During the course of our hands-on session with Anthem, we were able to take a break and sit down for an interview with BioWare Executive Producer Mark Darrah to discuss the next title from the company primarily known for such series as Dragon Age and Mass Effect. Throughout our conversation, we talked about how the game came to be, what players should expect at release, what BioWare has planned for post-launch content, and more.

Game Rant: Why was Anthem chosen as the final title for the game?

GR: How quickly do you believe the team will be able to make bug fixes, balance changes for weapons, or anything in the world that might need fixing?

GR: How does Anthem intend to avoid potential content drought and keep players engaged within its loot-driven play cycles?

Now, I think we can do a lot of stuff to react to the way people are going to engage with exploits, to deal with features that are maybe broken under certain circumstances just from the server side, which we can do right away.

Then we introduce additional content things where we want to have a much quicker conversation with our players than we have in the past where we are dropping things more regularly, more often, and one of the things on that is Cataclysms. It’s relatively big–not big like a piece of story DLC we’ve done in the past–but something to chew on for a while that changes the meta, that introduces new ways to think about the game, and then we can do that on a regular cadence to make it feel like the game is pushing back on you as you’re reaching your horizon, and we can then introduce a new horizon, a new goal that keeps you engaged over long term.

GR: Did the team ever think about letting players fly constantly rather than there being cool downs and other restrictions involved?

GR: Be it connected shooters, platformers, or what have you, what games did BioWare look to as inspiration before the formulation of Anthem?

GR: If PvP ever does get introduced, what would BioWare have to change with Anthem in order to make it fit?

And there’s a lot of examples of games out there with flying, but what’s really been interesting on this game is, I think, with flying and combat sort of banged into each other, that’s been where we’ve actually found something special, which I don’t really think exists out there right now, and so we’ve had to kind of forge our own path. But I think in that forging, that’s where we’ve really found something.

So, it also lets us do more different weapons that, again, don’t have to take into account the fact that there’s a person on the other side of that. Things like the Sparkbeam are very good against AI, but actually, probably quite useless if you’re using it against somebody who can dodge and get out of the way.

If we were to introduce PvP in the future, there would have to be other criteria where we could narrow that realm. So that either means a mode where everyone’s a Storm, or everyone has to be the same Javelin, or a mode where gear is restricted in some way. We wouldn’t want to do it where we restrict gear for the game as a whole, because that just degrades the PvP experience in the service of PvP. If we were to add a PvP experience in the future, we would want it to be connected to the experience you’re having in PvP, but somehow restrained to allow that balance to come in.

GR: It’s been confirmed that Anthem will have Seasonal Events of some kind, but how will they work?

GR: When Cataclysms were originally called Shaper Storms, Anthem lead producer Mike Gamble said in an interview that they could theoretically fit Mass Effect’s universe into them. Could Cataclysms feature crossover events in that regard?

The second thing is Cataclysms. Cataclysms are much more of that season more in the way that something like Diablo has a season, or Hearthstone has a season, where it’s a timed event with specific gains to the end of a bigger thing with more story attached to it, with more endgame purpose.

GR: Right. You wouldn’t want to have older intellectual properties overshadow the new one.

GR: When you have the free time, what games are you able to play other than Anthem?

GR: Are there any games you’re looking forward to?

So, right now, there isn’t really anything. I’ll be playing Anthem after it comes out, but there’s things I need to get back to, for sure.

GR: Understandable. Finally, what will Anthem offer that no other game can?

Anthem is scheduled to release on February 22, 2019 for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.