Thanks to a report from Kotaku, we’re learning a lot about how the development process on Anthem went.
The process was rather long and iterative, to the point that the game wasn’t even a loot shooter initially, but an online survival title called Beyond.
The name was changed a few days before the E3 2017 reveal because EA wasn’t able to obtain rights on the trademark for it.
So, the original intent never was to create a game where you’d be required to grind missions to level up and obtain more powerful weapons, perhaps it was even the opposite to that.
“The idea was going to be that there were all these levers that could be pulled internally so there’d be different events happening at all times. You’d be out somewhere, and an electrical storm would happen at random, and you had to survive it.
We had an early demonstration of this where the environment was dynamic and by pulling levers we could change it from summer to winter to fall. You’d see the snow hitting the ground, hitting the trees…”
Anyway, another interesting focus is the E3 2017 demo that officially revealed the game.
An anonymous developer said it was largely “fake,” as it often happens with titles that get revealed at E3, but that time BioWare promised stuff it kind of knew it wasn’t going to be able to introduce into the final product.
This explains why people have found so many differences between the E3 2017 demo and the game that was ultimately released in early 2019.
“After E3, that’s when it really felt like, ‘Okay, this is the game we’re making,’. But it still felt like it took a while to get the entire team up to speed. It was also kind of tricky because there were still a lot of question marks. The demo was not actually built properly—a lot of it was fake, like most E3 demos.
There was a lot of stuff that was like, ‘Oh are we actually doing this? Do we have the tech for that, do we have the tools for that? To what end can you fly? How big should the world be?’”
