Anthem: The Flight Model Deserved a Better Home

Anthem released in February 2019 as BioWare’s attempt at a looter-shooter in the shape Destiny had already proven out — a persistent online world, exosuits called Javelins standing in for classes, loot drops driving an endgame grind. It’s remembered, correctly, as a disappointment: thin endgame content, a loot system that took months of post-launch patching to become functional, and a story that felt bolted onto a live-service chassis rather than built to justify one. EA cancelled the promised “Anthem NEXT” overhaul in February 2021, less than a year after announcing it, and the game has received no meaningful content since. What gets lost in that story, because it’s a story about failure, is that Anthem’s core traversal system — flight — was and remains one of the best pieces of movement design a game in this genre has ever shipped, and it’s worth understanding exactly why, because almost nothing since has matched it.

Flight as the actual game

Most third-person shooters treat verticality as a level-design accent — a grapple point here, a jetpack boost there, used to reach a sniper’s nest or skip a corridor. Anthem inverted that relationship entirely: flight wasn’t a tool bolted onto ground combat, it was the primary way you moved through and fought in the world, and BioWare built an entire heat-management system around it to make sure it stayed interesting rather than becoming a free camera. A Javelin’s thrusters generate heat the longer you fly continuously; diving through water vents cools them instantly, letting you extend a flight indefinitely if you route your path through the world’s rivers and waterfalls rather than simply holding the boost button. That’s a genuinely elegant piece of systemic design — it turns the environment itself into a resource you have to read on the fly, quite literally, and it rewards players who learn a map’s water sources the way a Tony Hawk player learns a level’s grind lines.

Combat while flying carried the same tension. Hovering to snipe was possible but drained heat fast and left you exposed; diving into melee range and pulling up at the last second required real timing; a Colossus Javelin’s heavier frame handled completely differently in the air than an Interceptor’s, so the flight model wasn’t one system wearing four skins, it was four distinct movement feels built on a shared heat mechanic. Few games before or since have made three-dimensional combat traversal feel this readable — Iron Man games have tried and mostly failed to make flight feel like combat rather than a cutscene camera; Anthem’s Javelins are still the best comparison point for what “flying and fighting as the same verb” should feel like.

What the moment-to-moment loop was missing

The problem was never what happened while you were flying. It was what you were flying toward. Anthem’s endgame at launch consisted of a small number of repeatable Strongholds — instanced multiplayer missions functionally identical to Destiny’s strikes — with a loot table that, for its first several months, dropped gear with stat rolls so inconsistent that build-crafting was close to meaningless. A Legendary-rarity item could roll worse than a Masterwork one; there was no reliable way to target specific gear; and the itemisation depth that makes a looter-shooter’s endgame compelling — the sense that the next drop might complete a build you’d been chasing — simply wasn’t there for the game’s crucial first year. BioWare patched substantially through 2019, improving drop rates and adding a loadout system, but the improvements arrived well after the player base that would have sustained a years-long live-service game had already moved on.

The story mode suffered a parallel problem: a narrative clearly written with BioWare’s usual character-writing instincts — companion banter, a found-family cast at the game’s central hub, Fort Tarsis — delivered through a structure that made every return to base a slow, load-screen-heavy walking simulator between missions. The writing wasn’t the weak link; the pacing built around delivering it was.

Why “Anthem NEXT” never happened

EA and BioWare announced in early 2020 that they’d begin a fundamental reconstruction of Anthem’s core systems — loot, endgame structure, the loop itself — under the internal name Anthem NEXT, essentially conceding that the 2019 launch had been unsalvageable through patches alone. A year later, in February 2021, EA cancelled the initiative, citing the cost of a from-scratch systems rebuild against a player base that had largely already left. It’s a case study in a specific and well-documented production problem: BioWare’s own public statements and subsequent reporting describe a studio stretched between Anthem and other projects during its final development stretch, without the sustained focus a live-service game’s launch year actually demands. That’s a fair comment on how the project was resourced, not a claim about any individual’s effort.

