BRIAN BLESSEDMaybe you aren't SPEAKING LOUDLY ENOUGHHHRegistered Userregular
edited October 2020
My statement was more in regards to them trying to expand their crafting system into something the game's progression is built around, rather than them specifically obfuscating it the exact same way Warframe does (using actual real-world days). Besides, it wouldn't be the first time that BioWare would have done it - they did it for Dragon Age Inquisition, unmonetized, with people falling either way on whether or not they enjoyed it.
I already spoke my piece on the inventory management - I do reiterate I think it could be tuned better to allow designated points of access but erring on the more conservative side of things would serve the overall game world better, and it's hard to assume the who-what-why of how they decided to get to that point, which is like trying to reverse-engineer the psychology of a product's designer
Having hot swappable guns would make sense out in the open world or a mission but your active abilities and components shouldn't be changeable until you go back to a hub with a javelin station (strider would be fine).
As someone that barely gives a rip about cosmetics, the game needs a lot more variety with equipable items. There needs to be many, many more weapons that are viable and create different play styles and combinations. Best in slot should be verboten, everything should have a use case. I will work endlessly to pair just the right autocannon with the perfect component, then do it all again for a different autocannon. Once I stop gearing and the game turns into Barbie dress up, the clock starts on my ability to maintain interest.
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
While I don't think GaaS will ever go away I'll be happy if they were just the fad for this console gen and take a backseat for the next.
I wish. GaaS's promise of a constant revenue stream is just too damn tempting. You saw similar products coming out back in the '00s when MMORPGs were all the hotness and everyone wanted a piece of that sweet WoW $15 a month subscription. You saw the same results back then, a buggy beta, a (hopefully) less buggy but playable release version, and a playerbase that burns through all the content and then leaves once they get to the endgame and realize that nothing new is going to be added because the poor dev team is busy putting out fires. The only really notable things about Anthem are how many of the issues were due to them having to use Frostbite without sufficient technical support to bang it into shape and the fact that Bioware's project management was utterly abysmal.
Personally I've been wanting to give Anthem a try, but the dumb thing is still full price here, which is a non-starter given its current condition. I don't need it to drop to $10 or whatever, but a little something something would be nice.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
I mean, if it wasn't for GaaS, we wouldn't be getting an Anthem revamp at all.
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BRIAN BLESSEDMaybe you aren't SPEAKING LOUDLY ENOUGHHHRegistered Userregular
That's super weird, I swore a while ago I checked the gift price for Anthem and it was sitting at like... 15-20 dollars. Maybe a sale, I guess.
At the very least grey-legal channels are almost certainly selling codes for that much. ed: and retail boxed versions (of which the PC box is literally a code in a discless DVD case l.m.a.o) look like they're definitely the price of dirt, eg. Amazon
I got the disc for $5. I would be willing to bet it'll be very easily available for such on Black Friday if nothing else. But I also don't know which country we're currently discussing.
What is this I don't even.
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
Huh, I hadn't even bothered to check the physical disc price. 249 czk (about $10) for the disc, 1800 czk (about $75) for digital.
Like, what the hell. Ah well, might give me something to do this weekend.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
I mean, if it wasn't for GaaS, we wouldn't be getting an Anthem revamp at all.
If it wasn't for GaaS, Anthem might have been good from the start.
Based on my whopping two days of playing I'd have to lean more in that direction. The core of the game, flying around in power armor and crushing the hell out of everything you see is freaking awesome, but everything else around it is just so thin. I don't know if that's because the project was so horribly run that they didn't have time to flesh things out or because the suits figured that GaaS meant that they could get away with half-assing everything that wasn't related to keeping the gameplay loop going for the endgame, but there's basically two games here. One where I'm flying around and having fun on a bun, and another that I have to deal with in order to get back out and fly around and advance the story and whatnot. I'll also note that I've been booted four or five times over two days due to the game losing it's connection to the EA servers while playing. So far it hasn't wrecked some insane amount of progress. It hasn't kicked me during some hard-ass boss fight when the big bad was down to his last sliver, but it has certainly been annoying when it has happened and that's something that I'm definitely going to blame on GaaS.
So the gripes, and there's a lot of them.
Fort Tarsis sucks. The layout is this weird combination of too small and constrained for me to think it's part of some bustling frontier town, while also being large and annoyingly laid out that it's a bit of a pain in the butt to navigate. And you have to navigate it because there's at least four different peeps to talk to for missions. The default walk speed in town is disturbingly low too. Sprinting is a fine enough speed, but walking is a slog.
Mission progression is not great. I hit the Trials of the Legionnaires and the main storyline just seems to stop dead in it's tracks. Basically telling me to stop everything and go do some Freeplay (read: Multi-Player) to hook into the GaaS shiz. Never mind that the freeplay map has all of three peeps on it when I'm playing. Plus, the other mission peeps have kind of dried up. I think Yarrow still has stuff that needs doing, but the Arcanist and Sentinel are done for the moment it seems. My quest journal thingie has all of two things in it, freeplay to rack up things for the Trials and whatever I got from Yarrow. This is insane and would be absolutely unacceptable in a normal RPG. Compare it to something like Borderlands, which is also sorta a GaaS thing, though one focused more on selling DLC instead of premium currency for cosmetics, where your quest journal is always chock full of places to go and people to shoot. Anthem leans heavily on people going into freeplay and doing world events in order to keep people busy, but that's not really doing it for me. I don't think it helps that missions are run in an instance that ends when the mission is over, so you're either doing one single mission or you're cruising around doing whatever in the 'real' world. I think it might have been better if there was an option for missions to occur in a freeplay type instance that just disabled the world events and whatnot in the vicinity of the mission, then once the mission was completed events would re-enable and you could cruise around, maybe go to another mission location. Something like that.
The characters aren't that great. They're not horrible, but I'm a chunk of the way in and I'm not really liking any of them all that much. I'm looking for someone to hook me into the setting. A buddy I want to hang out with, a love interest, something. It's just not there. This is Bioware and I'm disappointed with the characters they've created. WTF.
Dialogue options are not good. You only get two of them and some of the cues are misleading, similar to Fallout 4's sarcastic response. Again, this is Bioware and I'm bitching about the dialogue choices. Also, most of the dialogue is delivered quickly with not much of a pause between lines so a lot of the conversations seem rather rushed to my ears.
The missions are starting to feel a bit samey. Go to location, shoot things, move on, shoot more things, gather echos to unlock a door, there's a relic and gather shards to shut it down. The basic elements that make up the mission aren't bad, the weakness is that there's not a lot more to it to distract from those pieces. Borderlands uses wacky characters to keep things going, Mass Effect slathered everything with heaps of story and legitimately good dialogue and character choices to break up the shooting, even Skyrim has player freedom and the open world to keep things interesting. Anthem, so far, has none of that.
Good stuff:
Flying around and combat are legitimately fun. Like really super fun. I'm running in a Colossus and it absolutely feels like I'm a god of war. Sprint, jump, trigger the jets, slam down on a group of mooks and then let loose with the flamethrower on anyone who is still standing is just awesome. I've even got a mortar on my back that I bust out every so often. Not often enough since most enemies want to get up close and personal, but I try. Bioware is in love with their prime -> detonate mechanic, but I'm barely using it and I don't care. It's burnination time, and if something big and tough shows up I have an autocannon and a grenade launcher to make them question their life choices. I actually feel like a tank. And not the RPG definition of tank where you're just a pool of HP with enough damage output to get by, I mean I'm a tank. I'm a highly mobile heavily armed and armored weapons platform that's the culmination of centuries of technological development.
The world is gorgeous. I've done enough games that I can recognize that it's still fundamentally a corridor and room setup with the winds at the top keeping you on track, but it's niiiiiiiice. Open, vertical, lovely, ruins that can be explored on foot with broken areas that require flying. With a decent variety of enemies for shooting too.
The core concept of the story is a good one. Ancient aliens harnessing the force of creation to do things, then humanity mucking around in the ruins of their civilization, it's a good hook. I also like that the public transportation system is a bunch of AT-ATs. The only disappointment is that the relics so far just seem to spew out critters. I'd have liked it if they did a bit more with maybe warping the physics or deforming the terrain, but I'll chalk that up to Frostbite being a pain in the ass.
And... yeah... that's kind of the thing with the game. Fun gameplay, beautiful world, not a whole lot else. Or in the case of the story, a good core that they (so far) haven't done much with. Well worth the $10, but I wouldn't have been too happy spending full price on it, especially with the tech issues it was having early on and the fact that even now it's dependent on phoning home to the EA servers.
Things that definitely could be improved without rewriting the whole thing:
The tutorial, because there really isn't one at the moment. I had to google how to switch weapons. C'mon peeps.
The setup. The whole 'we failed to get to the Heart of Rage (who names these things anyway?), lost a whole lot of people, and now everyone hates the freelancers' thing is goofy. Also your friend hates you because he wanted to do a suicide run and you (and your other friend, but he doesn't seem to hate her) stopped him. I think they should have had the intro/tutorial be the Dominion attack on Freemark. That brings the Monitor in from the beginning and gives a better setup for people not liking Freelancers since some of them could have abandoned the city from the start with additional ones fleeing as the battle went south. You can even have the Sentinel survivors throwing the Freelancers under the bus after the fact. It'd still let them setup the conflict between the main character and his old team since a heroic last stand to save civilians is an easier sell than charging head first into an apocalypse storm that already wiped out over two thirds of your forces.
Components are this weird combination of increasing your total HP pool while also providing various other perks. I'd prefer them to be a bit more rigid with Offense/Defense/Utility type components, so you weren't stuck wondering if the +shield/armor on a higher level component was worth losing the explosion or burninating bonus on something lower level that you had equipped. Tradeoffs when considering what gear to equip are good, but the way they are now there's a bit more of a direct conflict between stats and abilities from components and how I want to tweak my armor. It doesn't help that I have the meta-knowledge of how wacky the DPS (and possibly other things) is in the game. There was one thing way back that indicated that the main thing that mattered was the total power level of your Javelin, so the best thing to do was to equip the highest power everything you had. I suspect that unborking the damage calculations might be impossible, but letting the player maintain their focus on certain types of enhancements by specializing the components would be an improvement in my eyes.
And that's my take on Anthem. A fun enough game brought low by really horrible project management that was then compounded by the developers leaning in on the online GaaS elements to try and paper over the weaknesses that resulted. Or possibly the weaknesses were introduced by the GaaS model and the team didn't have enough time to shore them up due to the horrible project management.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
I don’t think the problem with anthem was bad monetization; they did a fair enough job with that, at least imo
It just doesn’t feel like they knew what they wanted the game to be, which is backed up by what we know of the production. As a proper RPG or a looter/shooter, it’s threadbare
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
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ThegreatcowLord of All BaconsWashington State - It's Wet up here innit? Registered Userregular
Really well said. I'm dreading what's to become of Dragon Age under this model as it's been confirmed to have completely restarted development as a result of Anthem and will be a live-service game as well. Just...ugh.
At this point, from what we've learned the Anthem we got was a combination of 3 factors:
EA: They have their live sports games that print money. I'm sure they looked at Destiny, The Division, and other live games and wanted in on it. They pegged Bioware to do it. Bioware: From what we've heard, they were pumped at first to tackle it. Which makes sense; developers, artists, designer, etc, all like new challenges. Of course what ended up happening was that like Mass Effect Andromeda, they scoped way too big and their upper management was incompetent, unable to correctly manage a project of this size. Frostbite: Again, everything we know is that this engine is a nightmare to work with and folks spent way too much time having to recreate stuff they had with Unreal. Add in that many of the resources had little experience with it and hiring folks with experience is near impossible since it's mostly an EA only engine.
In the end you have what we got, a game with an incredible core gameplay loop but lacked content and polish in every area. It's sad to imagine if this game had just used the Unreal engine and what those 100's or 1000's of hours spent around Frostbite's issues could have been put towards.
A good gameplay loop can cover a lot of snags or blemishes. As someone with *checks Steam* nearly 1,300 hours logged into Warframe over the years, I can attest to this. There are a lot of similarities, but also a lot of differences.
Warframe has randomized loot that you get as drops, and almost always as pieces of a thing (typically takes 3-5 bits to actually begin crafting the thing, along with other materials acquired through gameplay). However, there aren't random stats on the gear; you craft the gun, it's as good or bad as any other version of that gun, and then apply mods to it that you've been collecting and improving over time as well. The crafting time means that when I do fire it back up again, I pick up a bunch of new weapons, play with them for a while to improve them (frames (classes), weapons, and other elements can all level from 0 to 30) while crafting some things, and then when those things are done I swap to them for levelling purposes (this is tied to a larger account based progression).
And then there's the trading. You can play the game, never put a cent into it, but you can trade/sell items you don't need to players who will pay premium currency for them. Through this, even though you often need 4 or 5 bits to create a given suit/weapon/whatever, if you're short on them, you can use the trade channel or a trading site to arrange a purchase/trade.
