BioWare may have taken to publisher EA’s stage to officially unveil Anthem to the world, but they took the game’s first gameplay reveal to the Xbox E3 stage.
The game is absolutely stunning running in 4K on a Scorp–err, Xbox One X–and does a fantastic job at showing off the art direction’s talents. The game takes place in a post-apocalyptic world (as does pretty well every other game on the planet these days), full of incredible environments, lush jungles, and unique villages.
Massive and terrifying creatures also roam the lands, it seems, and players have to traverse the world while trying to thwart these creatures’ attempts to kill them.
The game is not dissimilar to Destiny or even Mass Effect, though the latter was developed by the same team. Exosuits called Javelins are how people traverse the open world here, and they’re quite easily compared to something like Master Chief’s MJOLNIR armor crossed with something a bit less rigid like Sam Fisher’s stealth gear in Splinter Cell.
Anthem also relies heavily on RPG elements, further conditioning it to be similar to Destiny, in that these exosuits are customizable and have unique play styles and abilities that allow the player to have unique capabilities. All of them, it seems, will be equipped with jetpacks, as it appears that traversing the world will be done by air for a vast majority of the game. This may also lend the reasoning behind the name Javelin, as the player is akin to a spear gliding through the sky.
As an RPG, the game is also going to feature a large multiplayer component similar to the open world drop-in, drop-out gameplay of The Division, for example, though to what degree at this point, we do not know. The company is said to be crafting the game around some sort of “live” service, but whether this extends beyond console to an app for resource management or something else is yet to be seen.
BioWare has said that Anthem will be launching in Fall of 2018, though given the company’s track record with announcing games and pushing back their release date by months or even years, we actually don’t expect this ambitious title to be ready to play until the following Spring, at the earliest.
Anthem will launch on Xbox One (and all its counterparts) as well as Windows 10 PC and PlayStation 4 / Pro.