The online shooter Anthem was a big deal for EA and BioWare in 2019: The game was supposed to run for ten years. However, Anthem had a disastrous launch. A rework was supposed to revive the game, but by early 2021, these hopes seem to have been dashed.
This is the situation in brief:
Anthem launched in February 2019 – it quickly became clear that while the gameplay of Anthem worked, the game systems did not. Updates were lacking, and a roadmap was scrapped. The game, which was supposed to last for 10 years, had run out of steam after just a few months, and nothing new came.
In February 2020, BioWare announced, Anthem had too many problems to be improved with regular updates. They planned a major rework of the game. About 30 employees from BioWare Austin were supposed to conduct this rework, Anthem Next, As it became known later, the employees had already been working on Anthem 2.0 for some time.
From March to November 2020, sporadic blog posts and Twitter messages regarding the status of Anthem Next came out, mostly written by Christian Dailey, the head of the team. However, he left his position in December 2020. BioWare needed him elsewhere.
Anthem has too many unanswered questions
Why are fans losing faith in the update now? There are simply too many unanswered questions about Anthem 2.0. The whole situation seems nonsensical.
If you hoped that Anthem would have a major renaissance like No Man’s Sky, Final Fantasy XIV, or Fallout 76 – why are only 30 people working on such a reboot? With so few people and such large problems with the game, a rework takes a long time.
How does BioWare plan to make money with Anthem again? The remaining players of Anthem outright refuse to spend money on a reboot that is supposed to deliver what the base game should have provided.
When is it supposed to come out? There is no timeline for Anthem Next. The last update on the Twitter page is from October, which is already two and a half months ago. Since Dailey left, the regular Twitter posts that assured players that something was happening with the game are missing. Dailey speaks of the team being in a “transition phase”.
A year after the announcement that Anthem would receive a rework, there is hardly any more information than at the time of the announcement.
The sad state of Anthem Next is clearly illustrated by an FAQ on reddit. A year after the announcement of Anthem Next, there is hardly any reliable information about the game:
- You don’t know if it will come for PS5, Xbox Series X
- You don’t know if it will cost money or be free
- You have no idea when the release is supposed to be, and not even the name is safe
Now that Dailey is gone, there is even a missing point of contact associated with Anthem Next. Many players on reddit have lost faith in Anthem Next. They say: Even if Anthem Next comes, it will be a 3 to 5-year-old game struggling for attention with new games.
Other players even believe that the announcement of Anthem Next was only made to calm the players down for now. They doubt that Anthem Next will ever come.
Anthem was envisioned in 2019 as a game that would build on the significant success of Destiny. It was designed for “10 years.” Meanwhile, the entire loot shooter genre appears to be in crisis:
MMO shooters in crisis: Here’s the state of Destiny 2, Anthem, Division 2 before 2021
