Anthem DEAD

We are gathered here today to say goodbye...

Alas, poor Anthem. I knew him well, Horatio. Okay that's a barefaced lie; I didn't know Anthem, at least not personally. No, I was the creepy tsundere onlooker from afar with binoculars in one hand and a notebook in another, trying to pretend that I wasn't at least somewhat interest in what Anthem could have been. But even by that first trailer I felt like something was wrong, and so did a lot of folk out there which is likely why, even with the benefit of ignorance, in week one Anthem undersold next to Bioware's previous title. (Though that might be also due to said previous title; considering that game was Andromeda) since then it's been a rocky road for Anthem that has been characterised totally by disappointment and despair, all of which has been rounded off just recently with the announcement that Anthem Next, the overambitious plan to revive the game for a new age, has been killed off. Finite. That's all folks. No more out this little birdie. Goodnight.

And yes, I mourn. I mourn not for a game that was good, nor for a chance it might have become good, but for a game which people liked which is now no more. I mourn for those that feel let down by Bioware and EA, and I mourn for the belief of a world of Javelins and the Anthem of creation. I won't lie, when Casey Hudson got up there and started pitching to the crowd, I sold myself over for a while. Let myself believe in the dream even if it didn't always makes sense. (The Bioware formula in an MMO-lite setting? Sure, why not?) So perhaps I also mourn for the dream I almost fell for. And to be clear, at no point am I blaming EA for making this call, as hard as that is to believe given how I tend to act towards them. This was the right move to make and if anything, it was foolish and unbelievable for Bioware to pretend they could fix this game and just re-release it to a crowd of adoring fans. (All of whom, I suspect, were supposed to just be waiting around, with flowers in their bonnets and candles on their window sills, for the grand return of their favourite game.) People move on, and that goes especially true for when your company has provided nothing but express reasons why they should.

The Anthem Next proposal wanted to take an inherently flawed and unfinished game in an attempt to make something out of it. Think what CDPR are attempting to do with Cyberpunk, only they lacked even the parts of Cyberpunk that CDPR got right, such as the world concept and the story. Recall, that Anthem was a game so buggy that it caused PS4's to hard restart in it's early days. It featured a narrative so unfinished that there were literally missing cutscenes and an entire mission thread built to make players replay content for an extended period of time so that the play time could be buffed up. And had a concept so underdeveloped that it proposes the break down of tools which the gods themselves used to shape the very world and all who reside in it, and then represented it in gameplay solely by making it an endless spawn machine for generic wildlife enemies. Do not forget; nothing about Anthem was redeemable. Nothing, except, for the flight.

Flying is all anyone thinks about when it comes down to this game, because that's all the team were ever really told to do. Famously, Anthem was frostily received by the EA bigwig in charge of Bioware until he saw the flying, then he asked them to focus more on that and thus was born perhaps the only system which the team fully realised. And sure, zooming around the skies in a mech suit looks pretty; but what does it actually mean for the game? Well it was an excuse for the map to be several magnifications bigger than it needed to be, because the team didn't really have the ideas/time to fill it fully, and that's about it. You might argue that the gameplay too was a highpoint, but I see it as a 1.5 upgrade from Mass Effect Andromeda's gameplay, and thus hardly worth the praise. It's fun to play, but so is Andromeda. Just play the Mass Effect game instead.

I'm sure the team of thirty who have been working on Anthem NEXT for the last two years, (give or take some months) will be just that little bit heartbroken by this and thus I feel too for them. But then, for EA's side, that is just another two wasted years of development money into a game which famously wasted several years of development money before even the main game was released, so there are certainly fair reasons for pulling the plug. Honestly, even if Anthem NEXT proposed simply the greatest possible revival for the franchise ever it probably still would be canned for the plain fact that gamers aren't going to be coming back to that game, it just won't happen. That seal of trust was broken and Bioware is going to be in the dog house for at least the next two game launches. (provided they go well) And honestly that's just fair.

However, let it not be said that the death of Anthem was for nothing, because it's demise did have a positive effect on the future of EA/Bioware games and that's a silver lining if ever I've heard one. When news dropped that Dragon Age 4 has been given the blessing of EA to drops it's multiplayer mode and focus on being a fully single-player experience, I honestly instinctively thought it was fake news. But then I saw the writer as Jason Schreier, and he is the only journalist in games journalism, so I guess it's just definitely true now. What a change of tune given that EA, just months before Anthem, tried to affirm to us all how Single player games were dead and live services are the be-all-end-all. (How'd that one turn out for you guys? Poorly, I'd imagine.)

Anthem's utter failure in every regard is apparently one of the catalysts for this switching of gears; as it demonstrates how a live service might not only fail, but be utterly disgustingly torn down by the community and turned into a symbol of everything that's wrong with the modern world. (Seriously, people were one more bad news story away from burning Javelin effigies in the street. That backlash was biblical.) The other catalyst was that Jedi Fallen Order game which was entirely single player and won awards because it was so beloved. Pretty much securing, in no uncertain terms, that EA weren't just wrong in their predictions, but utterly out of touch with the things that gamers want out of todays games. That they're now giving greater control to their developers in such a significant manner is a huge step in the right direction that I absolutely applaud.

So does this mean we have to start liking EA? First off 'ew', second off; you wash your brain out with soap for even thinking such a detestable thing. Never give Electronic Arts the benefit of the doubt because if there's one thing they've proven it's that they only give an inch when they expect to sneak a mile out from behind your back. Keep a very close eye on the next subtle way they try to trick gamers out of their cash when Dragon Age 4 comes around, because I all but guarantee they'll be a grift of some sort. (Even if it's just the confusing special edition grift; that's one which hasn't exploded in their faces too badly yet.) But what this does mean, is that we can put Anthem to its final rest in the knowledge that, despite everything it was and represented, it's legacy will prove a noble one, and isn't that the most any of us can hope for out of our last departure? Au revoir, Anthem, you shall not be missed.