Anthem’s Alliance system rewards players for playing together, guilds coming post-launch

Anthem is designed to be played with others. The entire game matches players together — and turning off that functionality involves delving into submenus. While playing with groups is already easier than playing alone, there will be some systems in the game to incentivize players grouping up. In a Reddit post on Friday, lead producer Ben Irving revealed the game’s Alliance system, as well as future plans for in-game guilds.

Players who engaged with the demo will likely have seen the Alliance XP being added up in the end-match screen. This system allows players to form long-term alliances — like a reward system for Freelancers. Essentially, players will join an Alliance and contribute experience after completing any kind of activity. This experience will go into a pool of Alliance XP, and will level the Alliance’s tier each week.

At the end of each week, Coin (the game’s cosmetic currency) will be given out to all Alliance players based on how much experience their Alliance earned that week. Players can increase their individual experience contributions by playing with friends on their friends list — even if they aren’t in the same Alliance.

Coin can be used to purchase items in Anthem. In the demo, players were able to buy different armor pieces and emotes for their Javelins. It’s currently unknown if there are any non-cosmetic uses for Coin.

A more advanced group-finding system, guilds, won’t make it into Anthem before launch. “While we believe the Alliance system is a great way to encourage social interaction with Anthem,” said Irving, “we also understand guilds play a critical role in helping players form organized groups with people of similar interests and play styles. Our goal is to release guilds as soon after launch as we can.”

It seems Alliances and guilds will work separately once they’re both available. However, Alliances seem worth joining even for players who have no desire to play with others. So little is known about guilds in Anthem at this time that it’s hard to say if there’ll be rewards worth joining for.

Anthem will be released on PlayStation 4, Windows PC, and Xbox One on Feb. 22.