Anthem NEXT officially cancelled by EA

Following the announcement a couple weeks back that EA was deciding whether or not to cancel Bioware's Anthem NEXT, an attempt at rebuilding the widely disappointing loot RPG, Schreir has reported that EA opted to cancel the development.

Shortly following the tweet, former Anthem NEXT lead Christian Dailey put out a blog post confirming that Anthem NEXT was officially cancelled, as well as touching very briefly upon some of the obstacles that presented themselves along the way. It sounds as though the development team that was designing the NEXT update will be moved to Dragon Age 4 development.

What do you all think, is it for the best that Anthem NEXT got canned? Or could a rebuilt Anthem have lived up to the comparisons to other rebuilds, such as the oft referenced FF14: A Realm Reborn, or No Man's Sky?

With development already being as wonky as it is due to Covid, I'm really not surprised by the decision to can this and instead focus on Mass Effect remaster and the inevitable new ME and Dragon Age 4. But I could see them having put a bullet to this even if we'd be living in a normal non-pandemic world.

Having never even tried Anthem, I can't say I'm disappointed by this decision. Would prefer them to put that time and resources on other projects.

As the elusive Anthem defender I do think it’s a shame and there are good bones to that game that could be built upon.

But its also not a smart hill to die on so this is probably the smart decision

Good riddance to bad rubbish

Not surprising. Hopefully the folks who were on the Anthem NEXT team transition smoothly to other BioWare projects.

Am I happy about this? No. I feel bad for the developers who spent all that time and effort into a project that just got abandoned, and the players who invested their time and money in a dead services game.

Do I think it was the right decision by EA from a business perspective? Obviously. There was no path back for the game. It may have been possible to fix it creatively but it was commercially dead and there's nothing that could be done about that.

If I'm Squeenix and Crystal Dynamics I'm looking at this and sweating. They're not in exactly the same position with Avengers yet; it's got the license and they have a natural soft relaunch with the PS5/XS versions, but it's going to be a tough path and they still seem to be spinning their wheels.

I am not surprised to see this. But I was looking forward to seeing what they might do. From playing all of Anthem during launch, the flying mechanics were so satisfying. Maybe those will find their way into other BioWare projects.

At this point it’s Im starting to really wonder about the state of DragonAge since they’ve been working on it for years and have showed nearly nothing of it.

I hope they take some of the good stuff from that game (flying) and put it to use in a better game.

EDIT: Seeing this was already said, and you know what? It deserves being said multiple times.

At this point, take whatever ideas you had to reboot this and make a new game with a different name. The bad press around anythng with 'Anthem' on the box probably isn't worth the investment for the developers/publishers.

The only thing I find surprising about this is how long it seemed to take to reach this point. At least to me, it seems patently obvious you could easily have made this decision at least 6-8 months ago. Beyond a poor corporate attempt at saving face, I can't quite fathom what they were hoping to accomplish by working on it even this long. A team that size was never going to be able to overhaul the game on their own COVID or no COVID. At the same time, the team was also big enough and this farce went on long enough that they must have incurred a fairly substantial cost for ultimately no benefit.

And even if they had been able to put out a solid proof of concept for how to fix the game, I don't understand what the plan for covering the development cost was going to be? We aren't talking a nip and tuck here - the entire foundation of the game was so rotten that pretty much everything would have needed to be rebuilt to get people back in the door. That would have been really expensive, and I don't see a way for them to make back the budget.

Selling the new version of the game, even at a discounted price point, was never going to fly. The game has microtransactions, but that was likely to be a no-go too. For that to work, they would have needed a solid player base to actually . . . um . . . transact with the microtransactions.

One would hope that this would lead to a lot of soul searching at both BioWare and EA, since this is far from an isolated occurrence. When I read the Schreier article on Anthem, I was struck by how much crossover there was to the one that he wrote for Mass Effect Andromeda. It really felt like he had about 80% of the thing already written because the problems were so similar - issues with Frostbite, game directors that couldn't make up their mind, poor employee morale from crunching to finish, and a general arrogance in believing in the "BioWare Magic(tm)."

As other people have noted, the flying in Anthem is pretty good and has potential to be great.

