BioWare’s Anthem has problems, that’s no secret, but until now EA brass have largely tried to put a happy face on the game’s struggles. So, it was a bit surprising how candid EA CEO Andrew Wilson was about Anthem’s issues in a new interview with GameDaily.biz, in which he admits some aspects of the game, particularly its endgame content, are “not working very well.” Check out his full comments below.

　　Making fun is hard. […] We brought together these two groups of players who were making this emotional value calculation on two different vectors. One was traditional BioWare story driven content, and the other was this action-adventure type content. About the 30 or 40 hour mark they really had to come together and start working on the [late game content]. At that point everyone kind of went, ‘Oh, hang a minute.’ Now the calculation is off. It's off because I've got a friend who sits in this other category of player. They want to play the game a certain way. I want to play the game a certain way. The promise was we can play together, and that's not working very well. I'm used to 100 hours of BioWare story, and that’s not what I got or I expected that this game would have meaningfully advanced the action component that we'd seen in games like Destiny before, and I don't feel like it has.

　　Given the troubles Anthem has had, you’d think a return to the studio’s single-player story-driven RPG roots would be advisable, but, apparently, Wilson disagrees. According to the EA CEO, the plan is to test the “elasticity” of BioWare by having them work on more projects outside their wheelhouse…

　　What the BioWare teams are thinking about is that we're going to build a lot of different types of games. We're going to have our core BioWare audience that's been with us for a really long time, but there are kids today who are 12 years old who weren't around when BioWare started making games…and they have different expectations of what a BioWare game should be in the context of the world they've grown up in. As a result of that, BioWare has to evolve and has to expand and has to test the elasticity of that brand.

　　Poor BioWare. I do hope they can find their feet, but Wilson’s comments aren’t terribly encouraging. The studio is working on Dragon Age 4, but the game is rumored to essentially be “Anthem with dragons” with a heavy live-service focus. It seems the BioWare of old may well and truly be gone.

　　Anthem is available now on PC, Xbox One, and PS4.