Anthem: Everything We Learned After 20 Hours of Gameplay

By Brandin Tyrrel

Anthem is just around the corner and all month long we’ve been covering it as part of IGN First. For our big deep dive this month, we got the opportunity to go to BioWare and play over 20 hours of Anthem in a work-in-progress state.

With that knowledge we’ve returned to share what we learned in order to give you a better understanding of what Anthem is going to be like, and how to decipher some of its lesser-known aspects – especially if you intend on spending any time in the upcoming demo. While some of this you may already know if you’ve been following Anthem, some of it you likely don’t, so let’s get into it.

The Story in Anthem

Anthem’s story is a closely guarded secret to BioWare – the team won’t even reveal the name of the planet yet – giving us only the smallest bits of info so far. The big picture, quick-and-dirty synopsis is Anthem’s set on a planet that’s littered with futuristic technology. A long-gone group of beings called The Shapers built and used this technology – alongside an unfathomably powerful energy called The Anthem of Creation – to do, well, anything they wanted.

At some point the Shapers vanished, leaving the world unfinished in the process. Unfortunately for humanity, all this godlike technology was left in various states of functional and from time to time it comes to life and runs amok causing chaos – from monster summoning storms to extinction-levels cataclysms. Humanity now takes refuge behind the walls of Fort Tarsis – named for the legendary general Tarsis who commanded the Legion of Dawn – and only ventures outside the walls in custom crafted super-powered exosuits called Javelins to stop the cataclysms anytime one spins up. These javelin-clad pilots who venture beyond the safety of the walls are called Freelancers.

But after playing a lot of Anthem, we’ve learned a little more. For example, we know there are other cities, and probably whole other continents on the planet. The lush area, or country, or continent – or whatever you want to call it – that we’ve all seen so far is called Bastion. It’s the home of Fort Tarsis and where Anthem primarily takes place – from what we’ve seen so far. But it was once home to another major city, called Freemark.

Freemark was ancient and prosperous, but was attacked by the militaristic, black-clad faction of conquerors called the Dominion who came from the North. The Dominion, lead by a man named Doctor Hawkin, sought a powerful Shaper artifact that he believed they could use to control the Anthem of Creation. He was wrong, like most megalomaniacs tend to be. His tampering created a massive cataclysm destroying Freemark. After that day, the Dominion disappeared, along with Doctor Hawkin.

The doctor leading the Dominion in Anthem.

But like any good neighboring city-state would do, the Freelancers from Fort Tarsis took up the call, and sent multiple squads to the Freemark cataclysm – now called the Heart of Rage – in an effort to shut it down. Ultimately, they were overwhelmed by the storm and the massive Titans it spawned, and after suffering heavy losses, retreated in disgrace. Since that defeat, freelancers are no longer revered as heroes, and scrounge a living by taking mundane contracts around Bastion, trying to redeem themselves.

If you played the closed beta late last year, that last part should sound familiar to you because it’s essentially the opening of the game. And that’s where we the story of Anthem kicks off: the Dominion have mysteriously returned, and we’ve got to get the band back together to stop them and uncover the secrets of Bastion, and I suspect the plans of Doctor Hawkin and his smarmy face.

The Elder Game – Anthem’s End Game

The biggest question about Anthem is what you’ll be doing after you graduate from fresh-faced recruit and enter the endgame loop, which BioWare calls The Elder Game. Anthem’s Elder Game is a loop of customizing your character with the best gear and weapons you can find in order to start making crazy loadouts that allow you to push into the hardest content. The goal is to leverage better and better pieces of gear to increase your overall gear score and Javelin rarity and fine tune your tailor made loadouts so you’ll be able to blow through difficulty barriers and take on the hardest content on the hardest difficulty, to get even better gear, to create better loadout combinations, and so on.

There are multiple difficulty tiers in Anthem that you’ll select before taking on an expedition outside Fort Tarsis. This essentially allows you to set the risk and reward of any activity you do and from what we saw you can play all of Anthem’s content on any difficulty setting. The harder the difficulty you choose the higher the modifier climbs for seeing high-rarity equipment drops, but the more health enemies have and the more damage enemies do, so you can see the trade off.

