On paper, Anthem had everything. The marketing machine rumbled to life with hopes of a slick co-operative shooter set in an deriving world, and Anthem seemed to fuse all we enjoyed about looter shooters with the intricate world-building RPG developer BioWare is famed for.
As an ardent fan of both Bungie‘s Destiny and the Mass Effect trilogy- two rights that seemed to have heavily influenced the new IP, along with other Games as a Service( GaaS) AAA renders like Ubisoft‘s The Division- the only thing that really vexed me about Anthem’s initial unveiling was that there was no immediate release date.
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I was balls-deep in a steady, monogamous tie-in with Destiny at the time, but I can’t profess Anthem didn’t turn my thought. As much as I cherish Destiny’s lore-rich universe and filling action, the idea of slipping on a super-cool Exosuit and zipping around an ever-changing alien world designed by the fine tribes at BioWare made me fizzle with apprehension. As a studio renowned for its complex reputations and involved role-playing, marrying their knowledge and skills with the hypnotic looter-shooter car-mechanics of Destiny seemed almost too good to be true. And it was.
Following a problematic launch in February 2019 that mustered exclusively a lukewarm celebration, the developing crew was forced to regroup and revise. A year later, with some detractors sighing that they could previously hear the remote chime of Anthem’s death knoll, the studio held growing was alive and well and it remained committed to the sci-fi shooter.
Anthem. Credit: BioWare
Just two years and two days after its debut, though, publisher Electronic Arts has announced that it is formally pulling the plug on Anthem. Despite numerous predicts made to its ardent society of Freelancers- the word given to the alien-punching exponents roaming this alien planet- there is no more content coming to Anthem. It’s a disgraceful but grimly fitting culminating for video games that predicted so much better but delivered so little.
Anthem’s grandiose “10-year-plan” had been killed off merely two years after it had begun.
And look, I know it’s fashionable to shit on live-service plays, particularly those that predict everything and deliver good-for-nothing. I know many of us are sick of men in dress insisting they know what gamers miss better than we do ourselves, just as we’re sick of the endless pressure of microtransactions. But Anthem didn’t neglect because it was designed by committee , nor did it die because it relied too heavily on tapping its participates for more currency, either.
Anthem’s die comes not from one lethal punch as much as it bled to death from thousands and thousands of small-scale, inconsequential slice. It neglected because it made so much from its live-service peers that it neglected to craft an name all of its own. In its desperation to be all things for all players its become good-for-nothing for no-one, failing to stand out in any meaningful style in an already grossly over-saturated market.
The unpopular truth is that there wasn’t anything wrong with Anthem, really. Connection and lading wobbles aside- most of which were patched out shortly after its introduction- it was a perfectly perfunctory undertaking that offered meaty combat and quenching special abilities that easily accorded that of its antagonists. Yes, it made a bit while to get to grips with the numerous submenus and systems, and yes, I spent more occasion cooling down my Javelin than zipping around it in, but at its best- often in co-op with a couple of cronies at your place- Anthem utterly did deliver a good time. That’s why it continues to boast such a vocal, enthusiastic community.
Anthem. Credit: BioWare
Ultimately, though, it was all style and no element. The stunning environments and solid combat exactly weren’t enough to compensate for its shallow gameplay and absence of operation breadth and diversity.
Is it possible EA has yanked the plug too soon? Maybe. There are easy comparisons to be drawn against other tournaments that digested same spuriou starts but managed to turn it around. After all, Final Fantasy XIV was essentially rehabilitated from the ground up after its original form gate-crashed and burned, and No Man’s Sky has miraculously retrieved from a similarly destructive launch.
The trouble with live assistance activities, though, is that by their highly clarity, they should be continually tweaked, refreshed, and deliver a steady torrent of brand-new content. Anthem love were predicted this over and over again, but revises were continually delayed or cancelled only. Chuck in the absence of meaningful end-game content, and I suspect these burst hopes are as much to blame for Anthem’s sad demise as anything else.
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