When players reach Anthem’s endgame, they’ll have several different choices regarding what kind of content to play. These objectives will include:
Challenges Contracts Freeplay Strongholds
BioWare touches on each of these points, but only goes into detail regarding two of them: Contracts and Strongholds. Contracts are missions offered by the inhabitants of Fort Tarsis, broken apart into three different factions. These missions include daily, weekly, and monthly tasks, as well as unique Legendary Contracts given once reaching certain reputation thresholds. Strongholds will be familiar to MMO fans; they’re group-based PvE missions with several encounters, challenges, with a boss at the end.
Challenges are smaller or meta tasks found in the player’s submenu, offering a variety of rewards based on difficulty. Freeplay is self-explanatory - players can explore the open world, fight enemies, hunt down open world events, gather crafting materials, and so on.
As for Cataclysms, they will be time-limited events that result in “physical manifestations” like extreme weather and hostile enemy incursions, as well as offering new mysteries to solve. While BioWare doesn’t bluntly state it, the recent Anthem Demo wrap-up event “The Storm” was likely a taste of what Cataclysms will look like.
BioWare’s goal with Anthem’s endgame is to offer a variety of reward structures that allow players to grow increasingly powerful and tackle more challenging content in exchange for better loot. And any who are worried about Anthem’s challenge should know there are multiple options including three Grandmaster tiers of difficulty that unlock in the endgame.
The unspoken message here is that Anthem is a service-focused game. BioWare wants players to log into the game every day and find something different to do, a new reward to obtain.
Anthem releases February 22, 2019 for PC, PS4, and Xbox One. Early Access begins on February 15th.
