14 DAY TRIAL // Early this month reports about Electronic Arts deciding the fate of Anthem surfaced. After holding a meeting a few weeks ago, the publisher has finally announced its decision regarding Anthem and it's not good.
Long story short, BioWare announced that Anthem NEXT has been canceled and that there won't be any updates to the failed game. However, servers will remain live and a small team will continue to keep the live service running as it exists today.
“In the spirit of transparency and closure, we wanted to share that we’ve made the difficult decision to stop our new development work on Anthem (aka Anthem NEXT). We will, however, continue to keep the Anthem live service running as it exists today.”
In a statement posted on BioWare's official website, Executive Producer Christian Dailey revealed that going forward his studio will focus on the next Dragon Age and Mass Effect games, as well as on providing quality updates to Star Wars: The Old Republic.
He also points to the main reason for the cancellation the COVID-19 pandemic: “2020 was a year unlike any other however and while we continue to make progress against all our game projects at BioWare, working from home during the pandemic has had an impact on our productivity and not everything we had planned as a studio before COVID-19 can be accomplished without putting undue stress on our teams. ”
Anthem was a complete fiasco for BioWare, as the game launched about two years ago and was met with poor reviews. Although EA did support BioWare in its attempt to fix the game, it looks like the studio didn't find the necessary tools to turn the project around as Hello Games did with No Man's Sky.
That being said, if you've been playing Anthem recently, don't expect any new updates in the future. Seeing that developers have decided to abandon ship, it might be a good idea to switch to another game.