Bioware and EA had been suggesting that the studio's next game and new IP, Anthem, would be landing in 2018, but now it looks like they're going back to the
initial plan and it won't land until early 2019, sometime before the end of the fiscal year in April.
Last year, multiple sources at Bioware told us that the chances of Anthem actually launching in 2018 were "minimal at best" even back then, and now we're told that EA has agreed to delaying the game until early 2019 as the studio still have difficulties making the Frostbite engine work in giant third-person games and needs to re-evaluate certain aspects after the uproar Star Wars Battlefront II's microtransactions created. They still aren't getting as much extra time as they wanted, however, as the publisher has said that they need the game to be ready before the fiscal year ends on March 31 of next year.
Even making this deadline would apparently have been nearly impossible with the resources they originally had set aside for the project, so Bioware has supposedly lowered the priority of other projects they are working on and set most of those developers to work on Anthem to actually make the new deadline. One of the projects affected by this is the all but unveiled fourth Dragon Age game. Two sources claim that it was set to launch in late 2020, but that it'll probably be delayed until 2021 after this refocusing and some other big changes.
Most of these claims are being backed up by other sources Kotaku's Jason Schreier has talked to, and you can read his article about the situation here. It's definitely worth a read, as some of his sources also claim that Bioware is considering ending the development of Star Wars: The Old Republic, something we haven't heard anything about.
The good news is that our sources still believe that this will be best game Bioware has ever made, as things definitely have improved over the last few months. That's why we like to believe that the extra time and resources will make the highly anticipated game live up to its potential when it finally arrives.
What would you like to see in Anthem?