Anthem is a story for decades because of how the project was managed. Kotaku has a whole fascinating piece written on the development of Anthem behind the scenes and just saying it is a mess would be putting it mildly.
Anthem developer Bioware was once hailed a critically acclaimed developer who released many games that were worthy candidates of the game of the year awards. Their last crowning achievement was Dragon Age Inquisition, which won its game of the year award when it launched in 2014. Since then, they had two failed projects release one after another casting a shadow of doubt over their future.
Anthem was their most recent and perhaps the biggest failure so far. It was one of the most anticipated games released this year but somehow it ended up being a failure of catastrophic proportions. The signs of Anthem being a disaster were present from the beginning as the alpha and beta tests of the game didn’t exactly leave a good impression or a promising launch. Despite it all, it ended up being far worse than most of us had imagined, as our Anthem review shows we didn’t like the game.
Anthem subreddit has been quite vocal about the problem with the game. Loot is one particular cause of concern that has rarely been addressed, and when it was fixed, it was supposedly done accidentally and then rolled back in another update. As a result, the player base of the game is dwindling faster and for a game that shipped on such a massive scale, and was marketed endlessly, this is a worse failure than last year’s Fallout 76.
Today, the Anthem subreddit has accepted the fate of the game after it was learned that the main Bioware team has now moved on to newer projects and now only a support team remains to keep the promises of the games as a service intact for Anthem. The roadmap that Bioware planned during the launch week has been scrapped or possibly delayed and a new one still hasn’t been announced. As a result, the game has been declared “dead” by even the most hardcore fans.
It might be impossible to see Anthem bounce back and become another story like Destiny, but will EA be willing to put their efforts behind the project to get it back to a respectable level? This is a question that only time is going to tell, but so far the outcome doesn’t look good and the players know it.
