Anthem is BioWare's next big thing—a shared-world shooter that appears to share more in common with Destiny 2 than the developer's previous games. In conversation with Eurogamer, lead producer Mike Gamble stressed that Anthem is its own game, but this doesn't mean the likes of Dragon Age and Mass Effect have been left behind.
"It's key to be very clear what this game is," Gamble tells Eurogamer, referencing Anthem. "It is not a single-player corridor shooter, it's not a Mass Effect game, it's not a Dragon Age game, as much as those IPs are special to us. As much as we have various projects in the works and there's a team working on Dragon Age stuff right now, and Mass Effect is certainly not dead, Anthem is different and we have to highlight those differences, of which co-operative play is a big difference."
Gamble's words echo those of colleague Casey Hudson, who says that despite the fact "the majority" of people at BioWare are working on Anthem, he intends to return to Mass Effect down the line.
Gamble says that despite the criticism levied at Mass Effect: Andromeda, BioWare has learned from its perceived mistakes—"some specific tactical things like faces, for example, that was one of the hot-button rallying items for Andromeda"—and aims to do better with Anthem. He digs into Mass Effect's future further.
"Casey [Hudson] and Mark and I and EA leadership have to sit down and work out what that looks like," Gamble tells EG. "You're very near and dear to it—so are we, as creators, and we want to make sure there's a future. But that comes after Anthem, after all that stuff we're talking about. That's future.
"Personally I think Andromeda has a lot of great stuff in it, sometimes you need to scrape to get to it. But when you get there, you feel that magic. We launched in a highly competitive quarter—there were some great contemporaries out at the same time and hindsight is always 20/20.
"I'm proud of the team behind Andromeda and how hard they worked and I feel strongly there's enough of an audience out there who appreciates it and loves it that I feel encouraged by this still. Could it have been received better? Absolutely. Are there things we learned from it—focus, polish, visual fidelity? Absolutely. We have to, or we never get better and make the same mistakes."
Read Eurogamer's interview with Mike Gamble in full this way.
