ANTHEM - failed Destiny clone from BioWare

[Black]

It's

"Its".

 

[Fedora Master]

Division 2 is getting a lot of good press and the hype in the community has only grown with the latest beta. It's release will most likely be the nail in the anthem coffin.

All these flavor of the months shooters are still just engaging in cripple fights. Fo76 isn't good, Anthem isn't good, Apex isn't good and Division 2 won't be good. At least not by any sensible persons standards.

 

[Agame]

Division 2 is getting a lot of good press and the hype in the community has only grown with the latest beta. It's release will most likely be the nail in the anthem coffin.

All these flavor of the months shooters are still just engaging in cripple fights. Fo76 isn't good, Anthem isn't good, Apex isn't good and Division 2 won't be good. At least not by any sensible persons standards.

Yet "millions" of people are playing them. Never underestimate the power of mediocrity...

 

[BlackAdderBG]

 

[J1M]

Warframe has weapon and armor mods, which is exactly what I referenced in the very first sentence. Suppose I could've added WF there as a more obvious example for the sub though. Fixed the post a bit.

Warframe has probably around a hundred unique weapon models(a lot more skins, which range from simple textures to complete model changes) which is what I was referencing.

Yeah, but it's also how many years old now? I'd be surprised if they wouldn't continuously add more and more models for guns, frames, ships etc. Still, weapon mods are a very good crutch to stand on while adding more models.

You have to survive launch if you want to count 5 years of patches among your laurels.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Warframe has weapon and armor mods, which is exactly what I referenced in the very first sentence. Suppose I could've added WF there as a more obvious example for the sub though. Fixed the post a bit.

Warframe has probably around a hundred unique weapon models(a lot more skins, which range from simple textures to complete model changes) which is what I was referencing.

Yeah, but it's also how many years old now? I'd be surprised if they wouldn't continuously add more and more models for guns, frames, ships etc. Still, weapon mods are a very good crutch to stand on while adding more models.

Warframe has likely had less money put towards its development since it first began in total than Anthem cost to develop.

 

[True Ukrainian]

Looking at how Inquisition, Andromeda and now Anthem turned out, I suspect that Bioware had been hiring nutcases like Manveir in order to make the old guard seem indispensable to EA. When that did not work out, the nutcases were used to cripple the company so that the old guard's new ventures would have less competition.

 

[Crane]

I'm waiting for Bioware's dissolution with bated breath. EA needs to put the company out of its misery.

 

[Dexter]

To be fair Diablo 3 was a complete shitshow when it came out; the entire endgame was based around grinding endlessly for (literal) one in a million uniques with the right affixes that didn't feel unique in the slightest. That was more because of a terrible core design decision with the RMAH than anything, but still, it took them until RoS to make the game actually playable.

It's still a fucking shitshow, enemies are HP-bloated and the gameplay and loot loop simply ain't any fun.

Victor Vran was a much better recent ARPG, at the very least much better than Diablo 3 ever hoped to be.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/v2/2019/02/26/anthem-doesnt-care-about-its-own-story/

Anthem Doesn’t Care About its Own Story

I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing BioWare’s games and its approach to storytelling. My retrospective on the Mass Effect series is literally the length of a novel. I’ve watched the company evolve from indie developers making role-playing games to its current incarnation making tentpole shooters for EA. I’ve been frustrated with how the company has changed, but I keep coming back because I’m always curious what’s going to happen next. At this point, the story of what’s happening to the team at BioWare is more interesting to me than the stories put into the company’s games.

Despite its reputation as a story-first developer, BioWare is sometimes criticized because its stories tend to be formulaic and predictable. This was particularly true in the period that ran from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic to the first Mass Effect game. Its work was very much focused on a classic hero’s journey against an obvious villain in a world of black and white morality. Unlike rival studio Obsidian Entertainment, BioWare didn’t do deconstructive or subversive plots, and its stories didn’t explore shades of grey. Critics said this simplicity made BioWare games shallow.