Sorry if this is getting a bit long winded, but while I can see the comparison on many levels between the two, with an engaging core gameplay loop that drew me in for hundreds of hours (for both games, though Anthem definitely didn't last the years that Warframe has in terms of things taking up my free time), I agree that other elements aren't a direct 1:1 that translates well. I don't think one can really mold Warframe's approach to loot and progression in a direct way over (not that anyone has been calling for such, I'm just commenting on the comparison in general).
I think there are definitely some lessons to learn there. Bioware is a massive studio filled with creative people, but even without borrowing overtly, there are some things they really should have looked at how their competitors were doing them to get a feel for where they wanted to go. The articles we've read over the years about how they struggled with direction certainly made a ton of sense comparing what I'd hoped the game to be with what we got at release, and the patches/content that followed.
I'm pretty sure Anthem is even still installed on my PS4's hard drive. Apex Legends videos might be starting to nudge it off there, but with a good enough revamp, I'm not beyond giving it a whirl once more. Sadly, of the half dozen or so friends who picked it up as well, I could see maybe one giving it a shot, such is the bitterness tied to that experience.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
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BRIAN BLESSEDMaybe you aren't SPEAKING LOUDLY ENOUGHHHRegistered Userregular
edited November 2020
I'm willing to defend the 'Heart of Rage' as a pretty fucking metal name for a locale/incident tbh :P
I've said that Anthem is an okay game that I've played before, Nu-Anthem will probably be an okay game but I'm not sure if I'll play it right off unless there's like... significant additions to the story or something. We shall see~
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
I'm willing to defend the 'Heart of Rage' as a pretty fucking metal name for a locale/incident tbh :P
It's a hard core name, no problems with that. It just seems excessively anthropomorphic for the situation. Like if the hurricane naming system produced things like 'That Asshole Michael' or 'Eta Seems Fun'. The cataclysm name didn't seem grounded in anything in the setting, it was just badass for the sake of sounding badass. Doom of Freemark would have been pretty badass too, and also have tied into the actual situation with the cataclysm. At least as far as what I understand with the story so far. It's certainly not a major gripe, just something that kind of stood out since tight writing is something I generally expect from Bioware.
Monetization: The monetization wasn't bad, outside of general arguments that monetization is generally bad. I snazzied up my Colossus last night just using the non-premium currency no problem. More that their endgame content just wasn't enough to keep people around.
To continue with that thought, Warframe was brought up, and it seems like it has a silly amount of crafting and tweaking of things. Borderlands has ludicrously stupid amounts of loot and a good chunk of it is actually useful. Anthem's endgame loot situation though... man. The Colossus has five pieces of kit for the built in weapons, each of which has a single super duper legendary variety. Then there's ten specific components plus however many generic ones there are. It's sort of like the first Mass Effect, where once you got the good N7 gear everything else was fodder for the omnigel machine. This is a perfectly acceptable setup for a single player game. You level up, you improve your kit, and you get the really good shiz just in time to hit the big boss and end the story. It's just not nearly enough I think to really hook people into the raid/event -> loot -> raid/event -> loot loop that they needed to keep the playerbase involved. Especially since one of the truths of the universe is that gamers will consume content at a rate far higher than any developer will ever believe or design for. This is something that I'd chalk up to Bioware's inexperience. Similar to how their attempts at open worlds in DA:I and ME:A were pretty bad. They made wide open spaces but left them empty and boring. They got the basic concept, weren't able or didn't realize they needed to do more. Like in the case of the Colossus' weapons. It has a flamethrower, and that flamethrower has a legendary version. But that flamethrower is only ever a flamethrower. This seems like a bit of an obvious oversight since someone like Gearbox would definitely have created a more generic 'element thrower' and then had different flavors of fire/acid/frost. It's not negatively impacting my game at all, I'm having fun, but the relatively limited amount of loot really stands out.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
At least it's better than "Pillar of Autumn." (Halo lore makes me stabby.)
Halo ship names are great, you are on the wrong side of history.
They're pretentious and artsy fartsy and no credible military organization would ever name them that. They'd rather name them the USS Ralph P. Higgenbottom or the USS Oshkosh or the USS Cockthruster. I WILL NOT BE MOVED ON THIS
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BRIAN BLESSEDMaybe you aren't SPEAKING LOUDLY ENOUGHHHRegistered Userregular
edited November 2020
I'm going to start throwing hands for both Halo and Anthem names haha
Terms like "Heart of Rage" and "Anthem of Creation" come off to me as much more poetic and high-concept - in a way I think it's part of their way of trying to differentiate the setting from Mass Effect and Dragon Age. If I remember correctly, some of the designers of the game concept for Anthem were inspired by Hurricane Sandy during post-release development of Mass Effect 3 (and its wildly successful multiplayer), so anthropomorphizing the power and terror of natural disasters seems in line with Anthem's world.
Also, the game being persistent multiplayer was one of its main design targets from the start, suggesting they would have somehow made a better game if it wasn't is dubious at best
Re: equipment, some components with legendary behaviours have more variety than others. Yeah it's thin overall but I didn't find it overly so for a Year One first-attempt game of this kind. Most of the games Anthem gets compared to honestly started off incredibly mediocre content-wise as well
The obvious response is "well there's no excuse they should have learned from the mistakes made prior by these franchises", but after so many games like these it's kind of apparent that a lot of effective ongoing games don't emerge fully formed anyway. Obvious and significant technical issues at launch aside, the scope of what content the developers think players want and what content players actually want is frequently different. I feel like these older games were given that chance to do so and people run off the assumption that ongoing-content titles start at the point where older services have ended up.
(This isn't to say the game didn't have drop rate issues or other loot things that needed a lot of retooling based of inexperience handling the shift in genre, but there are a good deal of elements of the game which were intentionally designed the way they were to differentiate themselves from the rhythms/loops of other titles, some of which I think have merit and others which don't)
I'm going to start throwing hands for both Halo and Anthem names haha
Terms like "Heart of Rage" and "Anthem of Creation" come off to me as much more poetic and high-concept - in a way I think it's part of their way of trying to differentiate the setting from Mass Effect and Dragon Age. If I remember correctly, some of the designers of the game concept for Anthem were inspired by Hurricane Sandy during post-release development of Mass Effect 3 (and its wildly successful multiplayer), so anthropomorphizing the power and terror of natural disasters seems in line with Anthem's world.
Also, the game being persistent multiplayer was one of its main design targets from the start, suggesting they would have somehow made a better game if it wasn't is dubious at best
Re: equipment, some components with legendary behaviours have more variety than others. Yeah it's thin overall but I didn't find it overly so for a Year One first-attempt game of this kind. Most of the games Anthem gets compared to honestly started off incredibly mediocre content-wise as well
The obvious response is "well there's no excuse they should have learned from the mistakes made prior by these franchises", but after so many games like these it's kind of apparent that a lot of effective ongoing games don't emerge fully formed anyway. Obvious and significant technical issues at launch aside, the scope of what content the developers think players want and what content players actually want is frequently different. I feel like these older games were given that chance to do so and people run off the assumption that ongoing-content titles start at the point where older services have ended up.
