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Anthem Review Thread
- Thread starter Earvin Infinity
- Start date
Yeah, for me its definitely better than the story of Destiny and the Division. I wouldn't say that makes it good, just that the bar is so low in this genre.
I'm sure I'm in the minority in this thread but I've been playing Anthem on and off since Saturday and I am having a ton of fun with it. It has its share of frustrations with the server disconnects and the expected kinds of release-week network problems, but outside of that the game is a lot of fun. I like the look of the world, the lighting and effects, but most of all the movement and the weighty feel of the animations just make traversing the world and fighting enemies a lot of fun for me. I don't hate it and so far I don't regret buying it. It's hard for me to understand why people are calling it a flat out "bad" game, when I can name dozens of games that are fundamentally broken or bad, downright unplayable things. But - I am playing mostly solo so far, and I think that's why I view the game differently.
What it feels like for me is that this was originally going to be a single player game the likes of which we know bioware is good at doing. The sheer convolutedness of the way you are issued missions and have to basically leave your group to go watch conversations and then head back into the menu to choose the next ones just feels so broken and so tacked on that it feels like an afterthought or something that came into being late in the development cycle of the game. When I am playing alone, the game flows nicely and I think that's part of why I like it so much. When trying to get things done with my friends, it's a fucking mess. I feel like we'll all be better off if we solo the story and then go back and work contracts together later as a group.
I like the ideas Anthem brings to the table, and I like the freedom of movement and the visual quality Frostbite provides, but I do hope to see some improvments sooner rather than later, mostly to the multiplayer structure.
Also, as beautiful as the game is - go back to Destiny 2 and Bungie's masterful use of vibrant colors and crazy alien geometry really drives home how great Destiny's art team is - the game just POPS when played back to back against Anthem.... something we've been doing a lot of after Anthem's 3rd disconnect of the night each night.
What it feels like for me is that this was originally going to be a single player game the likes of which we know bioware is good at doing. The sheer convolutedness of the way you are issued missions and have to basically leave your group to go watch conversations and then head back into the menu to choose the next ones just feels so broken and so tacked on that it feels like an afterthought or something that came into being late in the development cycle of the game. When I am playing alone, the game flows nicely and I think that's part of why I like it so much. When trying to get things done with my friends, it's a fucking mess. I feel like we'll all be better off if we solo the story and then go back and work contracts together later as a group.
I like the ideas Anthem brings to the table, and I like the freedom of movement and the visual quality Frostbite provides, but I do hope to see some improvments sooner rather than later, mostly to the multiplayer structure.
Also, as beautiful as the game is - go back to Destiny 2 and Bungie's masterful use of vibrant colors and crazy alien geometry really drives home how great Destiny's art team is - the game just POPS when played back to back against Anthem.... something we've been doing a lot of after Anthem's 3rd disconnect of the night each night.
I think most people consider the core aspects of the gameplay to be pretty fun. Flying around casting "magic" is as engaging as the combat was in Andromeda or previous mass effect games, if not more-so. But the game has a very real issue with objectives and mission design. And I think it's down to bioware not being very good at populating open world's.
The activities you do in Inquisition and Andromeda outside of the main story missions show that pretty clearly and they were incredibly similar to what anthem is currently doing. It's a small selection of repetitive tasks that you have to repeat over and over. It's the definition of filler content...busy work...a grind. Prior to this gen bioware never made open world's. They made hub planets made up of small contained environments. Missions felt like they were well crafted linear affairs. This gen however they've pushed into a territory I don't think they're capable of doing well in. Whether it was EA sending them down that path or not I don't know. What I do know is bioware are 3 games deep into open world territory and their mission design is still painfully lacking.
The activities you do in Inquisition and Andromeda outside of the main story missions show that pretty clearly and they were incredibly similar to what anthem is currently doing. It's a small selection of repetitive tasks that you have to repeat over and over. It's the definition of filler content...busy work...a grind. Prior to this gen bioware never made open world's. They made hub planets made up of small contained environments. Missions felt like they were well crafted linear affairs. This gen however they've pushed into a territory I don't think they're capable of doing well in. Whether it was EA sending them down that path or not I don't know. What I do know is bioware are 3 games deep into open world territory and their mission design is still painfully lacking.
