Anthem’s return at E3 2018 was just as spectacular as its debut a year earlier, and last week, Electronic Arts posted a full 20-minute gameplay video of the latest demo – with developer commentary, no less. Presented in full 4K, the firm shared a source quality version of the asset with us, allowing us to take a closer look at the game’s Frostbite foundations, and compared to other EA titles using the tech, we’re witnessing a use of the engine quite unlike anything else we’ve seen before. Developer BioWare isn’t talking about performance targets, but the sheer intensity in detail, and the integrity of the open world suggests that this will likely be a 30fps game on consoles – and an interesting counterpoint to the 60fps heroics of Battlefront and Battlefield.
And this makes the content of the demo all the more interesting in that you can’t help but wonder – what kind of hardware is running it? Will consoles be able to deliver this level of fidelity? EA tells us that it’s the PC build running here, controlled with an Xbox pad – hence the standard console button prompts. For the record, the E3 hands-on ran on dual GTX 1080 Ti GPUs, albeit at 60 frames per second at full 4K.
Apart from what looks like a very short pre-rendered cinematic right at the beginning of the presentation, this is indeed full, real-time gameplay. It’s running at 2160p, but curiously, the tell-tale stippling on edges associated with checkerboarding is also present, just like the initial reveal at the Microsoft conference shown at E3 2017. This commonality suggests Xbox One X as the actual host platform, but EA double-checked for us and re-confirmed that this is indeed the PC version featured in the capture, which makes the checkerboard-like artefacts a rather odd feature.
Source: Eurogamer Anthem's E3 demo analysed: BioWare takes Frostbite into new territory