When it comes to these difficulty settings, we’ll start with the base levels: a no-pressure Easy difficulty, the standard Normal difficulty, and of course, a Hard difficulty. Having played content on all three of the base difficulties, the breakdown seemed to work like this: you can probably solo most of the activities Easy if you know what you’re doing. On Normal, depending on what kind of content you’re taking on – Missions, Freeplay, Contracts, etc. – you’ll need to be mindful but it’s possible to get by on your own. On Hard difficulty you’ll need friends and tactics to clear most activities. That’s where you start.

There are six difficulties in Anthem, but Grandmaster 3 is your ultimate goal.

Once you hit the level cap of 30 and begin Anthem’s Elder Game, you’ll get access to a new tier of difficulties: Grandmaster 1, 2, and 3. Choosing to run content on these Grandmaster difficulties is your best chance at finding the best gear available, but the risk is intense. Grandmaster heavily enhances enemies, incrementally increasing their health and damage, up to a ridiculously daunting 3,100 percent on Grandmaster 3.

It’ll take a lot of work to build your team’s javelins to the point you can start tackling content on Grandmaster difficulty, requiring a fully kitted out squad of Javelins and preplanned loadouts that synergize with one another in order to get it done. In short, Grandmaster difficulties are the best of the best: the best rewards, and the best Anthem has to throw at you.

What does putting together a crazy endgame build look like? Well, each javelin – Ranger, Colossus, Storm, and Interceptor – has three gear slots, two weapon slots, and six component slots. Finding the right piece of gear for each slot helps you put together a build that works, which you then continue to modify with powerful up to six components. Components range from basic – increase your flight time or weapon damage – to specific enhancements for specific javelins and their abilities – like increasing the damage on one ability when you use another. Eventually you’ll fine tune it into a powerhouse after earning and crafting the right gear.

Gear in Anthem comes in six rarity varieties: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, Masterwork, and Legendary.

I spent the majority of my play time working on a Storm javelin, which you can learn more about by watching our IGN First Storm Javelin profile. To give you an example, I had earned dozens of pieces gear and components that let me start building a foundation for a powerful loadout. One Masterwork component I found called Token of the Master shortened my left ability cooldown by 60% when I scored a killing blow on an enemy’s weak point my right ability. That’s pretty handy by itself because it means my cooldown loop is shortened and it effectively increases my damage per second. But then I found a Masterwork component called Mark of Ruin that increased my right ability damage by 100% while my left ability is on cooldown for five seconds. You can start to see how this build can bloat in damage.

In combat I’d use my left ability – a heavily damaging ability with a long cooldown, for instance – which boosted the damage of my right ability for 5 seconds. In my right ability I’d go with something flexible, like a short cooldown fireball ability so it’s always ready to use in the event I trigger the buff. Then I kill an enemy with my right ability, activating the buff and shortening the cooldown on my left ability, and start the whole rotation over. Once I got enough practice I was easily doubling my damage output as long as I maintained this rotation. And that’s only using two of my possible six component slots, and relatively good (but not great) gear. The ceiling for truly crazy builds seems really high.

This whole chase to get the best gear is then further enhanced by randomly assigned special attributes to gear and weapons, which are called Infusions. The goal is to find or craft every piece of gear you want with the infusion you want in order to get the best version of your loadout possible. The progression loop struck me as perfect for you build doctors and theory crafters, and I anticipate a heavy community of discussions and YouTube videos about optimal builds for each javelin and each style of play.

Now that you know about difficulties and the gear chase, it’s time to quickly talk about activities and what you’ll want to do to meet your goals. Every activity in Anthem is designed to delivery on a different part of the power climb. For example, Freeplay is the best way to get materials to craft gear and weapons – javelin parts, embers, and natural materials in Bastion. You name it, you can find it all in Freeplay.

If you’re looking to just earn experience, taking on Missions and Legendary Contracts is the best way to do that and increase your overall Pilot level. And Strongholds – Anthem’s version of MMORPG dungeons (or Strikes, for the Destiny crowd) – are the best way to find high-rarity gear. If you’ve been following Anthem you’ve likely already seen one of them: the Tyrant Mine stronghold that pits you against a massive spider monster. But there are other Strongholds out there in Bastion, like The Temple of Scar, which BioWare will reveal more about in the near future.

