Anthem is an upcoming shared-world third-person shooter from BioWare. BioWare is the studio behind famous franchises like Dragon Age and Mass Effect. Anthem is expected to launch on February 22 and runs at native 4K resolution on Xbox One X . Just like Destiny, the developer wants to support the game for the next ten years. If you're on PC and an Origin Access Premier subscriber, you can play the full game today. Unfortunately, other platforms will have to wait another week. Recently, BioWare's Head of Live Services Chad Robertson was asked on Twitter if your save progress would carry over to the next-generation of consoles. He replied, "Always." Hopefully Anthem will still be popular and aggressively supported when next-generation machines roll out in 2020. Before launch, there's no accurate way to predict how popular an experience will be years later. If you want to download the EA Access Anthem trial, you have to search for the game on your console. However, instead of going to the preorder page which gives you the option to purchase the bundle, you have to select the game itself. The bundle should show you the game and the preorder bonuses, so just select the game. After you've done this, there should be a "Free Trial" button at the top. Clicking this will download the 40 GB file onto your console. Right now it seems that those who haven't preordered the game can play it early through EA Access. If you've preordered it, you'll probably get an error message saying that you're too early. Just wait a few hours and you should be able to play it too while the servers update.<doc-sep>A trend has emerged in the video game industry in recent years: Multiple release dates. Singular launch dates have been replaced by early access periods due to pre-orders, special editions, and subscription services. Anthem, the upcoming live service game from BioWare, is a prime example of this trend. The advertised release date of Anthem is February 22 on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. And while that’s the first day you’ll see the game on store shelves, many will get to play it earlier. Some folks have already played Anthem. It’s understandably confusing, and EA even released a chart to detail when and how you can jump into Anthem. But even with a chart, there’s still some confusion because, well, the chart is somewhat misleading. So, if you’re intrigued by Anthem but cannot figure out when you can actually start playing, let’s break it down for you. Everyone can play the demo right now While last weekend’s VIP demo locked down the player pool to only those who pre-ordered Anthem, this weekend’s open demo is available to everyone. Starting February 1 at 9 a.m. PT, users can download the Anthem demo from the PlayStation Store, Microsoft Store, and EA Origin. The demo runs until February 3. On consoles, the demo is 26GB and the PC version is 44GB. The only restriction to the demo is that you need an active Xbox Live Gold or PlayStation Plus subscription to partake in the weekend activities. The demo includes two story missions, a section of the map that you can explore, and a Stronghold event. The Stronghold event is four-player co-op only, but the rest of the demo can be enjoyed solo. In the demo, you start at level 10 as a Ranger Javelin. When you reach level 12, you can pick one of the three other classes of Javelins to try (Interceptor, Storm, Colossus). The demo caps at level 15. If you participated in the VIP demo, the can continue where you left off. Demo progress does not transfer to the full game, though. Origin Access Premier members can play the full game on February 15 Origin Access Premier members gain access to the full Anthem game on February 15. This is a PC only opportunity, though. Origin Access Premier subscriptions cost $15 per month or $100 per year and grant access to a large library of EA games. Origin Access Basic members can play the first 10 hours starting February 15 Origin Access Basic subscribers can play a 10 hour trial of Anthem starting February 15 on both Xbox One and PC. Origin Access Basic costs $5 per month or $30 per year. However, you can get a one month trial for just a buck if you want to give Anthem a go early. You’ll still have to buy Anthem on February 22 like the rest of us, as Origin Access Basic doesn’t give you full access to the game at launch. Progress made during the trial period does transfer to the full game. Everyone can buy Anthem on February 22 February 22, the official launch day of Anthem, is when everyone will be able to buy a regular ‘ole copy from brick and mortar retailers as well as through the PlayStation Store, Microsoft Store, and EA Origin. We had the chance to check out Anthem at a preview event and came away quite impressed. No matter when you wind up entering your Javelin, it seems like BioWare has cooked up an action experience that will delight many. Editors' Recommendations<doc-sep>I’ve played about six hours of Anthem, a game where players fly around in mechanical suits blowing stuff up in search of ever more rare loot, and while I’m still getting my bearings I already feel a lot better about the game than I did back during its two demos. Advertisement The game launched earlier today on PC for Origin Premier subscribers and on Xbox One as part of a 10-hour trial through EA Access, with a full-launch for non-subscribers and PS4 players on February 22. Unlike the two demo sessions earlier this month and last, I haven’t gotten disconnected from the servers or experienced any bugs on the scale of the never-ending loading screen. Load times are still a nuisance and I wish developer BioWare had done something to make them less noticeable and boring than a bar slowly filling up above a still image, but at least they’re not broken. There have been occasional graphical glitches, but nothing that lasted for more than a second or in any way interrupted what I was doing. So far, Anthem works. It’s also a lot of fun. The core of Anthem is flying through ancient caves and jungles dotted with ruins, and that part of the game could not feel any better. Punching the left analog stick to turn on forward thrusters or the right one to gracefully hover in place is easy and responsive but full of complementary camera effects and richly layered sound effects that really convince you you’re controlling a sentient rocket. Even if Anthem were just a fantasy-infused flying sim, it would still be a ton of fun. But of course there’s a lot more to the game than just flying around. Anthem revolves around getting missions from the people in your hub, a city called Fort Tarsis, going out into the big, bad, dangerous world to complete them, and then returning and using the loot you collected to upgrade a mechanical suit, also known as a Javelin. You can play as part of a group of up to four players or alone, though some of the missions really are built for teamwork. Happily, Anthem offers automatic matchmaking for everything. One