It’s gone. In case you didn’t know, Servers for BioWare’s multiplayer game Anthem have been turned offthis online game will no longer be playable. No matter how you look at it, Anthem doesn’t exist anymore.
Rewind a week and I found myself at a used trade-in shop, eager to experience Anthem’s final moments for myself. Anthem had been scheduled to close for months.ever since last summer, when January 12, 2026 felt far away. But at the store, that day was drawing near. I wanted a physical copy because it was the only way someone who didn’t own Anthem could play it since the game was no longer available for download and EA Play subscriptions no longer allow access.
There are only so many anthems you can buy for £2. Price is the kind of cruel abbreviation used in stores like this to express whether or not you want a game, but Anthem clearly wasn’t. But after a few days, the game will devalue and become literally worthless, making it a game you can own but can’t play. But I made the mistake of buying it for my Xbox One and forgetting that the Xbox Series S doesn’t have a disk drive, but I wanted it. I had to order another new PlayStation online to correct my mistake. And it’s a strange feeling to excitedly open a shrink-wrapped game knowing it only has a few days left in its lifespan.
It’s a jarring sense of disbelief that I felt throughout my time playing Anthem. No matter what you think of BioWare’s ill-fated multiplayer experience, it’s how you play Destiny, and you can’t accuse it of being cheap. Racing through the skies of Coda’s moody jungle world filled with giant architectural ruins being grabbed and pulled down by natural grape vines is a sight of face-filling joy. Jumping from the sky into the water and then passing through the water is even more amazing. This dramatic and expanded playground that BioWare has built around the game’s fundamental idea of flight is often surprising. You can soar through giant pipes, through waterfalls, and soar into the brooding sky. There is a sense of solidity everywhere.
Later in the game you get a close-up of all the walking and intricacies of your stronghold, Fort Tarsis, so not all the details are zoomed out. This is the “BioWare part of the game,” and it’s where the studio sought to deliver the story- and character-rich experience it’s known for. Here you will find dialogue options and characters with whom you can develop some kind of relationship. It was a gorgeous mix of high-tech and low-tech, with detailed animation and high-quality audio, a Star Wars-esque desert cobblestone fortress lined with garages for state-of-the-art mech suits. Look at it during the day, look at it at night too. This is a place dense with detail and full of life. Six years after its release, Anthem is an eye-opener.
I saw some great comments on the Anthem subreddit. There’s a lot of farewell going on right now, and someone described it as “the best What If game” ever, and they’re right. To play Anthem is to imagine what could have been, or was (though I haven’t yet adapted to the past tense). As I walked through the streets of Tharsis, I imagined the storied single-player BioWare experience that would take place there, or I flew through the jungle and wondered how a single-player game would work there.
Anthem had potential as a cooperative multiplayer experience similar to Destiny. While there were some discrepancies between the first and second halves of the game, the gist of a fun cooperative multiplayer game was there. We had some fun. It wasn’t fully organized yet. As with all live service games, continued work was required. And there were plans to do this and do a 2.0 overhaul, but like so many other things with Anthem, it was abandoned.
The effort that went into Anthem was obvious. Years of development and significant investment, you can see it and feel it. It’s a realization that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to accept that these things can just be switched off and discarded, and in a sense become wasted. What’s even more difficult is reconciling the fact that the people who still play the game are the ones who supported it and gave it life, judging by the high level of the characters and the elaborate paintwork. Their time and energy are quickly lost and their character is taken away. That doesn’t seem fair.
I kept coming back to the end. A mixture of morbid curiosity, final goodbyes, and unfinished business brought them back. It is difficult to know how many people there are. Anthem was originally an online multiplayer game, and didn’t have a large social space to bring people together. The closest one was Launch Bay, which can hold 15 people. But I found people who could easily carry out the mission. Launch Bay was also quite populated when I visited that instance. And there I could see an ever-changing parade of people in their hard-earned armor, some waving, some wandering, wanting to share this moment in some way.
What pisses me off is that EA BioWare didn’t do more than congratulate them and send them off with a hearty wave and a thank you. company said I was grateful when Anthem announced the end of the service, but people say all kinds of things. Action is what matters. The action here was…nothing. The in-game store continued to insist on charging for products until the end. Merchants still expected your coins to create components. And mechanically, the game still offers a slight experience to slowly level up. Nothing changed. The grind stayed that way until the end.
If you have someone to take care of the game, chances are someone has messed with the dials. End times are the perfect time to do stupid things, break rules, lift restrictions, and reward players who supported you with insane generosity without consequences. Throw a party. Let’s have the players go home with a smile on their faces. Run wild. But that’s not the case. Abandoned in death as in life, Ansem quietly faded into oblivion.
On some level that’s understandable. Because why should I draw more attention to something I want to move on from? The Anthem has been a ghost ship for years now. The 2.0 overhaul was retired in early 2021. That means nothing has really happened in the game for the past five years. Another way to look at this closure is that it may have lasted longer than it should have. But this moment brings to the surface an increasingly important question: what should happen to live service games in Anthem’s shoes.
As players, should we really expect game services to run, run, run even when no one is playing? Should we have safeguards in place to ensure we don’t lose access to the games we’ve purchased or the characters we may have invested hundreds of hours into? How should we react to the end of these live service games? Can we transfer their care to the community? These are the kinds of questions that movements like Stop Killing Games are trying to address, and those are good questions that demand good answers. who knows? After all, this may not be the end of Anthem.
But that’s it for now. For now, those copies of Anthem you’ve bought to experience Vanishing Moment are virtually useless. These are games that you can just stare at on the shelf and do nothing with. It cannot be resold or transferred. Their only value is for collectors. And who will collect this? Endings are strong because they set up what came before, but Anthem sets up a story that BioWare would probably like to forget. This is the story of a misguided gamble that destroyed a studio from which it could never recover. Anthem changed BioWare. That would have been the case even if the game had been a huge success. That was a turning point. This is probably one of the most important games in BioWare’s history, and now it’s gone forever. I wonder how long it will be before we can say the same about studios.