It’s Official, ANTHEM has been Cancelled

Well, it’s official; Anthem has now been cancelled as confirmed by a BioWare blog post.

Earlier in the month, there were reports from Bloomberg that EA was to assess the progression of the Anthem revival (dubbed Anthem 2.0) and will make a decision on its future.

By now I’m sure you’re familiar with the launch state of Anthem.  Yes it looked great and the flying was fantastic, but it was clearly lacking in content, had regular server issues, repetitive mission design and more.  After a short few weeks, the concurrent player numbers had drastically reduced.

Anthem was EAs and BioWare’s attempt at getting in on the live-service pie and it failed, miserably.  Roadmaps were released and promises were made, but ultimately the developers and publishers failed on just about every level.

This launched the project “Anthem 2.0” if you will, in 2020.  A project that would revive Anthem, make it the game it was always planned to be and perhaps more than anything else, fulfil promises to loyal fans and then some.

So here we are in 2021 and project Anthem 2.0 is well and truly dead.  While the game will still run (until they decide to turn the servers off, which will probably happen within the next year), there will be no added content, no updates, no nothing.

“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“, said Christian Dailey, executive producer of Anthem.

Dailey continued and stated that COVID-19 also played its part in the decision.

“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 continued: “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.”

Moving forward Dailey explained that the team working on Anthem 2.0 would now shift focus to the development of the next Dragon Age and Mass Effect titles, as well as updates for Star Wars: The Old Republic on PC.

For me personally, like many, I am not surprised by this news.  Though there was always a little part of me that hoped Anthem would make a triumphant comeback and launch with its potential fulfilled on high-end PCs and new-gen consoles.

How do you feel about Anthem 2.0 being cancelled and do you believe that EA/BioWare should compensate early adopters of the game in some way?  Let us know across our social media channels.

Source: BioWare blog