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It's now been a week since Anthem's demise, but it suddenly seems a whole lot more likely that fans might be able to get BioWare's looter shooter up and running again themselves, even if EA pulled the plug on its servers.
Previously, Anthem executive producer and Dragon Age veteran Mark Darrah explained that "Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months before launch," and while he's not sure if they'd still work, "the code is there to be salvaged and recovered." As he explained at the time, this would mean the game wouldn't have to rely on dedicated servers, but rather "let the server run on one of the machines that's playing the game." In combination with that, had BioWare been able to add AI party members, Anthem could have feasibly been playable in a single-player format, but alas, that was never to be.
Except, as spotted by Kotaku, it looks like fans might be able to pull something of a revival off themselves. Over on YouTube, one user who goes by And799 has shared a proof of concept "Anthem Client as Server testing" video (below). Not only do they show the game loading up and running again, but they even open it in a second window to connect a second player to the session. While things look a bit laggy here, the point is the idea – you can see both characters moving around, totally connected by the user's alternate server. Oh, and did I mention that they posted this only five days after the EA servers were shut down? Fans work fast.
Don't expect the return of Anthem to come from And799 specifically, though, or any time soon, as they note in the video description that "this is just a POC from my research and experiment and does NOT represent the current progress of the private server/revival project that is currently in progress." They also note: "Seems like the majority of the player data are handled through bioware's server instead of blaze and it is required for the game to be able to load offline."
They don't explain exactly what revival project they're referring to here, but looking around online, there's been chatter within the remaining Anthem fanbase across Reddit and Discord from folks hoping to bring the game back, including from one server (known as The Fort's Forge) which they're part of. While it doesn't look like enormous progress has been made at the time of writing, it's obviously very early days, and fingers crossed And799's findings are indicative of the fact that there's real hope of folks actually pulling this off.
