BioWare's latest Anthem update brings both good news and bad news. The good news is that Anthem is still alive and, if not kicking, at least twitching feebly, as the very existence of the update suggests. The bad news is that we can expect only feeble twitching for a long time yet.

The update was posted by Christian Dailey, formerly director of franchise development for Anthem's live service and now studio director at BioWare Austin, where he directs Anthem's development. He explained that Anthem's "incubation team" of about 30 people is "beginning to test design hypotheses," a process that includes revisiting the game to experiment and prototype areas that did not meet expectations.

"Spoiler - this is going to be a long process. Yes, the team is small, but it's important to take the time to go back to the beginning. And a small team gives you agility that a big team doesn't have," Dailey wrote.

Dailey said that one of BioWare's priorities is to be "open and honest" with players throughout the process.

"The reality is, you're going to see things that look great but end up on the cutting room floor, or things that we feel are taking too long, that we think suck... Because of your passion and interest in Anthem, we want to be as transparent as we can. We want to provide you with as much transparency as we can. But that means seeing how the sausage is made."

BioWare also aims to update the progress of the Anthem redo more regularly in the future with things like live streams and social media posts, but it's not clear what that will look like: Dailey said BioWare will "soon I will get back to you guys on what the update process will look like."

While that sounds at least potentially promising, it's not clear how long it will take for the Anthem act to be shelved in favor of seasonal updates so that Chad Robertson, then head of live services, can focus on more long-term, systemic fixes for BioWare. Eight months after announcing that Anthem would be shelved and promising "transparency" with players, it is also disheartening to read that the studio is still trying to figure out how it intends to keep its player base informed about updates that haven't even started yet.

It's clearly going to be a long-term process, and BioWare general manager Casey Hudson emphasized that point in February when he announced that Anthem's seasonality had also been dropped so that developers could focus on a "more substantive revamp" of the game. But what has happened since then does not indicate that Anthem is being treated as some kind of priority, and that they are not giving up everything if they are trying to convince gamers.

Still, Dailey expressed optimism. I'm not here to hype anything up, but we believe the changes we are making are the right ones," he said. We need constructive criticism and feedback."