This week will be a make or break meeting for the fate of Anthem. According to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, publisher EA is set to hold a meeting to decide if it wants to allocate more people to the project or scrap it and let Anthem go. This is per three sources familiar with the internal decision making that is set to happen soon.
Launched to middling and negative reception in February 2019, the future of Anthem—a game that was alleged to be BioWare’s Destiny—was put on hold while BioWare attempted to do a reinvention of the game in some form. The team kept up semi-regular updates to what they were working on and adjusting, but a BioWare management restructure in December 2020 shifted Executive Producer Christian Dailey off the team and over to the next Dragon Age, calling the future of Anthem into question once again.
Schreier says that internal leadership at EA will be reviewing the latest version of Anthem Next this week to see the progress the the team has made and determine if the two-year old game is worth salvaging. This decision will be on whether to expand the team working on the reinvention project or cut their losses and scrap it altogether. According to BioWare last year, the team working on reinventing Anthem is made up of about 30 people. Schreier’s sources told him that to realistically reinvent the game and work on engaging ongoing content, the team needs to be about triple that size, meaning EA would need to throw around 60 more people at the project.
Where this additional staff would come from is unclear. BioWare currently has a number of other projects in the works, most notably the next Mass Effect and Dragon Age games. Many agree it would be unwise to pull people from these teams in an attempt to revive Anthem. But where else could EA pull from in order to throw more budget and dev power at Anthem Next, a project that isn’t guaranteed to do well? While stories of games turning around aren’t unheard of in the industry, the latest internal version of Anthem is going to play a big part in whether BioWare’s redemption arc includes the maligned looter shooter or not.
When Bloomberg reached out to EA for comment, the company said it does not comment on rumor and speculation. With Anthem currently on life support and a dedicated community of fans eagerly awaiting the next update from the studio on Anthem’s rework, we’ll undoubtedly hear more official word soon about which direction the publisher decides to go.
What do you think? Should EA put more money and development power into reinventing Anthem, or should they drop the project and let BioWare focus on Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and other future projects?