Reactions to gameplay seem mixed. A lot of reviewers and commenters feel the gameplay is just about hitting your cooldowns every time they've cooled down, and is otherwise just shooting boring guns at mediocre enemies with bad ai.
It's not an unpopular opinion that the core gameplay is good. Angry Joe even praised it in his review. And it's good some can feel that, but personally I don't really understand where that opinion comes from. I guess some of the cooldown abilities feel satisfying, if only because how they look and sound.
The problem with flying is that it's fun... but kind of pointless. It is not used creatively in the game even once, they could have done so much with it but at the moment it's purely a means of transportation, a fancier sprint option if you will. By the time I hit hour 70 I dreaded having to fly to the next event or contract point. This could be somewhat solved by better mission design but I think the core idea of the flight only being used to get from point a to point b is a bad one , that feels amazing for the first 100 hours and then wears thin very quickly after.
The combat kind of breaks down as well once you hit GM2 and 3, abilities become kind of second fiddle to weapons (opposite to early game), which is bad because the gunplay is mediocre as hell and abilities are one of the few fun things. When you have guns that can kill a boss within 15 seconds (or even just a couple of minutes) then what is the point of using your abilities? They're so far behind in damage to even some of the not broken guns.
I highly recommend watching Angry Joe's extended review I posted a little further up, I actually think the discussion is better than his main review.
Yup, this is exactly their issue. There is nothing wrong with hub worlds like they had before, It was still an open experience. CRPG's do a good job of branching narratives and open worlds to explore that aren't like giant empty world maps with nothing to do in them. Instead scale it down to have a more dense and robust level design.
As for Anthem, your right. There's a bunch of us enjoying it even with the issues, which there are plenty of. But when your in the middle of combat and flying around, or talking to the characters and hearing their stories or watching a cinematic, you get that sense of BioWare hidden under the mess of a game. What I don't like, is the quest design. Holy shit is it horrible. I'll load up, we all fly to point A shoot some stuff. Fly to point B and play scavenger hunt while we shoot things all within 5 to 10 minutes and the mission ends, sending everyone back to a loading screen and I may or may not get an after mission report and possibly booted. Then you do it again. The missions are some of the stupidest things I've ever seen for the most part with the exception so far of a few that are slightly more interesting. The game as a single player RPG with its lore and characters would have been a way better experience. It could have been the next big IP from them.
I was looking at the in-game MTX store refresh this morning...
Am I crazy, or for a game that wants to pay for future content by selling cosmetic MTX is this not a really poor execution of a store?
- if you are considering buying an emote, you click on it and get a static image of it? You don't see an animation?
- the skins they want to sell are presented as static, layered images that don't look very good at all. Why not a 3D render you can rotate?
- instead of selling the materials as a ball, why not show an example set of armor using it or something (or maybe in addition to the ball)
Compared to best in class examples like a Fortnite and Apex, it really feels slap-dash to me.
Am I crazy, or for a game that wants to pay for future content by selling cosmetic MTX is this not a really poor execution of a store?
- if you are considering buying an emote, you click on it and get a static image of it? You don't see an animation?
- the skins they want to sell are presented as static, layered images that don't look very good at all. Why not a 3D render you can rotate?
- instead of selling the materials as a ball, why not show an example set of armor using it or something (or maybe in addition to the ball)
Compared to best in class examples like a Fortnite and Apex, it really feels slap-dash to me.
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With all things considered, I really believe they were building one game and 2-3 years back just scrapped it, kept some assets, and started new. That is the only plausible answer.
You're so right. I thought it was pitiful as well and not enticing me to purchase anything in the least. It's really bizarre how few options there are and how terrible the store itself looks.
Eurogamer's review is out.
The opening paragraphs capture it all quite well, I think:
No rating. It avoided Avoid, at least.
The opening paragraphs capture it all quite well, I think:
No rating. It avoided Avoid, at least.
Yeah lol, this is exactly what I thought when I saw it. The store is so bad. I was thinking it was going to be like walking into a mall of cosmetics. I won't even buy anything because of the reasons you said.
I'm not sure about the emotes, they might too, but the vinyls and armor cosmetics you can go to the forge and look at them there.
