Once again Anthem has done the unthinkable and is actually celebrating its birthday. There are five new items for everyone to enjoy until March 24 at 7:00 a.m. EST. BioWare revealed in a post that this was done as a way "to thank all the brave Freelancers who dared to journey beyond the walls and face a myriad of dangers, from the Monitor to the Grabbit King."
Anthem was released on February 22 of last year, and despite BioWare saying that there was going to be a celebration, all was silent on that day this year. Days later however, the developer did release small changes to the game with patch 1.7.0. The new patch was expected to let Anthem switch to a recurring schedule for updates and fixes. You can read more about that here.
For the celebration, everyone is going to get five items for free. There are going to be four exclusive “Empowered” vinyls, which means there's one for each javelin type. Then there's the brand-new “Painted Metallic Flake" material.
Anthem was released for the PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One and received mixed reviews with many critics leaning towards the negative side. Anthem was one of those hyped-up games that didn't meet expectations. Indeed, many of the criticisms were focused on how poor the execution was. For example, the loot system seemed impossible to get anything of value. Then there was the issue of loading times. Note that many of these issues popped up barely a month since its official release. Making it worse was that it was from BioWare, a developer who had a history of good games.
While Anthem did get somewhat strong sales, it wasn’t enough to meet the goal of 6 million units sold. Despite the many issues surrounding Anthem, BioWare announced a month from launch that it would continue to support the game. You can read more of that here.
However, it reached a point when the problems were just too much and players started to quit the game. This later resulted in players facing difficulties with matchmaking. Around just a week or two before its first birthday, an announcement was made that upcoming seasons were going to be dropped with Anthem getting a major overhaul.
Let’s see how Anthem moves forward with their plans and if we get to celebrate a second birthday.
