Anthem Will Be Start of 10 Year Journey, Bioware Challenged to Maintain Fidelity

Bioware’s Anthem is the hot new property thanks to a strong showing at E3 and it doesn’t hurt that Patrick Söderlund, Executive VP of EA Worldwide Studios, said that the game was running in real-time on Xbox One X.

Speaking to Microsoft’s Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb during the Xbox Daily Live Show at E3, Söderlund described Anthem as the start of a long journey for EA. “It’s a social game where you and your friends go on quests and journeys. It’s a game that we’ve been working on for almost four years now, and once we launch it next year I think it’ll be the start of a ten-year journey for us.”

He further told Bioware to create a large shared world game without sacrificing any visual fidelity. “I pushed the team and told them that a lot of these open world, shared world games sacrifice visual fidelity because it’s a technical problem. But I challenged them and said, ‘Let’s thinking about this in a way that we don’t have to sacrifice fidelity and we can basically get to the same level of fidelity or higher as you would in a secluded map, but in an open world map.

“It took time to get that done but, you know, with some smart investments in technologies, some smart design from our art team, we got there. I would firmly say that I haven’t seen any open world that looks as good as this, ever, which is kind of what we wanted.

“I’m happy that we can finally show Anthem to the world. It’s an important game for Bioware, it’s an important game for EA as a company, it’s an important game for me personally since I’m invested in this, it’s what motivates me to stay in this industry and push as hard as I can forward.”

Anthem is currently slated to release in Fall 2018 for Xbox One, PS4 and PC.