Leap Of Faith
After a tough few years, Bio Ware hopes to rise again with a soaring sci-fi shooter
After a tough few years, yea BioWare hopes to rise again with w soaring sci-fi multiplayer shooter shoo Anthem
Every bone in our body is telling us not to jump. As we peer over the edge of the platform into the waiting crevasse below, it’s astonishing how strongly our survival instinct kicks in. We’re aware that it’s only a videogame, but whichever way you slice it, leaping off a cliff while wearing a hulking great mech suit feels like a terrible idea.
It’s the details that contribute to the fear. To launch an Anthem session, we must first climb into our comfortably padded Javelin in firstperson view. A camera swoops around the exterior, allowing us to admire our rig: our new helmet and breastplate, every scuff mark on our custom paint job. The suit feels real, tangible – strangely intimate, like a classic car we’ve spent hours fixing up. And then, suddenly, we’re asked to drive it over a cliff.
This isn’t even the first time we’ve done so – we’ve already played a good few hours of Anthem – but the terror persists as we clunk forward and jump. We hang in the air, gravity momentarily distracted, and our stomach lurches – before we remember to hit our rockets, and take flight. “Something that someone said last week that I actually think is really accurate is, ‘Every time I start flying, I panic a little bit and I have to remember how to do it’,” executive producer Mark Darrah says. “At the time I was like, ‘Oh no, that’s a problem’ – but I actually think it’s not. It’s actually the power of the game. Every time you’re jumping off a building, and every time the game catches you. But every time you need to jump off that building again. It’s looking for that leap of faith every time you fly.”
The parallel is irresistible. For Bio Ware, Anthem is that same leap, and it crackles with the same energy. It’s a venture into, if not the unknown, at least the uncertain. Here is a studio that has made its name on singleplayer, story-focused roleplaying games with a beginning, a middle and an end.
Anthem is an always-online multiplayer looter-shooter set in an ever-changing world that is designed to be played for years. It’s a new IP spanning several genres with which Bio Ware is not entirely familiar, and in which fans of Dragon Age and Mass Effect may not even be interested. It is also a game whose aims and means place it in direct competition with the likes of Destiny.
“EVERY TIME I START FLYING, I PANIC A LITTLE BIT AND I HAVE TO REMEMBER HOW TO DO IT”
“WE WANTED I T TO B E AN OPEN WORLD OF SOME SORT, AND WANTED I T TO B E MORE SOCIAL”
And, to cap it all, it’s a crucial game for the studio. Bio Ware’s previous game, 2017’s Mass
Effect Andromeda, went over miserably, and contributed to the closure of the Montreal studio later that year. EA, too, has made unwanted headlines: thanks to Star Wars Battlefront II’s grubby monetisation, trust in the publisher has nosedived, and ‘loot’ has become a dirty word. This might not, on the face of it, be a great time for an EA studio to make a loot game. But if our visit to the Edmonton studio reveals anything, it’s that Bio Ware knows all too well that if you’re not prepared to jump, you’re never going to fly.
Being pushed doesn’t work, either. Tempting as it is to imagine a pantomime exec in a meeting room, puffing on a cigar and demanding someone bring him EA’s Destiny, the truth is that
Anthem was a natural development for Bio Ware. As the studio wrapped up work on Mass Effect 3 and the Citadel DLC in 2012, the team began to talk about taking on a new challenge in the form of new IP. For general manager Casey Hudson, the foray into new territory proved nostalgic. “It reminded me of when we finished working on Star
Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic,” he says. “Our feeling was, ‘Wow, we had so much fun – we want to do that again, but there’s a whole set of new things that we want to do now.’ That gave rise to Mass Effect. And what Anthem started out as was, ‘Let’s create a whole new universe, and be a lot more open-world in our design.”
The other challenge that he wanted the team at Bio Ware to take on was multiplayer. “Why can’t you have a game where there is a really interesting authored story, characters, relationships and an open world to explore – and be able to adventure around in it with a friend?” Hudson says. “We’ve always wanted to figure out how to crack that one.” It wasn’t a completely unknown quantity: back in 1998,
Baldur’s Gate sought to recreate the experience of playing Dungeons & Dragons with friends on a computer. “It’s always been there, in what we are trying to do at Bio Ware. Even when we don’t have actual multiplayer, it’s still always very much a shared experience. Everything that we do is about not just you adventuring on your own as a character – part of what’s unique to a Bio Ware game is that you can look over at your friends, whether they are multiplayer friends or written characters, and they are part of the dynamic of the experience.” Game director Jonathan Warner was there at
Anthem’s inception, helping shape the concept from the start. “We knew we wanted a few specific things,” he tells us. “We wanted it to be an open world of some sort, and wanted it to be more social.” This was early 2012, before the likes of Destiny or The Division were even announced. “We just felt that this was where the industry was going, and we thought it would be interesting to pursue.”
