Gaming developer Ben Irving worked for BioWare for eight years, for a long time he was responsible for the MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic, and in the decisive phase of Anthem he worked on the SF MMO as lead producer for combat, creatures and gameplay. In 2019 he left Anthem and BioWare, today he says he would like to try it again.
This was the story of Anthem: The SF-MMO Anthem went through a difficult development phase, as we now know. The game was released in February 2019, but BioWare had exhausted itself on the way to release and was therefore unable to add any content when the MMO was released. According to reports, the developers had become bogged down in their work on Anthem, had reached creative dead ends and had worked their way into burnout.
After the release of Anthem, they realized that normal updates that were supposed to come to the game would not be enough to fix the game’s problems in the loot and progression systems, and the team planned a major overhaul of Anthem BioWare, which worked on Star Wars: The Old Republic.
In Austin, Texas, the MMORPG experts from BioWare also got to work fresh and motivated: the idea of an Anthem 2.0 or Anthem Next emerged and the fans were hopeful.
But EA ultimately decided against this revision in February 2021 and stopped developing Anthem.
Anthem shows the four different battle suits in the launch trailer
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“Anthem has all the potential in the world”
This is the situation now: Although Anthem has not been further developed since February 2021, the shooter is still very popular in 2024 due to its great gameplay loop and unique game concept.
Posts keep popping up on social media in which players rave about how much they like Anthem.
Ben Irving, the former lead producer of Anthem, responded to one of these posts:
“I would love to remake Anthem one day.”
He explains: It’s amazing that people are still so excited about Anthem so many years later. Irving explains, meaningfully: The game still has so much potential…
When fans specifically asked that EA and BioWare should deliver a PS5 version with a higher frame rate, he dismissed it: He hasn’t been at EA for years and can’t do anything about it.
Back then, Irving was a scapegoat for Anthem’s failures
Why did he leave then? Irving was someone who was already controversial among fans at the time because of his decisions on SWTOR, and who was also used as a scapegoat when Anthem was released for the fact that development didn’t go as planned.
If you look back, this was obviously a systemic problem at BioWare at the time: Anthem was only ready for release through an act of violence, and after the release many management people suddenly disappeared and sought escape.
The developer behind WildStar once explained that at the end of an MMO’s development, many developers like to move on to new projects and look for a fresh start.
Even the man who was ultimately the fans’ hope, Christian Dailey, was pulled from Anthem Next – BioWare needed him for Dragon Age.
This huge loss of developers and management at the time was probably one of the reasons why Anthem was not further developed.
But Irving is certainly right with his analysis: Anthem is one of the MMOs that is much mourned today because everyone can see the potential in the game, which it never achieved in its lifetime: players love Anthem, BioWare’s failed MMO, so much so much that it hurts them