I could see it being a major part of movement in open-world sections of a Mass Effect game for example.

I suppose it makes sense. In 2019, the powers that be must've thought Anthem's rehab was a necessary step to salvage Bioware's reputation. Now Bioware has a shiny new Mass Effect Trilogy remaster on the way to remind people of the fuzzy feelings that name used to inspire, and a new Dragon Age game on the way to act as proof of concept that Bioware can, presumably, still make good games. They don't need to pretend Anthem matters to the company anymore.

Bioware would never have pulled off a No Man's Sky or FFXIV. Not under EA at least. Bioware has at least two other more notable IPs they can work on: Mass Effect and Dragon Age. EA has no good reason or motivation to toss money into rebuilding a failed original IP. Like Jeff mentioned in the bombcast, FFXIV is a numbered flagship FF game, there's no way Square could let it tarnish their main brand franchise like that. No Man's Sky was Hello Games' only game and if they could not fix it and repair their image, then they were done as a studio.

What reason is there to do an Anthem rebuild? Anthem is a failed IP in a portfolio of more impressive and successful IPs. It would be like Square Enix pouring money into trying to rebuild an original IP rather than just making another Final Fantasy. An easier way for Bioware to gain good PR is to just announce another Mass Effect project and put out another Dragon Age trailer and coast on their bread and butter franchises rather than keep investing in the money pit that is Anthem.

Also Anthem Next would have had to compete with other loot games like Destiny, The Division, and then Diablo 4 coming in the future. And no one talked about Anthem at all for too long. It wasn't such a flaming mess of a news story like No Man's Sky or FFXIV that EA couldn't just sweep it under the rug. Most people literally forgot Anthem existed when Bioware announced a new Mass Effect project and Dragon Age.

I think Anthem had some really great aspects. They flying and combat was fun. The world was gorgeous. Add some variety and a bit of intelligence to the enemies and missions. Fix the loot progression and I think it could have been a solid game. I have zero interest in Dragon Age. I will only get another Mass Effect game if they make it Anthem like and I definitely won't pre-order it. Anyway a shame. I and my XBox friends were looking forward to Anthem Next. Maybe we will get another Titan Fall or something. Stop with the battle royales already.

I typically hold a “pro publisher” point of view as video games are typically the cheapest form of entertainment out there dollar-per-hour but 3 things have really left a bad taste in my mouth this year: Cyberpunk’s release debacle, Stadia’s library rarely (if ever) hitting the promised 4K/60 FPS performance, and now Anthem’s cancellation.

This is total bullshit. They sold the game advertising a road map then literally released nothing promised in said road map. And I’m really irritated at the developers comment about them providing two years’ worth of updates; they literally went dark 3 months after release when they promised they’d get to work on the project they just scrapped!

The only reason they pulled the plug on Anthem is because EA’s bean counters calculated that the PR hit would cost them less in future sales than Anthem Next’s development. I sure as hell won’t be purchasing the next Dragon Age or Mass Effect that’s for sure.

@thej6m: It's literally impossible at this point to make good on the promises. The vast majority of players have moved on and they won't come back even if the promised content was provided. The game is basically dead, and spending a bunch of time and money to make good on it for the few thousand people who would actually care is a waste.

You're not wrong to be mad that EA lied and abandoned a game that they sold on false promises, but those bad acts were done a long time ago, not with this.

This was just acknowledging the truth.

Nah, they didn't go dark, they released 2 years of updates to the microtransaction store ;)

Knew this was coming, I can't believe EA actually said they'd try to bring this one out of the gutter. Maybe COVID killed what was left of Anthem, but that game needed A Realm Reborn levels of effort to fix it.

@bigsocrates:

You’re not wrong and if they’d give all of us who bought the game some sort of compensation I wouldn’t be as irritated but they outright lied to the player base for years at this point. they promised me like six months of content in the lead up to its release...they owe me that content.

All of this whilst I’m staring at my stadia collecting dust....4K @ 60 FPS my ass

Don't care either way. I got it for $5 just to play it. Not my thing.

The game released in Feb 2019...wtf does it look like now after 2 more years of work has gone into it? At least patch it up to the latest version or a stable version if there's some fixes and enhancements that can be released.