(This isn't to say the game didn't have drop rate issues or other loot things that needed a lot of retooling based of inexperience handling the shift in genre, but there are a good deal of elements of the game which were intentionally designed the way they were to differentiate themselves from the rhythms/loops of other titles, some of which I think have merit and others which don't)
If you want to start as a content light, buggy and poorly thought out experience, you need to be innovating to make up for that. You can't be a me too entry in a fairly saturated genre that wants points for trying. That's ridiculous. You don't see anyone releasing a smart phone on par with the iPhone 5 and wondering why that's not good enough now.
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
I'm going to start throwing hands for both Halo and Anthem names haha
Terms like "Heart of Rage" and "Anthem of Creation" come off to me as much more poetic and high-concept - in a way I think it's part of their way of trying to differentiate the setting from Mass Effect and Dragon Age. If I remember correctly, some of the designers of the game concept for Anthem were inspired by Hurricane Sandy during post-release development of Mass Effect 3 (and its wildly successful multiplayer), so anthropomorphizing the power and terror of natural disasters seems in line with Anthem's world.
Also, the game being persistent multiplayer was one of its main design targets from the start, suggesting they would have somehow made a better game if it wasn't is dubious at best
Re: equipment, some components with legendary behaviours have more variety than others. Yeah it's thin overall but I didn't find it overly so for a Year One first-attempt game of this kind. Most of the games Anthem gets compared to honestly started off incredibly mediocre content-wise as well
The obvious response is "well there's no excuse they should have learned from the mistakes made prior by these franchises", but after so many games like these it's kind of apparent that a lot of effective ongoing games don't emerge fully formed anyway. Obvious and significant technical issues at launch aside, the scope of what content the developers think players want and what content players actually want is frequently different. I feel like these older games were given that chance to do so and people run off the assumption that ongoing-content titles start at the point where older services have ended up.
(This isn't to say the game didn't have drop rate issues or other loot things that needed a lot of retooling based of inexperience handling the shift in genre, but there are a good deal of elements of the game which were intentionally designed the way they were to differentiate themselves from the rhythms/loops of other titles, some of which I think have merit and others which don't)
Which is kind of a damning statement for the GaaS development and release process. Plus, it doesn't do a lot of good if your game is going up against others that have had that year to flesh out their offerings or you've got something like BL3 coming up on your heels that is providing the loot pinata's from the get go. This isn't to say that Anthem was bad, and it's flopping was both deserved and predictable. More that if enough games of the GaaS ilk are produced and released with threadbare content, then eventually one of them is going to crash and burn out of the gate. Which is something I saw back in the MMORPG craze too. A bunch of games came out and limped along and got better, but eventually there were enough fleshed out 'full games' out there that the new ones coming out failed to get enough players to keep going long enough for their development to be completed.
I'm not sure if Anthem would have been much better without the persistent multiplayer, but I do think that being GaaS meant that Bioware was really hoping that the multiplayer aspect would carry the game long enough for them to sort out all the other stuff. Without MP, maybe they would have done more to produce the more standard story heavy Bioware style RPG we all love. I dunno, Frostbite and their lack of project management really threw a spanner in the works.
One thing about the game I thought of that I think is indicative of it's rocky development. You can choose your pilot's face out of 20 or so options. No customization at all though on the face though, just the presets. Yet the only time (that I know of) that you're out of the Javelin and people could see your face is in Fort Tarsis, and that's a single player hub. So why the limitation on facial customization? It's not a horrible design decision, just one that seems weird since all other Bioware games allow for a lot of tweaking of your appearance, and the only real reason I can think to limit it is because at some point Tarsis was going to be MP and they wanted to limit the complexity. Or not, I dunno, it's just kind of a strange thing.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
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DragkoniasThat Guy Who Does StuffYou Know, There. Registered Userregular
I mean a lot of these GaaS are released half baked on entry with the idea of expanding are rather finishing things later. That and the monetization.
But yeah you can't do that without bringing something new to the table. The flying is novel but not deep enough to patch all those weaknesses.
I've never bought the "Destiny sucked at launch too" argument. Destiny was hugely successful at launch and reconfigured the industry in a lot of ways. It had flaws, certainly, which are observable in hindsight. But it was one of those games that tons and tons of people experienced happily that caused the entire industry to pivot to be more like it. It objectively did not "suck" at launch.
The weirdest thing about Anthem as a GaaS to me is that Bioware’s niche is that they do great “Choose your own adventure” RPGs with a lot of player choice and sharply written characters. That they didn’t bring those to the table in this game was baffling.
Looking at another GaaS game with a horrible launch, Fallout 76 has reached the “It’s good now!” stage of media coverage because Bethesda’s main strength of good open world maps was in the game from the start, and they were able to polish around it.
all of the gaas attempts that 'sucked at launch' that survive have a unique or innovative element to keep people going through that rough 'figure out what we do with this whole thing' period
BRIAN BLESSEDMaybe you aren't SPEAKING LOUDLY ENOUGHHHRegistered Userregular
edited November 2020
To me the innovation is the verticality of its combat and level design. Maybe I'm just a basic bitch but as someone who takes a lot of stock in the core mechanics of a game, the way Anthem is built feels vastly different from the others in this nebulous genre. The flying and movement isn't just about the way the player controls their character, it informs the way enemy arenas are built, the manner in which cover is used and informs the visual scale in its setting.
I get that's probably not enough for people. idk, I was part of the game population that plays Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer to this very day long after I finished the trilogy, and that doesn't engage C&C storytelling either
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
To me the innovation is the verticality of its combat and level design. Maybe I'm just a basic bitch but as someone who takes a lot of stock in the core mechanics of a game, the way Anthem is built feels vastly different from the others in this nebulous genre. The flying and movement isn't just about the way the player controls their character, it informs the way enemy arenas are built, the manner in which cover is used and informs the visual scale in its setting.
I get that's probably not enough for people. idk, I was part of the game population that plays Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer to this very day long after I finished the trilogy, and that doesn't engage C&C storytelling either
But using cover means I'm not burning things with my flamethrower.
