Today’s Anthem update has removed special Elysian chests from the game just
over a month after they were added. This comes on the heels of several delayed
updates, leaving the game’s remaining players bewildered and frustrated.
Anthem’s 1.1.1 patch went live earlier today and fixed a handful of small bugs,
including one which was causing the wrong equipment stats to be displayed. The
patch notes also included a note encouraging players to use up their remaining
Elysian keys before they vanished from the game completely. “A reminder that
Elysian Caches will be going away on May 7th, so if you have any keys left be sure
to use them today!” it read.
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Elysian Caches were special loot chests that appeared at the end of Stronghold
missions and had unique cosmetics like decals and fabric textures inside. They
were originally added to the game in a March 26 update, the game’s first major
new piece of content since its February release. The cosmetics inside the chests
weren’t fantastic, but they did give players an additional reason to keep running
through the same old content over and over again.
“I know they weren’t very rewarding but Elysian Caches were literally the only
thing that kept me in the game. Log on. Do a daily. Get a key. Heart of Rage. Log
Out. Easy enjoyable experience,” wrote one player on the game’s subreddit. “Not
rewarding mind you. But I still had fun. Hell, sometimes I would run TWO
strongholds in the same night.”
In the comments section of Reddit, BioWare global community manager Jesse
Anderson responded that the Elysian Caches were never meant to last. “They’ve
always been planned as a temporary thing since there was a timer under the
challenges,” he wrote. “There is a chance that they’ll come back again at some
point.”
A post on EA’s website about the chests does indeed allude to them being
temporary. “You’ll have to move fast, though, because Anthem’s world is always
changing, and the Elysian Chests won’t be around forever,” it reads. But that
hasn’t made the game’s remaining players feel any better about their removal
given Anthem’s overall lack of content.
It’s especially discouraging in light of the several updates that were originally
scheduled for April but never arrived. There were 14 new additions to the game
planned for April in BioWare’s original 90-day calendar, but only the new Sunken
Cell Stronghold mission made it, with things like guilds and a new masteryprogression system falling to the wayside. Two weeks ago, BioWare announced
that the big Cataclysm event planned for May was being indefinitely delayed as
well.
In the meantime, the game’s popularity on Twitch has plummeted, and some of
its players have taken to the subreddit to announce they’re taking a break. Last
week, Chad Robertson, the game’s head of live service, took to Twitter to try and
reassure fans that Anthem wasn’t dead. “We remain 100% committed to Anthem
and look forward to showing players the new content we are working on,” he
wrote. “We want to make sure we aren’t overpromising, so our updates on what’s
coming in the game will be focused when we have things near completion.”
Unfortunately, the removal of some of the game’s only new content since release
isn’t the type of update many were hoping for.