Probably a good idea on their part. Sucks for everyone who bought it though including me. I'd really rather see them get Dragon Age and Mass Effect right though, so I'm kind of glad they aren't diverting their attention with Anthem more.

It was always an ill-advised attempt to get Bioware to bail on their core competency and cash in on loot shooters. No offense to people who like those games, but there are plenty of other/better options.

Back to ME and DA. If they can't deliver on the next chapters of those franchises, well... difficult to imagine EA keeping the studio around. And maybe that's OK. They had a good run.

Maybe it's because I only paid $5 for it, but I had a lot of fun with the game and was looking forward to the next chapter they were setting up. Sucks it ended like this, but hopefully it means Dragon Age will be a very polished game when it releases.

Yeah, on paper I am probably the perfect target audience for Anthem. I've played thousands of hours of Destiny, and Mass Effect and Dragon are two of my favorite series of all time. Despite this, my interest level in Anthem was tepid from the very beginning. I like Destiny and Bioware games for completely different reasons, the things I like about Bioware games are not compatible with a Destiny style game. Anthem was flawed at a conceptual level, there was no saving it.

My god, these comments. When will people ever, *ever* learn. "Oh all this employee abuse and crunch and fraudulent marketing to customers was worth it though for this cancelled, unfinished game because NEXT TIME...." Man, if you all haven't learned yet after the last 6-7 years of "live service" nonsense, you will *never * learn. But hey, when Avengers inevitably is abandoned because of (insert Covid-based excuse here) it will just make the NEXT live service scam so much better!

This game was fine. Classic case of hardcore reviewers that play games with bloated playtime like Persona and JRPGs as well as Destiny and WOW and other bastions for time sucks projecting their desires onto a Bioware project. I'm glad we've moved away from review outlets to personalities. I ignore personalities 100% whereas outlets seem relevant when they truly never were.

Finally, we can stop talking about Anthem

@frytup: "EA bungled the management of Bioware so now maybe it's time to shut it down and for everyone to lose their jobs" is an absolutely wild take here.

It's never okay when EA shuts down these studios because EA IS THE REASON THE STUDIOS OUTPUT FALLS OFF A CLIFF.

Dead Space 3 wasn't bad because Visceral forgot how to make good games, it was bad because EA shoehorned microtransactions into the thing. In Bioware's case EA bungled things in multiple ways, from driving away talent to, again, focusing on microtransactions and short term profitability.

Sure, sometimes studios eventually lose their way and stop being productive, but more often these post acquisition closures are due to shortsighted management, and they cost people their jobs and damage lives.

"Maybe it's time to just shut it all down" is definitely something EA management would say. And has. Many, many, times.

@bigsocrates: Laying the blame wholey on EA is incredibly harsh considering we've had plenty of inside stories on how hands off EA are, almost to a fault.

EA may have wanted microtransactions or some sort of recurring revenue from Dead Space, but the how would have been completly up to Visceral. Visceral could have easily implemented a horde mode similar to Mass Effect, but they chose a different path.

Visceral based in San Francisco was an expensive studio to run, EA even opended a sister studio to help off set the costs. At the end of the day with the move to HD, Visceral needed to raise their bottom line.

Its also telling that after the failures of Andromeda & Anthem, Bioware moved into a new building and EA greenlit ME4.

@thepanzini: If it were just one or two studios that this happened to then I'd be more inclined to give EA the benefit of the doubt, but EA has a long history of buying studios only to shut them down relatively shortly after, which is not unique to it among big publishers but is an area where it especially "shines." EA also knew how expensive Visceral was when they bought it.

EA's pushing microtransactions is also ubiquitous and has harmed a lot of games, including, perhaps most famously, Battlefront II. Saying Visceral "could have implemented a horde mode" is not fair either. First of all it's not as simple as just "implementing a horde mode." Mass Effect had a bigger budget than Dead Space and was a different kind of game. A good Dead Space horde mode would have been much tougher to pull off because of how much Dead Space relied on atmosphere and specific combat scenarios, whereas Mass Effect focused on different areas.

The only studio acquisition EA has made recently that has panned out was Respawn, and even there EA's bad decision making torpedoed Titanfall 2 and if Apex Legends hadn't caught on like it did we might be having a different conversation even about them.

