https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/01/22/anthem-everything-we-learned-after-20-hours-of-gameplay
This is a big article, and there is much, much more at the link.
Elder Game (End Game):
Personalization:
Monetization:
Alliance System:
Faces:
This is a big article, and there is much, much more at the link.
Elder Game (End Game):
The biggest question about Anthem is what you'll be doing after you graduate from fresh-faced recruit and enter the endgame loop, which BioWare calls The Elder Game. Anthem's Elder Game is a loop of customizing your character with the best gear and weapons you can find in order to start making crazy loadouts that allow you to push into the hardest content. The goal is to leverage better and better pieces of gear to increase your overall gear score and Javelin rarity and fine tune your tailor made loadouts so you'll be able to blow through difficulty barriers and take on the hardest content on the hardest difficulty, to get even better gear, to create better loadout combinations, and so on.
Once you hit the level cap of 30 and begin Anthem's Elder Game, you'll get access to a new tier of difficulties: Grandmaster 1, 2, and 3. Choosing to run content on these Grandmaster difficulties is your best chance at finding the best gear available, but the risk is intense. Grandmaster heavily enhances enemies, incrementally increasing their health and damage, up to a ridiculously daunting 3,100 percent on Grandmaster 3.
Personalization:
By far my favorite aspect of personalization are the emotes and animations. Do they affect how well you play? No, not at all. But there are a ton to choose from and there are some really infectious emotes to be had.
Monetization:
Getting back to Anthem's monetization structure: Yes, there is a premium currency, called Shards, in addition to the free currency called Coin. But any premium currency you end up buying is only used on cosmetics like armor sets, emotes, decals, etc. And most of the purchasable cosmetics we saw required a combination of both Coin and Shards, though all of that was still being finalized when we saw it.
BioWare is really adamant that they don't want to divide the player base by selling story content, so while there are huge post launch plans for Anthem, none of it will be tied behind a paywall. That means story and content expansions to the game, that means new missions and new strongholds, and that means the daily, weekly, or monthly content drops BioWare has planned: If you bought Anthem, you'll get all that for free.
Alliance System:
The Alliance system is a way of helping other players and allowing other players to help you without ever having to do anything. If you play any content with other players, or you have Anthem players on your friends list, all those people will automatically be added to your alliance.
At the end of a mission, you'll tally up your personal experience and rewards, but you'll also see a tally for alliance experience. That alliance experience builds over time, and is awarded to the other players in your alliance. The idea being the more you play, the more alliance experience you'll give to other players, and the more Alliance experience other players can give to you.
Faces:
From the many characters we spoke with we can happily say that Anthem's faces and characters behave like real people. In one particular early scene with your friend Owen, you can get a real sense for his playful personality as he messes with another no-nonsense character, and his eagerness to be a freelancer pilot in his own right one day. While there might not be romance options in Anthem, there are relationships with characters to be made, and it's important that the immersion of those relationships aren't broken if a character's eyeballs suddenly come bulging out of their head. From what we saw, every character in Anthem has believable personality and facial muscles to match.