I think something wearing thin after 70-100 hours is pretty good going considering all it is a means of transport akin to the sparrow in destiny. Yeah, it would have been nice to have some dog fighting in there. Same as it would have been nice to have underwater combat too. But it's a very satisfying means to get around and I totally expect them to expand it to arial races like destiny did with sparrow racong. the combat is pretty fun though, as angry Joe even said. Sure things become a little redundant as you max out your characters, but I think for most people the simple act of shooting things and throwing your abilities around is a compelling one. It's just a shame the missions that require you do do so are so by the numbers and are repeated so often.
They've basically taken the shallow optional side missions you get in all open world games and made an entire game around them. Maybe that's par for the course for these looter shooters? I can't say I experienced much better in destiny 1 or 2 either. So maybe inspired mission design and GaaS are terms that don't mix. But I expected a hell of a lot better than what is here. Or at least enough narrative context to make me notice less.
It's all super glaring. Which makes it all the weirder that not one person within bioware or EA noticed?
I agree with everything, I'm really having a lot of fun. The only thing that I kinda maybe don't agree is the Destiny comment - sure, it looks vibrant and nice but I like Anthem's visual style more. I've been playing a lot of Forsaken and Tangled Shore gets a bit old too fast for me. There is something about Anthem's nature that looks mighty, though it is a bit more generic. I also like the Javelins more than I like the Guardians.
Anyway, I am having fun. I had fun in Destiny 1/2. I expect to have fun in Division 2. I like games like this. A lot of things are frustrating in Anthem, but it's been really fun so far and I look forward to playing it each night.
I love this notion. Basically "give a developer a decade to work on a game thats providing no returns during that time of investment for the publisher, and maybe then it would be good" is something that could literally be said about any game thats ever been made. I'm sure plenty of devs would love to get a decade of time and funding to work on their projects.
Yeah would be pretty interesting to be a fly on the wall right about now
It's really dumb but you need to go into the forge to preview them. You click into say Helmet and then tab over to 'Buy' to see it. So no way to preview the whole thing together either afaik.
Maybe I'm misremembering an article I read, but didn't you work for Bioware as marketing director? You longer work there I assume?
Question is: are they completely surprised and blindsided by the negative reactions or were they actually expecting them? Since they are the ones that know the game the best obviously, strengths and flaws both.
I think they must've seen this coming, right?
If they never tested the game (which I honestly don't think they did) they may have gotten creator blindness. Just couldn't see the faults through the trees so to speak? Especially regarding the people with creative power over the project? I refuse to believe no-one within the company noticed these issues, but I can definitely believe the people who did having too small of a voice within the company to change anything.
For me I like how D2 keeps changing up the visual areas as you work through stories and missions. Avoids monotony, and I *really* like their skies.
I'd love to hear any stories about the development of this game in case you are allowed to reveal anything about it
Just so you know this is 100% false. This game was Casey Hudson's dream. He has said repeatedly that this is the game he is always wanted to make, stop letting him off the hook.
Yes and no, this is all my opinion of course, and I'm an idiot so it's probably a bad opinion, take it with a grain of salt. This style of game is made to get the most time out of the most people, a hobby basically. Lets say by the end of the lifecycle the average fan of the game that has treated it as a hobby has say... between 500 and 1000 hours? Considering this game's lifecycle was meant to be at least as long as Destiny, so 3 or so years, that seems more than fair. The first difference I have to make to Destiny is that I never liked the sparrows, but I never disliked them, they were just a fancy MMO mount. Even after 1000 hours in Destiny I never liked or disliked sparrows any more or less than the first time I used them. They never became more interesting but they never got in the way of doing what I was there for, shlooting.
Whereas for flying in Anthem they've kind of gone halfway between making it a pure transport system i.e mounts/sparrows and making it a core element to gameplay with deep skill differentiating systems. This means for me personally, the early game was great while you were still learning the system and how to use it to it's best ability but by the time you've finished the campaign you've mastered it, it's a disappointingly shallow system. The problem is that it's not braindead like a mount, it requires SOME effort, even if only a small amount to keep from overheating. The issue comes when you're on you're 180th FreePlay event, your 50th Legendary Contract or your 25th hour running Tyrant. You don't want to worry about overheating, you just want to get to the damn loot and anything that makes getting the loot take longer becomes annoying. That small amount of effort it takes is just enough for it to be tedious and the only way to eliminate some of that is sacrificing some of your power by equipping items that raise your overheating threshold or lower heat generation. The more I played the game, the more I felt like the flight system in the current iteration of Anthem was a poor allocation of resources, they didn't do enough to make it interesting or skilful but didn't make it simple enough to be braindead. Though I also feel the story/narrative was a poor allocation of resources as well.
