Following tons of promises about rebooting Anthem with new content, upgraded features and renaming to Anthem NEXT, developer BioWare today officially announced the cancelation of Anthem. Owned by the merciless studio-killer known as Electronic Arts (EA), majority of the blame was placed on the issues caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to studio director Christian Dailey, “not everything we had planned as a studio before COVID-19 can be accomplished without putting undue stress on our teams,” and as usual did not talk about any incompetency from the management team and leadership over the many years of development. Anthem had potential, but too much has already been put into it.
A key sentence which personally tripped me was “Game development is hard.” Life and work is hard for everyone in this new normal, but that does not give big companies like EA and BioWare the rights to use it as a shield to look like a hero in the public domain. Once again, never pre-order any games from big corporations from now on. Especially Diablo 2: Resurrected and Diablo 4.