All future development on Bioware and EA’s looter shooter third-person game Anthem has been cancelled. This sad news is made official by Bioware Austin studio director Christian Dailey.

“I know this will be disappointing to the community of Anthem players who have been excited to see the improvements we’ve been working on. It’s also disappointing for the team who were doing brilliant work. And for me personally, Anthem is what brought me to BioWare, and the last two years have been some of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my career.

Game development is hard. Decisions like these are not easy.”

It also did not help that COVID-19 stifled further post-launch development for the title.

Originally released in 2019, Anthem came out to middling reviews, with critics and content creators saying the game feels incomplete. Bioware attempted to do a No Man’s Sky reboot, but then realized it’s dealing with a company like EA and most of Bioware’s top dogs and founders are nowhere in sight to help lead the project. So it’s been a lost cause since 2019, in other words.

Our hearts go out to the many Anthem fans, players, and content creators (who hopefully got paid big-time for pre-launch and post-launch content for this title’s promotion) who still stuck on with the game, hoping for a fated rebirth and revitalization of sorts, not unlike Final Fantasy XIV and the aforementioned No Man’s Sky. Perhaps in the future, Anthem could serve as a cautionary tale for studios not to jump onto the live service looter shooter-esque bandwagon introduced by Destiny. We predict Marvel’s Avengers to be next, but maybe things might turn around in the next few months or so.