I have seen some of the reviews for Anthem, but they reinforce my expectations so I’m being wary. Gabe linked to this one review, in fact, that so panders to my sour expectations that I instinctively mistrust it. What do people who are actually playing the game thinking of Anthem?
Moe Lane
PS: Bioware is still dead to me. I just, you know, was curious and stuff.
Several of my gamer buddies bought it. Another one asked “was it worth the money?” They said “not yet”.
Those who say it shipped earlier than it should have, have a point.
.
But compared to Destiny, the Division, and Destiny 2 at launch, it’s head and shoulders above.
Love it.
I have about 20 hours in, and am, at best guess, slightly over halfway through the main storyline. (And level 20 out of a possible 30.)
.
Negatives and meh so far:
Gunplay is in the “ok,I guess” category. (But gets significantly better once you start getting gear that attacks damage modifiers.)
The story is serviceable, if a bit uninspired.
Your character is a bit vanilla (sometimes witty and gloriously sarcastic, but vanilla.)
It’s a bit of a pain to have to go back to base after every mission.
How XP is awarded isn’t immediately obvious.
It would be really nice to have radar. (A minimap couldn’t possibly cope with all the elevation changes.)
.
Positives:
The combat system is deep and multilayered. I’ve stuck with Interceptor my entire run, and there’s still a lot of gear types for it that I haven’t even tried out yet.
The environment is amazing. Big, beautiful map, in physics-defying 3-D. Little secrets (dormant plot hooks) all over the place.
The mobility is something truly special. I could seriously rave about it for paragraphs.
Also positive: memorable NPCs.
Stacks damage modifiers, not attacks damage modifiers.
You want to wait. The base game is short. The end game is anemic. (3 end dungeons, 2 of which are replays of other missions in the game.) Forced multiplayer in missions leading to you being dragged from place to place without ever really seeing the game part. Faults with the quick play system which can result in low level characters being dropped into the end boss. Lousy variety in loot drops. Loading screen after loading screen after loading screen. While folks are praising the flying and the animals, and some folks really like the combat, it’s not ready for prime time yet.
You know a weird thing? Metro Exodus has longish loading times. It astonished me. Not all the time, and not everywhere, but every time you reload because of a death or start the game from ‘desktop’.
.
I had gotten so used to not seeing them anymore that I looked at it almost like ‘what is this thing?’ and wanting to poke the console with a stick.
Have not played it yet. Right now, not sure the PC system could handle it and I, by and large, hate shooters on console.
.
I have mostly just been watching with bemusement the anticipation, the reviews and now the mad cap speculation. Now it seems as though people are almost universally panning it for no better reason than they want to strike at EA by almost hoping that they shut down Bioware if Anthem performs poorly. Ok, have fun with that.
.
Then we will see the beloved postmortems about how great Bioware was and how evil EA shut them down for no good reason.
That’s pretty much my take on it, as well.
.
Some of the criticisms make me wonder what the heck the critic was thinking (or even if they’d actually played the game!)
The one that really makes me shake my head is about the dialogue choices not mattering.
I feel like I’ve successfully navigated some pretty tough trees to get the result I wanted, and that there are some I could have done better on. And while they don’t impact the overall story, there is a distinct impression that my Fort Tarsis looks different from most others based upon the choices I’ve made. I mean, it doesn’t advance the plot if you negotiate a peace between the young hothead and a powerful member of the Fort’s black market, but…
From my perspective, an EA studio buyout is like a zombie plague. It’s still moving, but has really been dead since the infection. Bioware, like Maxis and Westwood and all the others before them died the moment they sold to EA.
It is hard to separate the stuff from the ‘stuff’ here. Most commentary about the game seems to be more about EA than it is about Bioware or even Anthem.
.
Then you have some reviewers who are completely in their own zip code who are pissing on everything like drunken alley cats while railing against Capitalism. Angling for one of those prestigious spots on the People’s Internal Bureau of Games Management when the ‘People’ come to power, eh? Good luck with that, sparky.
My thoughts… (I’m playing on the XBox One)
– Flight in the game is a *lot* of fun. The flight system is more sophisticated than the ones you see in most MMOs, but it’s still very intuitive and easy to use.
– The downside to the above is that the game doesn’t like players spread out all over the place. If my group is flying to the next location for the mission, and I’m not in the lead, then I’m all but guaranteed to get at least one notification that I’ll be moved to the mission boundaries within the next 20 seconds. I typically catch up before this happens. But it’s still a nuisance. It doesn’t help that the Javelins for the most part aren’t capable of continuous flight. They can fly for quite a while, but eventually the jets will overheat if you don’t land for several seconds.
– Combat seems solid, though I’m getting annoyed with Titans. It’s likely just me, but I seem to have a lot of trouble with them.
– The combo system from Mass Effect is back, and can be very effective if you have a group that’s able to coordinate it.
– The primary issue that I’ve run into revolves around event triggers. When triggers occur during a mission, the game is supposed to play the designated dialogue, and then move your nav point or update the mission objective. I’ve run into a few times where there was a noticeable delay in having the dialogue to play, and even had one time just last night where it never played at all during the mission. We literally had endlessly spawning waves of enemies, and I finally gave up after at least ten minutes (the good news was that I got some achievements taken care of in the mean time…)
Hey, shoot me a friend request:
GT Moldymaltquaff
(A feature of Anthem is that you get free XP from members of your friends list who are playing.)