BioWare and EA end work on ‘Anthem Next’.
After putting a pin in short-term updates and expansions to focus on a “longer-term redesign” of the game, EA announced today that it will be canceling its planned revamp of the game Anthem, called Anthem Next. But the company plans to keep Anthem’s live service running “as it exists today.”
Anthem Next Cancelled:
“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),” BioWare executive producer Christian Dailey said in a recent blog post. “We will, however, continue to keep the Anthem live service running as it exists today.”
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.
The note also cites the challenges of working during the pandemic, which made all this even more difficult, and affirms that at the very least, they aren’t shutting down the servers for the game, continuing its “live service” existence in the sense that you can literally still play it, but it does not seem as if any other actual content will be developed for it.
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.”
BioWare does have other projects in the works, including Dragon Age 4. According to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, the small team that was working on Anthem’s redesign will now be working on the sequel to Dragon Age.
Today is a sad day for any Anthem fans out there. Anthem launched nearly two years ago and was met with poor reviews, with the main criticism stemming from a lack of content, subpar story, and repetitive gameplay. A year following its release, BioWare said it was invested in improving the game with seasonal updates. But last year, then-general manager Casey Hudson said that “it would pause short-term updates to reinvent the entire game. It was reported last May that an incubation team of about 30 people was tasked with reworking Anthem”
Anthem will forever remain a cautionary tale about how a massive IP can fail, and how even in an age of endless development, live service roadmaps, and post-launch patches and revivals, sometimes, games just die. And you can’t save them, even if they might deserve it.
