Anthem is finally, officially dead

Today at roughly 2:05 pm EST, almost seven years after launch, Anthem’s last few players were unceremoniously booted from whatever launch bays, strongholds, and freeplay zones they lingered in. A popup informed them they’d lost connection to EA’s servers. After a lengthy delay, any additional login attempts would fail, citing an “error retrieving Anthem live service data.”

Anthem, BioWare’s infamous looter shooter that had years ago become a byword for EA’s development dysfunction and live service mismanagement, is now officially dead.

Our Anthem review back in February 2019 gave the ill-fated power armor RPG a 55, and its reception never grew much warmer. Flying in its Iron Man-esque mech suits was by far its most-loved feature, a take on armored aviation so delightful that it underlined Anthem’s otherwise disjointed design every time your freelancer set metal foot on solid ground.

The disparity between Anthem’s flight and its everything else, according to its own executive producer, was a crystallization of a development cycle that was plagued by stunted creative direction from its earliest stages.

Anthem’s fortunes didn’t improve after launch, as middling reception to post-release support led BioWare to pledge to “reinvent” the game. EA abandoned those plans a year later, ending ongoing development for Anthem in February 2021. After four years of quiet operation for those players who stuck with it, EA announced in July that today would be the day its plug was finally pulled.

Bouncing between Anthem livestreams in its final hours was like watching a microcosm of the Anthem experience. Future Games Show presenter and producer Jules Gill, who picked Anthem up for the first time last week, called flying and fighting with the Interceptor javelin class “so fun,” particularly delighting in carving through strongholds. YouTuber and Monster Hunter guy Rurikhan waded through battles as a Colossus with visible glee, saying its shield smash and artillery shell were “so satisfying.”

But in both cases, when the action gave way to navigating Anthem’s rote quest design, stumbling story content, and generally shambolic presentation, it produced confusion, frustration, and fatigue.

The best summation of Anthem’s final hours came from variety streamer DreadfulSapien, who had been in the middle of a stronghold bossfight when the servers went down.

“The poetic nature of it is that the game is unfinished, and we were not done playing it,” DreadfulSapien said. “But now we are. And I think that’s really unfortunate.”