BioWare Austin’s Studio Director Christian Dailey has provided an update in a blog post regarding the development of Anthem’s future. This follows a similar announcement back in February that promised a “substantial reinvention” to realise the game’s full potential, and Dailey has followed that up by stating “we are starting to validate our design hypothesis”.
This major revision of Anthem is being worked on by a team of around 30 developers who are currently experimenting with different ideas aimed to improve the overall experience. Dailey refers to this process as “incubation”.
“Incubation is a term we use internally – it essentially means we are going back and experimenting/prototyping to improve on the areas where we believe we fell short and to leverage everything that you love currently about Anthem.”
Released back on February 22, 2019, Anthem received mixed reviews from critics who lauded the game’s combat and visuals but took issues with the lack of engaging content and technical problems. Despite this, Dailey has thanked the Anthem community and stresses the need for strong communication between player and developer. BioWare will therefore continue to inform the public of the reinvention process through further blog posts, social media posts, and live streams.
While this paints a bright future for Anthem, and we have certainly seen redemption stories with games like No Man’s Sky turning their fortunes around, the blog post also makes it clear that this next step is still some time away. By taking their time with trying out new ideas, Dailey admits that “this is going to be a longer process”. No dates or time windows are given for when Anthem 2.0 may be coming.
It appears we will have to wait and see how well BioWare executes an Anthem overhaul, but it nice for such a large developer to be this transparent and apologetic with their community. However, only time will tell whether the concepts founded in this incubation will change the game for the better.
