Anthem is $8.99 on the EA Origin store right now, an 85% discount that pretty accurately reflects the current interest in the game. More than a year after release, Anthem has completely failed to capture any kind of audience, nor has it delivered on any of the (now canceled) content releases on its original road map. Many may be under the impression that Bioware has moved on from the game and EA has decided to cut its losses. So why spend $9 on a dead game?
Anthem, it turns out, is far from dead. And if history is any indication, $9 is going to seem like an absolute steal when it “Anthem 2.0” is finally revealed.
Yes, Anthem Is A Terrible Game
Anthem sucks. The critical consensus about the game from day one has been overwhelming negative and the user reviews are even worse. Poor optimization, long load times, bad UI, and a lack of variety in missions are certainly all things that could have been fixed (and should have been fixed before launch), but Anthem’s real problems are much more fundamental.
Any live-service game that hopes to retain players — and ideally convince them to keep spending money — needs a thoughtful and rewarding end-game. The hobby-type players crave an endless grind for power with frequent content updates and unique experiences to keep things fresh. Anthem, unfortunately, has none of that.
After the (widely considered) weak story ends, there simply aren’t good enough reasons to keep playing the game. On top of that, the loot system is poorly tuned, the Javelins are horribly unbalanced, and, if you ask me, the need to flying between each encounter — often through load screens — has got to go.
By May of last year, just three months after the launch of Athem, the player base had dropped so low that it wasn’t even in the top 50 games on Xbox. At the time, it had fewer players than 2016’s Battlefield 1 and fewer players than the similarly plagued Fallout 76. Last May there were less than 2,000 players. We don’t know where that number is a year later, but with nearly no support, it’s hard to imagine it has gotten any better.
A Plan To Fix The Game
Anthem’s original roadmap laid out a 3 act structure with a series of updates within each act. The first act “Echoes of Reality” began in March of last year. At the time, Bioware was promising a 10-year plan for the game.
It took until August 2019 for Cataclysm to finally materialize. The long-overdue update 3 marked the end of the three act structure for Anthem. pivoting to a seasonal structure in order to focus on the game’s core issuesInstead, the development team explained to fans that they would be. First, the content was delayed, then it was canceled, but that wasn’t the last time the team would completely change their messaging about future content for the game.
This February, just before the one year mark for the game, Bioware’s general manager Casey Hudson updated players on the future of Anthem, this time halting seasonal content completely. Rather than continue to release light seasonal content while they attempted to address the game’s core issues, it was decided that Bioware needed to go back to the drawing board and rebuild the game from the ground up. In the post, Hudson wrote:
There have been no updates made to the game since February 25th, and there is no indication as to when “Anthem 2.0” will be ready.
“We recognize that there’s still more fundamental work to be done to bring out the full potential of the experience, and it will require a more substantial reinvention than an update or expansion,” said Hudson. “Over the coming months we will be focusing on a longer-term redesign of the experience, specifically working to reinvent the core gameplay loop with clear goals, motivating challenges and progression with meaningful rewards – while preserving the fun of flying and fighting in a vast science-fantasy setting.”
Why Buy A Bad Game?
Passionate developers can always turn things around. In fact, there are plenty of recent examples of this being the case. No Man’s Sky was the laughing stock of the game industry at launch and without a doubt, the biggest disappointment of 2016. The game was routinely 60% off throughout 2017 until July 2018 when No Man’s Sky Next, a free update, completely reinvented the game, delivered on almost all of their original promises, and fixed most of the issues that players had. By the time their second major update No Man’s Sky Beyond released last August, No Man’s Sky had become one of the most popular games on Steam. Today it still averages 10k daily players and, while it does occasionally go on sale, still retails for $59.99.
Fallout 76 had one of the most embarrassing launches in history. Between broken pre-order promises, data leaks, aggressive microtransactions, and game-breaking exploits, Fallout 76 seemed completely doomed. Sales were purportedly so low that Gamestop was giving the game away for free with the purchased of a used controller. One year after launch, the game was consistently on sale for under $20, and it stayed that way until just this past month with the release of the free content update Wastelanders.
Just like No Man’s Sky Next, Wastelanders went to great lengths to fix many of the problems players had with the game, while simultaneously attracting many knew players. As such, the base price was reduced to $40, and it’s rare to find it on sale for less than $35.
Today, Anthem is available for $8 with no recent content updates or fixes to long-standing problems. It’s a reasonable price for a game with a lot of potential, and an absolute steal for a Next or Wastelanders style update that completely overhauls and fixes every problem the game has. Most of us had a lot of faith in Bioware before Anthem flopped, and there’s no denying that EA has incredibly deep pockets. If EA wants to keep financing the project and Bioware wants to keep developing it, there’s no reason to think the game can’t come back and completely turn things around the way No Man’s Sky and Fallout 76 did. If it does, you better believe EA is going to jack the price back up to at least $30, if not $40, for the new version of the game.
So grab Anthem while it’s $8, would ya? Yes, it’s a gamble, but we think it’s a pretty safe bet that Anthem is going to come back bigger and better than ever.
