After Andromeda
I lived in Mass Effect. All three games, every side quest, every corner of the Citadel and the planets beyond it. The ending was something everyone wanted to rewrite and sure, there were moments that felt like compromise, but I never cared about the arguments. Those games felt real to me in a way most don’t. Then Andromeda happened and it became clear that lightning doesn’t strike the same bottle twice, that whatever alchemy BioWare had found wasn’t going to happen again with that particular formula.
They went quiet after Andromeda. For a while it seemed like maybe that was it, maybe Mass Effect was just done. But they were building something else the whole time. Anthem launched today—four players in these mechanized suits called Javelins, flying through a colorful world, fighting together against some threat that’s probably meant to be cosmic and important. It’s about as far from Mass Effect as you can get while still keeping the same studio’s DNA underneath everything.
I don’t know what I think about it yet. It feels like the move you make after you’ve stumbled. Not a retreat, exactly, but a pivot. Just trying to prove something still works. Whether that’s true will take weeks to find out. Live service games reveal themselves slowly. You don’t know what they really are on the first day.
What stays with me is what it means that this is what BioWare wanted to make next. That story-driven single-player worlds gave way to this multiplayer live thing. Maybe that’s just the market pressing in from all sides, every studio following the same path. Maybe BioWare looked at what made them famous and decided they were tired of making that game. Maybe both things are true.
It’s out now. Xbox, PlayStation, PC. I’ll try it eventually. Not because I think it’ll be Mass Effect again—of course it won’t be. But because I’m genuinely curious what happens when a studio decides to stop making what it’s known for and do something else entirely. Whether they learned anything from what they built before. Whether they still know how to make something that sticks.