For eight years, game developer Ben Irving worked for BioWare, where he was long responsible for the MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic. During the crucial phase of Anthem, he served as Lead Producer for combat, creatures, and gameplay on the sci-fi MMO. In 2019, he left Anthem and BioWare, and today he says he would love to try again.
This is the story of Anthem: The sci-fi MMO Anthem went through a rough development phase, as we now know. Although the game was released in February 2019, BioWare had exhausted itself on the path to release and was unable to provide additional content when the MMO launched. According to reports, the developers became entangled in their work on Anthem, ran into creative dead ends, and faced a series of burnout situations.
After the release of Anthem, it became clear that normal updates, which were supposed to come for the game, would not be sufficient to address the problems within the loot and progression systems, leading to plans for a major overhaul of Anthem by the BioWare team working on Star Wars: The Old Republic.
In Austin, Texas, the MMORPG experts from BioWare approached the task freshly and motivated: The idea of Anthem 2.0 or Anthem Next was born, and fans were hopeful.
However, EA ultimately decided against this overhaul in February 2021 and halted the development of Anthem.
“Anthem has all the potential in the world”
This is the situation now: Although Anthem has not been in development since February 2021, the shooter still enjoys great popularity in 2024 due to its excellent gameplay loop and unique game concept.
Time and again, social media posts appear where players rave about how much they enjoy Anthem.
On one of these posts, Ben Irving, the former Lead Producer of Anthem, recently responded:
“I would love to remaster Anthem one day.”
He explains that it’s amazing that people are still so enthusiastic about Anthem years later. Irving states meaningfully that the game still has so much potential …
However, when fans ask about a PS5 version with a higher frame rate, he waves it off: he has not been with EA for years and cannot do anything about it.
Irving was a scapegoat for the mistakes of Anthem
Why did he leave back then? Irving was someone who was already controversial among fans because of his decisions with SWTOR and had to take the blame for the way the development of Anthem went at its release.
Looking back, it seems that this was a systemic issue at BioWare: Anthem was only completed through a violent effort by its release, and after the release, suddenly many leadership figures disappeared and sought escape.
The developer behind WildStar once explained that at the end of an MMO’s development, many developers like to switch to new projects and seek a fresh start.
Even the man who was at the end the last hope for fans, Christian Dailey, was pulled from Anthem Next – BioWare needed him for Dragon Age.
This massive loss of developers and leadership back then was probably one reason why Anthem was not further developed.
However, Irving is certainly right in his analysis: Anthem is one of the MMOs that is still greatly missed today because everyone can see the potential in the game that it never achieved during its lifetime: Players love Anthem, the failed MMO from BioWare, so much that it hurts them
