Anthem Developer Shares Some Brand New Gameplay Details
Anthem, the upcoming shooter from Bioware, was revealed during Microsoft’s E3 press conference last year. It’s big reveal sparked a lot of interest amongst the gaming community and while details have been scarce, Bioware has recently announced that Anthem will feature a bigger open-world than Destiny! Now however, the developers have revealed even more details about the gameplay, including mech suit capabilities, combat and a whole lot more.
Brenon Holmes, Technical Design Director of Anthem, has responded to more questions on a Reddit thread, giving us a bunch of details about the upcoming shooter. While many have expressed their excitement over the ability to seamlessly fly around in the environment, and even use their mech suits underwater, Holmes explains what it actually feel like, saying there will be limits to the flying aspect. “We really want you to feel a sense of freedom with our exploration mechanics. There will be some amount of progression and skill expression with flying, which will affect how far you can go and what you can do in the air. There are also limits as to how high you can go, we’re playing around with a flight ceiling prototype right now. It’s fairly subtle, and feels more like a heavy down draft. We’ll have to see about specific height limitations… it’s all kind of up in the air right now as it’s mostly dependent on performance.”
Anthem promises to give players a choice between various mech suits, each with their own different capabilities, to equip. While this class system sounds similar to other shooters on the market, will there be any time where players will find themselves outside of their mech suits? Holmes says this is a lot more complicated in practice. “We had a prototype of this early on but we ran into a lot of problems. The world is fairly dangerous, some of the smallest “non-hostile” creatures in the game are basically like small horses to humans… and they probably eat humans honestly. So you didn’t really have a lot of combat interaction beyond getting eaten.” According to Holmes, that’s not the only problem with facing the world without your suit. “The larger problem had to do with getting stuck. You could hop out of your suit and then fall into a ravine and basically just get screwed… since humans have nowhere near the same mobility as a suit. All in all, while it was a really cool atmosphere thing (it was terrifying!) – there wasn’t enough gameplay to support it without a ton of work.”
With that said, one Reddit user suggested controlling these scenarios in scripted moments during the game. In response, Holmes said there may be “the possibility of some of this kind of stuff down the line.” Another Reddit user asked if Anthem would have the ability to change things around in the suit for those who are left-handed. If you’re left handed, you may be disappointed with the answer. Holmes gave an honest answer mentioning that while it’s not impossible, it’s “just rather complex… and in the overall set of priorities, I’m guessing something like this is going be fairly low.”
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