We all have that one neighbor, you know the type. The guy who doesn’t take his Christmas decorations down for weeks or even months following the holiday, or somehow justifies leaving his lights up for the duration of the year. The day is February 7, 2020, and Anthem is that neighbor. The Anthem Christmas decorations still adorn its forgotten hub world. Perhaps communicating the sad state of the game, Anthem hasn’t received an update to remove them since the holiday season ended. 44 days have passed since Christmas. 37 days since we crossed over into the New Year. Valentine’s Day is in just one week. And Anthem’s Fort Tarsis is still strung with tinsel and lights.

The leftover decor was noted today by GamesRadar Editor-in-Chief Sam Loveridge. We’ve also logged in to double-check (yes, I still have it installed, though I had to do quite a few gigs worth of updates), and sure enough, those twinkling holiday decorations remain sadly strung around. What once evoked holiday cheer gets sadder and sadder the further from the holiday we get.

Decided to have a dip back into Anthem. The fact that all the Christmas decs are still up made it feel even sadder pic.twitter.com/HQlN668H2e — Sam Loveridge (@apacherose3) February 7, 2020

The Anthem Christmas decorations were added as part of the Icetide seasonal update on December 11, 2019. On January 22, 2020, Anthem received another update that extended the Icetide season “through February.” The extension of that season apparently also turned Anthem into that sad neighbor that still has an inflatable Santa and light-up wireframe reindeer in their yard.

Anthem Christmas Decorations as Good News?

This could also be seen as good news. Anthem’s development team is rumored to be focused on a complete rework and relaunch of the game, harnessing its core potential through vastly reworked endgame and progression systems. While it’s difficult to find current player numbers for Anthem, the game was reportedly at less than 2,500 players on Xbox in May of last year (just a few months after its launch). Chances are high that the numbers have dropped significantly since then. If the team is hard at work on reinventing the entire game, it might not be worth extending the dev hours to take down a couple of the Anthem Christmas decorations for just a few thousand people across all platforms. Extending Icetide is the easiest way to keep the game going while BioWare works on what’s coming. And that means festive holiday lights for just a little while longer.

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