BioWare hosted a developer live stream on February 20 to talk about the Day 1 Patch (now live) for Anthem as well as give us a sneak peek at upcoming new content and features: Vanity Stronghold Chests and Legendary Missions. We also got an explanation why is the Roadmap so short and why they can’t talk long-term upcoming content. Let’s dive into it!
BioWare’s now regular Anthem live streams have become a great way for the team to present new ideas, discuss upcoming content and give us a general preview of what they plan for Anthem in the near future.And speaking of the future of Anthem… have you ever wondered why the Post-Launch Roadmap is so short? Three Acts in 2019 and only vague details on Act I? BioWare is under the hood of EA, which is a public company. Some legal and organizational factors play here, which limits the game studio from being completely open. As executive producer Mark Darrah clearly stated on the stream – if it was up to them, they would disclose a lot more of their own plans and what they are working on compared to what they currently do: “If it was entirely up to us, we would provide more detail than we are currently providing. But it’s not. There are government organizations that determine what we can say.”. He also added “Our goal is to share as much as we can as quickly as we can and we are continuously working to make sure we can provide more.”
This has been discussed before and you might remember a post from me here on VULKK.com talking about how both DICE and BioWare Austin are not allowed to talk about long-term plans for the Star Wars: Battlefront 2 and Star Wars: The Old Republic games.
For an upcoming update some time in the “next few weeks”, BioWare is working to bring two big new features to Anthem – Vanity Stronghold Chests and Legendary Crit Path Missions. Both of these are a mix of player’s wishes and internal planning.
What are the Stronghold Vanity Chests?
Anthem is a looter-shooter game and as such it needs to offer a wide variety of customization on both fronts – Loadouts and Appearances. Given the fact that the game is just about to launch (a few hours from this post’s publication), there isn’t a huge amount of items in any of the two category yet. BioWare promises a long-term live service for it and is determined to prove they are hard at work to deliver! The Vanity Store just got its first refresh yesterday, despite the previous announcement that the next fresh batch will arrive next Tuesday.
Strongholds are the bread and butter of Anthem’s End-Game. BioWare qualifies this at the top of the ladder in terms of challenging content. The exact order was clarified on the stream as well. Here’s how it looks from the easiest to the hardest (and most rewarding):
Freeplay ► Contracts ► Legendary Contracts ► Legendary Missions ► Strongholds
The Vanity Chests that will be added to the Strongholds are a way for us, as players, to have yet another incentive to go farm the **** out of them. At the end of the run there will be four Vanity Chests. To unlock them, you will need keys. Those are rewarded for completing your Daily Challenges. You can earn one key per day. The best part is that each player can use their key to unlock one chest and the loot will be shared. BioWare believes this inspires social contacts between players at the end of a successful Stronghold run.
In the future there will likely be additional ways for you to earn Keys. One that comes to mind would be the Vanity Store, of course.
The Vanity Stronghold Chest will contain a hundred vanity items in its catalog. When you open it, you may not always see only vanity items, however. Ember (crafting material) and other items might occupy a certain amount of the five slots inside the chest.
Once you get a vanity item (which may be armor, vinyl, material, emote and so on) it will be unlocked in your collection and you will not get it a second time from the Vanity Stronghold Chest. This improves the chances of collecting all items from the chest’s collection. After a while a second Vanity Chest might be added with another 100 items in its pool for you to never feel like you are not getting enough out of your Stronghold farming runs.
To collect all items from the chest’s catalog, you would still need to run a lot of Strongholds, that is an undeniable fact. However, the items you will earn are of high quality. Producer Ben Irving confirmed that Epic tier items will be available in the Vanity Chests as well, not just common and uncommon.
The Legendary Missions are in some way BioWare’s NG+ mode for Anthem. These will be tuned up for max level players missions from the main story of Anthem. If you have ever wanted to be able to replay a certain Crit Path mission with a different Javelin and see how different the experience would be, this is the perfect tool for you.
Of course, starting a new pilot can also be seen as a form of a New Game Plus mode. You get to keep a lot of the items you have earned in your previous run, including all four Javelin exosuits and the vanity items you have earned, purchased or unlocked. The Legendary Missions are designed to challenge the end-game players and also reward them appropriately.
At first we will likely see a handful of the main missions, starting from the first one – Lost Arcanist. If we as a community approve and enjoy them, then other missions will also be converted later in future updates.
The biggest difference between the standard and Legendary Missions are not just the scaled up mobs. Different encounters, more creatures to defeat and with greater variety – all of these will create a much more challenging experience compared to the first time we have completed them as part of the story. The Legendary Missions will still offer all six difficulties.
The Stream also talked about some of the fixes included in the Day One Update (1.0.2). It is now live. If you haven’t seen it in your client yet, simply log out of the game and you will see an update available. It’s about 5 GB in size.
Head of live service at BioWare Chad Robertson announced that next week we will learn more details about the upcoming updates part of Act I. Stay tuned! Don’t forget to sign up for new posts notifications and don’t miss any updates!
Last, but not least – Anthem launches officially worldwide tonight – Midnight between February 21st and 22nd. The game will become available to all players, who purchased the Standard or Legion of Dawn edition of the game and did not have Early Access (which required an active subscription to Origin Access or Origin Premiere). It is midnight your local time, so naturally some would get to play it earlier than others.
These are the highlights of the Anthem Develer Pre-Launch Live Stream. If you want to catch up the full event, you can watch the archived video below.
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