While EA is one of the most reputable publishers in the industry with a lot of valuable IP addresses and developer talent, it has long been the subject of bad press due to the many questionable decisions it has made with its games and business practices. However, at the moment, the publisher is certainly taking steps in the right direction, trying to correct its many mistakes, but some of the mistakes it made before were considered among the most disappointing in the recent past. Perhaps the most important of them is Anthem, a live Service game that was supposed to take the world by storm, but in the end turned out to be without much influence.
Anthem has promised all the elements that players expect from a live-action service title-great action, a sophisticated world, an ever-changing world, and meaningful cooperative play, to name just a few. But that was all in the concept, and what we got was a game that didn’t live up to its many promises. Despite this, Anthem still showed some signs of greatness under a Buffet of technical and non-technical problems – but the refusal to do the required work on intellectual property led to the sad passed away of the game. To that end, here is Anthem’s rise, fall, and passed away.
The history of Anthem’s development is turbulent. Plans for Anthem were forged in 2012, and after a lot of ideas and prototypes, Anthem (which was not yet named at the time) was presented for the first time at E3 2014. The developers showed concept drawings for The environment as they made promises about the ever-changing world of the game and the cooperative nature of the gameplay. The team was optimistic at the time to develop something new and exciting, but this excitement would soon turn into Frustration, as the Studio kept playing with new ideas and never came to its conclusion.
Reports on the development of Anthem paint an extremely gloomy picture of BioWare Edmonton. Although new mechanics were added to the game at a constant pace, things never worked very well with each other, and the team had to redesign other mechanics to create something that would eventually become a fun game. On the narrative side, the game has been constantly rewritten to keep the world and the tradition in sync with the evolution of development plans. At the same time, the developers of Ground Zero also fought miserably – they had to work with the Frostbite engine, EA’s infamous internal engine.
While the team struggled behind closed doors to develop a coherent product, Anthem had already spent almost 4 years in pre-production and had little to show for it. Then came E3 2017, where the team presented a short Gameplay clip from Anthem. The game looked pretty damn promising and the Fans were undoubtedly excited to try it out, but the demo was mostly smoking mirrors; a pirated version that contained the first concepts, many of which would not be transferred to the final game.
While Anthem enjoyed a good first public reception, the BioWare team fought for the development of the game. Even when the team switched to full production, there was no clear idea of what the game would look like. Since many of Anthem’s original ideas did not stay on the landing, elements were borrowed from contemporaries such as Destiny and The Division – leaving the ability to fly through environments as Anthem’s only distinguishing factor.
As the game’s February 2019 release date approached, BioWare took long periods of brutal crunch as they attempted to create levels, implement progress, and capture movement in a matter of months. EA even hired additional staff from other Studios to help finish Anthem, but that extra manpower wasn’t much considering the game’s ever-changing plans. While this tumultuous and long development cycle seemed endless, many important managers and developers left the Studio in search of greener pastures – leaving the game in a state of complete despair.