Honestly Anthem was so fucking good. It’s a victim of the internet hate machine.
My hobby is video games, but some people’s hobby is hating things, and those people decided that Anthem was the next thing to hate. The hate was insanely disproportionate to the actual problems that Anthem had.
The endgame grind needed some work, but that’s always the case with a live service game. Comparing it to Destiny, which had been out for five years at that point, there wasn’t a lot of content. Comparing it to video games in general, it was fine. Easily worth the cost of a new game.
Graphics-wise? Top notch, triple-A.
And as far as gameplay, the actual most important part of a game? Anthem was a fucking masterpiece. The combat was fun and varied. Classes were distinct.
And the traversal was the best I’ve ever played. Soaring through the air like Iron Man and dipping into a waterfall so my suit doesn’t overheat is one of the video game highlights of my life.
But the internet ruined it. The same outrage machine that was built to respond to things like “a sense of pride and accomplishment” was turned on Anthem, not because it was that bad, but because there wasn’t anything else particularly hate-worthy that week.
It’s got a 61 on OpenCritic, and Brad Shoemaker of NextLander said he thought long and hard about giving it 1/5 stars at the time (ultimately giving it a 2/5) because the game didn’t even really work when it launched. That wouldn’t really indicate it was just something the internet wanted to hate that week.
I don’t think we played the game because Anthem was boring. I enjoyed being Iron Man but after an hour. But after that, it was kinda same ol’ for the next few hours.
I had more fun with Suicide Squad, because the city was awesome and the story was at least passable.
I did like the first hour - no question. But I think Anthem needed to cook some more. A lot more.
I think the worst thing BioWare did was ban people for loot exploiting when all they were doing was flying around in a loop collecting chests as they spawned. The players weren’t doing anything the game didn’t allow and banning them really created vitriol in the community. When added to the lack of end game, the player base just never got any growth momentum. It was really sad, because I was a huge BW fan and that game plus the loss of the Doctors really wrecked them (thanks EA /s). You could see the potential in Anthem, but it felt like a a great game engine waiting for the game to be written for it (honestly similar to pre-Forsaken Destiny 2, but even that had more content).
I’d imagine these comments are being made as a some thought experiment kinda deal. I play tested one of their concepts for Anthem Next. It was unremarkable, and the majority of the session was them trying to narrow down why people played Destiny. It was obvious what audience they wanted. The guy running it was visibly annoyed that my looter shooter of choice at the time was The Division.
It wasn’t going to be anything without a lot more work. The flying was nice. Everything else was still painfully generic. There’s a reason it got canned.
I mean, the first one was good. It was all downhill from there, sadly. The second was decent, but suffered from a ton of re-used assets and a dumbed-down combat system. By the third, it seemed like they were trying to make a single-player MMO, which just made no damned sense to me. Never played the 4th. Maybe I’ll get it for free at some point and check it out.
I remember watching an interview of one of the developers of DA2 and I could tell that he had no idea what people liked in video games. It killed my interest.
Ah it’s a <make up weird quotes that don’t reflect the general feedback and then react to that> episode. I too remember people in the street shouting “you never should’ve tried something new BioWare!” after making that memory up.
In truth the biggest criticism they got was when they released it unfinished, promised a bunch of content and then let it die because they smashed the numbers into a calculator and came to the conclusion it’ll not be worth it. No fucking shit. Fixing the mess you sold people for full price won’t make you a lot of profit, it’s something you do to make up for delivering unfinished crap in the first place.
Imagine a plumber who does pipe work in your house and when you call them because they did a shoddy job and it’s leaking they say “Nah, wouldn’t be worth it to fix this. I’ll rather go do a different project for more money.”
To Bioware’s credit, Anthem was a completely different game 18 months before release and EA came in and forced an entirely new concept, story and title on them.
I would be at least curious to see what Bioware would have done with the IP without EA flipping the table on them.
Probably more floundering. An EA exec told them at one point that their demo was crap (and based on word from other devs, he was probably right), so they reintroduced flight, which IMO was one of the best aspects of the game. EA didn’t force a new story or concept on Bioware, though. All that was Bioware’s own fault between lack of leadership and staff burnout.
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