Anthem

Mass Effect and Dragon Age developer BioWare has acknowledged the demand for further games in its two biggest series.

Another of BioWare's old-guard has left the building. This time it's James Ohlen, lead designer of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Neverwinter Nights and Dragon Age: Origins, and director of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Ohlen leaves BioWare after a staggering 22 years.

Anthem's return at E3 2018 was just as spectacular as its debut a year earlier, and last week, Electronic Arts posted a full 20-minute gameplay video of the latest demo - with developer commentary, no less. Presented in full 4K, the firm shared a source quality version of the asset with us, allowing us to take a closer look at the game's Frostbite foundations, and compared to other EA titles using the tech, we're witnessing a use of the engine quite unlike anything else we've seen before. Developer BioWare isn't talking about performance targets, but the sheer intensity in detail, and the integrity of the open world suggests that this will likely be a 30fps game on consoles - and an interesting counterpoint to the 60fps heroics of Battlefront and Battlefield.

BioWare's ambitious Anthem was the highlight of EA's E3 2018 press conference - although that was hardly a tough bar to clear. We gained our best look yet at BioWare's shared world full of jetpacking players in mechs, angry monsters and mysterious god energy - but some BioWare fans watching felt like the gameplay shown did not align with their own, personal expectations of what a BioWare game should be.

Anthem was EA's biggest reveal at E3 this year - its most unknown quantity, and fittingly the longest focus of today's press conference. But, despite an on-stage chat with BioWare staff and a decent montage of gameplay, I couldn't help feeling like I left the conference with more questions than answers.

Perhaps in recognition of this, executive producer Mark Darrah has been fielding some of the many questions from BioWare fans over on his Twitter account following the press conference - we've rounded up some of the most important points below.

We're chatting with BioWare about Anthem ourselves tomorrow - so if you have questions you'd like answered, leave them in the comments section and I'll be sure to read them.

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EA BioWare has announced Anthem will be released 22nd February 2019 on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

BioWare also committed to no loot boxes in Anthem (a running theme throughout the EA E3 2018 conference). Anthem executive producer Mark Darrah said: "We are going to have some cosmetics and vanity items that you'll be able to purchase but you're always going to know what you're gonna buy before you spend any money on it, so no loot boxes, no ability to pay for power. So that means no ability to spend money on gameplay advantage at all in Anthem."

BioWare has separately told GameInformer there will be no romances - a staple feature of BioWare's role-playing games - in Anthem. "There are no romances," lead producer Mike Gamble said. "There are friendships. Some of the stuff we did with Mass Effect - the Citadel DLC specifically - there was a lot of friendship moments. You and Garrus sitting up, shooting - that kind of stuff, we want to lean into that. The romantic stuff, we're moving away from that for Anthem."

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E3 is here! And EA's kicking things off nice and early this year with its EA Play event, which is live from 7pm BST. What to expect? Well, you kind of know that already - there'll be Anthem, Battlefield 5 and FIFA, the token indie game announce to try and convince everyone EA's not totally evil and maybe a surprise or two. Maybe. Join us to watch it all unfurl tonight!

EA has teased three whole seconds of new Anthem footage ahead of E3 this month, plus told us what to expect from BioWare's big new multiplayer game at the show.

EA has committed to a March 2019 release for BioWare's Anthem.

Influential BioWare writer Drew Karpyshyn has left BioWare for a second time. He's leaving to pursue personal projects and to work with 21st Century Fox's expanding gaming division FoxNext, and new studio Fogbank Entertainment.

BioWare's Anthem will now launch in spring 2019, EA has said, confirming recent reports of a delay.

Except it's not a delay, EA boss Andrew Wilson explained to company investors in a call last night (transcribed by Seeking Alpha). The game was progressing "well", but was being given "some free air".

"The first thing about Anthem is regardless of kind of how it's being portrayed, we are not looking at that as a delay in the game," Wilson said. "We've chosen to launch Anthem in Q4 and the date is really determined by portfolio of balancing consideration not for product readiness reasons. It's tracking well on its development milestones. We are really confident of its ship date."