With this very loose concept in mind, a small group began to kick about ideas. There were about 30 pitches in total. Quickly, the team was taken with the concept of a high-mobility traversal mechanic, and after much iteration and remixing of elements and ideas came to the concept of “a group of heroes who had these cool powered exosuits in an alien world”.
In the first prototype, Anthem’s exosuits were a means to a very different end: climbing. “You could get to all these interesting high spaces,” Warner says, “and once you got up there, it was like, ‘Now that you’re up here, why don’t we do something cool?’ rather than just jumping or climbing back down.”
The dev team began to play about with the parameters of flight. “It took a lot of iteration,” lead producer Ben Ir ving says. “A year-and-a-half ago, flight was gliding. That felt cool, but not
really, so we made it flight. Then it was like, ‘This is awesome – but the world doesn’t work and creatures don’t work’, so we took it out. And then the game was boring.” He and the others were worried that people were so busy flying about that they were neglecting the other mechanics – why scramble up a cliff face when you have a perfectly usable jetpack? – and so flight was turned off while the team worked on the minutiae of jump height and so on. “Then we were like, ‘Oh, when it’s off it just all feels wrong, so let’s turn it back on’, and the commitment was that this was a core part of how you move in the world. Then we just agreed to solve all the other problems.”
The challenges created were myriad: how levels should be designed, how to structure missions and direct the player towards points of interest, what kinds of attacks creatures would need to have to pose a threat to airborne players. “We get asked a lot whether flight came first or whether the world came first,” lead producer Mike Gamble says. “Flight did come first, because we then had to create a world to be flown around in.”
The team deliberated throughout 2012 over what shape that world might take – and how to solve one more problem they’d had with past games. “We always noticed that as much as people would love our games, they would not
“I WANTED TO BE ABLE TO DO THAT–GET PEOPLE EXCITED ABOUT SOMETHING”
want to talk about them,” Hudson says. Players were reluctant to spoil the story. “It limited the ability for people to share their enjoyment of our games with each other, especially in a world where you learn about games through conversation and viral discussion.” He watched series like Game Of Thrones gather momentum, with viewers discussing last night’s events over the water cooler each week, and saw an opportunity. “There’s an excitement that wasn’t in any game at the time along the lines of, ‘What’s exciting about what’s happening right now?’ And you don’t know what’s going to happen, but you feel like you’re in the middle of a ride and it’s going somewhere. We wanted to build that in.”
Then, later that year, Hurricane Sandy arrived. Hudson watched America react in realtime to the incoming ‘storm of the century’. “As it got closer, they ratcheted up the warnings about how bad it was going to be, and said they knew it was going to be at its worst point at 9am on Friday morning,” Hudson says. “I was like, ‘I’ll go into work and have that open in my second monitor and just see what happens’. One of the news items was about a crane that broke off and was dangling over the street – they were worried about whether it was going to fall.” Hudson found himself taking in endless amounts of text, diagrams, footage, and explanations from scientists as chaos unfolded.
“I was thinking, ‘That’s what’s missing in games: the ability to tell the story like that’. I wanted to be able to do that – get people excited about something, or start looking forward to worrying about what’s going to happen, control things and tell a story in realtime.”
Suddenly, it was clear what Anthem’s world should be: a place in constant flux, left half-formed by strange deities who had used technological tools to control a force known as the Anthem Of Creation. The gods would be AWOL, but the unstable technology would remain buried in the world – and when certain pieces malfunctioned, players would have to adapt to the dramatic changes in the environment. Bio Ware would have to adapt, too: this would be an entirely different approach to storytelling and world-building, requiring adjustable parameters to be built into the game from the beginning and be accessible to its developers at any time. It would be a huge undertaking. “A little bit of foolishness is important,” Hudson says. “When we look back at what we did in the early days, so much of where we were able to do good work came from the fact we didn’t know how to do certain things, but we would just throw ourselves into them. What can happen over time is that you become risk averse because you know the things you could fail on, and the consequences. But you want to be a little bit uncomfortable with the level of innovation that you are taking on.”
