BioWare’s latest won’t debut this year, but a new Battlefield will.
Electronic Arts has confirmed previous reports that BioWare’s upcoming game Anthem has been delayed to 2019, and in its place a new Battlefield game will debut this fall.
The Wall Street Journal reports Anthem will no longer be released this year, being pushed to 2019. However, EA denied to WSJ that the delay was due to the game’s development being behind schedule, as reported in a previous Kotaku piece. Instead, the 2019 release is, according to WSJ, a factor of EA’s decision to release a new Battlefield game this October.
As a result, the company’s executives believe Anthem, as a new IP, would fare better commercially in a quieter quarter than the busy fall window.
“It’s not a delay,” EA’s Blake Jorgensen told The Wall Street Journal. “People are trying to create a story.”
And while Anthem had previously not been given an exact release date, initial reveal plans had pegged the game for a fall 2018 release. Even before Anthem’s official debut at E3 2017, a new BioWare IP had been confirmed for a release before March 2018, until it had been pushed back to the 2019 fiscal year, which ends on March 31, 2019.
EA then officially debuted Anthem at both its own EA Play press conference, while new details were then revealed at Microsoft’s E3 2017 press conference. And recently, a new report examined how BioWare has doubled its efforts to deliver on Anthem.
The last Battlefield, meanwhile, debuted in 2016 with the WW1-set Battlefield 1
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Jonathon Dornbush is an Associate Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter @jmdornbush.