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Anthem, BioWare's ambitious multiplayer role-playing game, will now launch the other side of this Christmas.

One of BioWare's lead designers, Corey Gaspur, has passed away.

BioWare has just released its latest promotional video for Anthem, and it's amaizeingly kooky.

BioWare's general manager Aaryn Flynn is leaving the acclaimed RPG studio after 17 years with the company.

His departure comes roughly four months after the launch of Mass Effect Andromeda, a game that debuted to lackluster sales and disappointing critical reception. Our Edwin Evans-Thirlwell called it "probably BioWare's worst RPG yet" in his review, and the tepid reaction to the game has put the sci-fi series "on ice".

Interestingly, Flynn's role will be replaced by the Mass Effect series' project director Casey Hudson, who left the company back in 2014 and accepted a position as project director at Microsoft Studios the following year, where he was to work on HoloLens projects.

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UPDATE 4/7/17 8.50am: Sony has now removed the Anthem trailer uploaded to its PlayStation YouTube channel which featured Photoshopped Xbox One X buttons.

BioWare's new IP, Anthem is set to be "science fantasy" more like Star Wars rather than "hardcore science fiction" like Mass Effect, boss Aaryn Flynn has revealed. In an interview with CBC, Flynn spoke about how the game compares to the company's previous work.

EA has said BioWare's ambitious and visually impressive new IP Anthem will be the "the start of maybe a 10-year journey for us" - echoing the decade-long publishing deal Activision signed with Bungie for thematically similar series Destiny.

As a 'one more thing' closing zinger for the Microsoft E3 2017 media briefing, the reveal of BioWare's Anthem is hard to beat. A highly polished six-minute gameplay demo - or 'vertical slice' - the code is said to be running on Xbox One X hardware and it looks simply incredible. But from The Witcher 3 to Watch Dogs 2 and Destiny, we've been burnt before by preview teasers that exhibited noticeable downgrades when final code eventually hits stores. Armed with a pristine 4K capture of the trailer direct from Microsoft's on-site media riser, we set out to answer the question - is this the real deal?

The Xbox One X is going to be a beast. Amazing specs. Amazing look. Amazing tech chatter, a lot of which went over my head. It's built around power, compatibility, and craftsmanship, according to Kareem Choudhry, Xbox Director of Software Engineering, on stage at Microsoft's E3 press briefing, and somehow, it's a magic trick too, because it fits in the smallest box - the smallest Xbox - Microsoft has ever offered. Just look at how powerfully dinky this thing is, like an elephant squeezed into a service elevator. A controller leans insouciantly against one edge of it, and that insouciant controller pretty much towers over the machine. True 4K textures! True 4K assets! Enhanced visual fidelity, isotropic filtering and faster load times on the games you already own! Enough of this blather. Kareem is a man in a hurry. Let's see, he says, what this monster can do.

Microsoft closed its Xbox E3 2017 conference with an extended look at Anthem, BioWare's new shared-world action-role-playing game. It launches autumn 2018 on PC, PS4 and Xbox One.

The gameplay looked incredibly impressive, showcasing a vast open-world where you and a team of up to four friends can explore dense jungles and wildernesses, boosting around by jetpack or mech-enhanced-running. The ruins and treasures of a sci-fi world are there for you to find, but so are big beasties and baddies.

There wasn't much of a hint to Anthem's story, but we saw the player character heading out in their exo-suit, named Javelins, which we were told come in various models for different play-styles.

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BioWare has finally shown off its new IP, named Anthem.

A 45-second teaser showed sci-fi planet similar to that of Avatar, and humans fighting in mechanised suits. A huge wall divides civilisation from the wilderness.

This is the project which has been in the works for years at BioWare's main studio in Edmonton, while satellite team Montreal worked on Mass Effect Andromeda.

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