Anthem Next Has Been Cancelled

EA and Bioware’s attempt at fixing their pseudo-MMO Live Service, Anthem NEXT , has been cancelled following meetings to decide if the game could be saved.

In an update by Studio Director Christian Dailey, they announced that the promised Anthem NEXT update would not be coming to fix the many issues with the game, though they didn’t say they would be shutting down servers.

“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”, Dailey says.

Anthem NEXT was supposed to be the fundamental rework of the game, promising to fix the many issues critics had with the game, which basically boiled down to everything except its flying.

However, recently EA announced they would be having a meeting to decide on the fate of the game, ultimately leading to today’s news that Anthem NEXT would be cancelled.

According to Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier, the remainder of the team that was working on Anthem NEXT has been moved to Dragon Age 4, Bioware’s hotly anticipated follow-up to the Dragon Age series. He also mentioned that future publishers should be less reliant on the idea of a Live Service meaning games would always have the chance to be better if they didn’t stick the landing on launch.

“In our 2019 story on how Anthem went awry, we reported that BioWare leadership told staff that because they were a “live service,” they could fix many of the game’s problems after launch. Now, sadly, Anthem serves as a cautionary tale about that mentality”, he tweets.