From its troubled start to short finish, BioWare’s sci-fi looter-shooter ‘Anthem’ was a winner, loser, and everything in-between.
In February 2019, Dragon Age and Mass Effect developer BioWare released Anthem, a third-person shooter about human Freelancers donning armored Javelin suits to fight monsters and various factions. After seven years, EA is permanently taking the live-service game down on January 12, 2026, and with it, a chapter in the studio’s modern era is forever gone.
To know Anthem is to know its tumultuous life; the game famously suffered from crunch and internal struggles owing to BioWare’s knowledge of separately developing multiplayer games and third-person shooters—thanks, respectively, to Star Wars: The Old Republic and its Mass Effect series—but not having the expertise to make an ongoing multiplayer third-person shooter. But at the time, we didn’t know that; we just saw a game with four-player co-op about flying around big, expansive environments in sick mech suits with cool powers. At a time when the live-service shooter market was mainly just Destiny 2 and Warframe, it seemed like this could be another winner in that lineup.
But that didn’t happen. While it had a really great initial reveal, Anthem launched to mixed reviews and players running out of things to do fast. BioWare tried to steer things in a better direction with free DLC and a proposed rework, even going so far as to detail what specific ideas they hoped to implement. From increased drop rates to sky pirates and deeper Javelin build customization, it all sounded promising in concept, and seemed like the type of reboot that could really turn things around. Come 2021, EA opted to end future development; BioWare refocused on single-player games with the Mass Effect remasters and Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the latter of which started as a live-service game and had those elements mostly stripped out.
Anthem’s place in video game history is…kind of complicated.
