BioWare’s Brenon Holmes has been quite active over on Reddit for the past few weeks and months in terms of interacting with the community and answering questions about the upcoming Anthem. That was the case once again recently, and Holmes ended up answering some interesting questions about plenty of things.
In one particular thread, one fan mentioned how previously with multiplayer in games (such as Mass Effect 3), BioWare made several server changes to make hotfixes for things such as weapons balancing and enemy spawns, and asked whether that would also be the case with Anthem, or if that would be done with more traditional patches. Holmes didn’t give a lot of details, though he did mention how “most people are probably more interested in ‘what’ vs ‘how'”, before going on to talk about how developers Riot handle such issues for League of Legends.
“For sure, I think we still need to get a good handle on all the different ways that we want to communicate with you folks,” Holmes said. “Personally, I really like how Riot handles some of their communication around gameplay changes – specifically Meddler’s ‘quick gameplay thoughts’. It provides a lot of insight into what they’re thinking about and gives the fans an excellent opportunity to contribute to a focused discussion.”
In a separate thread, a fan suggested having evolving gear in the game in an attempt to make duplicate gear drops more meaningful for the player. Holmes said, “Philosophically, we want all the items you get to have some kind of value. While we still can’t really speak too much to specifics quite yet (sorry!), I’d be interested in what other kinds of mechanics you guys find interesting from other games!” When a fan suggested having something similar to what Monster Hunter World did, Holmes responded, “Yep, there was a bunch of Monster Hunter for a while… I’m not sure who is still playing at this point.”
In yet another thread, there was a question of whether Anthem would make use of NVidia’s Ray Tracing tech (which mostly makes significant improvements to in-game lighting, among other things). Holmes said that the amount of work it would take would be unaffordable, especially given the fact that it would only work for very high-end PCs. When we was asked if such a technology would become possible and more common within the next two or three console generations, Holmes said, “I’m not really a graphics guy, so I’m not really sure. Two generations from now would be like 10+ years though… which is a really long time when it comes to hardware. So if not this, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some other super fancy technique in this space.”
Anthem is due out for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC early next year. Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more coverage on the game.