Anthem Will Have One Masterwork For Each Gear Type, Goal Is To Find ‘Right Balance’

While BioWare games have most often been associated with story-driven campaigns, Anthem is a very different beast- as a live shared world GaaS title, players will have other expectations out of it, in the form of ongoing events, quests, raids, and much more. But while we know from what BioWare have said that the game is going to have plenty of content, we don’t know what that content’s focus will be, and how it will seek to find the balance between those two aspects.

Recently, while responding to fans on a Reddit thread, lead producer Ben Irvo said that BioWare’s goal with the content included in Anthem is to find that very balance, and that that is something that they will discover more and more once the game launches and the developer sees what its community is responding to more.

“People are motivated by different things – loot, vanity, content, social experiences, challenge, exploration, story, etc (in no particular order),” Irvo wrote. “There is normally overlap between the motivations for a given player. Our goal is to find the right balance for Anthem. Part of that will be discovered once people start playing the game and we see how OUR players play it.”

Meanwhile, while commenting in a separate thread, Irvo also confirmed that at launch, each gear type in Anthem will come with one masterwork with one special property, with all of them having four random inscriptions. 

“At launch there is one masterwork for each gear type with one special property (e.g. burst mortar has one masterwork property available that is on all masterwork burst mortars),” said Irvo. “The 4 inscriptions will be random so in that sense there are many different masterwork burst mortars to collect but the core functionality of them all is the same.”

“We will expand of this post launch,” he added.

We’ll get to test out all of this and more when Anthem’s demo goes live later this month for VIP players, and then a week later for everyone else. Anthem itself, meanwhile, launches on February 22 for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC.