BioWare have been pretty approachable in terms of fielding questions about Anthem from their fans online. Recently, Brenon Holmes took the time to answer a couple of fan questions on Reddit about whether certain features will be included in the game, namely support for satellite internet, and party chat.
According to Holmes, support for satellite internet will be a little complicated to incorporate. Latency is usually an issue where satellite internet is concerned, and pingbacks can take upwards of a second, which, obviously, is not ideal for an online focused game. “It’s hard to say definitively at this point,” Holmes said. “But generally speaking as you point out – latency is the big problem with satellite. Usually your total round trip time is upwards of a second, which is generally pretty bad for gaming. Sadly, I suspect you’ll have issues playing Anthem with that kind of latency.”
In a separate thread, the question was raised whether the PC version of Anthem will support party chat, zone chat, global chat, and guild chat like you’d see in a game such as World of Warcraft. Holmes confirmed that it’s looking unlikely that the feature will be included, citing added costs that complicate the implementation of such features. “The main challenge is that there are a bunch of additional accessibility options that we are required to implement,” he wrote. “This increases the cost of these sorts of features. As an example I’m pretty sure one of the things we need to support is TTS for any in game text based chat. This sort of thing unfortunately complicates what might normally be an easier feature… Right now we’re still figuring out what is feasible to do.”
Recently, plenty of other details on the game were also revealed, on all sorts of things, including its level cap, loot, whether or not there will be a New Game +, and more. You can read more on that here. Anthem launches on February 22 for the Xbox One, PS4, and PC.