Anthem’s Personalization

Now that you know what the gear chase looks like, let’s talk about what YOU will look like. Javelins in Anthem can be incredibly personalized. All the personalization is aesthetic, the way you look, as opposed to the customization, the different gear you find and equip, the way you play your javelin.

Personalizing your javelin is easy, and if I’m being honest, it’s easy to get sucked into it. We’ll all start with basic looking suits, but soon you’ll be able to change the color of each piece from a huge list of colors, or create custom colors if that’s your thing. In addition to colors, you’ll be able to set the textures as well. You want your armor to look soft and dull, hard and shiny, or maybe metallic? You can set the texture of each piece of gear: Helmet, Chest, Arms, and Legs, alongside the color, for a nearly endless amount of variety.

I turned a stock Interceptor into a pink Power Ranger just to see how it looked. My colleague did his best to recreate the Hulkbuster armor on his Colossus with mixed results in our limited time. And I spent way too much time turning my Storm into a gold-plated, iridescent eyesore – and I loved it. As someone that doesn’t really care how his character looks in games, the amount of minute detail you can go into turned the experience of handcrafting an outrageous look into something I wanted to perfect, and show off to others. There’s an artistry to it.

Which makes sense, because just when I thought we were getting the hang of it, a developer from BioWare stepped in to make some custom looks for our javelins. The personalized suits she came up with made anything we had already created look like shaky finger paintings.

But maybe you don’t care and just want to stick a vinyl decal on your javelin and call it good? Well you can do that too. You can even change the wear state of your armor to look beat up and busted if you want that lived in look. And if you eventually want to invest more, there are premium armor pieces that completely change the look of every armor slot for every javelin – which you can purchase through a combination of free and premium currency, but we’ll get into Anthem’s monetization in a minute.

By far my favorite aspect of personalization are the emotes and animations. Do they affect how well you play? No, not at all. But there are a ton to choose from and there are some really infectious emotes to be had.

I got used to my Storm exploding onto the scene with the default animation at the start of an expedition, but once I discovered the Space Baby animation, bought and equipped that, I don’t think I’ll ever take it off. He no longer burst onto the scene, but slowly floated into frame curled up in the fetal position like some kind of cosmic wizard infant. And I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of these hulking, badass suits suddenly drop all their intimidating techno presence and start hopping from one foot to the other with coordinated hip pops as they do the Cute Bounce emote. But the list is extensive and you can buy and equip whatever you want in your three available emote slots. But a word of advice: always bring the flare emote. Sure they’re useful to light up dark places, but flares are really best used when throwing them at your friends. Never leave home without a flare.

What a beautiful Space Baby.

Anthem’s Monetization

Getting back to Anthem’s monetization structure: Yes, there is a premium currency, called Shards, in addition to the free currency called Coin. But any premium currency you end up buying is only used on cosmetics like armor sets, emotes, decals, etc. And most of the purchasable cosmetics we saw required a combination of both Coin and Shards, though all of that was still being finalized when we saw it.

BioWare is really adamant that they don’t want to divide the player base by selling story content, so while there are huge post launch plans for Anthem, none of it will be tied behind a paywall. That means story and content expansions to the game, that means new missions and new strongholds, and that means the daily, weekly, or monthly content drops BioWare has planned: If you bought Anthem, you’ll get all that for free.

The one thing that isn’t strictly cosmetic BioWare mentioned might cost real money in the future are new Javelin suits. There weren’t any concrete plans in the works when we spoke with the developer, but in the future, if BioWare does decide to release more javelin suits you may have to buy premium currency to unlock them. But if you decide to buy a new javelin suit – if and when they’re available – they’ll just be another option of playstyle, not a requirement to experience the content.

Anthem’s Alliance System

In a cooperative game like Anthem working together with other players is an important part of the experience. But let’s face it, finding a group and playing with others isn’t everyone’s preference, though every activity in Anthem will include matchmaking to find you other players. To breakdown some of that natural resistance to playing with others, BioWare has created something called the Alliance system.

The Alliance system is a way of helping other players and allowing other players to help you without ever having to do anything. If you play any content with other players, or you have Anthem players on your friends list, all those people will automatically be added to your alliance.

