In an official announcement, BioWare announced that it has decided to cancel the development of the Anthem aka Anthem Next to focus on the next Dragon Age, Mass Effect Game. BioWare executive producer Christian Dailey in an official blog post briefed the situation on why the team working at Anthem Next decided to close the development.
Dailey, explains that due to the impact imposed by the COVID-19 situation in the year 2020, it became hard for the team to continue working on the project. However, Dailey has confirmed that the team continues to keep the Anthem live service running as it exists today.
“2020 was a year unlike any other however and while we continue to make progress against all our game projects at BioWare, working from home during the pandemic has had an impact on our productivity and not everything we had planned as a studio before COVID-19 can be accomplished without putting undue stress on our teams,” he wrote.
Dailey further explained that the team is now more focused on the development of the next Dragon Age, and Mass Effect games while continuing to provide quality updates to Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Game development is hard. Decisions like these are not easy. Moving forward, we need to laser focus our efforts as a studio and strengthen the next Dragon Age, and Mass Effect titles while continuing to provide quality updates to Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Notably, since the Anthem officially launched back in 2019, BioWare released various patch updates that brought a variety of improvements and new content to play in the game. Towards the end of 2019, the team decided to bring even more exciting stuff to the game in the form of a new fundamental restructure of the game called Anthem Next.
As BioWare said, the decision to quit working on Anthem was really hard and this will definitely disappoint Anthem fans around the world. But the good thing is that the team is now working on the next Dragon Age and Mass Effect games that will definitely rejoice fans to some extent.