Report: BioWare’s Anthem delayed as studio ‘doubles down’ on make-or-break titleAmbitious open-world RPG now coming in 2019Anthem, BioWare’s ambitious action role-playing game announced at E3 2017, will not come out until 2019, according to a report from Kotaku, representing a delay past the launch window originally said to be the last quarter of this year.Kotaku’s report characterizes Anthem’s delay as a sign of increasing pressure on the Electronic Arts studio to come back with a big hit following the disappointing performance of Mass Effect: Andromeda last year. Unidentified sources connected to the studio told Kotaku that the fall 2018 window was never realistic; Kotaku speculates that BioWare cannot delay the game beyond March 2019, which is when EA’s 2019 fiscal year ends.An Electronic Arts representative told Polygon that the company did not have any comment on Kotaku’s story or the progress of Anthem’s development.“There’s a belief that if Anthem doesn’t live up to EA’s expectations, BioWare will look very different in the future,” especially after Andromeda’s performance, Kotaku reports. The report says that most of BioWare’s attention is now focused on Anthem, and away from a Dragon Age reboot and the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, which launched in 2011.Mass Effect: Andromeda was a troubled project before it launched in March 2017, and the aftermath ultimately led to a restructuring of the BioWare Montreal studio, with developers from Andromeda reassigned to support the BioWare’s Edmonton office instead of working on a sequel to Andromeda. Support for the game ended in August and no post-launch downloadable content was ever created, a departure from how past editions of the AAA franchise between 2007 and 2012 had been handled.Kotaku’s story goes on to say that BioWare has also reevaluated its approach to Dragon Age in light of publishing expectations about games as a service. That, combined with difficulties integrating the Frostbite engine originally built to serve shooters like the Battlefield and Battlefront series, has some in the studio anxious that its fate depends on the success of Anthem and its reception, according to Kotaku.Anthem, an open-world science-fiction RPG whose characters wear mechanized combat suits and battle monsters in a post-apocalyptic setting, received a splashy premiere during Microsoft’s E3 keynote last June. The next month, however, BioWare’s general manager and Anthem’s director, Aaryn Flynn, resigned from the studio. He was replaced by Casey Hudson, the longtime veteran of Mass Effect development.