Just a few short days ago, a new cover story for Game Informer was revealed, with details regarding Anthem that made it seem as though we’d be totally out of luck for romantic relationships in the game. It shocked BioWare fans, especially since those have been a hallmark of the company’s titles over the past few years, and not having relationships in a BioWare game feels like peanut butter without jelly, or strawberries without cream.
Anthem’s lead producer Mike Gamble had the following to say to Game Informer, regarding the chance to kiss on any of your favorite characters. In short, the answer was a big, fat no.
“There are no romances,” Gamble said. “There are friendships. Some of the stuff we did with Mass Effect — the Citadel DLC specifically — there was a lot of friendship moments. You and Garrus sitting up, shooting — that kind of stuff, we want to lean into that. The romantic stuff, we’re moving away from that for Anthem.”
And yet, in a new interview with VentureBeat, BioWare’s Casey Hudson is singing a different tune. According to Hudson, Anthem is a very “different” game, and one that would need a different approach than the company has taken with games in the past.
“Of course we do want relationships”, he says, “it’s just more in an action genre of storytelling.” Not that this has ever really had to be an obstacle before, but we can see what he’s getting at. It doesn’t make the most sense to include those types of interactions. But where there’s a will, there’s a way. According to Hudson, if players “really like” a certain character and want to spend more time with them, they could potentially have that in the game in the future.
Now, don’t go getting your hopes up and talking about your new Anthem bae, but this could mean some exciting things for the future of the game…until a few days pass and the consensus has changed once more. We’ll have to see what happens, but this is certainly good news.