Tour Anthem's hub city in latest dev livestream

The town hub is a vital place in an action RPG. It's where you tend to turn in loot, upgrade your gear and chat to NPCs. Destiny has the Tower, and BioWare's upcoming shared world shooter Anthem has Tarsis. A new dev livestream has a wander, picks up some books, and chats to NPCs.

The livestream has a few technical hitches but the world is colourful and appealing. This is the first time we've gained a sense of Anthem beyond the shooting and jetpacking shown in previous trailers and streams and look, there are dialogue options (gasp!). It is a BioWare game, after all. The talk of closed shops hints (to me at least) that Tarsis will develop and expand as you work through missions, or as Anthem grows beyond the Feb 22 launch.

Anthem's closed alpha starts this weekend, December 8, and the system requirements give us a sense of how demanding it will be.

The latest livestream was cut a little short, but you can learn more about the game's mech suits in the last video. It shows how you'll be able to personalise your beautiful second robot skin with hybrid materials and textures. More then anything I'd like to know more about how the essential loot and progression systems will work. BioWare promises more details in future updates.

Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.