After a year and a half following a very rough launch, BioWare has announced that it is ceasing the development of Anthem Next, the redesign for Anthem that has been in development for about year. This follows reports earlier in the month saying that EA will decide the fate of the game after reviewing the progress that Bioware has made. In a blog post, BioWare announced the news saying “in the spirit of transparency and closure we wanted to share that we’ve made the difficult decision to stop our new development work on Anthem (aka Anthem Next). We will, however, continue to keep the Anthem live service running as it exists today.”
Anthem has gone through a lot (or a little depending on how you look at it) since its initial reveal back at E3 2017. Prior to launch, demo was available to try but there were a lot of issues that occurred on day one.
Unfortunately, these issues were unable to go away when the game launched. BioWare had plans to support the game, but the dominoes kept falling one after the other. The new content kept getting pushed, multiple developers left work on the game to focus on other projects as well as leaving the company, and then news came out that the game was essentially going back to the drawing board and getting overhauled.
Like so many games last year, Anthem Next was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. “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,” BioWare said
As for what’s next, BioWare said that they need to “laser focus our efforts as a studio and strengthen the next Dragon Age, and Mass Effect titles while continuing to provide quality updates to Star Wars: The Old Republic.”