BioWare has used another publisher’s cheat code in Anthem, which currently has its open beta/demo.

We’re talking about the Konami code, which allowed you to get thirty lives in the otherwise difficult (but beatable without cheats!) game, Contra on the NES. Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start is the code you need (you’ll need a gamepad on PC, and B is probably Circle, while A is X on PlayStation 4). If you’re successful, the title screen song gets replaced by an 8-bit like composition:

BioWare first planned Anthem as a free-to-play game! Jonathan Warner (the director) and Ben Irving (one of the lead producers) have talked about this subject in their interview with the EDGE magazine, and WCCFTech took a few quotes from it:

„We discussed a free-to-play model early on. It just wasn’t a direction that the company was moving in – BioWare or EA. Dave Brevik did it with Marvel Heroes, and I think it’s an interesting business model. It has its ups and downs,” Warner said. „If you go free-to-play, you still have to have a profitable business or we can’t continue to do an amazing live service for all our players. So what would you really be trading if you gave the game away for free? There’s all that money you’d have to make to be profitable. And so then you get into the territory of being less player-generous. I think in the triple-A space, people are more comfortable paying the entry fee and then having a great player-generous model with no paid DLC, and optional vanity items that you can earn in-game currency to buy anyway,” Irving added.

Warner said something bold, too: „[We might have] the most emotional shooter of our decade! Games you don’t connect with emotionally are not games that you end up talking about years later. To me, that is the delight of making games, because I know that somewhere some young person is going to pick up Anthem and play it, and it is going to be that game for them. It’ll be their game. That’s such an amazing privilege. It can sound so pretentious to say, ‘We really want you to emotionally connect to this game’. I do, but I want it to connect to lots of different people emotionally in different ways – whether it’s a touching story, or a character that you particularly love, or an adventure that you tell your friends about, or whether it’s just that adrenaline rush. It’s all emotional.”

We wrote graphically downgraded for a good reason in the title, too. Have a look at the 2017 announcement trailer, which ran on an Xbox One X…

However, DigitalFoundry says that Anthem runs better on the PlayStation 4 Pro than the Xbox One X! Both consoles’ „4K” mode makes the game run on a roughly 1080p resolution natively, and the checkerboard upscaling pushes the resolution higher. The frame rate isn’t that promising, either: the limit on the Xbox One X is 30 FPS, but it can easily drop into the twenties. Meanwhile, the PlayStation 4 Pro has an uncapped frame rate, and which is even more absurd, this console offers a mode to force the resolution to 1080p, but it’s not on Xbox One X! With this mode, the PS4 Pro can easily go up to 40-50 FPS. In short: the „next-gen visuals on current-gen consoles” did not happen, as there’s a noticeable visual downgrade, almost on Watch Dogs’ level!

Anthem will be out on February 22 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.

Source: GameSpot, WCCFTech, WCCFTech