After multiple developers leaving the studio including the Lead Producer and the Head of Live Service and the cancellation of future updates, Anthem has been in a state of silence over the past few months. It seems that “for the last few months, BioWare and parent company EA have been planning an overhaul of the online shooter, according to three people familiar with those plans. Some call ‘Anthem 2.0′ or ‘Anthem Next.'”
According to Kotaku, many of the details are in flux and there is no clear timeline for Anthem Next. The developers at BioWare are still trying to decide on how the game would get updated. They could pace out the updates like No Man’s Sky or they could make a large, game-changing expansion as Destiny has done. BioWare is also considering releasing Anthem Next as a new game but “those who work on the project said that could take a lot of forms (and it’s unlikely they’ll charge full-price to Anthem players).”
According to Kotaku, developers at both of BioWare’s offices in Texas and Canada are quietly working on plans to overhaul the game. One developer said “we spent a few months just tearing it down and figuring out what needed to change fundamentally (a lot). And we’ve been rebuilding for another few months since.”
BioWare apparently plans to change a lot about the game. The developers are looking to overhaul the loot, the quests, the social aspects of the game, the difficulty, the progression system, and the world map. The entire world of Anthem is set in a single contiguous map but the developers are looking into separating the map into segments so they don’t have to worry as much about create bugs and glitches all across the world which was something that plagued Anthem even before the game came out. A developer said “We’re also looking at breaking the need to go back to Fort Tarsis after every mission and what a mission is. That was always a weird disconnect. We’re trying to integrate the disparate parts of the game together.” Another person said that they are still doing “lots of testing things out and experimentation but still nothing concrete.”
While Bioware is overhauling Anthem, they are still developing the next Dragon Age. Recently, they teased that something may be revealed during Dragon Age day next month.