BioWare’s and EA Anthem is no more. With the servers now shut down, and because it was always online, Anthem has become completely unplayable. Back in 2019, when we reviewed the game we gave it a pretty middling score of 5/10. Our reviewer back then appreciated the awesome Javelins, the guns felt great and flying was magnificent.
However, Anthem was dragged down by rote mission design, limited enemy and content variety, and a boring opening stretch padded by heavy content-gating, while constant visual bugs, long loading screens, and restrictive, sluggish Fort Tarsis management, having to return just to equip gear, moving slowly, and even being teleported back if you stray too far, making the whole experience feel needlessly frustrating.
However, there was hope. As our reviewer mentioned, “That’s not to say that Anthem is unsalvageable. I think it can be saved, and I hoped that it will be. Because the good stuff is really good. There’s mounds of untapped potential here. It just needs work. Serious work, to fix the game’s core problems before BioWare begins the ceaseless content drip that defines games like this. That shouldn’t be their focus now. Getting this right should be. Right now, Anthem is the music of creation that inspired its name. Left alone, it’s unstable, flawed. But with the right hand to shape it, it could be something wonderful.”
And it seems that BioWare took that feedback to heart. In 2020, it announced that it would be overhauling the game’s many core systems. Dubbed Anthem Next, Christian Dailey– who was looking after Anthem back then – stated in a BioWare blog post that the team will be making several changes to experience.
“The Anthem incubation team has kicked off and we are starting to validate our design hypotheses,” Dailey said back then. “Incubation is a term we use internally – it essentially means we are going back and experimenting/prototyping to improve on the areas where we believe we fell short and to leverage everything that you love currently about Anthem. We are a small team – about 30-ish, earning our way forward as we set out to hit our first major milestone goals. Spoiler – this is going to be a longer process. And yes, the team is small but the whole point of this is to take our time and go back to the drawing board. And a small team gives us the agility a larger one can’t afford.”
“We really want this experience to be different for the team and our players, but we know we have some tough challenges to tackle,” he wrote back then. “We want to include you as we go and be open and honest with where we are at and what the expectations are with where we are going. The reality is you will see things that look awesome but end up on the cutting room floor or things that you might think suck that you feel we are spending too much time on – but in the spirit of experimentation this is all OK. We really want to provide you all the transparency we can because of your passion and interest in Anthem. But, with that comes seeing how the sausage is made – which is not always pretty by the way.”
However, in early 2021, all plans to revamp Anthem were scrapped. On the BioWare blog, Dailey stated that, “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. ”
Dailey revealed that BioWare will now choose to focus all its resources on Dragon Age (eventually released in 2024 to disappointing sales and critical reception) and Mass Effect sequel (which is still in production as of 2026), as well as focusing on Star Wars: The Old Republic.
“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.”
Interestingly, despite being a critical failure and EA letting it die for a few years, Anthem reportedly sold pretty well, at least on paper. In December of 2023, the LinkedIn profile of ex-EA employee mentioned that Anthem sold 5 million lifetime sales and 2 million in its first week. However, for the publisher it was a different story. Anthem’s sales failed to meet EA’s expectations, so overall, it was a failure. I mean imagine selling 5 million and still termed as a commercial flop. Sigh.
The entire situation surrounding Anthem has been pretty sad. I won’t go in what kind of development problems the game went through, those have already been documented on the internet, but my mind goes back to 2017. It was E3 and BioWare first revealed Anthem with an absolutely insane demo that showcased the potential of the new IP. It was unreal in so many ways and took the internet by storm. Unfortunately, a large portion of that experience never got translated into the final product.
After the revamp got canceled, Anthem still lived on through a small but passionate community, and now that the game is no more, that group is now looking for PC custom servers so that it could live on. Whether they will be able to achieve that is something that remains to seen.
Anthem is dead and buried, and has now joined numerous other live service games that squandered their potential. The truth is that the game, despite having some really good parts, didn’t do much above the required minimum. And simply put, that is not enough.
It’s a shame that, for most of us, Anthem won’t be remembered as a game worth our money or our time; rather, it’ll stand as a reminder of how poor management, weak planning, and troubled development can doom a game in a matter of weeks.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.
