BioWare's ambitious live-service shooter Anthem faced an uphill battle from the start. It was not what BioWare, a developer of single-player RPGs, had hoped for. It suffered from a small player base and unbalanced gameplay. And when it came down to it, they apparently did not have the resources they needed.

Today (February 24), Anthem Next, the long-awaited revamp of Anthem, has officially been written off. While the game is not going dark anytime soon, Anthem as an ongoing project is almost finished.

This information comes from studio director Christian Dailey on BioWare's official blog; in a short and straightforward post titled "Anthem Update," Christian Dailey says that Anthem Next will no longer happen, and that the current game - warts and all - is what will be available to players for the foreseeable future.

"We have made the difficult decision to discontinue new development work on Anthem (aka Anthem Next)," wrote Dailey. Anthem's live services, however, will continue as they are today."

Compressing a very long and complex story into a small space: Anthem is a multiplayer action game that debuted in 2019 to mixed reviews; BioWare's focus on world building and character development and Anthem's focus on multiplayer The gameplay itself quickly became repetitive, as BioWare's focus on world-building and character development seemed at apparent odds with Anthem's emphasis on multiplayer. Critics and fans alike praised the nuanced and fun flight mechanics, but that was about the only aspect of the game that left a universally positive impression.

BioWare released a series of patches to improve the Anthem experience, but the player base never truly reached critical mass. Furthermore, the core gameplay was not substantial enough to sustain Anthem's mediocre initial storyline.

When it became clear that Anthem needed to be rebuilt from the ground up, BioWare promised Anthem Next: a project that would streamline and redesign the game's more problematic features while maintaining what fans enjoyed (flying and combat).

Now, of course, that will not happen.

"Telecommuting during a pandemic affects productivity, and not everything we had planned as a studio before COVID-19 can be accomplished without undue stress on the team," Dailey said.

Like many other game projects from 2020, "Anthem Next" appears to be a victim of the global public health crisis.

"Going forward," he continued, "we need to laser-focus our efforts as a studio and continue to provide high-quality updates to "Star Wars: The Old Republic," while strengthening the next installments of "Dragon Age" and "Mass Effect.

While we may never know exactly what went on behind the scenes, fan apathy toward Anthem combined with the Covid-19 pandemic seems to have made Anthem Next an unworkable proposition. It appears that BioWare has no immediate plans to take down the game's servers, but if you're morbidly curious about the game's content, you'll want to check it out sooner rather than later.