Anthem is now available on EA Access and Origin Access subscription services, in case you care. Which statistically speaking, you probably don’t.
For those not already aware, EA Access is basically EA’s game subscription service. It’s like Netflix, but for EA games: you pay a fee every month and get access to just over 230 titles in EA’s back catalog. That’s a lot of games, and by now at least, most of them have been fixed to something that passes as playable.
Anthem was the game that back in 2018 we all thought was going to take over the world, displacing such looter-shooter classics as Destiny and Warframe while also making Gears of War and The Division obsolete with its cover-based fighting mechanics.
And then that didn’t happen--not at all. Anthem released as a bug-filled mess, without story or content or end-game. The loot system remained broken for months, and various missteps after the game’s release in February angered the game’s limited player-base to the point where they all just packed up and left.
Cataclysm, the free content drop that was billed as the thing that might save Anthem also didn’t live up to expectations. It was a brief flash of excitement, but as with everything else that Anthem has done, it failed to get back wayward fans.
After that, lead producer Ben Irving left BioWare while everyone else on the Anthem team was transferred to work on Dragon Age 4. BioWare got rid of their Anthem development “road map” sometime in June, and there’s basically been no word on what is happening to the game since then.
So now EA is putting it on their free-to-play-so-long-as-you-pay-monthly service. Rumors from earlier this year said EA was considering putting Anthem out as a free-to-play game, and EA Access might just be the first stop on its way to F2P status. Anthem is now available to all EA and Original Access subscribers.
And if that doesn’t work, there is simply nothing else left to save Anthem.