We’ll admit that we weren’t paying enough attention to the state of Anthem—BioWare’s troubled 2019 jetpack-powered open-world shooter—to notice EA’s July announcement that it was planning to shut down the game’s servers. But with that planned server shutdown now just a week away, we thought it was worth alerting you readers to your final opportunity to play one of BioWare’s most ambitious failures.
Anthem was unveiled at E3 2017 in a demo that was later revealed to have been largely faked to paper over major issues with the game’s early development. Anthem’s early 2019 release was met with a lot of middling-to-poor reviews (including one from Ars itself), followed about a year later by a promise from BioWare General Manager Casey Hudson that a “longer-term redesign” and “substantial reinvention” of the overall game experience were coming. Hudson left BioWare in December 2020, though, and a few months later, that planned Anthem overhaul was officially canceled.
While active development on Anthem has been dormant for years, the game’s servers have remained up and running. And though the game didn’t exactly explode in popularity during that period of benign neglect, estimates from MMO Populations suggest a few hundred to a few thousand players have been jetpacking around the game’s world daily. The game also still sees a smattering of daily subreddit posts, including some hoping against hope for a fan-led private server revival, a la the Pretendo Network. And there are still a small handful of Twitch streamers sharing the game while they still can, including one racing to obtain all of the in-game achievements after picking up a $4 copy at Goodwill.