EA has a long history of buying studios, managing them to underperformance, and then closing them, and it sucks. They're not ready to give up on Bioware yet, and that's good, but to say that Bioware should be closed if upcoming games underperform ignores that history.

At a certain point if your acquisitions keep failing then the problem is with you.

I think Anthem NEXT was doomed from the start, and any attempt to revitalize that game is basically making a sequel by another name.

I do hope that the bones of this game come back in some other project, like the feel of the mech suits. Seven year old me is still waiting on the right game to scratch that Exosquad itch.

I think it will show fans that EA and Bioware doesn't really care about them and I wouldn't doubt if they try another live service type game many people will be hesitant to try it. Also, going back on your word is a big hit to your reputation IMO.

It would have been better to not say anything at all and let the game die last year, going back on their word just further cements their reputation as being a pretty shitty publisher and a declining developer.

Of course EA is ultimately to blame. I didn't think stating the obvious was required.

I'd love it if Bioware could pull a Bungie and separate themselves from EA to become an independent studio again, but that seems highly unlikely given the differences in structure. Bioware is nothing more than a group within EA at this point.

If Bioware were to go away, some jobs would be lost. Some jobs would simply be moved to other groups within EA. Obviously that wouldn't be good and no one is cheering for it to happen, but if Bioware can't make successful games anymore, it's what's going to happen.

Hopefully management sees the light and actually realizes what people want from ME and DA. The news today that ongoing revenue and multiplayer bullshit has apparently been removed from the next DA game gives me some hope.

This just cements my mistrust for EA/Bioware. Each had their own part to blame for the downfall of Anthem. Anthem Next was a fever dream of a game at best with current day Bioware.

Also it brought so many questions on how it even be implemented like will it be free for current Anthem players and if so what requirements would it be to eligible or will it be entirely new game up.

The last most successful Bioware game released was Dragon Age Inquisition and that a nightmare to make to a point people working on it were hoping it would fail to force management to stop abusing them and stop relying on "Bioware magic."

It's clear to me Bioware has no idea what they're doing or at least in the grips of indecision ever since they announced Dragon Age 4 especially when they said it was going to be "Anthem with dragons!" Which was when? Two years ago?

It's sad now to question if Bioware could make another Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and even capture a glint of what that game was.

To say at least I am bitter. I bought the game at launch, liked the foundations, then realized that's all it really had. It's already a given to hold disdain for EA, but we shouldn't remotely give a pass to Bioware after seeing CD Projket with a similar treatment to their developers and team.

I am also very bitter about Cyberpunk 2077.

I am a very bitter person... I'm just going to eat some pho now...

NEVER believe a major publisher when they SAY they will continue supporting a game.

This isn't an "EA problem," it's a "AAA games" problem. Apparently there's no such thing as false advertising in this industry, and regulation ain't coming anytime soon.

@herrheimlich: I was discussing this with some friends, and I argued that the best thing BioWare could do for themselves right now is put a freeze on *all* development for awhile so they can figure out why everything they've done recently is a bit shit. And I'm not talking some token "send out a survey to the employees asking for feedback" effort that takes all of two weeks, either. I'm talking a multi-month, full-blown, company-wide RCA about their issues.

Because if you look at what's going on, there's a definite pattern. If you read the Schreier article on ME:A and then the one on Anthem, there's a pretty strong sense of deja-vu because the issues with development were so similar. Both of them had:

• Recurring issues with the Frostbite engine, which wasted a lot of time and development effort.
• Game directors incapable of setting out a clear vision for what they wanted the game to be.
• Those game directors getting replaced fairly late on in development.
• The game more or less getting made from scratch in the span of a year.
• Low employee morale from the resulting crunch conditions.
• A deluded belief that everything would come together due to the "BioWare Magic(TM)"

For all that people want to point at BioWare and accuse them of being talentless hacks, ultimately these are process/workflow/culture problems that go way beyond that. It's not something that can be fixed by hiring new people or shuffling dev teams around. It really doesn't matter how much talent or lack of it is going on in development if the entire process of development, is itself, fucked.

