The unpopular truth is that there wasn’t anything wrong with Anthem, really. In its desperation to be all things for all players its become nothing for no-one, failing to stand out in any meaningful way in an already grossly over-saturated market. It failed because it took so much from its live-service peers that it neglected to craft an identity all of its own. But Anthem didn’t fail because it was designed by committee, nor did it die because it relied too heavily on tapping its players for more cash, either.Īnthem‘s demise comes not from one fatal blow as much as it bled to death from a thousand small, inconsequential cuts. I know many of us are sick of men in suits insisting they know what gamers want better than we do ourselves, just as we’re sick of the endless pressure of microtransactions. It’s a miserable but grimly fitting ending for a game that promised so much but delivered so little.Īnthem‘s ambitious “10-year-plan” had been killed off just two years after it had begun.Īnd look, I know it’s fashionable to shit on live-service games, particularly those that promise everything and deliver nothing. Despite numerous promises made to its ardent community of Freelancers – the name given to the alien-punching protagonists roaming this alien planet – there is no more content coming to Anthem. Just two years and two days after its debut, though, publisher Electronic Arts has announced that it is formally pulling the plug on Anthem. A year later, with some detractors whispering that they could already hear the distant chime of Anthem’s death knoll, the studio insisted development was alive and well and it remained committed to the sci-fi shooter. And it was.įollowing a problematic launch in February 2019 that mustered only a lukewarm reception, the development team was forced to regroup and revise.
As a studio renowned for its complex characters and involved role-playing, marrying their expertise with the hypnotic looter-shooter mechanics of Destiny seemed almost too good to be true. As much as I love Destiny’s lore-rich universe and satisfying combat, the idea of slipping on a super-cool Exosuit and zipping around an ever-changing alien world designed by the fine folks at BioWare made me fizzle with anticipation. I was balls-deep in a steady, monogamous relationship with Destiny at the time, but I can’t pretend Anthem didn’t turn my head. READ MORE: Violent video games aren’t what 2021 needs.The marketing machine rumbled to life with promises of a slick co-operative shooter set in an evolving world, and Anthem looked to fuse all we loved about looter shooters with the intricate world-building RPG developer BioWare is famed for.Īs an ardent fan of both Bungie‘s Destiny and the Mass Effect trilogy – two franchises that seemed to have heavily influenced the new IP, along with other Games as a Service (GaaS) AAA offerings like Ubisoft‘s The Division – the only thing that really bothered me about Anthem‘s initial unveiling was that there was no immediate release date.
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