It speaks volumes that Hudson came back to risk it all again for Anthem, following his 2014 departure from the studio to work at Microsoft on Holo Lens. “After KOTOR and three Mass Effects, the beginning of Anthem represented the beginning of maybe the next ten years of what I was going to be doing,” he says. “It was exciting – I loved the game and I loved the people I was working with – but I also felt like I was getting to the end of what I felt like I needed to do at that level. I looked at other things that I could graduate to, like running the studio. I thought, ‘I don’t know if I want to do that, either’.”
Hudson felt he needed a change, and the fan outcry following Mass Effect 3’ s ending had been difficult. “Sometimes what gets lost is that for me and everyone who works on a game, the whole reason that you do it is because you want to delight people, in the end,” he says. “So any time that you are not able to make people happy, it’s hard. It’s hard for everybody. With each game, you learn what you want to do better, and that’s built in to the creative process. You’ve got to just try things. You know that some of them are not going to work and even though it really hurts sometimes, you just have to keep going back in, looking at how things are received and building that into what you do next.”
He pauses. “Everything that we make is full of things that we wish we could have done better. As you roll into the new thing, it’s always just a huge collection of things that you want to take on next time, innovations you want to add, mistakes that you don’t want to make. It’s always, ‘How do we respond to the thing that players want us to do differently?’ but also, ‘What is a set of things we want to do better ourselves?’”
One of those was clearly the simple pleasure of movement: Anthem is the studio’s most fluid-feeling game yet. The twin elements of the game’s flight system and its world are masterfully balanced, and work in delightful synchronicity, leaping around each other playfully like rocketpropelled dolphins as we soar through the vertiginous splendour of Anthem’s world. First, as always, the leap of faith – then a jet-fuelled dive straight down, skimming the line of a cascading waterfall like a shiny metal kingfisher. Then a seamless plunge into the water, which shimmers with bioluminescent barnacles. The riverbed is strewn with sunken mechanical wreckage; a dark tunnel spiralling down on our left suggests a mysterious underwater cavern filled with loot. The transition from air to water, back out into the air and onto solid ground is impeccably smooth.
The potential for honing your skill with your chosen exosuit’s flight system is dizzying. The jetpack has a limited amount of time before its engine overheats – but we can delay it, picking out optimal paths through the scenery that bring us skimming over bodies of water to halt overheating, or hugging waterfalls and taking steep dives to cool the suit and extend flight time. “You’re making little decisions constantly,” Darrah says. “You’re stimulated mentally, you’re using the gamepad pretty constantly as well, so you get this really cool interaction between what you are observing on the screen, the decisions you are making, the way you are using the controller. It all comes together.”
As Irving points out, it’s why things like the heat gauge matter: given infinite stamina, chances are you’d fly in a straight line to your next destination and barely engage with the landscape around you. “So it rewards advanced play. Everyone likes to feel like they’re good, so if you master flight and you can actually skim the water, the
“YOU L E ARN WHAT YOU WANT TO DO BETT ER, AND T HAT’S BUI LT I NTO T HE CREATIVE P ROCESS”
THE STRONG HOLDS WILL TRULY TEST TEAM COORDINATION AND SITUATION AL AWARENESS
byproduct of that is you need to dodge all the obstacles. So now you are an advanced player doing all this at once so you can manage heat. And you feel like you’re beating the game.” Darrah laughs, and adds: “When your friends have to land and you have just a little more heat left, and you’re able to go that little bit further – that feels so good!”
This spirit of friendly competition pushes us to experiment more, as we swoop through canyons alongside our teammates during one expedition. On the hunt for a missing arcanist, playing as an Interceptor is electrifying: with its multi-directional triple-dash accessible by holding down a button, devastating melee attacks and delightful habit of backflipping every time we take to the skies, the winged cyborg ninja suit is well-tailored to slicing through thick groups of insectoid Scars before dodging out of the fray to recover. The mission structure itself is less arresting – we locate a series of signal boosters until we find Matthias the arcanist, cowering in a room swarming with Scars and backed up by armoured Enforcer minibosses. It’s more free-for-all than grand feat of teamwork.
The Stronghold we attempt, however, is a different story. It’s brutally tricky, even on Normal difficulty (there will be three difficulty levels for missions at launch, with higher tiers offering better loot; three additional Grand Master difficulty levels will be added post-launch). Free Play and Expeditions will serve as the setting for the usual loot-chase loop, build optimisation and experimentation. You’ll grind to roll the perfect inscriptions (read: perks) on your guns and gear, and level up your Pilot. But it’s the Strongholds that will truly test team coordination and situational awareness. We begin to push up the first part of a spiralling ascent through a dark cavern – we must locate glowing ‘echoes’ and transport them to a strange Shaper relic to shut it down and progress the mission – but are quickly jolted out of our hitherto rather relaxed approach to combat when our team wipes four times in quick succession.
