The new online shooter Anthem aims to be a game for everyone. They don’t want to cater to “whales,” or players who spend a lot of money, nor do you need to know 6 people on reddit to play Anthem, they say.
Who is speaking? It is the lead producer of BioWare, Mike Gamble, speaking in an interview with Gamasutra and in a Q&A with journalists.
This is what Gamble says about “whales”:
Gamble is asked if Anthem will rely on having as many whales on board spending a lot of money in the game. Gamble denies this and says:
BioWare hopes to attract as many players as possible. We want to keep the player pool as wide as possible to support Anthem for as long as possible. Even if we don’t have a huge amount of players spending a lot of money, we hope that the economic situation is such that we have a large number of players supporting Anthem.
In gaming jargon, “whales” refers to players who spend particularly large amounts of money in games, often through microtransactions.
Gamble continues:
It’s great to have whales, but we don’t want to tailor the game to a specific group of players. Some people have more time than others – and that’s really all we want to say about that.
Fun without knowing anyone on reddit
This is what Gamble says about matchmaking: It is often said that games like Destiny are only fun if you have friends and acquaintances online to play with. Gamble also commented on this in a Q&A session.
We want to provide a matchmaking system where you don’t need to know six people on reddit to play the game.
It is known that Anthem wants to automatically find players for the players, even for raids.
Gamble discusses this focus on automated matchmaking:
We believe it’s one of the hurdles of this type of game – we have tried to design Anthem so that fans of single-player RPGs can get in – and the additional step is that it’s fun to play with others.
More news on Anthem and how the game wants to differentiate itself from Destiny:
