Anthem's Director: "We might have the most emotional shooter of our decade!"

Right now, Anthem is on an intensive beta-testing course, and the developers from BioWare want to gain as much feedback and reviews as possible before the official release. The game's director Jonathan Warner and lead producer Ben Irving gave a great interview to EDGE magazine, where they told that the studio was really thinking about turning Anthem into a free-to-play project. However, neither BioWare's nor Electronic Arts' head-management have liked the idea, so Irving had to develop the game's concept as it was a traditional AAA-title. 

Jonathan Warner: 

We discussed a free-to-play model early on. It just wasn't a direction that the company was moving in – BioWare or EA. Dave Brevik did it with Marvel Heroes, and I think it's an interesting business model. It has its ups and downs. 

[We might have] the most emotional shooter of our decade! Games you don't connect with emotionally are not games that you end up talking about years later. To me, that is the delight of making games, because I know that somewhere some young person is going to pick up Anthem and play it, and it is going to be that game for them. It'll be their game. That's such an amazing privilege. It can sound so pretentious to say, 'We really want you to emotionally connect to this game'. I do, but I want it to connect to lots of different people emotionally in different ways – whether it's a touching story, or a character that you particularly love, or an adventure that you tell your friends about, or whether it's just that adrenaline rush. It's all emotional.

Ben Irving: 

If you go free-to-play, you still have to have a profitable business or we can't continue to do an amazing live service for all our players. So what would you really be trading if you gave the game away for free? There's all that money you'd have to make to be profitable. And so then you get into the territory of being less player-generous. I think in the triple-A space, people are more comfortable paying the entry fee and then having a great player-generous model with no paid DLC, and optional vanity items that you can earn in-game currency to buy anyway.

Anthem releases February 22, 2019, on PS4, Xbox One and PC.