It's too easy to lay all the blame on EA. Sure, maybe EA wanted microtransactions in Anthem, but are microtransactions really the reason Anthem failed? It seems like its issues were more related to bugs, a lack of endgame content, and a somewhat bland story. EA certainly bears some blame for the Frostbite issues, but the other workflow issues that @therealturk identifies above are squarely on the shoulders of BioWare, not EA.

@tds418: Anthem's problem was that it was a live services game instead of a single player RPG with good story and mission design. The actual mechanics of Anthem were not the issue, the problem was what you actually did when you were in the game and the focus on multiplayer and repeated activities etc...

Given that it was just reported that after the success of some single player projects EA is now going to let Bioware make Dragon Age 4 a single player RPG instead of another live services game...I'm willing to assign them a whole lot of the blame until proven otherwise. Maybe Bioware management just lost its damn mind and decided they wanted to make Destiny but bad, but my guess is that even if lower level employees didn't know it there was a lot of pressure from EA to make a game that would produce perpetual revenue, and Anthem is what we got.

Before EA took over Bioware they made great story RPGs for a long time. Then we got the half steps of Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age Inquisition with some microtransactiony multiplayer tacked on and then we get Anthem.

Maybe that happens without EA, but I doubt it.

@bigsocrates But why are you assuming it was EA's decision to go the live service route?

The below is from Schrier's great article, describing the discussions that took place at Bioware early in the game's development. It sure seems like BioWare wanted to make a service-type game:

The early ideas for Dylan (which we’ll call Anthem from now on for clarity) were ambitious and changing constantly, according to people who were on the project. As is typical during this sort of “ideation” phase, nobody knew what the game would look like yet—they just wanted to see what might be cool. It would be an action game, certainly, and you’d be able to play it with your friends. The goal was to get away from traditional sci-fi and fantasy, so the game would feel distinct from Mass Effect and Dragon Age.

...

“The idea was going to be that there were all these levers that could be pulled internally so there’d be different events happening at all times,” said a developer. “You’d be out somewhere, and an electrical storm would happen at random, and you had to survive it. We had an early demonstration of this where the environment was dynamic and by pulling levers we could change it from summer to winter to fall. You’d see the snow hitting the ground, hitting the trees… There were states of the build where that was being demonstrated, and that we could see this was something you could actually accomplish.”

...

Anthem was always envisioned as an online multiplayer game, according to developers who worked on it, but it wasn’t always a loot shooter, the kind of game where you’d endlessly grind missions for new weapons. In these early versions, the idea was that you’d embark from a city and go out on expeditions with your friends, staying out in the world for as long as you could.

@tds418: Because it's EA? Because that's basically their business model at this point? They've done it with their sports games, they've done it with Battlefront, they've done it with Apex Legends, they've announced it's a huge priority. Even Need for Speed has been pushed in a microtransaction direction, if not exactly live services.

The fact that Bioware planned to make Anthem doesn't mean that EA didn't huddle up with the big wigs and tell them "you need to produce continued revenue from your games from now on. We are no longer in the business of selling single player games that players buy once with maybe some DLC." If they got that message from EA (and that would be consistent with basically everything else in EA's portfolio) then of course they would start thinking in an Anthem direction.

Even if they weren't told directly they might have noticed that all the teams that weren't making microtransaction focused games were getting dissolved and that would change their thinking?

Do you think that all of EA's teams decided on their own to focus their games around microtransactions? It's definitely an industry trend but there are lots of companies where it's not happening. Star Wars Fallen Order isn't an MT fest, but it was developed while Respawn was also making a live services game.

So...you are just assuming. Mass Effect 3 successfully implemented microtransactions, so BioWare had proven they didn't need to go the full GaaS-route to get microtransactions into a new IP. The quotes from the Schrier piece (which, you know, is based on conversations with people who actually work at BioWare) strongly suggests that BioWare leadership was looking to expand into a different type of game....which is a pretty natural and expected thing for a studio looking to expand beyond a particular niche (hell, Destiny is partly the result of Bungie going independent and wanting to expand what it was known for with Halo).

It seems more likely to me that BioWare was genuinely interested in a service-type game and EA was obviously willing to support that. So, far less arm-twisting than you're suggesting.