A closer look at the three lanes reveals we need to band together more closely around at least one Colossus, which can tank most of the central damage with its shield. It’s enormously gratifying to play the part on one (ultimately unsuccessful) run, shield-bashing the occasional Scar as we anchor the team and lead the charge. In a later section, however, we take on a different role in the mage-
like Storm suit. Our particular team-support ability is a Wind Wall that can be used to block enemy fire from behind as our teammates fight onwards; meanwhile, we can hover for an extended amount of time with a generous overshield and a Deadeye sniper rifle, zipping around to different vantage points to provide cover fire. Our dual-ability custom loadout is more melee-focused to give our squishy suit some options when we do need to land, consisting of Frost Shards and Flame Burst for their close-quarters power and potential to set up elemental combos with the team.
And we struggle, us and a team of devs who’ve been playing this game for years now. We’ve been boosted a bit – our Pilot level is hovering at around level 20, and we’ve unlocked a second gun slot – but even with the extra HP and damage value our carefully selected suit components afford, the Stronghold requires ruthlessly efficient teamwork. Then again, this is an endgame activity. Progression, Bio Ware hopes, will begin with the critical path and initial gear chase through the story, Contracts and Expeditions; new Javelin classes will unlock at fixed points as you level up. Then come Strongholds and Legendary Contracts: once you’ve gathered a reliable group of teammates, you can ratchet up the difficulty on all of these activities to aim for the best loot. “You’re chasing these builds, pushing against this tough content as you hit walls,” Irving says. “You’re like, ‘I need this other combination of gear to have these synergies with my group to do this harder content’. You get into a really interesting loop.”
But Anthem’s loops will differ from those of, say, Destiny. Firstly, Contracts and Legendary Contracts have a number of ‘links’ in their structure, and each is randomly drawn from a pool of different events and strung together to make more varied missions. Secondly, the nature of its world means that the developers can change the meta on a whim and force players to adapt, whether it’s to a particular storm blowing in or a massive shift in the landscape. “In a lot of games,” Warner says, “you know that when you go around this bend, there’s going to be this group of enemies and this is how you fight them. Our world is a little more dynamic and flexible: when I fly over an area, it may be the same enemies, but it may be raining, or nighttime, and there are a bunch of variables that you get to play with.”
While the developers appreciate that the chase is a crucial part of what gives this kind of game its longevity, they also know that it should be continually meaningful. Anthem’s shifting world is one way to take the sting out of grinding the same missions for a chance at a different reward – as is a crafting system that allows you to focus all your resources more specifically on a certain gun or piece of gear. But making sure that the gear-game is compelling, and that loot feels meaningful, is another important step. “It starts from a base of tying it back to you playing the game well, whether that’s skilfully or consistently,” Warner says. “If you start from the point of view of, ‘Let’s create a system that’s going to monetise’ or accomplishing some other end, it takes you to strange places. A base intention of rewarding the player gets you headed in the right direction. Then it’s all about understanding the journey, and creating a system that is going to feed that power fantasy of, in this case, Javelins getting more powerful. And also making you feel cleverer.”
Good loot, he believes, should be a simple puzzle that becomes more intricate as you begin to understand the relationship between the pieces. “And some of it is letting gear and loot go in that’s not necessarily great in a broken sort of way, so the player can feel clever about choosing not to use that piece of gear.” Irving adds: “It’s never quite as simple as the loot drops and it’s more powerful. There’s a difference in getting something that changes how you play the game.”
But the ‘how’, according to Bio Ware, should take a backseat to the ‘why’. “For me, Destiny never really had a good enough ‘why’,” Darrah says. “Ultimately, all games are about doing a thing in order to do another thing. But the question is whether or not you can contextualise that in a way where I’m like, ‘Right, but I want to do that’.
Destiny never really crossed that line for me. For me, it is about exploration, lore and being able to scratch the surface of this world, and figure out more.” For others, it’ll be about social competition: using their Javelin as a status symbol, creating a suit that tells a story, devastates a certain boss or helps them master flight and see more of Anthem’s maze-like world. And for others still – fans of Bio Ware’s previous output, we should think – it’ll be about the stories that buzz around the Fort Tarsis hub, and the growing relationships that form the basis of many missions.
