Anthem: A Bioware Game That Represents No One

In Bioware’s pursuit to make Anthem unlike anything it’s developed before, it lacks a lot of what differentiated the studio’s work from most of the AAA market. Some of its greatest losses can be traced back to its lack of a character creator. This omission might read as a luxury Anthem doesn’t need, but without it, Bioware’s foray into Games as a Service begins to assert a new set of priorities about how we’re meant to view the Freelancer we play as.

For some games, a character creator is merely a cosmetic change, allowing people to differentiate their characters from one another. But in the case of games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, the character creator is the first step of a player establishing an individuality and personal ownership of their character. From Shepard, the Inquisitor, Hawke, and Ryder, my characters in Bioware games carried traits similar to who I was when I played them for the first time. They were black-haired, bearded men who were a little bit sassy and, unlike the majority of protagonists I see in AAA video games, they were gay. These protagonists were all self-inserts to represent my morals, worldviews, preferences, and personality in-game.

Bioware’s work has spanned galaxies, fantasy kingdoms, and ancient Chinese mythology, and in all of those worlds, representation has been a major pillar in its writing and character customization. The studio has a storied history of finding ways to represent people of all walks of life in these worlds, but Anthem, rather than giving you the sliders and the hair choices Bioware has often offered at the beginning of its games, merely hands you 21 preset faces for your Freelancer to choose from and establishes a trend of uniformity in the game’s design. Early on, it becomes clear that Anthem’s goals are different, and those goals mean that, for the first time in a long time, Bioware’s not interested in representing anyone with its protagonist.

Anthem’s structure points to several calculated attempts to make its experience more universal in comparison to Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Unlike Shepard or the Inquisitor, there’s a sense that Bioware wants the Freelancer to be a nameless and faceless individual, comparable to Doomguy or a Division agent, but with just enough dialogue and interactivity to make them adjacent to games of Bioware’s past. In cutscenes and in all missions that take place outside of the Fort Tarsis hubworld, their identity is always obscured by a helmet and conversations are just interactive enough to make the player feel like they’re not entirely a passive participant, but so scripted they tell the story of a character who is distinctly not the player’s. The Freelancer is a person without a name, no face that matters, and no relationships to nurture with the people around them defined by the player’s preferences or morality.

The main character of Anthem has no name and is only ever referred to as “Freelancer,” even by their closest friends. Shepard and the Inquisitor were often referred to by their title as well, but there were points where they were referred to by their name or nicknames to give their relationships a sense of closeness, differentiating between who was a friend and who was an acquaintance. This detachment extends to dialogue options, which are binary, scarce, not tied to a morality or tone, and merely exist to push a conversation along.

My growing attachment as a player to a character like Owen Corley, whose charming, idealistic personality (backed by a great performance by TJ Ramini) led nowhere when Anthem didn’t allow me to push our relationship in one way or another, whether I wanted to pursue a romance with him, expand upon our friendship, or even be unkind to him. These fleeting dialogue options led to a greater sense that the Freelancer is not the player’s character to mold. Instead, their existence implies the player is supposed to feel that sense of oneness between them and the character they’re playing as.

When Anthem was still in development, Bioware confirmed the game would feature no romantic subplots, which have been a representative staple of the studio’s games, welcoming queer players into new universes. This naturally led to disappointment in queer spaces, but it wasn’t quite clear at the time that this was indicative of the loss of a player’s identity entirely. In the first two Mass Effect games, there was a distinct lack of same-sex relationships between two men, which meant these games didn’t represent a significant subset of players. In doing so, this exclusion felt targeted and intentional, as if Mass Effect as a franchise didn’t believe that queer men fit into its world. Anthem isn’t quite as direct and exclusionary, but its removal of a player input into the development of the Freelancer as a person echoes a similar effect of its streamlined design.

This decision to make the character of the Freelancer and the game of Anthem overall a universal experience for all players goes beyond representation for queer players who looked to form romantic relationships with characters of the same gender, it expands to people of color, gender expression, and even our individual morality. Bioware’s work in other series has found a way to make its characters defined enough to invest in but malleable enough for everyone to find a place to express themselves in the game’s world.

From Shepard to Ryder, Bioware’s sensitivity to this was a mainstay in its writing, direction, and game design, to the point where examining one’s decisions in its games over the course of several years could point to changes in one’s worldview and self discovery. But after all those years of cultivating a legacy of inclusivity, Anthem is a Bioware game that represents no one, leaving a drought in the AAA space’s representation that the studio has spearheaded for the better part of a decade.