Anthem Next is still a project that BioWare is working on. In a recent blog post from BioWare Austin’s Studio Director, Christian Dailey, we were updated on just what’s happening with the next version of Anthem that has been planned for a very long time. We know that EA allegedly swooped in at the last minute and changed up a lot of what Anthem should have been, but now the publisher has stepped back, allowing BioWare to actually work on a game the players will find fun to play.
The update explained that there is a smallish team of around 30 people working on Anthem Next. This team isn’t solely working on the project, but they are putting time and effort into it, and have been over the last year. since Icetide launched, Anthem has been in a weird state of limbo, with no real new content coming to it, apart from some very shiny cosmetics. Moving forward, players want the game to have more content, something akin to Destiny 2 or Fallout 76, but they still want it to retain the essence of what Anthem is.
This is what the team at BioWare Austin is working towards. While we haven’t heard or seen anything just yet, we have now been told that there will be some updates coming in the future. These might take the form of the odd blog post, like this one, or ad-hoc livestreams that we’ll have little to no warning for. This means that there’s no pressure on the team to show anything if they don’t want to, but it also gives them the freedom to show off anything that they do want to reveal.
The update doesn’t actually say either way how close Anthem Next is to fruition, but it does give me hope for the game’s future. With the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 launching later this year, there’s a good chance that BioWare is working on next-gen versions of Anthem, as well as current-gen versions. This must be an extremely complicated process, and with all the bad press the game has had, it would be easy for EA to cancel it and leave it here. I think it speaks a lot to BioWare dedication that they’re working on Anthem Next even now, and I can’t wait to see what it ends up looking like.