Anthem Twitter Thread

Gilbert: Without getting into specifics/spoilers, what are you most excited for people to finally see?

Gamble: It's challenging, because the demo was a little cross-section of the game. Unless you're going to give the beginning of the game to introduce players — which has its own problem of spoiling the beginning of the game — you have to dump players right in the middle without any context. They don't really know why they're doing what they're doing. So the whole idea behind the demo was to give players a tease of the gameplay.

Okay, so now everyone has a good sense of how the game plays. But what they don't have a sense of is how we grow the narrative and grow the story and immerse you in this world. Basically, we bring you along for this journey with us.

And then of course, you have the amazing gameplay to go with it. That's what I'm most looking forward to seeing: The people who can play the game from the very beginning, they can learn about the characters, they can get to know the world a lot more, and get sucked into the lore and context and everything that goes with it. Because you don't have a chance to do that unless you play the full game.

Gilbert: Something that really stands out in "Anthem" to me is Fort Tarsis and the idea of cities or settlements. Is Fort Tarsis the only one? Can more be added?

Gamble: Oh yeah, absolutely!

Part of the whole conceit of why we're doing this is to both build on the gameplay and the "looter/shooter" mechanics stuff in "Anthem" in a live service, but it's also to continue the story. It's to continue the narrative of the critical path, to tell new stories, to add new characters, to potentially add new areas in Fort Tarsis or new areas altogether to go to.

And back to my earlier response about what I'm excited for players to see, when you get a sense of the world and you get a sense of the scale and that Fort Tarsis is just one place ... you get a sense of the overall history and context. Your mind starts to go to, "I really wonder what the capital of this other province is," and "I really wonder what the northernmost fort closest to the Dominion is up against."

That allows us to seed the ground and pay some stuff off later, but also it allows us to look at what the community is really into and see where they want to go next, and what they want to do. So we can tailor some of the live service towards that stuff.

Gilbert: There was a mixed response to the demo of "Anthem," and I'm interested in how BioWare processes all that data.

Gamble: We have teams of people combing through forums and videos and responses and all that stuff. They're doing one of two things: They're getting qualitative feedback like, "I wish this could be better, or that could be better," or "I'd like this," "do more of this." And then we have the people who are looking into the bugs, and filing the bugs, and making sure that the bugs get sorted out. So there's a few things.

In looking and editing all the data together, the demo was pretty successful for us on a couple things. One: The people who played the demo, more often than not, nearly universally, liked what they played. The bugs got in the way in a big way. And I think when you see the mixed sentiment coming out of people, it was usually, "Hey this game has legs, the foundation, the core, moment-to-moment gameplay feels solid, but I'm concerned about the bugs." So we got that a lot.

And the other thing is, yes I know it was called a demo and that is what it is, but it did give us the ability to stress test a lot of the things that we otherwise would've seen at launch.

There was commentary that we didn't have enough servers up. We had enough servers up, it was just there were some networking issues built into the client of the game which caused a lot of the bugs that you saw. That stuff doesn't really showcase itself unless you give a proper at-scale test, and the demo was certainly at scale. There were a lot of people playing it. So when you have a lot of people, you start to see those bugs come out and you can fix them so you don't have them on launch.

So, overall, it was a pretty positive thing.

And a lot of the bugs that we did see, we felt good about because they were either, A) Already fixed, or Things that we had not reproduced consistently on our side and now we have a pretty good reproduction case for, and then we can fix it.

So I think overall it felt pretty good for us.

Gilbert: I think a lot of people who play games might not realize the distinction between game publishers, like EA, and game development studios, like BioWare.

Gamble: I get it, and I appreciate it, because it is a lot more complicated than people say. But if there's one soundbite that has to come out of that, it's, "The game, BioWare, the developers, their number one job — the thing that they get up every day to do — is to make the best game possible. And then sometimes the stuff outside of what that is leaves the studio and becomes more of a partnership with the publishing." And I think that's pretty standard with every publisher-developer relationship.

Gilbert: And finally, "Apex Legends" is suddenly a massive deal. It seems a little crazy that EA would launch it right before "Anthem." What's your take on that?

Gamble: So, a couple things on that. Super, super congratulations to those guys [Respawn Entertainment, another EA-owned game development studio]. They deserve all the awesome kudos. The game is really solid and, like, I'm playing it when I'm not playing "Anthem." There's all that. They're pretty awesome!

The second thing is, no one really knew how much it would take off. It's taken off in a big way, which is great! Back to the earlier publisher-versus-developer question, we're still all part of the EA Studios culture. So when one of our teams does really well on something, we all applaud it.

Now, I think that the audience for "Apex Legends" and the audience for "Anthem" — there is some overlap, there's definitely some overlap, but they are different. With "Apex Legends" being primarily a player-versus-player (PvP) game, obviously free-to-play and Battle Royale, that serves a certain niche.

And it is free — it's not like people have to make a decision between $60 "Anthem" and $60 "Apex." They just have to get "Anthem" and then they can download "Apex." So there is that. And the fact that we are a co-operative game (PvE) and we are a long-term service game, with a full story, characters, and that whole kit and caboodle. You can start to see how the people who are going to want to invest a lot of time in "Anthem" and the people who want to invest a lot of time in "Apex," the overlap starts to get less and less when you look at the kind of games that they are.

Does that mean that there's no overlap? No. But then again, people don't always want to be playing PvP and people don't always want to be playing PvE in that overlap group. So I think there's enough room for both of us to co-exist equally.

We weren't surprised by "Apex" — we knew about it. And it is a good time to be at EA right now, especially with both titles coming out.