“Anthem,” EA and BioWare’s newest property, released last week, and it was anything but a roaring success. This isn’t the first time EA has rushed a game out or released a game when it shouldn’t have. “Anthem” is just another game in a long-running trend from the big publisher that shows they don’t have a clue what they are doing.

       Just going into 2019, Respawn Entertainment, a subsidiary of EA, released the free-to-play “Apex Legends” which is a massive success. It is another battle royale game and seems to have taken some of the steam out of the “Fortnite” juggernaut. However, this success came at a cost.

A week later, BioWare’s new game, “Anthem,” released to the public. Two EA properties releasing so close to each other, one of them free and another $60, isn’t great. It wouldn’t matter much if “Anthem” was the game we were all waiting for, but it isn’t. I haven’t played the game, but from what I have read, it doesn’t have the typical BioWare story and has atrocious loading times and a bad grind. All of these characteristics lead it to be a game that isn’t as good as it was hyped up to be. It is obvious the game needed more time in development. Because of this decision, the game is much worse than it could have been.

This isn’t the first time EA has done this to a BioWare product. The game prior to the newest release, “Mass Effect: Andromeda,” also had a lot of problems, like animation issues, bad voice work and a multitude of glitches. That game also looked like it needed more time in the oven, and then EA, due to the failure of the game, put the Mass Effect series on ice for a bit.

All of these problems don’t come close to the problems EA has caused with the “Star Wars” license. EA signed a contract with Disney in 2012 to get full rights to the “Star Wars” license. In that time, there have been multiple games put into production, reworked and then canceled. Some of those reworked projects changed from single-player games to ones EA said needed to have something more than just a campaign. Thanks to this change, there have only been two games in the Star Wars franchise released in that time, both games in the “Star Wars: Battlefront” series. Neither of those games were what fans were hoping for either. The first seemed to be begging for more content, and the second was riddled with microtransactions that ruined its progression system within the game.

EA has continued all these bad decisions with the yearly releases of their sports franchises, which still don’t improve anything year-after-year. It feels like they could release the game, and then give a yearly update but, of course, that would never happen. EA knows people will buy the games every year even if they don’t change anything, so they don’t. Why change something if people keep buying an empty product?

EA has been in business for years, but it seems like the last decade or so, they have just gotten worse and worse — price gouging their customers, creating games the fans don’t want, canceling games and closing promising studios. It’s gotten to the point where I’m not even surprised when they’re in the news doing something stupid. That’s just who they are now.