Anthem

Autopsy Report

Seven million people suited up in Iron Man cosplay and flew into a world that BioWare had spent six years failing to design. Anthem shipped on February 22, 2019, and by the time EA pulled the plug on “Anthem NEXT” exactly two years later, it had become the most expensive proof that a studio’s name on the box doesn’t guarantee the studio’s soul is in the game.

BioWare — the house that built Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Knights of the Old Republic — poured over $100 million and the better part of a decade into Anthem. The result scored a 55 on Metacritic, one of the lowest ratings in the studio’s 25-year history. Across roughly 40,000 user reviews, the consensus was brutal: gorgeous flight mechanics trapped inside an empty world with nothing meaningful to do once you landed.

The rot started long before launch. According to extensive post-mortems, Anthem spent most of its development without a clear creative direction. The game cycled through multiple creative leads, each pulling the vision in a different direction. At one point, flying — the single feature that every player would later agree was Anthem’s best quality — was nearly cut from the game entirely. The E3 2017 demo that generated millions of views and genuine excitement depicted a game that, by BioWare’s own admission, did not exist. Teams scrambled to reverse-engineer the trailer into a shippable product, building backward from a marketing promise rather than forward from a design document.

EA’s mandate to use the Frostbite engine compounded every problem. Frostbite was built for Battlefield — linear, heavily scripted military shooters. Forcing it to run an open-world RPG with seamless flight, loot systems, and cooperative multiplayer meant BioWare engineers spent years building basic tools that other engines provide out of the box. Loading screens became the game’s running joke: loading into missions, loading between areas, loading to access your inventory. In a genre where Destiny players expected seamless world transitions, Anthem felt like it was held together with duct tape and loading bars.

The live service failure was the killing blow. Anthem launched with a threadbare endgame — three strongholds and a handful of repetitive contracts on rotation. The loot system, the beating heart of any looter shooter, was so poorly tuned that BioWare accidentally shipped a bug that improved drop rates, then patched it out, triggering a player revolt. The roadmap promised a Cataclysm event and regular seasonal content. The Cataclysm arrived months late and underwhelming. The seasonal content never materialized. Players who had bought the game expecting a Destiny competitor found themselves grinding the same three activities with loot that didn’t feel rewarding.

The numbers paint the decline in stark terms. From 7 million players in its opening window — driven by EA’s marketing machine and BioWare’s legacy — the population cratered within weeks. By the time BioWare announced “Anthem NEXT,” a ground-up overhaul meant to salvage the project, the remaining community was measured in thousands, not millions. An estimated 5 to 10 million people owned the game. The vast majority had already walked away.

On February 24, 2021, BioWare officially cancelled Anthem NEXT. The blog post was clinical: the team would be “moving on” to Dragon Age and Mass Effect. No sunset event, no farewell season. Just a quiet admission that $100 million and six-plus years of development had produced a game that couldn’t be saved, even by starting over. The servers eventually went dark, dropping concurrent players to zero — a flatline for a game that once had the pulse of millions.

Key Failure Factors

• Development Without Direction: Anthem spent the majority of its six-year development in pre-production chaos. Multiple creative leads, shifting vision, and a team that didn’t settle on core gameplay loops until the final 18 months. The E3 2017 demo was aspiration, not reality — and the team burned years trying to build the game they’d already promised.

• Frostbite Engine Mismatch: EA’s insistence on Frostbite — an engine designed for Battlefield’s corridors — forced BioWare to build fundamental RPG and open-world tools from scratch. Basic systems like inventory management, loot tables, and seamless world streaming consumed engineering time that should have gone into content and polish.

• Content Desert at Launch: Three strongholds and a handful of contracts were all that waited at endgame. In a genre where Destiny 2’s Forsaken had just raised the bar for post-launch content, Anthem’s offering felt skeletal. The promised content roadmap collapsed within months of launch.

• Loot System Sabotage: The accidental loot buff — and BioWare’s decision to patch it out — crystallized player frustration. In a game built around the dopamine of better gear, actively making drops worse was a self-inflicted wound that accelerated the exodus.

• Studio Identity Crisis: BioWare made its name on narrative-driven RPGs with memorable characters and branching stories. Anthem asked the studio to build a loot-driven live service game — a fundamentally different discipline. The 55 Metacritic score reflects a team working outside its expertise.

Lessons for Developers

1. Don’t demo what you can’t deliver. Anthem’s E3 2017 reveal generated enormous hype for a game that existed only as a vertical slice. When the shipped product couldn’t match the promise, the backlash was proportional to the gap. If your demo requires six “imagine this but bigger” disclaimers, you’re writing checks your team can’t cash.

2. Engine choice is an architectural decision, not a corporate mandate. Frostbite cost BioWare years of productivity building tools that Unity or Unreal provide natively. The savings on licensing fees were obliterated by the engineering overhead. Pick the engine that fits the game, not the corporate portfolio.

3. Live service games are content factories — plan the factory before launch. Anthem shipped without a viable content pipeline. A live service game with no content roadmap is a subscription with nothing to subscribe to. If you can’t commit to sustained post-launch development before you ship, you’re not building a live service game — you’re building a single-player game with an expiration date.

4. Play to your studio’s strengths. BioWare’s mastery of narrative, characters, and player choice was largely absent from Anthem. The studio’s greatest asset — storytelling — was sidelined in favor of a loot grind the team had never built before. A BioWare-flavored Anthem that leaned into story-driven cooperative campaigns might have found an audience. The generic looter shooter they shipped did not.

Related Deaths

• Marvel’s Avengers — Another IP-driven live service game from a respected studio (Crystal Dynamics) that launched with thin endgame content and collapsed despite massive brand recognition.
• Evolve Stage 2 — A different flavor of the same disease: innovative core gameplay destroyed by business decisions and content drought, with millions of owners and single-digit concurrent players.
• Firefall — An earlier example of a promising sci-fi shooter that spent years in chaotic development, constantly shifting direction, and shipped as a shadow of its original vision.