New Anthem footage shows full first mission and ultimate abilities

Bioware has released another chunk of gameplay footage for Anthem, this time taking us through the first mission of the game and showing off the ultimate abilities of some of the characters.

The footage above, from a Paris Games Week livestream, shows a team of four set off to find a lost arcanist called Matthias. They fly from camp to camp, discovering clues as they trace Matthias's signal, and it all culminates in a mini-boss fight against a big enemy with a huge shield and a flamethrower.

We get a look at the ultimate ability of the Storm Javelin—it's a huge elemental storm concentrated in a small area. It looks pretty impressive, even on low settings, which the team are using to show off this alpha build of the game. You'll also see Storm fire off bolts of lightning and ice during regular combat.

The Interceptor Javelin, described as a "space ninja", is also along for the ride, and their ultimate sees them whip out dual blades and warp from enemy to enemy, dealing huge damage.

The audio echoes for the first 3:37, so it's probably best to skip forward (the team recaps the first three minutes anyway). You can see the Storm ultimate at 13:45 and the Interceptor ultimate at 24:50. In the middle of the video, the team stops playing for a Q&A. All told there's around 20 minutes of gameplay in the half hour video.

Bearing in mind it's running on low settings, what do you make of what you see?

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.