BioWare announces the end of ongoing Anthem development

An update from Christian Dailey cites a need to focus on other BioWare properties.

Anthem fans got bad news today when Christian Dailey, studio director at BioWare Austin, posted an update advising everyone that the studio has made the "difficult decision" to stop new development work on Anthem. The company will continue to operate the Anthem live service as you know it today for an unspecified amount of time.

"Since Anthem's launch," Dailey recalls, "the team has been working hard to continually improve the game, releasing multiple updates that brought with them a variety of improvements and introduced new content to play. Towards the end of 2019 we expanded on that effort and started working on a more fundamental restructure of the game."

This more fundamental restructure is the effort that wound up not going where people hoped it might. It probably didn't help that the team has spent much of its time working to right the ship in the middle of a pandemic, which would have added a lot of strain to an already difficult task.

"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," Dailey added. "It's also disappointing for the team who were doing brilliant work. And for me personally, Anthem is what brought me to BioWare, and the last two years have been some of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my career."

According to Dailey, the team will now attempt to "laser focus our efforts as a studio," which translates to more work on the next Dragon Age and Mass Effect titles, as well as "quality updates" to Star Wars: The Old Republic. You can check out Dailey's full statement for more.

Anthem released in mid-February of 2019 and almost immediately ran into the sort of trouble one might not have expected for BioWare at the time: mediocre reviews. Some critics went further and accused the game of being "unfinished." A lot of trouble seems to stem from its release as a "Live Service" game that would theoretically have continued to involve in pleasing ways over the course of many years. That clearly won't happen now.

Have you played Anthem, either at launch or following some of the updates already released? If so, what did you think? Did Anthem and its fans get a raw deal, or are you more interested in seeing what BioWare can do with its more proven IP?

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Staff article by Jason Venter (February 24, 2021) Jason Venter has been playing games for 30 years, since discovering the Apple IIe version of Mario Bros. in his elementary school days. Now he writes about them, here at HonestGamers and also at other sites that agree to pay him for his words.