When Bioware first revealed Anthem at E3 2017, fans were hyped to see this refreshing take on the MMO genre – with one of the biggest appeals being the game’s vertical emphasis due to players being equipped with jetpacks to traverse the environment. Now, BioWare’s Brenon Holmes has now responded to various queries on a Reddit thread regarding the title. Most of the questions were centered around the suit aspect of the game, and what the title will be like when players aren’t inside their mechanical armor.
For starters, fans queried the seamlessness of the players suit when flying around, “We really want you to feel a sense of freedom with our exploration mechanics,” Holmes said in a comment. “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,” he continued, moving on to the topic of just how high you can really go while flying around in your suits. “It’s fairly subtle, and feels more like a heavy downdraft. 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.”
When it comes to combat, one fan asked what players can expect when you don’t have a suit equipped.
“We had a prototype of this early on,” he said, “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.”
“The larger problem had to do with getting stuck,” he continued. “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.”
Finally, a fan asked whether or not there would be specific settings to suit those who were left-handed, his response was pretty straight-forward:
“I’ll ask… but I’m pretty sure the answer is ‘no’,” he said. “Not that it’s impossible, just rather complex… and in the overall set of priorities, I’m guessing something like this is going be fairly low.”
As of right now Anthem is set to release 2018, however recent news suggests that a 2018 release was never realistic and that a 2019 release is more plausible.
