Dragon Age veteran says Anthem Next could have matched No Man's Sky comeback

Gamesradar reports Mark Darrah, executive producer on Anthem and the Dragon Age series, said the cancelled overhaul known as Anthem Next "could have" produced a No Man's Sky‑level turnaround, even as Anthem is now dead less than seven years after launch. Anthem Next was officially scrapped in February 2021, after which the plan had been to "continue to keep the Anthem live service running as it exists today." Darrah said Next was "in the process of trying to fix Anthem to make it have a broader appeal, to make it regain its footing as a live service," and called EA's decision not to continue the work "a mistake." He said he would have pursued a different approach that included porting to current‑gen consoles and moving to "locally hosted servers." "Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months before launch," Darrah said, adding "I don't know that they still work, but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered" and explaining that local hosting would reduce the costs of dedicated servers.

Darrah also suggested adding AI party members so players could treat the game like a single‑player experience.

Key Topics

Culture, Mark Darrah, Anthem, Anthem Next, Bioware, No Man's Sky