EA’s troubled online only multiplayer action game Anthem has gone offline for good, with EA turning off the servers meaning no Freelancers can take to the game’s skies anymore. There are no plans to add an offline mode to Anthem so it is completely unplayable. EA did announce it was pulling the plug on Anthem’s servers back in July, so players would get a chance to play it for at least six months before it all got turned off.
Anthem launched on 22nd February, 2019 and was hit with problems from the start with major performance issues, which meant the Act 1 roadmap was been seriously delayed, and BioWare essentially went radio silent as it worked on trying to realise Anthem’s potential. At the time, news was also coming out that there had been issues during the game’s development. It was not a surprise then that game’s first major event, Cataclysm, took six months to appear after launch.
In February 2020, Bioware announced it was going to “reinvent” Anthem with Anthem NEXT, removing seasons but changing the gameplay loop and the whole experience. That never materialised as the world was plunged into the COVID-19 pandemic, which meant development slowed down as countries entered lockdown to contain the virus. The impact of the pandemic and the general slow progress saw EA make the decision to end all further development for Anthem.
Source: EA
