At Gamescom 2018, Anthem director Jon Warner revealed some additional details. Beyond Tarsis, for instance, you can freely jump into someone else's mission, and vice versa. It doesn't matter what level you're at, or how far you've progressed through the 'critical path' story. Anthem is a social game and BioWare wants to make it easy for people to team up and tackle objectives together. Some missions, of course, will include lore and story snippets. To avoid unwanted spoilers, the game will offer some kind of guidance, or warning, for players who are jumping around narratively.

BioWare is still "tweaking some of the details" on this, according to Warner. The studio has two guiding principles, though: Firstly, to ensure that players always know what they're getting into. "So that you don't get surprised by, 'Oh I jumped into your game and look, it's the end of the game. Oh my god, I didn't want to know this.'" The second is to give people the flexibility to play how they like. If they don't care for the story, and simply want to play with their friends, players can jump into other people's sessions and, theoretically, experience almost every mission out of order.

"So, not over-engineering a solution," Warner said. "I don't want to get into the business of trying to second guess what our players want and need."

Outside of Tarsis, the world will be almost identical for everyone. BioWare will sync the planet's weather and day-night cycle so that all players -- regardless of their real-world location and position in the story -- will experience the same environmental flourishes. If you see a strange storm, for instance, you can open Discord, or walk into work the next day, and talk to other people about it -- everyone will have experienced the same thing.

It's unlikely, though, that the world will change dramatically as a result of your actions in the story. That's because it would create strange inconsistencies for people who are jumping back and forth through the plot. Imagine, for instance, that you popped into a game, ventured through an underground stronghold and escaped a lethal cave-in at the end. It would be jarring to then return to your version of the world which still has the cave intact.

The game will have set pieces, but they probably won't leave huge, lasting scars on the world. "We just kind of acknowledge that yup, this is a stronghold," Warner said. "You can play it as many times as you want. And you're gonna find it fun and engaging to go through it and challenge yourself."