Electronic Arts wants you to pretend Anthem never existed

BioWare's Anthem is no more. Yesterday, EA shut down the official servers of the ill-fated online action-RPG, making it inaccessible to all players… at least until the small, yet dedicated communities set up their own servers, if ever. The ending was infamous as the servers simply stopped working and players could no longer get back into the game.

Many people – at least those who could download it – have flocked to the game over the past few weeks to either play it for the first time or spend a precious few extra hours sailing around its open world in a Javelin suit. Anthem was incredibly flawed in many ways, but its movement and combat mechanics have a magic that few games have attempted to replicate.

As Anthem awaited its inevitable demise, I reflected on my own experience with Anthem as a journalist and gamer, and how what was one day promised to be BioWare's most ambitious outing crashed and burned under the sheer weight of its own false expectations. A game that promised to be everything ended up being nothing.

Anthem's Reveal was one big fat lie

The default Ranger, Colossus, Intercepter, and Storm suits float in the air in Anthem.

BioWare and EA revealed Anthem to the world during E3 2017. Three years after Dragon Age: Inquisition and five since Mass Effect 3, although Andromeda dropped earlier that year, gamers around the world were waiting to see what the beloved studio had in store for the last few years.

Anthem was designed to not just be the studio's next big thing, but to allow EA to capitalize on what had become a huge moneymaker: online multiplayer shooters that could live on for years.

The game's official reveal was predictably spectacular, as the player character, known as the Freelancer, appeared in a busy marketplace full of conversing NPCS and larger-than-life machines moving overhead. It felt like a living, breathing world for people to put down roots in. Once you enter the spear, most of the narrative pretense is thrown away as multiple players drop into the game and start interacting, except they're played by actors who are trying so desperately to sound like real people. Like all trailers of this type, it feels fake to me.

What breaks my heart is that it looks spectacular from a gaming standpoint. There was something incredible about watching the player character float through the open world like Iron Man, only to land smoothly and take on enemies and quests with friends. It was an expansion of hits like Destiny that promised to make movement, combat, and questing much more involved. However, it turned out that this reveal of the game was nothing more than a virtual slice, and BioWare was sitting behind the scenes trying to figure out how to get this game into production and on sale in the next 18 months.

Executive producer Mark Darrah recently released a three and a half long video about what happened to Anthem, which is definitely worth a watch.

Jason Schreier wrote an excellent report during his time at Kotaku that took a deep dive into how Anthem turned out the way it did, and how it was a rushed project given to BioWare despite having no experience with online shooters or the resources to support one long-term project. But everyone else was doing it and EA wanted record profits. Anthem launched in February 2019 to negative reviews and lackluster sales, and it didn't take long for BioWare and EA to admit their mistake and promise to fix things.

This came in the form of Anthem NEXT, a reboot of sorts that we wanted at the time to be a throwback to the level of Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn, completely overhauling the game and making it a BioWare game to be proud of. But a few months went by without an update, and eventually this project was completely pulled. EA cut their losses and allowed BioWare to move on to other projects, and I don't think they've really gotten back on their feet since.

Despite its shortcomings, the players miss the anthem

Screenshot from Anthem. It shows a sci-fi soldier firing a gun attached to their wrist. A huge battle can be seen behind them.

Since the servers shut down earlier this week, a number of hardcore gamers shared their goodbyes on Reddit and how they will miss playing Anthem regularly and the many communities they've become a part of as a result. Darrah's video essay talks about how the team put a lot of excellent work into the game during their time on the project and how it managed to shine through regardless of everything else.

Darrah notes that before full production began, EA believed that single-player titles were dead and therefore wanted BioWare to refocus on the multiplayer project. Anthem was a proposal created by BioWare that tried to fit into this new vision, and Mass Effect trilogy director Casey Hudson wanted to present EA with a new future for BioWare.

A new way to tell stories, a new business model and a game that could live on for years to come. Much of that imagination didn't make it into the finished game, but what Hudson was telling EA was exactly what the suits wanted to hear. Unfortunately, it wasn't like that.

A group of Freelancers prepares for an expedition to Anthem.

I believe there is a world where a live-action shooter like Anthem could tell a compelling story with excellent characters along with gameplay mechanics that have kept us going for years, much like Destiny's golden era. But after years and years of pitching, prototyping, and such drastic changes to the team at BioWare Anthem, they consistently failed to create the foundations that would make this possible.

Now a small but passionate community of players must say goodbye to a game that will never be playable again without intervention. Years of great work and ambition were brought to its knees by a publisher who suggested BioWare try to make a game that wasn't what the players or many of its team members wanted. Anthem was doomed in a myriad of ways, but like so many triple-A failures over the years, it didn't have to end that way.