BioWare has announced that it is permanently discontinuing development of Anthem Next, which would have been a bottom-up transformation roughly equivalent to No Man’s Sky Next and Destiny: The Taken King. Anthem servers will continue to run, BioWare has confirmed.
Several factors may have contributed to BioWare’s decision to discontinue Anthem development, but in particular the COVID pandemic and the pressures of working from home were mentioned in Wednesday’s announcement.
“ However, 2020 was a year like no other and while we continue to make progress with all of our game projects at BioWare, working from home during the pandemic impacted our productivity and not everything we planned as a studio before COVID-19 can be achieved without putting undue stress on our teams, ”wrote Anthem executive producer Christian Dailey.
In recent weeks, EA has reportedly been struggling with decisions about how to deal with Anthem’s future. Early last year, the studio committed to a full overhaul of Anthem, designed to provide “a more satisfying loot experience, better long-term progression, and a more satisfying endgame.” But a recent Bloomberg report described a situation where EA was unsure whether to fund Anthem Next.
In today’s announcement, Dailey said the decision to cancel Anthem Next was “not an easy one,” but explained that the studio needed all its resources to focus on the upcoming games. “Going forward, we need to focus our efforts as a studio and strengthen the following Dragon Age and Mass Effect titles, while continuing to provide quality updates to Star Wars: The Old Republic,” said Dailey.
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