BioWare Planning Huge Changes to Anthem

Anthem was a lot of things, but chief among them was “disappointing” – while everyone had doubts that BioWare, a company best known for deep single-player RPGs, could successfully branch out into making a Destiny clone, I don’t think anyone was actively rooting for it to fail. Hell, lots of people really hoped it would do well so the company would be spared EA’s merciless reaping. But it did not, and in the year since very little has happened to improve the game or indicate what possible direction it could be going in… outside scrapping a “road map” of planned content.

Well, in a new blog post, BioWare general manager Casey Hudson explains that BioWare hasn’t, in fact, given up on Anthem – and that they’re hoping to pull some “No Man’s Sky” magic with their sci-fi shooter.

One year ago, we were preparing to launch Anthem – a game that represented a big leap into new territory for us as a studio. It was an exhilarating and terrifying experience to go out to the world with something new and different, and we are grateful to all the players who have come along with us on the journey… I am so proud of the work the team has put into this game, and at the same time, there’s so much more that we – and you – would have wanted from it.

Over the last year, the team has worked hard to improve stability, performance and general quality of life while delivering three seasons of new content and features. We have also heard your feedback that Anthem needs a more satisfying loot experience, better long-term progression and a more fulfilling end game. So we recognize that there’s still more fundamental work to be done to bring out the full potential of the experience, and it will require a more substantial reinvention than an update or expansion. Over the coming months we will be focusing on a longer-term redesign of the experience, specifically working to reinvent the core gameplay loop with clear goals, motivating challenges and progression with meaningful rewards – while preserving the fun of flying and fighting in a vast science-fantasy setting. And to do that properly we’ll be doing something we’d like to have done more of the first time around – giving a focused team the time to test and iterate, focusing on gameplay first.

While there isn’t much discussion about the scope of these changes, one would have to imagine they’d be fairly substantial: it’s not that people were unhappy with simple, easy-to-fix issues like bad loot drop rates or enemy health, it’s that the whole game was mired in a terrible grind where the lauded BioWare “story” was either absent, lame, or downright got in the way.

So yeah. Brace for “Anthem Next” or whatever. In the meantime, the current game will keep running as planned, so you can keep playing it if you’ve really got nothing better to do.