Sometimes you just have to head back to the drawing board, and that’s exactly what BioWare is doing with Anthem.
In a blog post on their website, BioWare announced that the development team would focus on reinventing the game and that over the coming months, they would focus on a “longer-term redesign of the experience.” The blog post acknowledged players’ concerns about Anthem’s loot system, long-term progression and lackluster end game.
Anthem, an action role playing game, was released in February 2019 and immediately got a mixed reception; the graphics were outstanding, and the combat and flight mechanics were highly praised. Even still, the issues were numerous; the game was considered way to “grind-heavy” with players having to complete repetitive missions, ruining the flow of the story. On launch, the game even had severe loading screen times, as well as many issues with the game crashing on the PlayStation 4 version.
Early patches helped fix some of these problems but the initial impressions were already set in stone, and while BioWare provided three seasons worth of additional content, the company decided it was time to reimagine the game more intensively, similar to how Square Enix retooled Final Fantasy XIV after it was panned by critics and players upon release.
These issues can likely be attributed to an uneven development phase; in the blogpost, it’s stated that “we’ll be doing something we’d like to have done more of the first time around – giving a focused team the time to test and iterate, focusing on gameplay first.” This has drawn criticism on social media, as players and fans feel the game was pushed to be released before ensuring it was a quality experience.
There is no estimated release date for the reimagined Anthem, and the team will not be adding any more major additional content to the game; however, BioWare will continue to run the Anthem servers for the time being.
