What’s ahead for Anthem? BioWare rolls out 90-day road map

By Aaron Mamiit Published February 24, 2019

Anthem is not off to a great start, but BioWare hopes to encourage players to stick around by rolling out the first 90-day road map for the futuristic shared-world shooter.

The next 90 days until May make up Anthem‘s first “Act” named Echoes of Reality, which is the end-game content for players who have already finished the campaign missions. BioWare said that there will be recurring updates, including quality of life fixes and improvements; weekly Alliance Coin rewards; daily, weekly, and monthly challenges; and new cosmetics through Prospero Store refreshes.

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February will see the addition of three new Freeplay events, with four more to be introduced in March alongside Legendary missions, new cosmetics, and new item rewards. Anthem accelerates in April, with the arrival of guilds, a Mastery system for character progression, and a new Stronghold named The Sunken, in addition to seven new Freeplay events and more Legendary missions.

May will then bring something called the Cataclysm to Anthem, which entails a new Freeplay event, new missions, and new items. Nothing else was revealed about the event, though BioWare will likely talk more about it as the weeks progress.

A significant percentage of the items in the 90-day road map are marked “Cortex Locked,” which basically means that they are hidden to prevent spoilers on the game’s lore. There are also placeholders for the unnamed Act 2 and Act 3.

The pair of demo weekends before its launch raised concerns for the hyped-up game, and while the world and story that BioWare created has lived up to expectations, our Anthem review points out glaring issues such as plot points being separated by hours of grinding.

In a blog post, BioWare’s Head of Live Service Chad Robertson acknowledged that there are many points of improvement for Anthem.

“Coming off our Early Access period, we understand that we have lots of work ahead of us to continue to improve the game,” Robertson wrote. “Anthem‘s launch represents a commitment we’re making to you: we’re just getting started.”

The 90-day road map for Echoes of Reality shows BioWare’s commitment to making further improvements to Anthem. The question now is whether players will stay as Freelancers, or if they will jump ship before seeing what the first Act has in store.

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Digital Trends: Nightingale is much different than anything you worked on at BioWare. What are some of the biggest lessons you took from BioWare for this game?
Arynn Flynn: One of the things we made sure we did, having learned some things at BioWare, was that around the topic of worldbuilding. We created a world of our own creation, full of interesting characters and relatable elements. That's why we chose a contemporary fantasy setting. When you do something more like high fantasy or sci-fi, you have to establish the rules of that universe more fully, so players understand them. With contemporary fantasy, we get more relatability from the get-go, and from there, we can layer on great worldbuilding, interesting characters, and stories to engage with.
What are the biggest challenges you've encountered switching from creating traditional RPGs to a survival game?
We've definitely learned a lot and are still learning. One of the most important elements in a survival game, in my mind, is player autonomy. Players get to go where they want to go and do what they want to do while engaging with the building and crafting. We need to make sure the player always feels like they always have options and have something to do is fundamental to the experience.
When you think about it, great role-playing games also offer choice, right? And so we're trying to adjust a lot of the lessons we learned about giving players meaningful choices but put it closer to the gameplay and things that are important to survival crafting players. It's been an interesting challenge for us, but hopefully, players will really appreciate what we did.
How has the recent success of games like Valheim and V Rising influenced the development of Nightingale?
The success of Valheim and V Rising is very encouraging and is really great for those wonderful teams and inspiring for our developers. Unlike Valheim, which has the rich Nordic lore to draw upon, and V Rising, where pretty much everyone knows what vampires are, we have to establish a lot more background information so players can appreciate the Victorian gaslamp setting.
That's why we chose alternate history, where a lot of our world's history is present, but we added in the complications of magic and the Fae. That ultimately become the fun of worldbuilding again.

Could you explain the Realm Card system that lets players create realms to explore in more detail?
Realm cards are a way we give players more agency in their experience. We procedurally generate Nightingale's realms, so all of the realms you see in our trailers were created by our software stack after our environment artists worked hard to create the components of it. The Realm Cards allow players to manipulate, control, and change those things from a huge pallet of options. It lets players choose things like what biome they're going to go to, whether it's daytime or nighttime, what weather challenges there are, and what bonuses or buffs there might be.
When you open a portal and go through it, what's on the other side is reflective of what you played with the Realm Cards. It's also very social because if we were playing together, you could put a card down, I could put a card down, and they will be mixed together. So it encourages cooperative play and becomes the way we offer more agency to our players.
So, does that make it a survival game where you're supposed to be constantly moving, or can players settle down and build if they want to?
We definitely want you to settle down so you don't have to move your estate. I think a lot of players will want to do that and keep growing it. One thing players can do is go through realms and bring back resources to continue building their estate. Or, you can leave your estate behind to build another one in a new realm with some friends. Both options are available to you.