“Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months before launch,” Darrah continued. “I don’t know that they still work, but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered. The reason you do this, it pulls away the costs of maintaining this game. So rather than having dedicated servers that are required for the game to run, you let the server run on one of the machines that’s playing the game.” This, he added, could have worked alongside an additional move to add AI party members to the game, allowing people to play it like a single-player game.

Ok, this is even more heartbreaking now. I loved the concept of Anthem and had a fair bit of fun with the game in its current (prior to shutdown) state and was hopeful that the “Next” project would overhaul it into something great. I still don’t blame EA for their decisions in this case; Bioware fucked around for way too long during development and the overhaul project was most likely seen as too little, too late… or too expensive.