It's been a particularly rough week for BioWare and its struggling live service game Anthem. Following a rocky launch, optimism for a better future continued to deteriorate over the next few months due to constant game issues, missing roadmap content, workplace controversies, and the recent high profile departures of senior leadership figures of BioWare's Mark Darrah and Michael Gamble leaving to work on Dragon Age 4. Things have gone from bad to worse, as a recent update removed one of the features that the community enjoyed, and brought about a game breaking bug.
Elysian Chests, special treasures found at the end of Anthem Strongholds with unique cosmetic gear, have been removed from the title nearly 40 days after being added. While BioWare never intended them to be a permanent fixture, the news seems to have caught many players off-guard and spawned plenty of angry posts and comments online. The removal serves as another pain point when combined with the recent news that most of the planned post-launch content for April and May have been delayed indefinitely.
As if the Elysian Chest issue wasn't bad enough, patch 1.1.1 arrived earlier today intending to fix a couple of bugs and audio issues. After installing the patch, players quickly discovered that the patch went far beyond those simple fixes and accidentally disabled loot from dropping once players kill the Titan boss inside the Heart of Rage Stronghold. Considering that mission is one that most players run over and over for quality loot in Anthem, this game breaking bug isn't sitting well with the community on social spaces like Reddit.
Anthem community managers have reported the bug to developers, and at the time of this writing, the studio doesn't have any additional information to report on a fix. With the game continuing to struggle in the face of multiple controversies, a declining player base, and content that has been indefinitely delayed, this added bug couldn't have come at a worse time.
Despite all of the controversies and setbacks, BioWare Austin leads Ben Irving and Chad Robertson have attempted to reassure players that the studio remains committed to Anthem. With a new controversy or issue seemingly arriving every week, the team at BioWare clearly has a long road ahead of them. With other looter shooter games like The Division 2 getting ready to launch new raid content and Borderlands 3 just a few months away, BioWare may be running low on time to turn Anthem around.
Anthem is available now on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.