Oh huh, BioWare's exosuit shooter Anthem is still online

rockpapershotgun.com:

Like most people, I had assumed EA shut down Anthem soon after dashing BioWare's hopes to overhaul and revive the sci-fi looter-shooter. I was surprised to see Anthem on Game Pass while poking around checking out space games which are not Starfield. It did shut down, didn't it? Surely it did. So why's it on Game Pass? If an 80GB download is the price I pay for a ha-ha-hilarious joke post where I review a spinning loading ball or server error message, so be it. Let's go. Wait. Hang on. I'm playing this. This is a game. This is still a game!

Anthem first launched in February 2019. It was BioWare's Destiny, in that it was a live service looter-shooter where the plot is about random capitalised Nouns and the game desperately needed big updates (and possibly a sequel with several big updates of its own) to potentially become worth playing. "It needs changes to how it actually works, which is a lot to ask," said Alice Bee in our Anthem review. Unlike Destiny, Anthem did not get that second chance. While BioWare did patch parts and eventually hoped to release a giant overhaul, EA scrapped this 'Anthem Next' in February 2021 so BioWare could focus efforts on Dragon Age 4 and the mysterious new Mass Effect. And, like, surely EA shut it within the year?

I thought maybe a good joke post would be 'speedrunning' Anthem. 13 seconds to see everything it had to offer, reach a "service unavailable" victory messages. Or maybe a review of what I could see, perhaps a few splash screens before hitting a loading stall. Great joke. Very funny. Top work, Alice. Then the intro cinematic started playing but ah sure, that doesn't mean anything. Then the intro missions starts and I'm quite surprised but but maybe that mission was offline. And then