It had some nice flying mechanics and combat effects and could have been a solid sp game. Stopped playing early to not get attched to it thinking it would be taken down MUCH faster. Never bought an online-only game since, probably never will.
This game had so much potential, the combat was fun, the powers/weapons you got were unique and felt punchy and powerful. The flying was amazing, and when you popped your super and everything around you just evaporated into charred metal and meat chunks? Whoo, that shit was fun.
But the gear upgrade system for everything but weapons was very lackluster. The micro transactions were front and Center, and you really didn’t get many free options to look cool. The prices were laughable for what you were getting. And as fun as the combat was, it didn’t make up for how little content there actually was. You get a piddly squirt of what could have been. And what’s there is repetitive.
It had great bones. With a fresh team it could have been phenomenal with what they had already. They just didn’t try.
Anthem will also be removed from the EA Play playlist on August 15, 2025, and EA says that the sunsetting of the game has not led to any layoffs at developer BioWare.
Is there anyone left at BioWare? What the two people who just turn on the lights every day? After DragonAge they kneejerk let everyone go rather than reflect on anything and then patted each other on the back for being such great managers.
Personally surprised it was still up. I’m not sure I can think of a game that seemed so promising in the public beta, but then had so little at launch.
It improved a bit, and then the studio began working on an overhaul internally to provide what the game should have been, sort of No Man’s Sky style… but they were shutdown by Bioware.
There’s a lot of reasons it ended up the way it did, development hell and poor management mostly. Hell, the flight mechanic, which had been added and removed several times in development, was core to the released game, and easily the best part, apparently wasn’t even decided to be a necessary feature until Patrick Soderlund, former head of EA studios, was very disappointed in a demo BioWare had shown in early 2017 that the team decided to add flying back in.
One of the core pillars of the game was essentially added just to impress an executive and keep the development going versus being canceled. Flight like in the game requires the entire map and structure of the game world to be different. If you can fly,. you now need to take advantage of the vertical space, something that simply doesn’t even get considered in most games. A mountain you can climb is not the same as needing to fill in an entire mountain range and canyon region with content.
gamespot.com
Aktywne