As for combat... I don't know. If the endgame is designed around running content on GM3? They need to go back to the drawing board, like, asap. After running some GM3, I literally gave up on the game it was such a bad experience (I haven't touched it since.). I don't even know how to properly explain why it felt so godawful, but it was so unfun that it's not funny. Not to mention that I got MULTIPLE common white drops running GM3 strongholds which majorly annoyed me after how long it took. I had an okay time on GM1, everything died in a satisfying amount of time but the MW and Legendary drops were way too stingy to stay on it.
GM2 felt worse than the worst bullet sponges in The Division and GM3 was literally about 900% worse than that (I'm pretty sure that's how much the buff over GM2 is).
The reporting from insiders was that they knew it was flawed, but that they were expecting a mid to high 70s score - the same as other GaaS released. It's clear this has partly caught them by surprise.
A mobile game Marvel Future Fight even lets you test out the skin in a gameplay practice room. Maybe this one is just not ready and they will show animated and a showroom display of skins later...
This was my takeaway for sure. I just finished the vanilla campaign last night and just in those missions there was so much variety of setting and so much of it looked so good. The second to last mission in particular was just $$
That is not true. It's just the same stuff, you'd get from anything else. Difficulty level determines you loot drop chances.
So, basically, it's Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign. A metric ass-load of money and expectations spent on something that never defined why it needed to be, and the way it turned out leaves most people angry or at least disappointed about the future.
Sigh.
This is what boggles me. I'm not saying that vanilla Destiny was great, but in hindsight and compared to Anthem, Bungie did get a lot of things "right". I cannot fathom that the general consesus at Bioware was that Anthem in its current state is an experience worth paying 60 dollars/euros for, and being good enough to steal your time from games like Destiny of The Division.
So the channel that made my favourite review of Anthem has made a video all about Inscriptions/Augments and why it's terrible. (As well as some other discussion.) Worth a watch. Actual length of the video is about 6 minutes, the rest is showing his various MW's and Legendaries and their rolls to illustrate the point.
Anthem seems like how I imagine one of those failed Blizzard or Santa Monica projects that were shut down and never released, probably for good reason. Except EA cut the franken-pieces together, sprinkled it with some "micro" -transactions and pushed it out the door for 60 bucks. Everything in this game screams failed project hurriedly slapped together from the barely functional parts.
They fucked up estimating Andromeda's score too. Whoever is responsible for internal reviews probably needs to be axed.
I don't understand how a game like this could release into a field of looter games with no stat page.
I love me some Diablo 3 (top 15 in all of North America in multiple seasons in Greater Rift rank) and the stats page was not an option; it's a must. Too many things giving additive or multiplicative bonuses, flat gains and reductions, elemental increases and so on. It was a MUST to know what was doing what and how so that you could to some degree min-max your build. It was non-negotiable. The same is true in Path of Exile as anyone who plays the game knows. Try playing that game without knowing exactly where you stand with your resists and damage bonus to whatever damage type you're looking to build your tree around.
How can it not be here? As for random stats....I'm going to be honest: I don't have a problem with that in concept. Diablo 3 had that at launch and Path of Exile has a lot of that too. The problem is when you have a RNG system this punishing AND have no way to trade items. It works in Path of Exile because they designed the game to have a robust trading economy. Diablo 3 was okay at launch in concept because it had the same idea (but ended up being trash because it was built around their real money monetization scheme). It's not reasonable to have this degree of random variance AND not have some sort of way to trade -OR- a higher amount of embers upon dismantling.
Further, I don't understand some of the stat ranges for high-tier items. Diablo 3's model would have been perfect here where an item can roll maybe 8-10 possible types of stats that make sense for the weapon or item (and not %fire damage on a cold item) and then have a stat range. Maybe whites can roll +0%-5%. Maybe blues can roll +5%-10%. and so on up to however high you want to go on Masterworks and Legendaries. That way, you may get an item that isn't better than what you had before (so you trash it), but it's not just insta-garbage because it has affixes that your class can't even use. Having Masterworks and Legendaries that can roll 0% affixes (or even something < 20% IMO) is unacceptable.