I don’t think that criticism is fair because it reduces the entire narrative experience of a game down to the plot summary: “Hero defeats villain and saves the world.” But narrative is more than the plot, and BioWare’s writers were less interested in the plot and more invested in worldbuilding and supporting characters. They made big, complex worlds that were bursting at the seams with details. Those worlds were full of factions with long histories, strong rivalries, and vibrant leaders. Cultural attitudes and assumptions were revealed and explored through your characters’ friends and allies. A lot of titles will jam all their worldbuilding into a clumsy lore dump as soon as you launch a new game. For contrast, BioWare would take that information and turn it into personal stories so getting to know your allies also let you learn about the world.

In the original Mass Effect, your buddy Wrex would tell you a tangled story that involved the cagey Salarians, the militaristic Turians, the bug-like Rachni invaders, and how all of them connected to his people. These events shaped his entire worldview, which subsequently tied into missions where those views could be expressed through conflict. The game’s overall story might have been a simplistic yarn about stopping space-Cthulhu, but the worldbuilding was closer to the level of complexity in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

Recent BioWare games have a lot less detailed worldbuilding. The characters you meet no longer reveal the world through their backstories. Instead they tell you about the melodrama in their past. That’s not an inherently bad storytelling choice, but it is a departure from how their earlier games were constructed.

This brings us to Anthem, which has a story the game doesn’t care about and characters who have very little to say about the world they inhabit. It’s a story completely lacking in player agency where the dialogue choices don’t matter. This is probably the best game about robot suits ever made, but if you’re looking for a classic BioWare story in a complex world full of vibrant characters and interesting choices, then you are going to be disappointed.

This is the first BioWare game where you can’t skip individual dialogue lines by slapping the spacebar. The game doesn’t tell you, but you can skip them with the escape key. (I have not tried using a controller.) If you want to skip a cutscene, then you need to hold escape for a couple of seconds. In terms of presentation, the designers take their story very seriously, and they really don’t want you skipping any of it.

This makes sense, since the developers clearly spent a lot of money on this story. The important conversations don’t use the standard BioWare system of shot reverse shot and canned animations layered together. Those techniques have the advantage of being incredibly cost effective, which is really important in a game with dozens of hours of branching dialogue. In Anthem the big scenes use techniques normally associated with strictly linear games and fixed cutscenes. Every conversation uses unique facial expressions and motion capture. This means Anthem‘s cutscenes show a lot of polish in a technical sense, but they are being used to convey a rigidly linear story that the rest of the game doesn’t care about.

The game is intended to be played with others, and the matchmaking is designed to put you into a four-person squad for every mission. This matchmaking is so important to the designers that they added a popup to discourage you from attempting to play solo. The combat systems are designed so that players can synergize with each other and multiply their damage, and the enemy encounters are designed with squads of players in mind. On the gameplay side, this is fundamentally a four-person co-op game.

And yet, the story makes no allowance for this. The matchmaking is happy to drop you into a group of randos that are halfway through a mission, which means you’ll miss out on half the dialogue. What did you miss? How much did you miss? Was it important to the plot? There’s no way to know from within the game. You’ll have to watch the mission on YouTube later to find out.

On top of that, the dialogue triggers at the same time for everyone, whether it makes sense for them or not. On more than one occasion I had conversations playing where my character was commenting on things I hadn’t seen yet because the dialogue was triggered by one of the other players. And this is assuming you can hear the characters talking. Very often their chatter would play in the middle of a pitched battle and I wouldn’t be able to pay attention to it because I was busy doing my robot-powered murders.

Worse, even though you’re supposed to play in a group, the dialogue never makes allowances for this. All conversations make it sound like you’re the only freelancer on the job and nobody makes any reference to the team you’re on.

Everyone in the squad is being treated like the main character, and the story is pretending the rest of the squad doesn’t exist. Everyone hears the conversation at the same time, but we’re not all hearing the same dialogue because the male and female protagonists have slightly different lines. The whole thing is really weird.

Occasionally there are little environmental details sprinkled around the world. Sometimes you can learn something new if you’re willing to stop and examine the details. Except, if you’re playing as intended then the game will punish you for attempting to do so. The moment a battle ends, all the other players launch themselves towards the next waypoint. The moment they move out of brick-throwing distance, the game warns that you’ve strayed too far from the group and it’s going to forcibly teleport you to them. If you’re not quick enough to catch up, you’ll be dragged through a load screen when the game relocates you, even if it only moves you a short distance.

