Anthem has been officially lost to the world, and the game is no longer playable online. BioWare’s highly ambitious live-service project promised exhilarating flight and high-octane combat back when it first debuted in 2019, combining these elements with online multiplayer for nearly endless amounts of content.
Unfortunately, the game ended up failing almost immediately, leading to EA and BioWare giving up not long after its release. As of January 12, Anthem is no longer playable due to its online-only nature, but a former BioWare developer suggests that something can still be done to bring the game back.
According to former BioWare producer Darrah, EA could salvage Anthem for about $10 million. This estimate is on the higher end, and the BioWare veteran admits that EA is unlikely to actually go through with such a plan, but it does show how Anthem could work as a single-player title.
First and foremost, Mark Darrah believes Anthem should receive a current-gen edition for souped-up visuals and frame-rate. Discussing a potential offline mode, the ex-producer then shed light on existing code within the game for local servers running in a developer environment.
He confirmed that this feature was removed from the game just a few months before its release. Restoring it, as the former developer puts it, would allow Anthem to run on servers hosted locally on consoles and PC, eliminating the cost of maintaining servers for EA.
Finally, Mark Darrah suggests EA pivot to a single-player focus through AI companions, tweaking the world and gameplay of Anthem to offer a simplified BioWare RPG-like experience. Of course, this would be easier said than done since the game was designed around online play from the get-go.
“Anthem actually had code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months before launch.” – Mark Darrah
The big takeaway here is that the possibility of Anthem returning from the dead certainly exists. Even if EA doesn’t intend to revisit the series, there is a small chance modders and fans will come up with custom servers or an offline mod, as they have for various other games in the past.