The real ancestor, and what came after

Anthem’s flight model doesn’t have a clean genre ancestor — it’s closer to a flight-combat game like Rogue Squadron crossed with a third-person shooter’s cover-and-shoot grammar than to anything Destiny had done before it. That originality is exactly why its cancellation stings more than a generic looter-shooter’s would: nothing since has fully picked up the heat-management flight idea and run with it. Warframe’s Archwing mode gestures at open-air combat but never built an equivalent resource system around it, and even Halo Infinite’s grappleshot, the decade’s other big traversal swing, stayed a single tool rather than a full movement economy; most other looter-shooters retreated to ground-based cover shooting entirely rather than risk the production cost Anthem’s flight tech clearly required. The lesson other studios seem to have taken from Anthem isn’t “build better traversal” — it’s “don’t build traversal this ambitious unless everything wrapped around it is ready to match it,” which is the right lesson, but a genuine loss for anyone who spent forty hours skimming through waterfalls and never found enough of a game to justify staying.

Fort Tarsis and the hub that fought its own pacing

Anthem’s social hub, Fort Tarsis, is worth examining as its own design failure sitting apart from the loot and endgame problems, because it’s a case of a good idea executed at the wrong pace. The concept — a walking, first-person hub where players talk to named NPCs between missions, delivered with BioWare’s usual attention to character writing — isn’t inherently wrong for a live-service shooter; Destiny’s Tower and The Division’s Base of Operations both do something similar. The difference is that Fort Tarsis had no fast-travel shortcuts for its first several months, forcing players to walk the same corridors at the same slow pace between every single mission, turning what should have been a five-minute character beat into a genuine tax on session length. BioWare patched in faster traversal eventually, but the damage to the game’s pacing reputation had already set by the time the fix arrived, and it’s a clean example of how a feature that reads well in a design document — “give players a reason to care about the world between missions” — can actively work against a live-service game’s core requirement, which is respecting how little time a player has for friction between the parts they actually came to play.

Where Anthem sits in BioWare’s own identity crisis

Anthem didn’t fail in isolation; it landed in the middle of a stretch where BioWare was visibly uncertain what kind of studio it wanted to be. Mass Effect: Andromeda, released two years earlier in 2017, had already drawn criticism for animation quality and a somewhat formulaic open-world structure grafted onto a series built on tighter, more curated spaces — a different symptom of a similar underlying problem, a studio built around branching narrative choice and character writing stretching itself across production templates borrowed from other genres. Anthem pushed that stretch further, into live-service territory BioWare had no prior experience shipping. Reporting from the period, including detailed accounts of the studio’s internal development culture published by outlets like Kotaku, described a team without a clear internal design pillar to rally around for much of Anthem’s development — a fair comment on how the project was steered, not a claim about the skill of the people executing week to week. The flight model’s quality is proof the talent was there. The absence of a studio-wide throughline for what BioWare’s live-service ambitions were actually for is why that talent ended up in service of a game that couldn’t fully use it.

The heat-management system as a template nobody borrowed

It’s worth stating plainly what a rare piece of design Anthem’s flight-heat system turned out to be, because five years on, no major shooter has borrowed it wholesale. Destiny’s various flight-adjacent mechanics stayed cosmetic; most third-person shooters that added aerial movement since have treated it as a burst ability with a cooldown timer rather than a continuously managed resource tied to the environment itself. That absence of imitators is usually a sign either that a mechanic was a dead end or that it was expensive enough to build well that nobody else has been willing to risk the production cost after watching what happened to the game that pioneered it. Anthem’s commercial failure makes the second explanation more likely than the first, which is the quieter tragedy underneath the louder one.

The suit-switching idea nobody else has matched either

One more piece of Anthem’s systemic ambition worth crediting on its own terms: players could switch between all four Javelin classes freely between missions rather than committing to one permanently, letting a single character roster four entirely different playstyles — heavy-armour Colossus, agile Interceptor, ranged Storm, balanced Ranger — without the alt-character grind most class-based live-service games demand. That flexibility meant a squad could rebalance its composition match to match without anyone needing to level a second character from scratch, a genuine convenience most competing looter-shooters still don’t offer five years later.

Spoilers below

Anthem’s main story campaign resolves around a Shaper artifact called the Heart of Rage and an antagonist, the Monitor, attempting to weaponise it — a plot that ends with the Freelancers (the player’s faction) destroying the artifact rather than controlling it, closing off any of the sequel hooks the ending’s framing gestures toward. With Anthem NEXT cancelled, none of the story threads left open at the campaign’s close — including the fate of several supporting Freelancer characters introduced late in the game — were ever followed up on.