I agree though. I'm not using the flight mechanics a lot in combat, at least not how I saw people doing it on Twitch where they're hovering around and shooting and whatnot, but I'm definitely doing the sprint, jump, jets, and slam into some poor bastards however many meters away thing. The thing I'm liking, in addition to the vertical elements, is how the the ability to take off and jet across areas lets them have rather large battlespaces without having the player being bogged down by having to footslog stupid distances while being shot. It's sort of like the ME's Vanguard, but with the added bonus of letting you control your engagement range. You want to land in the middle of the group you can do that, you want to come in a little ways away and lay into them with some guns? You can do that too.
Continued gripes: Got past the trials, not super duper horrible relatively speaking. Needing to get ultimate kills wasn't too bad other than needing to remember to trigger the dumb thing. The treasure chest one was a bit less enjoyable, but I was already close. The annoyance is that still there's only a single mission. It's either Freeplay or hit the main storyline. Expeditions didn't come back, no faction action, nothing. I'm not sure if they did that to control player advancement in regards to levels and the faction blueprint unlocks or something, but it's just damn weird.
Haluk and Owen are grinding my gears. The writing on Owen is getting kind of obvious so I hope it's a misdirect; and in the course of a single cutscene Haluk suddenly got all 'I love you man', but it was too quick so I'm still probably going to try and burn him if he ever shows up in a mission.
Good stuff: The crazy shopkeeper lady with the wildlife fetish is growing on me.
I might hit Freeplay on Hard next time I'm out. Hopefully it will let me keep on with my current 'burn all the things' playstyle but be a bit more challenging. I took down a Titan solo just by sitting on a nearby hill and blazing away with the autocannon. It was all good fun, but Titans had been built up to be a major thing so it was a tad strange.
I'm a bit worried about what I'm hearing about the Anthem 2.0 rumors. A major revamp of the character development and an introduction of skill trees isn't really what the game needs. Nothing against skill trees, more character customization probably can't hurt, but I would think that greater gear variety and adding some permanent outposts with mission givers would be a relatively easy thing to add that would go a ways towards perking up the game. The combat gameplay is fun, they just need more ways to get people combating other than cruising around the map and looking for a world event marker to pop up.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
Reading about Anthem again made me remember the main theme and I'm sure I'll give the revamp or whatever they call it a try just to hear the theme again
daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
On thing I'm surprised about is that I haven't seen a delivery quest so far. Overland travel is legitimately fun in this game, so I'm somewhat surprised they haven't leveraged it more so far.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
I hope they rework some of the encounter design with 2.0. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to articulate this right but some combination of the constantly respawning mobs, the way most of them just disappear after an event ends, and the abrupt phase in of some mobs often left me feeling like I was waiting on some arbitrary timer for an event to end rather than my own combat ability being the decisive factor. The smaller arenas where you ended up looping around the place a bunch of times definitely exacerbated the feeling. Adding more fixed size encounters a la Borderlands might help.
I played some Genshin Impact a few weeks ago and after getting into a few boss fights, I just thought "Well this feels a lot like Anthem's combat". Makes me think that Anthem would work better with an open world instead, and of course, more Javelins to choose from. Though the aspect of customizing skills for your Javelin is definitely better.
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DragkoniasThat Guy Who Does StuffYou Know, There. Registered Userregular
I think the core gameplay for Anthem is very solid. It reminds me of ME3MP in a good way.
Eh, the primary freeplay encounter design being combat in the round against constantly spawning mobs could use another look. The guns and abilities all feel great to use but the impact of any ability feels weak because even if you catch a portal perfectly and nuke everything you know that portal is going to be back in 30 seconds spawning more mobs.
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DragkoniasThat Guy Who Does StuffYou Know, There. Registered Userregular
I actually don't mind that too much. Most of the time those mobs aren't an issue with proper target prioritization and it usually exists to dissuade overly conservative play.
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BRIAN BLESSEDMaybe you aren't SPEAKING LOUDLY ENOUGHHHRegistered Userregular
Reading about Anthem again made me remember the main theme and I'm sure I'll give the revamp or whatever they call it a try just to hear the theme again
I don't think Sarah Schachner has ever produced a bad soundtrack. Her work absolutely rips
I just feel like a lot of games would benefit from what Star Wars squadron did. Just make it a half price game at launch. You don’t even need a gaas model, just scale things back and polish what’s there. Not every game needs to be a big triple A experience that lasts thousands of hours
More games need to just give players a good 10 to 20 hours and say “I hope you enjoyed our game”. Hell even a good 5 to 10
Instead they try and stretch it out and it becomes a giant distraction and warps player expectations around how they approach the game.
Same thing happened with marvel avengers.
If anthem had released for half the price of a AAA game and just had a small decent story, with a few modes to play at the end if you want, and people went into it understanding that framing, the response would have been very different
You live by the gaas you die by it basically. Gaas is often treated as a way to fix a game that’s not finished, when they’re better off making less game, not more. A smaller punchier experience is better than a flattened out long one
Eh, the primary freeplay encounter design being combat in the round against constantly spawning mobs could use another look. The guns and abilities all feel great to use but the impact of any ability feels weak because even if you catch a portal perfectly and nuke everything you know that portal is going to be back in 30 seconds spawning more mobs.
I do think this is the case. The awesomeness of the flight system is really hard to match against any sort of geometric design for fight environments. I don't know, frankly, how they could ever fix this other than to do what Destiny did which was mostly have only two z-levels, even though the illusion of moving up and down more than that seemed there.
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I already spoke my piece on the inventory management - I do reiterate I think it could be tuned better to allow designated points of access but erring on the more conservative side of things would serve the overall game world better, and it's hard to assume the who-what-why of how they decided to get to that point, which is like trying to reverse-engineer the psychology of a product's designer
I wish. GaaS's promise of a constant revenue stream is just too damn tempting. You saw similar products coming out back in the '00s when MMORPGs were all the hotness and everyone wanted a piece of that sweet WoW $15 a month subscription. You saw the same results back then, a buggy beta, a (hopefully) less buggy but playable release version, and a playerbase that burns through all the content and then leaves once they get to the endgame and realize that nothing new is going to be added because the poor dev team is busy putting out fires. The only really notable things about Anthem are how many of the issues were due to them having to use Frostbite without sufficient technical support to bang it into shape and the fact that Bioware's project management was utterly abysmal.
Personally I've been wanting to give Anthem a try, but the dumb thing is still full price here, which is a non-starter given its current condition. I don't need it to drop to $10 or whatever, but a little something something would be nice.
At the very least grey-legal channels are almost certainly selling codes for that much. ed: and retail boxed versions (of which the PC box is literally a code in a discless DVD case l.m.a.o) look like they're definitely the price of dirt, eg. Amazon
Like, what the hell. Ah well, might give me something to do this weekend.
If it wasn't for GaaS, Anthem might have been good from the start.
