I remember being literally speechless when, in the distance E3 of 2017, I saw for the first time Anthem in action. Jaw-smashing graphics, flying exoskeletons that were tremendously reminiscent of the style of Iron Man, a vast, living world, and the promise of constant support that would have made the title of BioWare the greatest Game As A Service that the gaming world would have known from that moment on. Today, almost 4 years later, we are in the conditions of unplug to a project that did not keep the promises made even before its birth. Something went terribly wrong, and we will end up remembering Anthem Next not only as what it could have been, but which it was not, in any of what should have been its strengths.
It is fresh news, in fact, that Electronic Arts and BioWare have mutually agreed to delete Anthem Next forever, the project that should have revived the fortunes of the title after a couple of years of sad abandonment, both by the players and, above all, by its own developers, who few had remedied bugs and various problems that plagued a title with a repetitive end game and without stimuli, e a support that in the end there never was. On the one hand the users, who like me believed in the potential of a title that really had all the credentials to establish itself on the market and in the hearts, on the other hand, a company that has come to terms with that same market, and has decided that ultimately resurrecting a dead person would bring more costs than profits. The feeling is that of a game in which we believed more than the developers themselves. The question, on the other hand, is whether it would really have been the case to carry on the Next project, or whether we were still at the time of the first falling in love in 2017, not seeing reality before our eyes: that of play now out of time to be recovered. As usual, we take stock of the situation, and then try to give us an answer.
In Anthem Next, we probably believed more than them
The discussion went on for weeks, if not months. The two developers wondered if it was really worth carrying out a new project after the initial one failed. Gamers want it, it's true, and many members of the development team have been working on it for some time. Yet the economic and image loss was too great, and a second flop could be really damaging to society. So, Electronic Arts and BioWare, reluctantly, they decided to delete the project, which therefore will no longer see the light. There will, almost certainly, not even be an update patch to bring the title up PlayStation 5 e Xbox Series XS at 60 FPS: Anthem will die as we know it.
The official confirmation came from the director of works of Anthem Next, Christian Dailey, who through a long post on the BioWare blog, confirmed that the update has been permanently canceled and that the team that was currently working on it was added to that of Dragon Age 4. Dailey, in addition to apologizing to the fans, explained that the game servers will remain open, and that Anthem will remain playable in its current version on all platforms. Those few users who were still supporting it, therefore, will be able to continue playing it, imagining it working and waiting for an improvement that will never come.
Yet, recent examples of titles that did not start exactly on the right foot, but that in the course of construction have managed to get back on track and step on the accelerator, even, there are. One for all, No Man's Sky. The procedural action-adventure of Hello Games it hadn't started in the best way, and many players had abandoned it over time. Yet, its developers believed in their creation, closed in a long press blackout, rolled up their sleeves, and today the game has fully recovered, thanks to hard work and especially with thelistening to player feedback. An even more obvious example is Rainbow Six Siege, which after a very complicated start is now one of the real pillars of the competitive landscape.
A new defeat
Anthem he was not born under the best of stars, let's face it. On the debut day the servers were not working, and the first real problems emerged already in the first weeks, hitting to the heart all those many players who had pre-ordered the title following the great advertising campaign and what the trailer seemed to promise. Not just bugs, not just one background repetitiveness, not only the impossibility of immediately using the collected loot, but also the same game structure that at a certain point threw an insurmountable obstacle to the players: the opening of some tombs required the acquisition of an infinite number of objects, consumables , enemies killed and areas uncovered, a forced stop from grinding in a plot that never really took off. Many have stopped there. For the most faithful who have arrived at the end game, however, Anthem has not reserved anything. If not the repetition of the final mission and only two new dungeons, with an increase in the parametric difficulty based on our progress, and nothing more. A clear step back from what other titles of the same genre can offer, despite the “graphic” and the spectacular flight mode (probably what has kept the entire game alive to this day), elements that have not saved the game from criticism.
The basis for carrying Anthem forward, however, would also be there. A user base, the hard core, remained. A solid game structure, which however should be freed from the repetitiveness mentioned several times, could still be there, once we have intervened on everything that is wrong. Abandoning the project for the second time would really be a great shame and would mean a new defeat for Bioware. A decision that did not take into account those players who have continued to believe in it, and those (few) developers who have continued to work on it all this time, and who they believed in the future of Anthem Next. Yet we must ask ourselves a whole series of questions. A big software house like EA, can afford to rework and reinvent its own title, at the cost perhaps of only returning to a balanced budget, or of earning very little? After about 4 years, are we still in time to relaunch a title that would still need years of work to get back to what it was supposed to be?
2021 proved that the idea that the public has of a certain product can mark it forever. For example cyberpunk 2077 it is an extraordinary game (for those who can afford it at high performance), but the common opinion is now that of a "broken" game which is useless. The same as that has long been cloaking Anthem. So maybe we are the ones who fell in love with an idea that unfortunately never existed, and that we're trying to keep a game alive for which there was never hope? Perhaps the best solution was to just pull the plug, and let it go forever.
