BioWare’s plan to make Anthem’s loot ‘satisfying’

Anthem is being remade with a massive new update, but we just don’t know when it will be finished. On Friday, BioWare revealed the first hints at the kind of improvements players can expect.

The developer’s first topic of discussion is loot, one of the most important and disappointing aspects of the original Anthem release. BioWare is well aware of the fact that the original game’s loot fell short of what fans were hoping for, and the developer spends most of this update outlining its plan to make loot better with Anthem’s big new update.

In its post, BioWare outlines several bullet points for how it wants to make the loot system better. Among them are things like making loot more immediately rewarding, by making all pieces of loot better, and making sure that they’re viable for players to equip more often.

BioWare also wants to make the loot-hunting experience a little more specific when the system is updated. Rather than making all the loot in the game random, which would make finding just one specific piece of gear an absolute nightmare, BioWare will create loot tables, quests with specific rewards, and specialized vendors to sell rare items. All of this should make hunting down the perfect item significantly easier and more fun.

Developers also plan to better balance Inscriptions, which are augmentations that could take a piece of gear from useless to outstanding thanks to randomly rolled traits. As an example in the post, BioWare brings up the fact that one Inscription increased weapon damage by +225%, a massive number that made this trait a must have for players obsessed with getting the best gear.

Image: Bioware/Electronic Arts

Finally, BioWare mentions that it wants the new version of Anthem to make gearing up easier for players, so that Power levels can be gained more consistently and with less grinding.

For now, it seems that this is all the information that BioWare has for us on what the new version of Anthem will look like. The developer’s post does say that it will have more updates in the future, though it’s not exactly clear when that will be. More importantly, there’s still no word on when this update will actually come out, or what form it will take — free update, a new expansion, or something in between.