of the big questions facing the game prior to release was whether it would have any meaningful story beyond a few wacky sci-fi premises strung together to explain why you were flying around a strange world in robot armor. And while the narrative does take a back seat to everything else going on in the hours I’ve played, it does exist. Playing as a freelancer, a class of warriors tasked with protecting humanity from deadly forces of nature brought about by mysterious artifacts, you become entangled in a plot to stop a particularly ruthless faction called the Dominion from obtaining special artifacts that could be used to do any number of terrible things. Based on what I’ve seen of it so far, it doesn’t have anything as complex as the political conflicts and intrigue at work in any of the Mass Effect games. Instead, it’s more in line with the Destiny games’ clear-cut drama around good vs. evil, and it’s decent enough with a world that feels somewhat more lived-in than Bungie’s series. Where Destiny’s hub, the Tower, is located up in the clouds and feels somewhat like a dream, Anthem’s Fort Tarsis feels more like a giant, greasy car repair shop with a bar inside it. I have no idea what the people in Anthem smell like but I’m absolutely sure they smell like something. Advertisement The game’s otherwise straightforward plot is also helped out a lot by a cast of extremely well-voiced and well-acted characters. Motion-capture is the basis for a number of the performances and it shows, with small winks, bitten-lips, and idiosyncratic mannerisms helping to set each person apart. You can see this in characters like Owen, a side-kick who helps guide you over the radio during missions. He’s charming, scrappy, and way out of his depth. Advertisement So far Neeson Giles is my favorite, even though I only spoke with him once and the conversation didn’t go very well. A loser who just wants to hang with the cool kids, Giles told me Owen was weird and unstable before backtracking after realizing he’d clearly offended me to say he’d only heard other people say that Owen was weird and unstable. He then proceeded to say we should hang out again sometime, before eventually begging me to hang out again some time. I have no idea if Giles will play an important part in the main storyline or if he’s just there to add flavor. Maybe he’ll have an interesting set of missions for me at some point. I could have easily just walked past him and never met him at all. Did I mention he’s voiced by Brooklyn 99’s Joe Lo Truglio? Though I’m running the game on medium settings to keep the framerate up thanks to my under-powered GTX 970, it still looks crisp and detailed, especially considering all of the action. Despite all of the flying around and almost non-stop explosions, everything has run smoothly. The few times I’ve slowed down to push my settings to the max to take in how the light peers over a ridge or bounces off the ripples in a pond, I’ve been really impressed. Even when the environments start to run together and feel repetitive, their size, scope and detail are breathtaking. Advertisement Of course, the real challenge for a game like Anthem is whether it can still feel almost as exhilarating after 100 hours as it does after six. Even now I have concerns the breadth and diversity of enemy encounters and mission types. Almost to a one they’ve consisted of some version of a spherical arena space that requires slow, methodical circling. When I end up in a tight spot, I fly out of range and then begin a new sweep. The mission objectives have so far been simple, consisting of either holding down a point or collecting orbs to activate an artifact. Enemy AI doesn’t help either. On more than one occasion I’ve seen enemies standing completely still, or turning around and showing their backs, exposing their weak points to me, for no particular reason. Given all of the powers and mobility at the player’s disposal, Anthem seems to try and make up for these slip-ups by giving enemies a good chunk of health and throwing tons of them at you. In the end it can all feel a bit chaotic, more like a free-for-all than a tightly wound shootout than forces you to actually consider strategy and tactics. Advertisement I’ve only completed about a dozen missions so far including one stronghold—a longer dungeon that’s made for a party of four players and features a boss at the end. As I unlock more abilities and equipment, I’m hoping the game’s encounters will change things up as well, beyond just offering me higher difficulties to complete all the same old missions on. I haven’t yet found one I would love to run again just for the hell of it. For now, there’s plenty of other things to keep me coming back.<doc-sep>
Anthem isn't officially in wide release until next week, but members of EA's various membership programs can play it starting today, February 15. If you're a member of EA Access on Xbox One, or Origin Access on PC, you can access the game in one way or another right now--it's a bit confusing, hence the chart below outlining when and how you can play on each platform. You can check out some gameplay from us livestreaming the game in the video above. With the game now being live, some players reported server issues earlier today, and EA Help's Twitter account has responded that it is aware of the problem and working on resolving it. Specifically, the errors include those telling players that matchmaking has failed and that no server has been found or is currently unavailable. In a further update, the EA Help account says it's "cleared up the connectivity issues," so things should now be working correctly for everyone. We'll continue to keep an eye out for any other problems that pop up. EA has also outlined the slightly convoluted steps to finding the trial itself on the EA Access hub. You'll need to go through the hub, rather than the EA Access area of the My Games and Apps section. Open the hub and refresh it (LT, RT, and Y). Go to Anthem. View the game. Click the 3 dots and select Play Trial. Both Access programs offer a 10% discount for purchases, but the two offer a different level of early access. The EA Access program offers only a 10-hour trial with progress that will carry over into the main game if you choose to purchase it. Origin Access also offers a 10-hour trial, but if you're a Premier member you can just begin playing the full game right now. PlayStation 4 has no Access program--at least not yet--and thus must wait until next week to start playing. As part of the lead-up to Anthem's release, EA partnered with District 9 director Neill Blomkamp to create an original short film that takes place in the universe. If you're curious how Anthem will last you in the long-term, check out BioWare's roadmap for endgame content. And if you just need help navigating the world of pre-orders, bonuses, and special editions, read our pre-order guide. Anthem will be available for everyone on February 22.