EA to Decide Fate of Anthem (Update: Development Has Ceased)

Anthem Update
blog.bioware.com/2021/02/24/anthem-update/
by Author -Christian Dailey - Posted on February 24, 2021

Friends,

In the spirit of transparency and closure we wanted to share that we’ve made the difficult decision to stop our new development work on Anthem (aka Anthem NEXT). We will, however, continue to keep the Anthem live service running as it exists today.

Since Anthem’s launch, the team has been working hard to continually improve the game, releasing multiple updates that brought with them a variety of improvements and introduced new content to play. Towards the end of 2019 we expanded on that effort and started working on a more fundamental restructure of the game.

During the development we’ve provided updates revealing some of the team’s work through blog posts and conversations with you on social media and it’s been inspiring for us to see the positive reactions and feedback. I’ve been incredibly proud of the work the team has been doing, and excited to see and play each new build of the experience.

2020 was a year unlike any other however and while we continue to make progress against all our game projects at BioWare, working from home during the pandemic has had an impact on our productivity and not everything we had planned as a studio before COVID-19 can be accomplished without putting undue stress on our teams.

I know this will be disappointing to the community of Anthem players who have been excited to see the improvements we’ve been working on. It’s also disappointing for the team who were doing brilliant work. And for me personally, Anthem is what brought me to BioWare, and the last two years have been some of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my career.

Game development is hard. Decisions like these are not easy. Moving forward, we need to laser focus our efforts as a studio and strengthen the next Dragon Age, and Mass Effect titles while continuing to provide quality updates to Star Wars: The Old Republic.

To the Anthem community, thank you for your passion and creativity. Your feedback and suggestions most certainly help shape the team’s direction, and on a personal note, your kindness and encouragement were much needed last year.

Please stay safe and be kind to each other. Strong alone, stronger together.

Christian

There are still daily people playing on my ~100 people friends list. I got instant play last weekend.
But such is the fate and I got really nice experience out of it and new friends to play other games too.

RIP Anthem.

Liana Ruppert @dirtyeffinhippy
I don't have the following that others have, but this is something we had confirmation on direct from the studio earlier this week. I'm honestly heartbroken about it because it had ALL of the potential to be truly magical. I'll have why soon.

Another reason to hate that fucking game.

This is just bad news, it will hurt BioWare in a long term. This is yet another loss from the studio and reputation matters.

Next Dragon Age game has to be a big success, otherwise things will not look good for the future.

Yes, it is. This game was killed so they could focus on that steaming pile of shit.

Sad. Not only because of the state the game is in, but also because I hoped, that they could at least give the game one last punch out of the work they did in the last two years.

On a personal note: I envisioned Anthem as the game to bridge time between Mass Effect titles and had high hopes in free content updates over multiple years. The gameplay is fine, but the repetitive mission design (fly to spots a, b and c and fight respawning hordes at every spot) is not, so I lost interest quickly after finishing the main story once. Disappointing that they won't improve the mission design before calling quits.

BTW: BioWare leads (Hudson/Darrah - who both were on Anthem at some point) leaving likely has a lot to do with EA seeing Anthem as their biggest failure.

So first they cancelled Andromeda, now they are cancelling Anthem.

Any reason to buy any other game from them ????

Oh no!

Anyway ...

Anthem falls under Austin. DA4 and NME fall under Edmonton. Stopping work on Anthem improves the prospects for SW:TOR.

But it does eliminate the chances of BioWare having to shift resources to Austin, to provide the GAAS support Anthem would require to succeed.

I'm not happy that Anthem is not getting updated, but I'm not upset and it's certainly not a tragedy.

I think BioWare seriously underestimated the level of resources required to support Anthem's roadmap.

For me, Anthem was always a stop-gap until DA4 came out and eventually, NME.

On the bright side, MELE will be out on 14 May … I guess it can act as my stop-gap until the next iterations of BioWare RPGs ship.

As others said, Anthem RIP.

Anthem was abandoned by Bioware long before Covid even became a thing. The last meaningful update (and it wasn't anything big or different) was in July 2019 or so. Afterwards the game went in a maintenance mode. Yeah, the PR team promised "huge things are in the works", but that was an obvious lie even at the time.