On paper, Anthem seemed like the perfect idea. The legendary RPG studio, BioWare, working on a continuing RPG adventure. Unfortunately, in practice the game’s launch ended up being somewhat of a disaster. Since then, there’s been some attempt to right the ship. Whether or not it can be done, only time will tell. Today we got some vague updates on the upcoming content, but vague is the keyword.
Via the official blog, Head of Live Service Chad Roberston talked about what the feedback had been from the previous event, Cataclysm. When talking about the game’s future, he did say there was expansions planned, but offered no specifics whatsoever. He promised that there would be continued engagement via test servers and the team was working hard on fixing core issues.
“We hear your concerns on core issues in Anthem and are acting on it,” Robertson wrote. “Those systems require a more thorough review and re-working versus quick fixes. We’ve got a team working on that now, and early results are promising.
“In order to address these long-range plans, we are moving away from the Acts structure for updates. Instead, we have additional seasonal updates planned for this year that we think players will enjoy. These events will deliver challenges and chases similar to what you’ve seen, and are built around some fun themes we’re bringing to the game.
“As I’ve said previously, we want to be transparent with you that we know more work needs to be done to make Anthem better. We also want to ensure we’re backing up our words with a great game you can play. So I don’t have any news today to share about the long-term changes we are bringing to Anthem. What I can say is that we will continue to engage with you, our community, through PTS when we can show you what is coming.”
The company has acknowledged that a lot of work will need to be done to fix Anthem, and it’s available on EA Access now, so that could also help the userbase. At least the team is communicating (there was a long period of time where it was almost total radio silence), but the question lingers: can Anthem really be saved? There’s been miracles before, so let’s hope BioWare is up for one.