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EA Killed Anthem For Good

Anthem is a game that was completely wrecked because of EA’s influence. In the final six months, executives stepped in and decided to push their views on a game that wasn’t built to meet them. The resulting product was a game that no one enjoyed. BioWare had no time to make it into an experience that they thought players would identify with, they just met EA’s needs. As a result, the game flopped. Players hated it, with a few exceptions like myself. After some support, BioWare went back to work on a big old update for the game. Last week, EA looked at the update, the future of Anthem. Then, they killed it, so Anthem will never change until the servers go offline in 10 years.

I’m pretty livid about this whole situation. In recent memory, Anthem was the last game that EA stuck their oar into and destroyed. The business people who did this will never get their comeuppance. Instead, they’ll continue working for EA until they move on to wreck stuff at another company. It’s not fair that BioWare put so much work into this game, creating a world that many players have now identified with, only for the publisher to kill it.

Looking back, I now don’t think EA had any intention of giving the green light on Anthem 2.0 or Anthem Next. I think they placated the industry by saying they would. This publisher has a history of doing exactly this with loads of games. Unfortunately, it took Anthem to make them realise that their business people know nothing about games. Now, EA is putting development decisions solely in the hands of their developers. That’s the best decision they could ever make.

While Anthem will live on in its current state, it’s more of a taster of what could have been. BioWare was excited about it once. It’s just such a shame that they had the worst publisher in the world behind them. I hope that one day, fans do something to create a new version of Anthem among themselves, and I hope it sells incredibly well. This universe deserves more depth, just somewhere that EA can never touch it.

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