Anthem: Developer Questions

I was curious whether Anthem will have any downtime/non-combat activities.

It can be a nice break to have mini-games or other things to do that don't involve explosive mortar rounds.

I have one! (perhaps is a spoiler, but wth!)

Is there going to be uhm... "Behemonth" Enemies? (ex. The architects in MEA)

Cheers!

What would you say the main influences/inspirations for Anthem are in terms of visual design?

Also (unrelated): How are multiplayer and singleplayer segregated, if they are at all? Are there separate missions/storylines for each, or is everything just built with the assumption of 1-4 players?

At the moment i have 3 question:

• What the hell IS anthem?is something akin destiny/the division/warframe etc.? or is something more mmoish with let's say a crafting/gathering system?
  
• How many javelin type will be at launch for each category (light,medium,heavy)?
  
• there will be various level of rarity for the javelins?common,uncommon,rare,epic etc?

From my 11 yo BioWare fan:

Can I swim and fly?

Have you seen penguins swim (i.e. dive)?

OK, here goes:

What is fun?

That's a conversation with Praxley (that plot has changed significantly since then). It's a "gold" quality one which uses full performance capture technology... real actors act out the scenes as their motions are captured. We also capture facial animation as well... though I'm less clear on how or when we do that (might be part of the same session?).

There's a lot of pretty crazy technology involved in capturing actor performances, whenever I go and see what those guys are up to it's always very interesting!

Interesting, thanks. 

I remember Mike Laidlaw discussing the 'conversation types', for example, the (let's call them) 'Bronze' quality conversations (in DAI) where you would essentially see a static conversation (the classic example of one of these would be '10 Ram Meat').



I seem to recall a slight 'zoom' was incorporated later in patching, and MEA developed this further.

As Mike pointed out at the time, you needed a 'basic' conversation format or it would not be possible to animate all those conversations in an open world.

But the 'gold' quality ones look great. 

It also regressed it. In DA:I the only upside to the "bronze"-type conversations was being able to quit at any time, and I think Mike stressed this as well, which is actually a nice feature. If they had made the characters move around and emote more I might've accepted this as a better solution than the cinedesign conversations seen in their previous games before Mass Effect primarily, but while Andromeda zoomed in better to emphasise the expression of the NPC you are talking to, it did not allow you to exit the conversation at a button press or move or reposition until your next dialogue choice, and similarly there were none of those excellent in-movement conversations that would be triggered with R3 in Inquisition.

Overall there's still ways to go if they do this either in Anthem or DA4 again. I think they should stick to cinedesign whenever they can and don't add in an overabundance of side-dialogue when it isn't feasible in their budget to make so many handkeyed conversations (which is the entire reason for the bronze convos I think) but they absolutely should explore the "Press R3 to bring up the dialogue wheel" during gameplay responses. Those were great and there were too few of them in Inquisition.

Besides all that, this was where the Witcher 3 comparisons were key. It proved Mike wrong in saying it's not possible to make handkeyed conversations in open-world, and even Andromeda proved him wrong because it did it. It could've been a last-gen limitation though and BioWare not always being experts at optimization of memory. Recall that ME3 didn't allow holstering specifically because PS3 had less memory than other hardware and they actually had to seperate exploration and combat mechanics with loading screens, primarily seen in the Jacob Ex-Cerberus scientists mission. With efficient coding they can go Witcher 3 style if need be, however, I doubt Anthem will do so as it's more about getting a quest and going on a hunt with friends I think.

The problem there is simply writing too much uninteractive dialogue and having it basically play in the background while the player is focused on moving around and doing whatever in the game-world. BioWare's gotten really bad at this since around ME3 by constantling upping the total dialogue count beyond reason.