As of roughly 2:05 pm EST on Monday, Anthem is really, truly dead. In a world of fan-run private server game resurrections, however, does it have to stay dead? Maybe not. At the end of a lengthy tell-all video about Anthem's legendarily troubled development (via Eurogamer), former BioWare executive producer and Anthem project lead Mark Darrah indicated that the tech for running Anthem locally once existed—and could, theoretically, exist again.
It would, however, rely on either third-party ingenuity or uncharacteristic generosity from EA. I'll let you decide which is more likely.
Anthem's live service network design had a client-server structure: To play, you and every other player would've had to connect to servers that handled the game's logic. Your PC didn't have to do the thinking. It just had to handle the results and make them look pretty.
According to Darrah, however, Anthem actually had code for running locally—meaning players' own machines would host network sessions that other players could connect to—until very late in development.
"Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months before launch," Darrah said. "I don't know that they still work, but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered."
Darrah then lays out an alternate future for Anthem involving reworking the game into a singleplayer with AI-driven companions and retrofitting the game with tech that would bring its visuals up to current-day standards—all of which, he estimates, would cost a further investment of $10 million that EA "would almost definitely not spend" on a game it's been eager to cut from the balance sheet for years.
While Darrah admits his idea of an ideal Anthem future is informed by his "singleplayer biases," I think the knowledge that Anthem once ran code for local hosting is a glimpse at a possible future where particularly devoted Anthem diehards cobble together their own solution for a player-driven private server revival.
The quickest way for that to happen would be for EA to provide the aforementioned local hosting code from Anthem's development, which I'd wager is just as likely as Darrah's singleplayer scheme—by which I mean it'll never happen. Instead, the fact that Anthem could once run locally just makes me think there's a better chance than ever that appropriately skilled enthusiasts could write a replacement of their own.
Player-run replacement for EA multiplayer services have happened before. The modders behind Northstar have offered an alternative to Titanfall 2's long-suffering official servers, while Battlefront 2 has its own player-operated multiplayer replacement in Kyber, a conversion mod with its own dedicated servers that's currently in open beta.
As a live service game with pseudo-MMO trappings, a private server resurrection for Anthem would likely entail more involved traffic analysis and engineering knowhow. But however small the chance is, if I know anything about dead PC Games, it's that somebody's going to try. Perhaps, someday, the freelancers will fly again.
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