Bioware’s Anthem was a big hit at this year’s E3. After the firm statement that there will be no romances and companions in the game, now things start to sound differently after Casey Hudson’s newest statements.
A couple of days ago the Bioware general manager Casey Hudson made many fans smile by announcing that “relationships are in the cards”. On EA Play and the following days during E3, the devs were telling everyone that they want Anthem to remain focused on the crazy action and the attention to fall down on what’s happening to this constantly changing world, left ravished and in chaos by the Gods.
At first it was clearly stated that companions will not be a thing. Instead this role will be picked up by your real-life friends and/or random people, who you meet and group up for the co-op missions in the shared world outside Fort Tarsis.
In an interview Casey Hudson told VentureBeat the following:
I think the expectations from a BioWare game—Mass Effect and Dragon Age, they’re quite mature-rated storylines, things like that. That was one framework for what romances were in a BioWare game. So then the question is, are there going to be romances in Anthem? We’ve been saying no, but—the nuance is, of course we do want relationships. It’s just more in an action genre of storytelling.
What can we gather from his words here is that the romantic relationships are probably something the studio desires to offer to us, the gamers. Why are romances not in Anthem now? Most likely because of the timing. In the past year or so we’ve been hearing all sorts of troubling news from Bioware how Anthem is in trouble, developers are leaving the studio, new ones are being hired. The game’s originally planned launch was even set for Winter of 2018, but then later pushed back to Beginning of 2019. Now we know the official date – Anthem releases on 22nd of February 2019.
And more on the topic later:
You might remember, with Mass Effect, Garrus was an alien that, as we developed the story—he was a kind of birdlike concept art that we eventually pulled together and shipped that game. But we didn’t know what he would really be like and what the reaction would be. It turned out that people loved Garrus so much that they wanted romances with him, so we built that into Mass Effect 2 and people loved it. That same opportunity exists here. If people really like a character and they want to spend more time with them, want a relationship with them, that’s definitely in the cards for the future.
If you haven’t been following my Anthem coverage, let me remind you that this game will be a live service with regular updates past its launch. Or so the studio says. This also means (and has been confirmed by Mark Darrah) that the game will not be playable offline. You will need to be connected to a server all the time.
Even if relationships make it into a future update, we still don’t know how would they fit the idea of not having these “companions” out in the shared world with you. Limiting your interactions with them to the confined space of your own base sounds a little… hmmm… unpleasant?!
What do you think? Do you want romances and would you be happy if they are indeed only available when you are in your own private base?
If you have missed it, here is the full video archive of Bioware’s EA Play presentation.
