Anthem looks so different from anything we’ve ever seen from BioWare. It’s a shared world online experience, and it’s not necessarily an RPG in vein of games that we’ve seen from the studio throughout their long history. While that’s cause for concern for a lot of people, I personally am cautiously optimistic about the game. According to BioWare, the game is going to be a blend of several genres, from shooters and action adventures to RPGs.
Recently, in an interview with CBC Radio, BioWare general manager Aaron Flynn was asked about what specific genre the game belongs to, and he responded by saying that it’s a mix of several genres, and it’s like nothing BioWare have ever done before. “So the mechanics are, there are shooting mechanics in it, it’s an action game, it’s a roleplaying game, it’s got a lot of those elements to it that let you just become a character and participate in this,” he said. “It’s co-operative, so it’s our first game in a long time that you’re going to play with your friends, natively, all through the whole experience. And that makes it a lot more fun nowadays, there are a lot of players out there who really want to play with their friends, so we’ll hopefully give them that.”
Sounds interesting. BioWare have historically been known for being developers of premium RPGs, though they have veered into action-shooter territory in recent years with the Mass Effect games, progressively so with each new entries. It’ll be interesting to see how they find that balance with Anthem when it launches next year for the Xbox One, PS4 and PC.