Earlier this week, Anthem officially shut down for good. But one ex-BioWare staff member thinks that EA could revive the game for a modest sum of $10 million, and he even thinks doing so wouldn’t be “too difficult.”
Anthem, the 2019 online mech RPG developed by BioWare and published by Electronic Arts, gasped its last breath on Monday.
Servers for the always-online game were shut off on the 12th, which means that even if you own it, you can’t access any of the content in the game. If you attempt to boot the game up, the furthest you’ll likely get is the title screen.
So, that’s that, right? The game is dead. Unless someone figures out how to get a private server running for the game, you can literally never play Anthem ever again.
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While that is true, one ex-BioWare staff member believes that resurrecting the game and converting it into a fully single-player experience would, apparently, be a piece of cake.
As spotted by Eurogamer, Mark Darrah, who worked at BioWare from 1997 to 2021, published a video on Monday titled “The Truth About What Happened on Anthem”.
Darrah was one of Anthem’s executive producers and even worked on a bunch of high-profile BioWare titles, such as Jade Empire and Dragon Age: Origins.
These days, Darrah seems content with talking about video games on his YouTube channel instead, and his nearly four-hour-long video on the history of Anthem’s development contains several juicy tidbits regarding EA’s mismanagement of the title.
However, one specific bit regarding Anthem’s development piqued the internet’s interest: “Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months up to launch… I don't know that they still work but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered,” Darrah revealed.
He also explained that getting the game running at 60fps wouldn’t be “too difficult because you're getting there to a large degree by throwing better hardware at it,” and that Electronic Arts would probably only need to spend about $10 million to achieve this.
Now, I couldn’t code my way out of a wet paper bag, so I’m not going to refute Darrah’s claim (even though it sounds somewhat unbelievable). However, the real question is, would EA make $10 million back in sales if they were to re-release a single-player version of Anthem?
Maybe. The game certainly seems more popular now that it’s dead, so perhaps they could make that figure back. Will they actually bother? Probably not, but it’s an interesting idea.
Let’s just hope some smart folks online figure out how to get some private servers up and running, because that sounds like our best bet at this point.