Again, these are all lessons that have been learned and paths that have been tread years and years and YEARS ago. There is no reason for a 2019 looter game to be missing these sorts of basic features and understandings of how to design loot. It's just unacceptable.
So I hope it is okay to post my review here. It is not yelling, and mostly calm collected thoughts about the game and how weird it is. Any criticism is okay, good and bad. English is my second language. Thank you
https://thegeek.games/2019/02/26/anthem-destinys-stepchild/
https://thegeek.games/2019/02/26/anthem-destinys-stepchild/
It's going to come out the game was made in 18 months. That's the only thing that makes sense. I have no clue how you can have designers on pay for multiple months and come up with this system.
It's been clear the past month or so that they've been making shit up as they go along in regards to the loot system.
if so much of the initial talk wasn't around the glitches and tomb quest. Which weren't as significant on console. I could see them thinking low 70s as best case scenario
But those were not even the major issues most reviewers brought up. If they reviewed the game today it would get the same (or worse) scores, since the patch seems to have created now problems than it solved.
Bioware was certainly aware of these bugs. They didn't care enough to fix the game before shipping it. They probably have too small of a dev/QA team to keep up with their bug backlog while also implementing features.
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Very nice review.
Though I will say: I've noted that a lot of people have a problem with not being able to hot-swap items on the fly. I, actually, have no problem with this at all...in concept. I think choosing your loadout at the fort before going out makes the game feel less "gamey" if that makes sense. After all, where the fuck are you hiding 200 other weapons? In your rectum? No, it's okay to have to make a good decision on your loadout before venturing out and IMO that's how it should be. Nightfalls in Destiny don't let you swap gear either and nobody complains about that.
The problem, however, is in the amount of time it takes to test and find the loadout you like. It's the loading times, man. It's the crashes. Ain't nobody trying to spend 45 minutes trying out various combinations of skills and weapons. In any other game, that might take 5-10 minutes, tops. That's Destiny, Diablo 3, Path of Exile. Even in a game that has a similar setup -- Elite: Dangerous -- It probably takes no more than a couple of minutes to test your loadouts. In that game the length of time is a design feature (you have to land your ship in a dock, dock, switch weapons, get clearance to launch, get to a safe distance to test fire to make things feel realistic) and not a bunch of loading screens. If Anthem didn't take several minutes per run to test weapon combinations, the loadout system would be receiving no complaints. I really like having to make all your decisions at once. It's very simulator-like. But not with these loading screens.
You know what I would accept? A virtual combat simulator or something that you can use when inside the Javelin to test out any build you want based on the weapons and stats you have. VR combat scenarios. Then once you've found something you like, you equip it on your real Javelin and then set out. I think that would be a happy medium for most players assuming these loading screens are here to stay.
lol, if you think the tomb quest changes would have raised this game's average scoring by 10 points, you failed to understand the scope of issues people have with the game.
The game was obviously developed in a 1980's era Soviet ICBM silo guarded by T1000's, that's the only logical way I can see so little information having gotten to BioWare on the modern state of video games and their competitions advances. I've said it before but other than the gorgeous graphics this game FEELS like it was made in '12-'13, and even then there was Borderlands 2 to compete with.
I like well done random rolls, but there needs to be SOME curation and a hard cutoff to how useless an items rolls are so truly useless items aren't dropped. When a rare item drops with a terrible roll, it feels bad, your dopamine hit wears off straight away. I think D2's current system does this reasonably well, there are really no bad rolls, just suboptimal rolls due to having a small heavily curated pool that is different for each weapon. The issue is the affix pool at the moment is the same for all weapon types and the pool is so large that getting a good roll (yet alone a god roll which is theoretically possible but so unlikely as to be effectively impossible) is too random.
Agreed on all counts.
That video with so many badly rolled masterwork items betray the name "masterwork" IMO. There's nothing masterworked about them. Ray Charles could have made something with better stats. Like, look at this shit:
why is that okay? autocannon damage? marksman rifle damage? ELECTRIC DAMAGE?
c'mon, BioWare.