Based on my whopping two days of playing I'd have to lean more in that direction. The core of the game, flying around in power armor and crushing the hell out of everything you see is freaking awesome, but everything else around it is just so thin. I don't know if that's because the project was so horribly run that they didn't have time to flesh things out or because the suits figured that GaaS meant that they could get away with half-assing everything that wasn't related to keeping the gameplay loop going for the endgame, but there's basically two games here. One where I'm flying around and having fun on a bun, and another that I have to deal with in order to get back out and fly around and advance the story and whatnot. I'll also note that I've been booted four or five times over two days due to the game losing it's connection to the EA servers while playing. So far it hasn't wrecked some insane amount of progress. It hasn't kicked me during some hard-ass boss fight when the big bad was down to his last sliver, but it has certainly been annoying when it has happened and that's something that I'm definitely going to blame on GaaS.
So the gripes, and there's a lot of them.
Fort Tarsis sucks. The layout is this weird combination of too small and constrained for me to think it's part of some bustling frontier town, while also being large and annoyingly laid out that it's a bit of a pain in the butt to navigate. And you have to navigate it because there's at least four different peeps to talk to for missions. The default walk speed in town is disturbingly low too. Sprinting is a fine enough speed, but walking is a slog.
Mission progression is not great. I hit the Trials of the Legionnaires and the main storyline just seems to stop dead in it's tracks. Basically telling me to stop everything and go do some Freeplay (read: Multi-Player) to hook into the GaaS shiz. Never mind that the freeplay map has all of three peeps on it when I'm playing. Plus, the other mission peeps have kind of dried up. I think Yarrow still has stuff that needs doing, but the Arcanist and Sentinel are done for the moment it seems. My quest journal thingie has all of two things in it, freeplay to rack up things for the Trials and whatever I got from Yarrow. This is insane and would be absolutely unacceptable in a normal RPG. Compare it to something like Borderlands, which is also sorta a GaaS thing, though one focused more on selling DLC instead of premium currency for cosmetics, where your quest journal is always chock full of places to go and people to shoot. Anthem leans heavily on people going into freeplay and doing world events in order to keep people busy, but that's not really doing it for me. I don't think it helps that missions are run in an instance that ends when the mission is over, so you're either doing one single mission or you're cruising around doing whatever in the 'real' world. I think it might have been better if there was an option for missions to occur in a freeplay type instance that just disabled the world events and whatnot in the vicinity of the mission, then once the mission was completed events would re-enable and you could cruise around, maybe go to another mission location. Something like that.
The characters aren't that great. They're not horrible, but I'm a chunk of the way in and I'm not really liking any of them all that much. I'm looking for someone to hook me into the setting. A buddy I want to hang out with, a love interest, something. It's just not there. This is Bioware and I'm disappointed with the characters they've created. WTF.
Dialogue options are not good. You only get two of them and some of the cues are misleading, similar to Fallout 4's sarcastic response. Again, this is Bioware and I'm bitching about the dialogue choices. Also, most of the dialogue is delivered quickly with not much of a pause between lines so a lot of the conversations seem rather rushed to my ears.
The missions are starting to feel a bit samey. Go to location, shoot things, move on, shoot more things, gather echos to unlock a door, there's a relic and gather shards to shut it down. The basic elements that make up the mission aren't bad, the weakness is that there's not a lot more to it to distract from those pieces. Borderlands uses wacky characters to keep things going, Mass Effect slathered everything with heaps of story and legitimately good dialogue and character choices to break up the shooting, even Skyrim has player freedom and the open world to keep things interesting. Anthem, so far, has none of that.
Good stuff:
Flying around and combat are legitimately fun. Like really super fun. I'm running in a Colossus and it absolutely feels like I'm a god of war. Sprint, jump, trigger the jets, slam down on a group of mooks and then let loose with the flamethrower on anyone who is still standing is just awesome. I've even got a mortar on my back that I bust out every so often. Not often enough since most enemies want to get up close and personal, but I try. Bioware is in love with their prime -> detonate mechanic, but I'm barely using it and I don't care. It's burnination time, and if something big and tough shows up I have an autocannon and a grenade launcher to make them question their life choices. I actually feel like a tank. And not the RPG definition of tank where you're just a pool of HP with enough damage output to get by, I mean I'm a tank. I'm a highly mobile heavily armed and armored weapons platform that's the culmination of centuries of technological development.
The world is gorgeous. I've done enough games that I can recognize that it's still fundamentally a corridor and room setup with the winds at the top keeping you on track, but it's niiiiiiiice. Open, vertical, lovely, ruins that can be explored on foot with broken areas that require flying. With a decent variety of enemies for shooting too.
The core concept of the story is a good one. Ancient aliens harnessing the force of creation to do things, then humanity mucking around in the ruins of their civilization, it's a good hook. I also like that the public transportation system is a bunch of AT-ATs. The only disappointment is that the relics so far just seem to spew out critters. I'd have liked it if they did a bit more with maybe warping the physics or deforming the terrain, but I'll chalk that up to Frostbite being a pain in the ass.
And... yeah... that's kind of the thing with the game. Fun gameplay, beautiful world, not a whole lot else. Or in the case of the story, a good core that they (so far) haven't done much with. Well worth the $10, but I wouldn't have been too happy spending full price on it, especially with the tech issues it was having early on and the fact that even now it's dependent on phoning home to the EA servers.
Things that definitely could be improved without rewriting the whole thing:
The tutorial, because there really isn't one at the moment. I had to google how to switch weapons. C'mon peeps.
The setup. The whole 'we failed to get to the Heart of Rage (who names these things anyway?), lost a whole lot of people, and now everyone hates the freelancers' thing is goofy. Also your friend hates you because he wanted to do a suicide run and you (and your other friend, but he doesn't seem to hate her) stopped him. I think they should have had the intro/tutorial be the Dominion attack on Freemark. That brings the Monitor in from the beginning and gives a better setup for people not liking Freelancers since some of them could have abandoned the city from the start with additional ones fleeing as the battle went south. You can even have the Sentinel survivors throwing the Freelancers under the bus after the fact. It'd still let them setup the conflict between the main character and his old team since a heroic last stand to save civilians is an easier sell than charging head first into an apocalypse storm that already wiped out over two thirds of your forces.
Components are this weird combination of increasing your total HP pool while also providing various other perks. I'd prefer them to be a bit more rigid with Offense/Defense/Utility type components, so you weren't stuck wondering if the +shield/armor on a higher level component was worth losing the explosion or burninating bonus on something lower level that you had equipped. Tradeoffs when considering what gear to equip are good, but the way they are now there's a bit more of a direct conflict between stats and abilities from components and how I want to tweak my armor. It doesn't help that I have the meta-knowledge of how wacky the DPS (and possibly other things) is in the game. There was one thing way back that indicated that the main thing that mattered was the total power level of your Javelin, so the best thing to do was to equip the highest power everything you had. I suspect that unborking the damage calculations might be impossible, but letting the player maintain their focus on certain types of enhancements by specializing the components would be an improvement in my eyes.