At the end of a mission, you’ll tally up your personal experience and rewards, but you’ll also see a tally for alliance experience. That alliance experience builds over time, and is awarded to the other players in your alliance. The idea being the more you play, the more alliance experience you’ll give to other players, and the more Alliance experience other players can give to you.

The expedition completion screen showing your alliance experience tally.

At the end of the week, all that alliance experience you’ve accumulated from other players is converted to Coin that you can use. So every week, whether you care about playing with other or not, you’ll all be helping each other earn money, without ever having to send a request or message to other plays. It’s hands off, and there are no downsides. The more you play the more rewards you get, and the more you play, the more rewards you give to other players you’ve brushed up against out on in the world.

Anthem’s Characters and Their Faces

If there’s one thing BioWare has heard from fans of Mass Effect Andromeda, it’s that people care about faces. And so BioWare set out to make sure characters in Anthem look like believe humans with believe human faces. It might sound like a small thing, but since the majority of interaction with other characters takes place in first person, it’s kind of important to feel like you’re talking to a person.

From the many characters we spoke with we can happily say that Anthem’s faces and characters behave like real people. In one particular early scene with your friend Owen, you can get a real sense for his playful personality as he messes with another no-nonsense character, and his eagerness to be a freelancer pilot in his own right one day. While there might not be romance options in Anthem, there are relationships with characters to be made, and it’s important that the immersion of those relationships aren’t broken if a character’s eyeballs suddenly come bulging out of their head. From what we saw, every character in Anthem has believable personality and facial muscles to match.

Anthem’s Combo System

We’ve already spoken about the combo system in our earlier IGN First profiles of the Storm and Javelin interceptors, but since the system can be a little complicated, here’s a brief refresher.

In Anthem, your Javelin’s abilities are tied to the gear you wear, and those abilities come with elemental damage and effects: Fire, Ice, Lightning, Acid, you name it. But there are two classifications of abilities when it comes to performing combos: Primers and Detonators.

You can tell which is which by the little symbol on the ability. Primer abilities have the little flame icon and stack elemental effects on an enemy. Depending on how strong the gear is determines how much of the elemental effect is stacked with each hit. When you hit an enemy enough to fully stack it, the enemy becomes primed: so if you’re hitting something with ice shards the enemy becomes frozen, and is primed and ready to be detonated for a combo.

To detonate a primed target, you have to use a detonator ability or a melee strike. You can tell an ability is a detonator by the little explosion icon on it. It’s important to know what each of your abilities are, because if you’re playing solo and only bring detonators, you’re not going to be getting combos. Combos are good; we like combos.

But here’s the great part, anyone can detonate any enemy regardless of who primed it. So let’s say you’re running a Storm Javelin and you don’t have any good gear with primer abilities yet. That’s fine. Your Ranger or Interceptor friend with really good primer abilities can run around and set everything up, while knock them all dead.

To expound on combos just a little more, each Javelin has their own type of combo, meaning when they detonate an enemy, a special thing happens that only that Javelin can do:

The Ranger’s combo type is Impact: This deals very high damage to the combo target. This damage can be increased by certain items.

The Colossus’s combo type is Explosion: This deals damage to the combo target and all enemies in a wide area around it. This damage can be increased by certain items.

The Storm’s combo type is Chain: This deals damage to the combo target and causes the status that is active on that target to chain to a small number of other nearby targets. The number of additional chain targets can be increased by certain items.

The Interceptor’s combo type is Aura: This deals damage to the combo target and then adds a status aura to the interceptor that matches the status on the target. This aura moves with the interceptor, allowing it to apply the status to nearby targets.

So as you can see, it’ll take some time, but getting a good group together that knows what one another is capable of is an important part of being effective in the Elder Game.

We’ll continue to dive into BioWare’s latest game as part of our all month long as part of our IGN First. To stay up to date, be sure to check out the Anthem IGN First hub for all our coverage so far.

Brandin Tyrrel is IGN’s Xbox Editor and is going to surrender a sizable chunk of his life to Anthem this year. You can find him on Unlocked, or chat over on Twitter at @BrandinTyrrel.