Anthem details plans for making loot more satisfying

Anthem developer BioWare has published a blog post that details how it plans on making the loot drop experience more satisfying for the game’s 2.0 relaunch.

BioWare Austin studio director Christian Dailey listed six keynote strategies for how BioWare plans on making the experience of obtaining loot more better for players: Respect Your Time, Embrace Choice, Create a Rewarding Loot Experience, Keep It Accessible and Immediate, Reliability of Equipment and Rewards, and Scale for the Future.

Respect Your Time means increasing the frequency of loot drops, making all items “better and more competitive” while still allowing for the “chance of getting something exceptional,” and making it so that “all loot rarities have strategic value throughout progression.” In short, loot should drop more frequently, and the loot that players pick up should have value more consistently.

The Embrace Choice strategy will make it so that players can actually seek out loot “without relying on randomness alone” through specific quests and vendors. Loot modification is also a key aspect of this, as it will allow players to reroll inscriptions and level up items that they enjoy using.

When it comes to Creating a Rewarding Loot Experience, loot drops will feel “exciting and more noticeable,” and rare enemies will act as “walking treasure chests” that will spit out a bunch of loot when defeated.

To Keep It Accessible and Immediate, players will be able to reveal and equip loot right away, in combination with a more detailed stat sheet and the ability to access that stat sheet anywhere. In other words, loot drops should provide more instant gratification.

Reliability deals with making items obtained through loot drops more useful. BioWare is trying to eliminate “useless items” that “were missing must-have inscriptions.”

Finally, Scaling for the Future means that players can increase their power cap while “the loot system scales accordingly.”

Keep in mind that these are the strategies that BioWare is using to rebuild its loot system and that it’s still “early days” when it comes to actually implementing its changes. “Changes like these are exciting to us and hopefully to you as well,” Dailey wrote in the blog post, “but I want to set expectations that there is a lot of work behind each of these and in some cases a rather large tech undertaking.” Said another way, BioWare Austin is probably still in the early stages of actually doing the technical work of making these changes, so temper your expectations accordingly.