Anthem is Offline, But Maybe Not Gone Forever
Anthem is now officially offline. As of 2:05 pm EST on a recent Monday, BioWare and EA have shut down the servers for good, marking the end of the game as a live service. For most online only games, that is usually the final curtain.
But in the PC gaming world, a game being shut down does not always mean it is gone forever. Thanks to private servers, reverse engineering and passionate fan communities, a surprising number of titles have found second lives long after their publishers pulled the plug.
In a new tell all video about Anthem’s famously troubled development, former BioWare executive producer and Anthem project lead Mark Darrah shared an interesting detail that has fans paying attention. According to him, Anthem once had working code for local servers during development. In other words, there was a version of the game that could be hosted and run by players on their own machines rather than only on EA’s official servers.
For a game that is now completely offline, that single detail matters a lot.
How Anthem’s Servers Worked and Why Local Hosting Matters
Anthem was built as a live service game with a typical client server design. To play, you always had to connect to EA’s servers. Those servers handled most of the game logic.
Your PC focused on rendering the world, your javelin and all the flashy effects, while the servers took care of what actually happened under the hood. Combat, world state and other core systems were processed remotely. That means once the official servers go dark, the entire experience disappears.
Darrah revealed that this was not always the only way Anthem worked. During development, there was a dev environment setup where Anthem could run with local servers. In that mode, a player’s own PC would host sessions that others could connect to. He says this code existed until just a few months before launch.
He does not know if the old local server code still functions today, but he believes it likely still exists somewhere and could theoretically be salvaged.
Why is this so important for PC gamers?
- If that code were ever released or recreated, players could potentially host their own Anthem servers.
- It would open the door to fan run private servers that do not rely on EA to keep the game alive.
- Modders and network engineers would have a real starting point instead of having to rebuild everything from scratch.
Right now, that is still just a possibility, not a plan. But for a dead live service game, even a small technical opening is enough to get the community thinking.
What a Fan Revival of Anthem Might Look Like
In the video, Darrah also imagines a different future for Anthem. He describes a single player focused version of the game with AI companions, updated tech and modern visuals. He estimates it would cost around 10 million dollars to pull off, and he is pretty blunt that EA is almost certainly not going to spend that money on a game it has wanted off the books for years.
That kind of official revival is extremely unlikely.
The more realistic path is the one PC gamers have seen before: fans building their own replacement for the original multiplayer services. We already have strong examples.
- The Northstar mod for Titanfall 2 gives players custom servers and has effectively revived the game’s multiplayer on PC.
- Battlefront 2 players have Kyber, a conversion mod tied to its own dedicated servers, currently in open beta, that lets the community keep custom matches and experiences alive.
These projects prove that when a publisher walks away, PC gamers sometimes step in. Titanfall 2 already had an official online mode, but Northstar gave players more control, better stability and a way around long running issues with the original servers. Battlefront 2’s Kyber has done something similar by creating a parallel ecosystem for matches.
Anthem is a more complex target. Its live service structure and pseudo MMO design likely mean a private server solution would involve deep traffic analysis, detailed reverse engineering and serious networking knowledge. This is not a simple toggle in a menu. It would be a major technical project.
There are a few possible paths forward.
- EA could release the old local hosting code or tools, making it much easier for the community. This is extremely unlikely, but it is technically the fastest way.
- Developers and modders could attempt to recreate what the local servers did by reverse engineering the existing game client and network traffic.
- The community might build a partial experience first, such as limited co op or custom missions, before slowly moving toward a more complete revival.
Still, even a small chance is enough. PC gaming history shows that when a game means a lot to a group of players, someone will try to bring it back.
Right now Anthem remains officially dead. You cannot log in, you cannot fly your javelin and you cannot roam its beautiful world on live servers. But the revelation that it once had working local server code changes how we think about its future. Anthem may never get a big budget single player relaunch, but a grassroots private server scene is no longer a crazy idea. It is just a very hard one.
If there is one thing veteran PC players know, it is this: dead games do not always stay dead. With the right tools, skills and determination, freelancers really might fly again someday.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/third-person-shooter/hopes-for-an-eventual-anthem-private-server-resurrection-ignited-as-former-executive-producer-says-code-for-running-the-game-locally-is-there-to-be-salvaged-and-recovered/
