Anthem

Submission 19,127

Part of a series on Electronic Arts (EA). [View Related Entries]

About

Anthem is an action RPG published by EA and developed by Bioware. The game features an open world and online play. It received mixed reviews from critics upon release.

History

Anthem began development in 2012, shortly after BioWare had released Mass Effect 3] The game was first teased at E3 2014 (shown below, left) and again at E3 2017 (shown below, right). There, it was revealed the game would be released in Q4 2018, but it was pushed back to Q1 2019. BioWare announced plans to regularly update the game, with Patrick Söderlund, EA's vice president, stating that the release of Anthem could be a "ten year journey" for the team.^[2]

Reception

The game was released on February 22nd, 2019, after a demo period of three weeks.^[3] Reviews upon release were mixed. As of February 22nd, the game has a score of 61 on Metacritic.^[4] Critics knocked the game's repetitive gameplay and dull story. Some found the game too derivative of games like Gears of War and Destiny.

Kotaku Development Story

On April 2nd, 2019, Kotaku^[13] published a story about _Anthem_'s development.^[13] The story painted a very negative picture of EA and Bioware, with many last-minute changes, numerous leadership switches, and reports of intense stress and crunch on the team leading to the game's underwhelming launch. This included team members being ordered by doctors to leave for months for the sake of their mental health, some of which never returned. The author of the piece, Jason Schreier also put up a video recapping his article (shown below). The article gained over 600 points on /r/pcgaming^[16] and 16,000 points on /r/AnthemTheGame.^[18] Redditor mdasgupta389^[17] wrote an apology to the developers for his criticism of them in response to the article, gaining over 3,800 points. In response, Bioware^[14] said they did not comment on the story in order to protect certain individuals and that they were attempting to implement better planning to avoid crunch time, but "there is always room to improve." Rockpapershotgun^[15] criticized Bioware's response as dismissive and sidestepping of much of the critique from Kotaku's piece.

Online Presence

The game has a growing online presence. It's official Twitter account has over 260,000 followers as of February 22nd, 2019.^[5] It also has over 119,000 likes on Facebook.^[6] Its subreddit, started after the 2017 E3, has over 149,000 subscribers.^[7]

Anthem Boycott

The weekend of March 9th, 2019, Anthem experienced a bug which dropped valuable loot at a much higher rate than normal.^[8] This was popular with players, as the point of the game is to grind for such valuable loot. Bioware quickly patched the bug out, which led players to express outrage. On March 10th, 2019, Redditor Afinda called for players to boycott the game, saying that not playing the game would send a message to Bioware that Anthem players were unhappy with the fix.^[9] The post got popular, gaining over 12,000 points. It also gained attention from BioWare and the media. Bioware responded by saying they would make incremental changes to the loot drop system over the following months.^[10]^[11] The boycott was covered and ridiculed by several media outlets, including Motherboard,^[8] who derisively described the movement with, "Yes, a boycott of a game that they’ve already purchased." Forbes^[10] wrote the "boycott isn’t really necessary given that the game itself in its current state will drive players away naturally." Playstation Lifestyle^[12] called it a "foolish endeavor." The boycott was also covered in a video by Pretty Good Gaming (shown below).