And that's my take on Anthem. A fun enough game brought low by really horrible project management that was then compounded by the developers leaning in on the online GaaS elements to try and paper over the weaknesses that resulted. Or possibly the weaknesses were introduced by the GaaS model and the team didn't have enough time to shore them up due to the horrible project management.
It just doesn’t feel like they knew what they wanted the game to be, which is backed up by what we know of the production. As a proper RPG or a looter/shooter, it’s threadbare
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Wud yoo laek to lern aboot meatz? Look here!
EA: They have their live sports games that print money. I'm sure they looked at Destiny, The Division, and other live games and wanted in on it. They pegged Bioware to do it.
Bioware: From what we've heard, they were pumped at first to tackle it. Which makes sense; developers, artists, designer, etc, all like new challenges. Of course what ended up happening was that like Mass Effect Andromeda, they scoped way too big and their upper management was incompetent, unable to correctly manage a project of this size.
Frostbite: Again, everything we know is that this engine is a nightmare to work with and folks spent way too much time having to recreate stuff they had with Unreal. Add in that many of the resources had little experience with it and hiring folks with experience is near impossible since it's mostly an EA only engine.
In the end you have what we got, a game with an incredible core gameplay loop but lacked content and polish in every area. It's sad to imagine if this game had just used the Unreal engine and what those 100's or 1000's of hours spent around Frostbite's issues could have been put towards.
Warframe has randomized loot that you get as drops, and almost always as pieces of a thing (typically takes 3-5 bits to actually begin crafting the thing, along with other materials acquired through gameplay). However, there aren't random stats on the gear; you craft the gun, it's as good or bad as any other version of that gun, and then apply mods to it that you've been collecting and improving over time as well. The crafting time means that when I do fire it back up again, I pick up a bunch of new weapons, play with them for a while to improve them (frames (classes), weapons, and other elements can all level from 0 to 30) while crafting some things, and then when those things are done I swap to them for levelling purposes (this is tied to a larger account based progression).
And then there's the trading. You can play the game, never put a cent into it, but you can trade/sell items you don't need to players who will pay premium currency for them. Through this, even though you often need 4 or 5 bits to create a given suit/weapon/whatever, if you're short on them, you can use the trade channel or a trading site to arrange a purchase/trade.
Sorry if this is getting a bit long winded, but while I can see the comparison on many levels between the two, with an engaging core gameplay loop that drew me in for hundreds of hours (for both games, though Anthem definitely didn't last the years that Warframe has in terms of things taking up my free time), I agree that other elements aren't a direct 1:1 that translates well. I don't think one can really mold Warframe's approach to loot and progression in a direct way over (not that anyone has been calling for such, I'm just commenting on the comparison in general).
I think there are definitely some lessons to learn there. Bioware is a massive studio filled with creative people, but even without borrowing overtly, there are some things they really should have looked at how their competitors were doing them to get a feel for where they wanted to go. The articles we've read over the years about how they struggled with direction certainly made a ton of sense comparing what I'd hoped the game to be with what we got at release, and the patches/content that followed.
I'm pretty sure Anthem is even still installed on my PS4's hard drive. Apex Legends videos might be starting to nudge it off there, but with a good enough revamp, I'm not beyond giving it a whirl once more. Sadly, of the half dozen or so friends who picked it up as well, I could see maybe one giving it a shot, such is the bitterness tied to that experience.
I've said that Anthem is an okay game that I've played before, Nu-Anthem will probably be an okay game but I'm not sure if I'll play it right off unless there's like... significant additions to the story or something. We shall see~
It's a hard core name, no problems with that. It just seems excessively anthropomorphic for the situation. Like if the hurricane naming system produced things like 'That Asshole Michael' or 'Eta Seems Fun'. The cataclysm name didn't seem grounded in anything in the setting, it was just badass for the sake of sounding badass. Doom of Freemark would have been pretty badass too, and also have tied into the actual situation with the cataclysm. At least as far as what I understand with the story so far. It's certainly not a major gripe, just something that kind of stood out since tight writing is something I generally expect from Bioware.
Monetization: The monetization wasn't bad, outside of general arguments that monetization is generally bad. I snazzied up my Colossus last night just using the non-premium currency no problem. More that their endgame content just wasn't enough to keep people around.
To continue with that thought, Warframe was brought up, and it seems like it has a silly amount of crafting and tweaking of things. Borderlands has ludicrously stupid amounts of loot and a good chunk of it is actually useful. Anthem's endgame loot situation though... man. The Colossus has five pieces of kit for the built in weapons, each of which has a single super duper legendary variety. Then there's ten specific components plus however many generic ones there are. It's sort of like the first Mass Effect, where once you got the good N7 gear everything else was fodder for the omnigel machine. This is a perfectly acceptable setup for a single player game. You level up, you improve your kit, and you get the really good shiz just in time to hit the big boss and end the story. It's just not nearly enough I think to really hook people into the raid/event -> loot -> raid/event -> loot loop that they needed to keep the playerbase involved. Especially since one of the truths of the universe is that gamers will consume content at a rate far higher than any developer will ever believe or design for. This is something that I'd chalk up to Bioware's inexperience. Similar to how their attempts at open worlds in DA:I and ME:A were pretty bad. They made wide open spaces but left them empty and boring. They got the basic concept, weren't able or didn't realize they needed to do more. Like in the case of the Colossus' weapons. It has a flamethrower, and that flamethrower has a legendary version. But that flamethrower is only ever a flamethrower. This seems like a bit of an obvious oversight since someone like Gearbox would definitely have created a more generic 'element thrower' and then had different flavors of fire/acid/frost. It's not negatively impacting my game at all, I'm having fun, but the relatively limited amount of loot really stands out.
Halo ship names are great, you are on the wrong side of history.
They're pretentious and artsy fartsy and no credible military organization would ever name them that. They'd rather name them the USS Ralph P. Higgenbottom or the USS Oshkosh or the USS Cockthruster. I WILL NOT BE MOVED ON THIS
Terms like "Heart of Rage" and "Anthem of Creation" come off to me as much more poetic and high-concept - in a way I think it's part of their way of trying to differentiate the setting from Mass Effect and Dragon Age. If I remember correctly, some of the designers of the game concept for Anthem were inspired by Hurricane Sandy during post-release development of Mass Effect 3 (and its wildly successful multiplayer), so anthropomorphizing the power and terror of natural disasters seems in line with Anthem's world.
