthem launched in 2019 to massive expectations, with the pre-release material for the game such as its trailer leading to huge amounts of hope and interest surrounding the title. While the game can be played single-player, it is heavily designed for multiplayer gameplay, with players being able to share the open world of Coda with up to three other players.
This multiplayer focus was linked to the game’s high hopes as a live-service title, hoping to act as an action sci-fi RPG that could continuously evolve and update post-release to make for a practically endless level of content for players to enjoy. However, the state in which Anthem released was a huge juxtaposition to how the trailers posture the game, with many instead regarding its live-service nature as a way of justifying the underwhelming state of the game at launch.
As a looter shooter, many regarded the core gameplay of the title as a grind, with very unvaried end-game content that quickly made late-game gameplay redundant. Given the huge hopes for the game’s longevity, this of course had a very detrimental impact on the title’s reception, with Anthem officially halting development in 2021
The Impact of Anthem on Dragon Age: Dreadwolf and Mass Effect 4
Dragon Age: Dreadwolf and Mass Effect 4 are arguably the two most anticipated upcoming projects to come from BioWare, and both titles have been inexorably influenced by the perceived failure of Anthem. With many of the developers of Anthem now working on the two aforementioned upcoming games, BioWare and EA are desperate to not repeat the same mistakes that Anthem made, and its multiplayer focus was undoubtedly a large influencing factor.
Given the massive amount of extra resources that need to be dedicated to a title to support engaging and seamless multiplayer gameplay, an immediate benefit of restricting a game to be purely single-player lies in the more simplistic development outlook that it fosters. Dragon Age is a franchise that has historically worked well as single-player, and although Inquisition featured co-op, it is confirmed that the upcoming Dreadwolf will be a purely single-player experience.
While it remains to be seen whether Mass Effect 4 will possess a form of multiplayer, it would not be surprising if the franchise drops these gameplay elements in the same way that Dragon Age will. As a result of the backlash BioWare faced from Anthem, it is understandable that the company is wanting to distance itself from the same gameplay motifs of the title, with labels of “multiplayer” and “live-service” only serving to tar its upcoming projects with the same brush of criticisms. Maintaining a single-player focus frees up resources and ensures a more stable launch, while achieving the necessary distancing from Anthem, a title that may be influencing BioWare’s future projects for quite some time.
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