Well, Anthem is dead, and let’s be honest with ourselves: It’s fine. Most of us forgot Anthem even existed long before the final call, and we were genuinely surprised to discover last summer that the servers were still running. Which isn’t so much an indictment of the game but of the system that produced it. Who tells BioWare to make a live service shooter?
Anyway, what’s done is done—or maybe not. As the curtain fell, a small group of diehards expressed hope that it might somehow be brought back without a reliance on EA’s servers—hope that was given, well, hope when former executive producer Mark Darrah said Anthem did actually have local server code “right up until a few months before launch,” and more importantly, “the code is there to be salvaged and recovered.”
That’s a far cry from actually making it happen, but some people do seem to at least be making progress in that direction. Youtuber And799 (via Kotaku) has posted a video showing Anthem alive and kicking, and—big points here—with two players (actually two accounts) logged in simultaneously.
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It’s very preliminary stuff, a proof-of-concept rather than anything like a playable game, and a redditor who says And799 is working with the Fort’s Forge restoration project described it as “a really hacky thing” and advised that everyone temper their expectations accordingly.
Of course, not everyone is taking that advice entirely to heart.
There’s still a long way to go, and it’s quite possible the whole thing will be derailed, either by technical issues or a cease-and-desist letter from EA. And even if it does all come together perfectly, I don’t anticipate a great Anthem revival: The game was a flop, and the fact that it’s effectively impossible to get it now means that whatever curiosity spike revived servers might drive isn’t going to result in a surge of new players. I think it’s great that Anthem could remain accessible to those who love it, but hopes expressed by a few turbo-optimists that EA will recognize the error of its ways and bring Anthem back officially are awfully optimistic.
The renewed interest in Anthem has resulted in at least one notable change of mind, though. Moderators announced earlier today that with the game shut down, the Anthem subreddit would be moved to an archived read-only mode. Following pushback from the community, however, moderators said they “didn’t realize how much demand there’d still be for this forum to keep discussions going,” and so they’re “pausing and rethinking the approach.”
“If this community is going to continue, it needs solid volunteers who are genuinely willing to take on ongoing moderation responsibilities so the sub can be maintained at a level it deserves,” the mod team wrote in a now-stickied comment. “There have been several and long phases where it has all been just one moderator away from “banned due to the lack of moderation” and the exhaustion from it is the reason why the closure of the servers felt like a fitting end. But, the community comes first.”
It’s a bit like Anthem itself, then: Maybe the lights will stay on, if the community can make it happen. And maybe it can.
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