Hot takes regarding Bioware’s Anthem have been all over social media since it debuted back in February of this year, and it’s hard to go through more than a few gaming YouTube videos without running across at least one overblown video thumbnail declaring the title to be deader than Jimmy Hoffa. That said, despite recent radio silence from both publisher and developer, rumors suggest that Anthem may just be getting a rework.
According to Kotaku, Bioware is currently in the middle of hashing out the specifics of a total revitalization of one of 2019’s most anticipated—and disappointing—titles. Though little is known about the project thus far, it certainly seems likely, as EA isn’t likely to waste millions of dollars and a near-decade of development time on a product that, so far, has failed to meet sales expectations.
Launched as yet another live-service in-game monetization nexus, Anthem stumbled right out of the gate and never seemed to recover. Broken, desperately rushed, and unbalanced, it felt like a soulless title developed by a committee of Electronic Arts suits who were hilariously unaware of what the gaming public wants to play in 2019. With a loot system that utterly destroyed the game’s core mechanics, a story held together by bits of duct tape and string, and a community continually spurned by dev promises which never came to fruition, player interest quickly evaporated.
Yet, it’s not all gloom and doom. First popularized by Final Fantasy XIV in 2010, there’s been a steadily increasing trend of failed titles being rebooted and released to a much better reception. The most famous recent example of this is probably Hello Games’ 2016 outing No Man’s Sky, a game which, over the course of three years, evolved from a worst-of-the-year contender to a polished, feature-complete experience.
EA themselves have been doing this fairly regularly as of late; Battlefield V was, by most accounts, a controversial misfire for the series when it first released in 2018. However, a year on, and they seem to have shelved the game’s more disliked elements in favor of returning to more traditional Battlefield settings and scenarios.
There’s no reason to believe that the same won’t happen to Anthem. In fact, if anything, EA has proven that they’re actually capable of publishing quality titles once they get out of their own way. Now that EA has seemingly given up on their attempts to suck every last dime from the game’s player base, BioWare may now be free to re-design the game into their own image without worrying about Electronic Arts breathing down their necks so ferociously that it dampens the skin.
Again, there’s no set timeline for Anthem’s prospective revival, and, at this point, this is all just speculation. Yet, it seems like, despite what some may believe, there may be a future for the project after all. The game’s release and subsequent development roadmap may have been a disaster, but who is to say that, by this time next year, it won’t have morphed into a worthwhile experience?