With Anthem now close to its debut on the market, BioWare has finally pulled the curtain on some of the game's endgame activities. Nathan experienced a Legendary Contract in his hands-on preview, but there's something else that the developers had teased at the end of the game's E3 2017 debut trailer: the Shaper Storms.
These occur in the world when the energy of the Anthem of Creation activates Shaper instruments, those that were used to create the world and left behind by the Shapers themselves. Now they've been renamed Cataclysms and in a couple interviews, Executive Producer Mark Darrah provided an overview while confirming their seasonal nature.
Variety: We unlock one stronghold during the main story. The other strongholds don’t unlock until you get to the endgame and finish the main story. There is power gating in a way, in that you have to have unlocked it in order to play it. We’re not going to force you to be at a certain suit level, at least not yet. The Cataclysms will be more like that. Anyone can go into them, but your degree of success will be more driven by your strategy and gear. It’s a soft gate. You can experience the content. We don’t want to have content that people feel like they can’t see because they aren’t good enough.
Gamesradar: What we want to try to move towards with our post-launch content in general is something a bit more conversational than what we've had in the past. I mean, the goal would be new content every day, of some form. I don't think we're going to get that, but it'd be nice to have some sort of touchpoint every single day. Cataclysms will obviously not be every day; they're designed to be content that you engage with for weeks, and they would come out less frequently. They're more meta-changing; they're designed to be more seasonal.
The goal of something like a Cataclysm is that it should be impossible for you to fully explore in that first week. You will need to do the Cataclysm to get the gear to do the Cataclysm better, so it will be somewhat self-gating. But never underestimate how quickly people can churn through your content. The ideal is that it should always feel like something new has come, or is coming, or just came. It should always feel like something's about to happen.
On a separate note, Lead Producer Ben Irving took to Reddit to reveal a bunch of Quality of Life (QoL) improvements coming to the PC version of Anthem when it comes to controls and UI (User Interface).
Aiming
Raw Mouse Input Fixed
We found and fixed a bug that caused the symptom of negative acceleration
Flight and Swimming
Increase Available Range for Mouse Sensitivity Options
Flight and swim sensitivity sliders now allow for more than double the range it offered before. This allows different mouse DPI settings (specifically extremely high or low) to better fit into our in-game swim/flight sensitivity settings.
PC Flight Box is now a Circle
PC Flight Cursor is now constrained by a circle boundary instead of a box. This allows better turn/speed management as the distance away from center dot (which dictates the speed of your turn) is always the same maximum amount in any direction.
Added Auto-Centering for PC Flight
Added auto-centering behavior on swimming and flying by default for PC.
When mouse input stops (after a delay) the crosshair will automatically return to center.
Resolved bug with Sprint/Fly on Button Press
We’ve resolve a jittering/FX spam issue bug that players would receive when playing with hold-to-fly (rather than toggle) option for flight.
Raw Mouse Input is now achievable in PC Flight
By setting Flight/Swim Response and Precision settings sliders to 0% you can now achieve raw mouse input.
Default Flight and Swim Sensitivity Settings Updated
All default PC flight and swim sensitivity settings are now tuned to 1200 DPI instead of 1800 DPI.
Default flight and swim sensitivity changed from 50% and 35% respectively, to both being 40%.
This is the same as having both set to 100% with our previous sensitivity tuning, and since swimming was lower sensitivity than flight it’s seen an even bigger boost in responsiveness at default settings.
Tuned Flight/Swim Response and Precision Default Settings and Curves
The defaults are now much closer to raw mouse input.
Adjusted defaults for Precision / Response:
25% for flight and swim precision down to 15%
50% for flight and swim response down to 30%
Tweaked flight and swim response to ease into the slowing down behavior close to center in a less steep way than before.
List of UI Changes for Launch (15th Feb / 22nd Feb)
UI Clicking on visible options in menus fixed for 15th Feb (except social which is 22nd Feb)
Navigating Menu tabs with Q and E instead of old keybindings fixed for 15th Feb
Forge rotation speed with mouse improved - 15th Feb
Scrolling with mouse wheel wont zoom your javelin AND scroll the menu (will be contextual based on where your mouse is) - 15th Feb
D-Pad will show as keyboard bindings - 15th Feb
Turning off Motion Blur in settings now works (decoupled from post processing) - 22nd Feb
HDR toggle available - 22nd Feb
Camera Shake slider added - 22nd Feb
