Anthem
The bad news continues around Anthem, the BioWare project now abandoned following the cancellation of Anthem Next. After the flop of the project comes the news that Jonathan Warner, director of the game, has left the Canadian house.This was announced by Warner himself through a post on Twitter, where he thanks BioWare for the almost 10 years spent at 'inside of his studios: "Today is my last day at BioWare, I go on to do new things. BioWare has been the home to my grateful heart for nearly 10 years and I want to wish them all the best. Dragon Age, Mass Effect and Star Wars: The Old Republic are in good hands and I can't wait to play them on the other side of the screen. " Warner never mentions Anthem and the whole troubled story that involved it, but it cannot be excluded that the interruption of work on the new version of the title may have played an important role in the author's decision. In this regard, below we explain all the reasons why Anthem Next had to die.
The future of BioWare is still well defined, with the development of the next main chapters of Mass Effect and Dragon Age underway. But while these two projects are still distant in time, all the spotlight is on the return of Commander Shepard: Mass Effect Legendary Edition will make the trilogy shine in 4K starting next May 14th.
Anthem Director Leaves BioWare
Jonathan Warner leaves after nearly a decade at the studio.
BioWare’s Jonathan Warner has announced that he has left the studio, moving on after nearly a decade at the developer. He hasn’t said what he’s going to be doing next, instead only stating that he’s “moving on to do new things.” Whether or not that means he will still be in the games industry remains to be seen.
Warner was most recently the director of Anthem. The looter shooter was met with criticism upon launch, and did not perform as well commercially as EA had hoped, quickly losing its playerbase owing to a lack of post-launch updates and a similar lack of necessary fixes to the base game. BioWare was working on an overhaul of the game dubbed Anthem Next, but that was recently officially canned by EA.
Prior to Anthem, Warner was also the game director on Mass Effect Andromeda, before which he served as producer on Mass Effect 3 and its post-launch content. Since May 2019, he had also been BioWare’s chief of staff.