While ex-BioWare producer Mark Darrah made a whole pitch about how EA could still salvage Anthem for relatively cheap, it does seem more likely that BioWare and its parent company are going to let the game die a meaningless death. However, some fans are looking into how the game could remain playable despite the servers being shut down, and one person has already managed to get it running on a P2P server.
YouTuber And799 has posted a video of the game running on local servers. Though some of the online features, such as looking at your online profile, didn’t work, And799 was able to get the game running with two players in the same matchmaking space. According to the video description, this is all just for “research” and an “experiment,” and shouldn’t be considered indicative of any kind of Anthem revival process. However, it is exciting to see that a playable version of the game is still possible, even if EA and BioWare aren’t helming it themselves.
If that’s already possible mere days after Anthem was shut down on January 12, hopefully fan efforts to preserve the game bear fruit in the coming months. Even if you didn’t like Anthem or thought BioWare shouldn’t have made it, a game shouldn’t disappear without a trace afterpeople paid money for it and hundreds of developers spent years working on it. Fans may get the game’s unfinished campaign back up and running, but it’s unclear how much of the online experience they’ll be able to rebuild.
Anthem’s shutdown comes about a year after BioWare was subject to significant downsizing following the launch of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, with remaining developers all working on the next Mass Effect. The studio put out a small tease for the game on N7 Day last year, but was completely silent when Dragon Age’s equivalent fan day came and went in December.