This was what made Mass Effect special, and what has the potential to make Anthem more wellrounded than its genre peers. “For us, the ‘why’ has to be emotional,” Irving says. “I think it’s nicer if it’s about a relationship or a character, but even
“ULTIMATELY ALL GAMES ARE ABOUT DOING A THING IN ORDER TO DO ANOTHER T HI NG”
the people who want to get the most powerful gear, they’ll have a different ‘why’, because they’ll want to compete with friends. I think whatever those emotions are, if we have the right avenues for the various player types, it’ll work.”
There’s no guarantee, of course: the market for this kind of game is crowded already, and its audience suspicious about what micro transactional traps may await them. Establishing the trust needed between players and the new IP that they need to connect to it emotionally will be tough, yes, but it’s nothing Bio Ware – and Hudson – haven’t done before. “It’s been great to have Casey back,” Warner says. “He has a very keen awareness of what ‘good’ looks like. It’s interesting to see how his brain works and to see it go from applying that to building a game – which is how I first started working with Casey on Mass Effect 3 – to see him apply that same kind of mentality to running a studio.”
Indeed, after a short stint on the outside looking in, Hudson feels better placed than ever to guide Bio Ware, and Anthem, to where it needs to be in the wake of the studio’s recent troubles. “Had I not gone and gotten some new perspective, skills and interests, I would have looked at that and thought, ‘Hmm, I don’t know what to do with that’,” Hudson says. “But now, I feel like I actually have a good sense of what Bio Ware needs, and I want to be a part of getting the studio there.” Having read the countless letters the studio has received over the years from fans, he knows what Anthem has to have to be a Bio Ware game. “What they describe to us so often is the power of playing a game where you can roleplay as someone and have an experience where, in your real life, you feel empowered, and you know how to handle a situation. People have played our games through cancer treatments and found a way to escape things and come out stronger. Those are the stories that really motivate us, and are kind of a meta version of what we do in our games. Once we have that – and we did a whole process where we were trying to figure out what that was – you can then apply it to something like Anthem, hold those values fixed, and not compromise on them.”
With Hudson comes focus, experience – and the confidence to stick his neck out for a vision he believes in, even when there’s a crowd of people holding pitchforks. “I find having done new IP a few times – and this happened with Mass Effect – is that human beings are very good at pattern matching. So they’ll say, ‘Well, this just looks like that, because it has this element’. But after it comes out, that’s when suddenly you can experience it. Suddenly you’re getting the final recipe and you go, ‘Oh, now I know what it is – it’s Anthem’.” He laughs. “It helps to have been through it. With Mass Effect I’d explain to people the concept, but also hope it ended up to be true. And then it did.”
The concept for Anthem – codenamed Dylan – is a lofty one. Like its namesake, Hudson wants the new IP to be timeless, to be talked about for years to come. “I don’t think it’s necessarily that the game itself continues to live forever, though that is a nice thought and goal,” he says. “People will talk about Mass Effect, Dragon Age and KOTOR, and remember the time in their life when they played it and what it meant to them. That’s what makes a game timeless. I really hope that we have that with Anthem.”
What they might have, Warner thinks, is “the most emotional shooter of our decade!” He laughs, only half-joking. “Games you don’t connect with emotionally are not games that you end up talking about years later. To me, that is the delight of making games, because I know that somewhere some young person is going to pick up Anthem and play it, and it is going to be that game for them. It’ll be their game. That’s such an amazing privilege. It can sound so pretentious to say, ‘We really want you to emotionally connect to this game’. I do, but I want it to connect to lots of different people emotionally in different ways – whether it’s a touching story, or a character that you particularly love, or an adventure that you tell your friends about, or whether it’s just that adrenaline rush. It’s all emotional.” We think back to how we feel every time we step over the edge in our suit – terrified, then elated – and start to understand. “My favourite fantasy is the superhero discovery story,” Irving says. “The average person who one day discovers that they are capable of something more. For me, that’s what flight and the Javelins represent.”
Warner lingers on the idea of flight. “It’s a very powerful metaphor, I think. Everybody has felt constrained or held down by society. When you’re a young person you feel constrained by your parents or by school and then later it’s your job, or the law, or the man, it’s whatever. In Anthem, everyone else is constrained. ‘It’s super-dangerous outside, stay inside, stay inside.’ But you get to go outside. You get to not only go outside, but you get to leap up into the air, and fly away.”
“SOMEWHERE SOME YOUNG PERSON IS GOING TO PICKUP ANTHEM… IT’ LL BE THEIR GAME”