Also, the game being persistent multiplayer was one of its main design targets from the start, suggesting they would have somehow made a better game if it wasn't is dubious at best
Re: equipment, some components with legendary behaviours have more variety than others. Yeah it's thin overall but I didn't find it overly so for a Year One first-attempt game of this kind. Most of the games Anthem gets compared to honestly started off incredibly mediocre content-wise as well
The obvious response is "well there's no excuse they should have learned from the mistakes made prior by these franchises", but after so many games like these it's kind of apparent that a lot of effective ongoing games don't emerge fully formed anyway. Obvious and significant technical issues at launch aside, the scope of what content the developers think players want and what content players actually want is frequently different. I feel like these older games were given that chance to do so and people run off the assumption that ongoing-content titles start at the point where older services have ended up.
(This isn't to say the game didn't have drop rate issues or other loot things that needed a lot of retooling based of inexperience handling the shift in genre, but there are a good deal of elements of the game which were intentionally designed the way they were to differentiate themselves from the rhythms/loops of other titles, some of which I think have merit and others which don't)
If you want to start as a content light, buggy and poorly thought out experience, you need to be innovating to make up for that. You can't be a me too entry in a fairly saturated genre that wants points for trying. That's ridiculous. You don't see anyone releasing a smart phone on par with the iPhone 5 and wondering why that's not good enough now.
Which is kind of a damning statement for the GaaS development and release process. Plus, it doesn't do a lot of good if your game is going up against others that have had that year to flesh out their offerings or you've got something like BL3 coming up on your heels that is providing the loot pinata's from the get go. This isn't to say that Anthem was bad, and it's flopping was both deserved and predictable. More that if enough games of the GaaS ilk are produced and released with threadbare content, then eventually one of them is going to crash and burn out of the gate. Which is something I saw back in the MMORPG craze too. A bunch of games came out and limped along and got better, but eventually there were enough fleshed out 'full games' out there that the new ones coming out failed to get enough players to keep going long enough for their development to be completed.
I'm not sure if Anthem would have been much better without the persistent multiplayer, but I do think that being GaaS meant that Bioware was really hoping that the multiplayer aspect would carry the game long enough for them to sort out all the other stuff. Without MP, maybe they would have done more to produce the more standard story heavy Bioware style RPG we all love. I dunno, Frostbite and their lack of project management really threw a spanner in the works.
One thing about the game I thought of that I think is indicative of it's rocky development. You can choose your pilot's face out of 20 or so options. No customization at all though on the face though, just the presets. Yet the only time (that I know of) that you're out of the Javelin and people could see your face is in Fort Tarsis, and that's a single player hub. So why the limitation on facial customization? It's not a horrible design decision, just one that seems weird since all other Bioware games allow for a lot of tweaking of your appearance, and the only real reason I can think to limit it is because at some point Tarsis was going to be MP and they wanted to limit the complexity. Or not, I dunno, it's just kind of a strange thing.
But yeah you can't do that without bringing something new to the table. The flying is novel but not deep enough to patch all those weaknesses.
Looking at another GaaS game with a horrible launch, Fallout 76 has reached the “It’s good now!” stage of media coverage because Bethesda’s main strength of good open world maps was in the game from the start, and they were able to polish around it.
https://medium.com/@alascii
I get that's probably not enough for people. idk, I was part of the game population that plays Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer to this very day long after I finished the trilogy, and that doesn't engage C&C storytelling either
But using cover means I'm not burning things with my flamethrower.
I agree though. I'm not using the flight mechanics a lot in combat, at least not how I saw people doing it on Twitch where they're hovering around and shooting and whatnot, but I'm definitely doing the sprint, jump, jets, and slam into some poor bastards however many meters away thing. The thing I'm liking, in addition to the vertical elements, is how the the ability to take off and jet across areas lets them have rather large battlespaces without having the player being bogged down by having to footslog stupid distances while being shot. It's sort of like the ME's Vanguard, but with the added bonus of letting you control your engagement range. You want to land in the middle of the group you can do that, you want to come in a little ways away and lay into them with some guns? You can do that too.
Continued gripes: Got past the trials, not super duper horrible relatively speaking. Needing to get ultimate kills wasn't too bad other than needing to remember to trigger the dumb thing. The treasure chest one was a bit less enjoyable, but I was already close. The annoyance is that still there's only a single mission. It's either Freeplay or hit the main storyline. Expeditions didn't come back, no faction action, nothing. I'm not sure if they did that to control player advancement in regards to levels and the faction blueprint unlocks or something, but it's just damn weird.
Haluk and Owen are grinding my gears. The writing on Owen is getting kind of obvious so I hope it's a misdirect; and in the course of a single cutscene Haluk suddenly got all 'I love you man', but it was too quick so I'm still probably going to try and burn him if he ever shows up in a mission.
Good stuff: The crazy shopkeeper lady with the wildlife fetish is growing on me.
I might hit Freeplay on Hard next time I'm out. Hopefully it will let me keep on with my current 'burn all the things' playstyle but be a bit more challenging. I took down a Titan solo just by sitting on a nearby hill and blazing away with the autocannon. It was all good fun, but Titans had been built up to be a major thing so it was a tad strange.
I'm a bit worried about what I'm hearing about the Anthem 2.0 rumors. A major revamp of the character development and an introduction of skill trees isn't really what the game needs. Nothing against skill trees, more character customization probably can't hurt, but I would think that greater gear variety and adding some permanent outposts with mission givers would be a relatively easy thing to add that would go a ways towards perking up the game. The combat gameplay is fun, they just need more ways to get people combating other than cruising around the map and looking for a world event marker to pop up.
It's everything else that really needs work.
I don't think Sarah Schachner has ever produced a bad soundtrack. Her work absolutely rips
More games need to just give players a good 10 to 20 hours and say “I hope you enjoyed our game”. Hell even a good 5 to 10
Instead they try and stretch it out and it becomes a giant distraction and warps player expectations around how they approach the game.
Same thing happened with marvel avengers.
If anthem had released for half the price of a AAA game and just had a small decent story, with a few modes to play at the end if you want, and people went into it understanding that framing, the response would have been very different
You live by the gaas you die by it basically. Gaas is often treated as a way to fix a game that’s not finished, when they’re better off making less game, not more. A smaller punchier experience is better than a flattened out long one
I do think this is the case. The awesomeness of the flight system is really hard to match against any sort of geometric design for fight environments. I don't know, frankly, how they could ever fix this other than to do what Destiny did which was mostly have only two z-levels, even though the illusion of moving up and down more than that seemed there.