BioWare is officially redesigning Anthem

Bioware’s Anthem has had a rough time post-launch.

Players criticized the game’s lack of content, and poor loot progression system, and the lack of certain endgame content available for the launch of the game only made things worse. But, after a year of updates for the game, BioWare has announced that it is slowing down production on Anthem in order to redesign the game.

The team is going to work to “reinvent the core gameplay loop with clear goals, motivating challenges, and progression with meaningful rewards,” according to the official blog post. The team will also work to preserve the game’s flying and combat mechanics, which many players enjoyed.

Anthem will also be online in its current state until the design is ready for launch. BioWare will continue to run in-game events, refresh the store, and will occasionally revisit past seasonal and cataclysm content so the remaining Anthem players will have something to do while they wait for the new version of the game.

This announcement of the new redesign for Anthem comes a few months after reports from Kotaku stated that the studio was still committed to the game, despite its early shortcomings and struggles. The idea of an Anthem 2.0, as mentioned in those reports, sounds similar to what Bioware is describing here.

BioWare’s post doesn’t give a clear indication of when this Anthem redesign is set to come out, however it does mention that the project will likely take “months.” On top of that, the post says that one of the goals of the redesign is to do “something we’d like to have done more the first time around — giving a focused team the time to test and iterate, focusing on the gameplay first.”