This has got to be one of the biggest failures in gaming by EA and Bioware. It's even bigger than Mass Effect Andromeda. I personally liked Andromeda overall. No, it wasn't as good as the original trilogy, but I played it when most of the bugs were fixed and I thought the story was decent enough and the combat was the best in the series. Losing the planned DLC story add-ons sucked. But Anthem was a mess from the gate. First they showed that trailer making the game look a lot better than it ended up being during E3, at a time people were getting sick and tired of having the fake gameplay demos thanks mostly to the Watchdog's fake gameplay demo. The storyline from what I heard was very bland and the end game online stuff was mostly empty.

Fixing that game meant creating it all over again and that takes too much time and money. It seems like they're instead trying to go back to Mass Effect by making a direct sequel to the original trilogy which might star Liara one of the series most popular characters, or perhaps her and Shepard's child. But truth be told, Bioware lost their was the moment they took the money and let EA buy them out. They haven't been the same since.

@tds418: I didn't say there was arm twisting. I said that EA pushes micro transactions and that is naturally going to lead teams to pursue live services. How direct EA's influence was or how much arm twisting there had to be I don't know. But again, EA studios have all trended in a specific direction over the last 5-10 years, and that's not a coincidence. It doesn't have to be as direct as EA sending men in dark suits and sunglasses to dangle Bioware execs off a balcony like Suge Knight 'negotiating' with Vanilla Ice.

We don't actually know how successful ME 3 and DA:I's micros were (I think the former was better than the latter) and we don't know what the discussions actually were. The employees Schrier talked to didn't say that EA hadn't exerted any influence, just that Anthem was the direction that the big wigs said that they wanted the studio to go in, so it doesn't really say anything about EA's role.

EA did make Mass Effect Andromeda but that game was clearly underfunded and should not have been put out in that state.

Ultimately Bioware is responsible for Anthem and obviously it had a troubled development. Other teams like Respawn have made good games under EA. But my comment was made in response to the suggestion that EA should shut Bioware down because Bioware has lost it, and I think that EA's actual path, of letting Bioware make another single player focused Dragon Age, is a much better route, so kudos to EA for that. They seem to have learned from Fallen Order. It is possible that Bioware has had enough turn over that it's not Bioware anymore and the game will be bad, like Andromeda was. I guess we'll find out.

@bigsocrates Okay, I guess we don't disagree much then. I also don't want BioWare shut down (or at least, I want them to have another opportunity to try and make a great single-player RPG first).

But, I think this is just as accurate as what you said:

EA studiosVideo games have all trended in a specific direction over the last 5-10 years, and that's not a coincidence.

@tds418: To some degree that's definitely true. But EA (and of course Activision) have really led the charge. Sony releases a lot of games with no cruddy microtransactions in them. Obviously Nintendo does too (Animal Crossing has been insanely good in that regard.)

Even non platform companies are less aggressive than EA with this. Bethesda made Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online, but it also made Doom Eternal and those Wolfenstein games (Doom has some micros for the multiplayer nobody really cares about, I think). Crash Bandicoot Nitro Racing had a lot of micros but Crash Bandicoot 4 didn't have any, and they're pretty minimal in Tony Hawk Remastered. To be fair to EA they released Squadrons and Fallen Order, but those both came after Anthem.

It's definitely an industry trend but different companies have been more or less aggressive. EA basically shut down its single player development for awhile outside small games and The Sims (which is of course heavily monetized.) Heck, even Popcap is making live services games now. POPCAP!

Fuck yea

Let it end. I dont want a redemption arc.

@bigsocrates: @tds418:

Interestingly, almost coinciding with the cancellation of Anthem, we have this Shreier report stating that Bioware has been allowed by EA to pivot Dragon Age 4 to an entirely single player game with all planned live service and multiplayer components dropped. Apparently, the failure of Anthem and the success of Jedi Fallen Order resulted in some sort of shift within EA that had them realize that Bioware should probably just do what they're good at.

Electronic Arts Pivots on Dragon Age Game, Removes Multiplayer - Bloomberg

@ll_exile_ll: Thats probably the best news out of all of this. The question remains whether they have enough talent left and enough time to do something worthwhile with DA4 though. Hopefully yes, but we'll see.