10 Video Games You Regretted Pre-Ordering

Anthem, when announced, glowed with all the promise of a new classic, returning developer Bioware to its typical standard after Mass Effect: Andromeda didn’t exactly make gamers jump for joy. And then Anthem actually launched.

For a game with combat focused so significantly on the use of high-flying exosuits, few recent releases have been quite so shallow in all aspects. Yet another exclusively multiplayer game that would have benefitted from a real solo campaign, players who bought into Anthem’s action-RPG-shooter tagline quickly realised there wasn’t all that much else to it, and the inevitable grind this resulted in left a bad taste of buyers’ remorse in everyone’s mouths.

Anthem was severely missing the level of technical and narrative polish expected from Bioware, likely due to a significant overhaul of the game made less than two years before its eventual launch. Without a defined identity and sense of direction, the version of the game that shipped to players amounted to little more than a lackluster flying simulation.

Initial announcements did commit to improving Anthem in the long term. However, a content plan outlining ‘acts’ adding new narrative and gameplay quickly turned into proposed seasonal updates, which then became plans to reboot the game, which in turn were eventually scrapped.

Live servers do still remain operational as of July 2022, but in 2021, Bioware stated that all future work on Anthem had been discontinued, killing the game — and players hopes — before it ever really got off the ground.