BioWare’s multiplayer shooter Anthem was released in 2019 and simply didn’t meet the expectations of players or Electronic Arts. There have been some tweaks over the years, but EA stopped supporting the game in 2021. Last week, EA announced that the servers will be shut down on January 12, which came as a surprise to the numerous people who had assumed they’d been shut down already. You can’t buy the game or purchase its premium currency anymore, but you can still play it, so I did.
I flew around the lush planet of Coda, landing by beacons emitting strange power. I weaved through waterfalls and dodged wyverns, sought out new creatures to observe (like a meerkat-esque beast with colorful plumage), and practiced my barrel roll. Though I haven’t encountered any other people playing Anthem — a problem for the online-only multiplayer game that encourages four players per server — I’m not the only one giving Anthem a shot years too late.
“I personally started playing like a week ago because I saw that it was free with Game Pass Ultimate on Xbox and decided to give it a try to see if the game is as barebones as people say it is,” one player told me. Another player told me they started recently because they were curious why a friend liked the game so much. All three of us are enjoying it — the flying, especially. “The traversal is single handedly the most fun I’ve had with a game,” one player said. “People call it the best Iron Man game for a reason.”
Anthem hinges on its movement; people like me, who are early on, are still enjoying the novelty of it all. The game’s exosuits give it a sense of movement that’s rare to find in video games, one that’s forgiving but requires precision, simple yet dynamic. Flight is central to Anthem, but BioWare found ways to constantly keep the mechanic interesting, even when you’re not in combat — balancing traveling long distances with using the environment to keep your suit from overheating, therefore staying in flight longer.
“You couldn’t fly indefinitely, your suit would overheat and you’d have to land ‘til it recovered,” a player told me. “But if you flew through a waterfall, or through the spray of water at the top of a waterfall, it would completely cool your suit down, and if you flew right over a river or body of water it would also cool your suit down.”
The best part of the game, that player said, was playing in the free roam mode: “Every so often I’d see another player flying around too, they or I may follow the other and fight alongside them for a while.”
But Anthem couldn’t live on its movement and flight mechanics alone. The game didn’t live up to the ambitious promise of its marketing and launched to abysmal scores and reviews. A Kotaku report published after Anthem‘s launch told a story of mismanagement at BioWare: The game was in development for almost seven years, but “didn’t enter production until the final 18 months, thanks to big narrative reboots, major design overhauls, and a leadership team said to be unable to provide a consistent vision and unwilling to listen to feedback.” After the troubled launch, BioWare and EA vowed to reboot the game as Anthem NEXT as a way to fix the game’s many problems. In February 2021, BioWare announced it was canceling Anthem NEXT and would instead simply keep the servers online as they already were. Anthem‘s existed in that state since.
Despite all this, Anthem continues to support a small, dedicated community of players. For years now, players in private Facebook groups and Discord servers have been gathering to look for groups on all platforms. Sure, you can’t just jump into a game and queue up with three other people, but one veteran player I spoke to, Jon, said he can usually find at least one or more people in the game’s free roam modes.
But the announcement of the game’s closure is one last breath of life for the game before it’s killed off. “The game feels almost alive again, as if support is [bringing in back],” he said. “Almost like a hope of breathing life back into the game. The community has come back alive from what it was.”
I’ll keep playing Anthem until it leaves Game Pass on August 15, when it will be tossed into the ether with the rest of the games that have been shut down — games like Dauntless, The Crew, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, and XDefiant. It’s a common practice for companies to stop supporting games with diminishing returns and low player counts, but one that’s especially painful for the small, dedicated fan bases of online-only games like Anthem. Once a server goes down, there’s nothing left to play.
Some players are organizing initiatives to stop publishers from taking down games that people have purchased, such as the Stop Killing Games movement, which is currently petitioning people in the UK to bring the issue to Parliament. The petition has hit a signature threshold (more than 100,000 signatures), and organizers hope the government will discuss this as a consumer rights issue.
For now, it’s seemingly too late for Anthem. Any minor boost of the playerbase is just a bump in nostalgia for what the game was or could have been, or simply curiosity.
“With a shutdown like this around the corner, there’s this air of ‘now or never,’ and it’s definitely brought me back to the playthrough I’d started,” a player named Leo told me. “So I have to imagine the same might be the case for a few others.”
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