While servers for Anthem have already been taken offline, it looks like industrious fans of the game have already started research into how it could be preserved. As caught by Kotaku, one player, going by And799, has uploaded a video showcasing Anthem’s server backend running entirely locally on their system.
In their video, And799 was able to successfully “log in” to the live service shooter. It is worth noting that this locally-running server is still in its early stages, and many online-centric features are still inaccessible. These include things like player profiles. Despite this, however, the player was able to set up the local server to function on a peer-to-peer basis, and was able to get a second player in the game by starting up another instance.
And799 has noted in the description of the video that it is simply a log for their research and experimenting with the server infrastructure. It is not meant to “represent the current progress of the private server/revival project that is currently in progress.”
Former executive producer on Anthem, Mark Darrah, had released a lengthy video detailing its development. Among the subjects he touched on throughout the video was also the possibility of reviving the live-service shooter. His pitch “conservatively” involved a roughly $10 million investment from EA, which he noted would be recovered if Anthem were to sell more than 400,000 copies. As a part of this idea, Darrah pitched that BioWare and EA should move the shooter over to current-gen consoles from its PS4 and Xbox One home, and make use of servers that could be hosted locally.
“The reason you do this, it pulls away the cost of maintaining this game,” Darrah explained. “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.”
Darrah had also spoken about the legacy of Anthem, and how it had left a mark on just about everyone who worked on it at some point. “To be honest, I’m not sure that I came back from Anthem. I think that’s true of a lot of people,” he said.
“Anthem did permanent damage to the careers of a lot of game devs, to the mental health of a lot of game devs. I think even with BioWare itself, you can trace some of the issues that it’s had in more recent years back to this time period,” Darrah continued. “I don’t think Anthem is 100 percent to blame [for] everything that’s happened since 2019, but definitely there are seeds of damage that continue to grow from that point onwards.”
Anthem was released back in 2019 on PC, PS4 and Xbox One. While it was praised for how fun its traversal systems and combat could be, the lack of mission variety and several filler missions would damage its reputation quite a bit. For more details, check out our thoughts on Anthem. Also check out our review from back when it first came out.
