BioWare Is Hoping to Be the First Great Story in the Genre
BioWare’s upcoming “live services” game Anthem is a departure from their usual RPG games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect. With this shift in focus, there’s no doubt it will be compared to other similar games like The Divison and Destiny. And according to BioWare Producer Mark Darrah and Lead Producer Mike Gamble, the genre has yet to see a multiplayer game with co-op “at heart” that can also tell a great story.
“I think what we want people to understand is, while Anthem is a very different game from games that BioWare’s done before, there’s still storytelling at its heart,” Darrah said. “It’s still about characters, it’s still about getting to know people in the world and that we’re telling story through this new way of, what we call ‘Our World, My Story,’ which is about going out into a shared world where story things happen. But then your true storytelling agency happens in Fort Tarsis where those choices live and you have that single-player, more player-driven narrative experience.”
“And it is a hard problem to solve,” Gamble said. “It’s like how do you do a multiplayer game that has cooperative at its heart, but also still be able to tell a great story? And you know I don’t think anyone actually nailed it yet. I think we probably have a pretty good shot at coming out of the gates and being able to do it. But it takes intentional design from the very beginning to split out, ‘Okay this is how you’re going to do your missions, and this is how you’re going to do your character building.’”
Anthem is set for release on February 22, 2019 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Microsoft Windows.