BioWare Is Giving Anthem A Complete Overhaul

General Manager Casey Hudson posted on BioWare’s official blog to let everyone know that the team in charge of Anthem are hard at work in completely changing Anthem’s core gameplay.

Almost a year later, BioWare is not giving up on Anthem

It’s a complete overhaul on how you will play the game. How long will it take? No clear date was given or details of what exactly will be changed. But Casey Hudson had this to say in their focus on the game’s redesign.

“Over the coming months we will be focusing on a longer-term redesign of the experience, specifically working to reinvent the core gameplay loop with clear goals, motivating challenges and progression with meaningful rewards – while preserving the fun of flying and fighting in a vast science-fantasy setting.”

This results in the team skipping the planned seasonal content for the game this year.  “We’ll keep the game going with events, store refreshes, and revisiting past seasonal and cataclysm content – starting with our anniversary towards the end of the month. “ says Casey.

So, don’t hold your breath. Those hopeful on the game can still play whatever content is available right now. Servers are still up and they will continue providing in-game events and bring back past content to keep players busy. This game was in development for seven years and had somewhat of a direction in place only during the tail-end of the game’s development cycle. The report from Kotaku’s Jason Schreier perfectly laid out what went wrong in BioWare’s latest release.

When it comes to complete overhauls of online games, the track record for studios going for that direction still looks good. In 2012, Square Enix rebuilt Final Fantasy XIV Online after it’s horrible launch and re-released the MMORPG as Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. They even put the relaunch as part of the game’s lore. The world of the original version of the game had it’s world destroyed by the Primal Bahamut, and that event birthed a new world that millions of players login everyday, and is now one of top games of it’s genre.

It’s difficult to go around the fact that Anthem was a complete mess the moment it launched. Instead of giving up on the project, BioWare hopes this overhaul will turn things around and might trigger a second life to this near abandoned online space.

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