Anthem: 9 MAJOR Revelations From Kotaku's Exposé

2. The Current Flight Mechanics Were Built Over A WEEKEND

Like the game's lore being all over the place for years, Bioware also couldn't decide on how to implement the now-signature flight mechanics. Every subsequent tweak of how high you could go, for how long, how fast etc. resulted in the game's map and levels being overhauled so everything made sense, and the player wasn't breaking immersion or leaving the area altogether.

A fascinating extract involves the need to please EA DICE's Patrick Söderlund, who was very unimpressed with early builds of the game. For his second visit, a small team of coders added flight back into the game across a single weekend, literally because "flying was the only mechanic they’d built that made Anthem stand out from other games".

They focused on getting the weight, physics and momentum of everything just right, and thankfully it impressed Söderlund. However, staggeringly, this became one of the first times Bioware overall "got" what Anthem "was", leading to just a few days later, it being shown off at E3 2017.