Anthem Cancelled, Which Means Anthem Next is now Anthem Never

Last Updated on: 24th February 2021, 07:43 pm

A sad day for Anthem fans as BioWare announces it is officially ending development of Anthem Next.

Anthem Next Cancelled

In a blog post, BioWare states:

“In the spirit of transparency and closure we wanted to share that we’ve made the difficult decision to stop our new development work on Anthem (aka Anthem NEXT). We will, however, continue to keep the Anthem live service running as it exists today.”

Credit: BioWare

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The post goes on to explain that “Since Anthem’s launch, the team has been working hard to continually improve the game, releasing multiple updates that brought with them a variety of improvements and introduced new content to play. Towards the end of 2019 we expanded on that effort and started working on a more fundamental restructure of the game.”

Unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this made development of Anthem Next a much bigger challenge than was previously anticipated.

“2020 was a year unlike any other however and while we continue to make progress against all our game projects at BioWare, working from home during the pandemic has had an impact on our productivity and not everything we had planned as a studio before COVID-19 can be accomplished without putting undue stress on our teams.”

Credit: BioWare

While this is certainly disappointing to fans of Anthem, as well as myself, that wanted to see the game succeed, it is important to note that BioWare refuses to overwork the developers and everyone that has played a part in Anthem’s development.

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As unfortunate as it is, I think BioWare made the right move for Anthem to be cancelled. Hopefully this means that BioWare can continue to work on and set aside resources for other projects rather than dumping everything into Anthem again.