For fans of Anthem, if there are any remaining that is, it appears there’s a small light at the end of the tunnel. Despite the hype surrounding the game when it was first previewed, it really didn’t match expectations once it was released. Since then, there have been a been a lot of changes made to try to improve the experience.
One of these was back in February of this year when developer BioWare made the decision to end seasonal updates with the goal of rebooting the game. In a recent post by Studio Director Christian Dailey, he confirmed that indeed Anthem is being redesigned and admitted that it’s “going to be a longer process.”
Before we continue, let’s look a bit closer and who Dailey is. Before becoming the Studio Director, he was the Franchise Development Director for the Anthem Live Service. In this role, he was part of the group that developed post-launch updates like the first Cataclysm and Season of Skulls. He has also been gathering feedback from different sources like the EA Forums, Reddit, and Twitter, to name a few.
Going back to Anthem, Dailey said an "incubation team" is in place and looking into the design hypothesis. Dailey went on to say that incubation is a word that they use internally and “essentially means we are going back and experimenting/prototyping to improve on the areas where we believe we fell short and to leverage everything that you love currently about Anthem.” The team is rather small, around 30 members, and is currently working to hit its first major milestone.
Despite these “assurances,” the response has been mixed. For one, there are those questioning what prototyping even means. There are also those who are saying that maybe BioWare is slowing down its support. If true, that would be a surprise considering that the studio has been insistent on its support of Anthem despite the criticisms.
In the same post, Dailey also revealed that BioWare is going to regularly communicate to everyone the changes being made along with the team’s progress. The team is also planning to have some day to day updates and hope that the community can get some interactions with the team.
Ultimately, what does this all mean? The good news, if you can call it that, is that someone’s still working on Anthem. The bad news? Pretty much everything else.
