Anthem revival efforts look to hinge on whether EA's Frostbite engine freezes attempts to wrangle its myriad quirks

A group of tinkerers working on reviving Bioware’s Anthem via private servers following its shutdown earlier this month have now offered more insight into how that project’s going so far. While a video posted last week got hopes up that a return could be relatively imminient, the group say there’s plenty of work to be done yet, with the main potential stubling block being efforts to figure out the quirks of EA’s Frostbite engine.

This group working on trying to get Anthem back online with private servers, likely in a similar fashion to the fan-revived version of The Crew released last year, have chatted to Ars Technica about the current progress. The short version is that while last week’s video of a basic private server setup running was a milestone, this group working out of a Discord server called The Fort’s Forge still face a big hurdle that they reckon’ll dicate how the project plays out.

According to a team member with the handle Ness199X, the group have so far managed to break the services that make Anthem tick into three parts. There’s EA’s Blaze server to handle basic player authentication, a web server called Bioware Online Services which tracks things like inventories and quest progression, and finally the Frostbite multiplayer engine which handles loading levels and tracking players in them. The video showed off “quick and dirty” efforts to emulate the first two.

How to handle getting the Frostbite element and its level data to work in fashion that doesn’t rely on the servers EA have shut down is something the group are “exploring”, but say has been complicated by Anthem sometimes behaving in quirky ways that are different to other Frostbite games. “For example, when we try to load most maps, no NPCs spawn, but in some maps they do,” Ness199X explained. “And we have yet to determine why.” They reckon the “fairly extensive amount of player data the game keeps as part of its online RPG nature” might be part of this, but at this point aren’t “entirely sure how deep the differences go, other than that the engine didn’t behave how we expected it to.”

As a result of that uncertainty, whether the group will be able to pull on all the Frostbite threads they’d ideally want to for a revived Anthem and how long that’ll take remain up in the air. Ness199X said they’re currently about 75% sure that’ll be doable, and it’ll dictate whether reviving the game takes “months, or less even, depending on motivation” or ends up with “the amount of work increases fairly exponentially” to the point the group might not be motivated to slog through it.

Either way, the group are still keen to emphasise that it’s early days yet, so not to expect they’ll definitely have more progress to show off or put out in short order.