So, if Anthem is Always On-Line...

I do think the game will always be online. That being said, the quality of that experience is entirely dependent on what kind of server structure Anthem has. In the case of an MMO, like SWTOR, they have various sever centers localized for certain parts of the world. No idea what Anthem's plan is, but server stability would be far more important for a twitch-based 3rd person shooter, than a key-based PC MMORPG.

As far as friends lists, voice chat, etc., that will all depend on which platform you play Anthem on. For consoles, I assume a lot of those features are already built in due to the nature of Xbox LIVE and PSN. PC is a bit more free form and open, so there are multiple possibilities there.

You mean P2P for matchmaking and some sort of transaction server for the item stuff? Elite Dangerous has that I think. Plus maybe one or a couple more to deliver world states / missions and whatnot.

Yep or pre-order, how the hell do they except us to believe that they can handle this and make sure it works on day 1? When all they've done is the simplest mp you could do; which is horde mode.  

Considering how single player gameplay is supposed to be "extremely important" to Bioware and Anthem, it shouldn't be always online. Diablo 3 preached about how it's always online on the PC was preventing cheating and hackers and they still got hammered over it (and yet sold extremely well.) I definitely don't see a justification with Bioware for forcing gamers to always be online for single player gameplay in Anthem.

There is actually some merit to the anti-cheating thing, even if the way it's used by the suits is stupid.

The thing is that in a game like Anthem if there is an offline mode supported then either you need to make it a single-player only character or you get the problem that happened in Diablo 2's open battle.net which is that almost everybody cheated because there was no server side of things to stop you.

Of course they'll pull the always online shit in something like Sim City, which was completely stupid(and actually a lie anyway). There's also that if you do value both SP and MP you can do what Diablo 2 did with the closed battle.net where you had to be always on Blizzard's battle.net servers to play those characters with the anti-cheat measures in place(which we would get around at one point anyway, but that's another story).

There's also the question as to just how important they're going to consider single-player. Thus far all they've really said is that the game will will be "solo player friendly", but we have no idea as to what extent that means.