When you’re in town, you’re meant to walk around the city and be immersed as if you were part of the world. To enforce this, designers took away your ability to sprint and jump. Instead you have to mosey around the place glued to the ground like you’re playing The Witness.

In earlier BioWare games, the designers attempted to weave the story and gameplay together. In Anthem, it feels like the writer and the gameplay designer lived in different cities and never spoke to each other. You can hear the gears grind as the game shifts from story mode to gameplay mode without a clutch.

In Knights of the Old Republic, the largest block of dialogue and cutscenes is dedicated to the moment where the main character unlocks their force powers. In Mass Effect, it’s a big emotional moment when Shepard is given command of the Normandy. In Dragon Age: Origins, a lot of time is spent establishing how the main character joins the Grey Wardens and what that means. In Anthem, the story has nothing to say when the player unlocks a new javelin. The player is given a pop-up telling them they have a new robo-suit to play with, but this is never explained or explored within the story. Where did this javelin come from? Who paid for it and why? It’s not that the story glosses over this, it’s that the story doesn’t even acknowledge that it happens.

Outside of missions, the game takes the story very seriously and discourages you from skipping any of it. During missions, the story is treated like an afterthought and the matchmaking will casually have you skipping sections of it without warning. The gameplay tramples on the story and the story ignores what happens in gameplay.

At the start of the game, you’re allowed to customize your face, but then that face never shows up in cutscenes because the game takes place entirely in a first person view. It feels less like I’m controlling the protagonist of an epic story and more like I’m viewing the world through a GoPro strapped to the forehead of a supporting character. Earlier I said it feels like the writer and gameplay designer never spoke, but often I got the feeling that they did sometimes speak and that they also bitterly resented each other.

I’m not saying that the lack of narrative content makes Anthem a bad game. I’m saying it feels like a very confused, un-BioWare game. While we have no way of knowing for sure, this feels like the result of meddling from the suits at EA. It seems like they saw the microtransaction gold mine of the original Destiny and thought, “Hey! This shooter is profitable and BioWare makes shooters, so let’s have BioWare make us one of these.” It’s the kind of decision that makes perfect sense if you only understand games through marketing and sales charts and never actually play any games.

I’m not surprised that Anthem is off to a rough launch. A developer focused on single-player narrative content is trying to compete in the online shooter market against Bungie, a company that specializes in multiplayer systems and solid game feel. BioWare is operating outside of its core competency to challenge a rival in a genre where gameplay is king. Despite all the glaring flaws in Anthem, I think BioWare has done surprisingly well. Considering how firmly the deck was stacked against the company, this could have gone a lot worse.

Sadly, I doubt EA will see things this way. Rather than acknowledging that Anthem works well as a first attempt in a difficult market, EA will probably be disappointed that it’s not a magical billion dollar smash hit.

Having said that, I doubt EA will be as disappointed as I am.

 

[vortex]

Anthem is already top seller.

 

[Loostreaks]

Who finds this shit fun? ME1 combat was better.

 

[vortex]

Who finds this shit fun? ME1 combat was better.

Anthem has far more fun combat.

 

[Gerrard]

Division 2 is getting a lot of good press and the hype in the community has only grown with the latest beta. It's release will most likely be the nail in the anthem coffin.

Too bad it's shit. The 8 hours or so I played in the "private beta" was more than enough to know. At least it runs well I guess.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Division 2 is getting a lot of good press and the hype in the community has only grown with the latest beta. It's release will most likely be the nail in the anthem coffin.

Too bad it's shit. The 8 hours or so I played in the "private beta" was more than enough to know. At least it runs well I guess.

It's an incredibly boring setting so it was gonna be meh anyways.

 

[Angthoron]

Division 2 is getting a lot of good press and the hype in the community has only grown with the latest beta. It's release will most likely be the nail in the anthem coffin.

Too bad it's shit. The 8 hours or so I played in the "private beta" was more than enough to know. At least it runs well I guess.

It's an incredibly boring setting so it was gonna be meh anyways.

Yeah a rioting America with guns is seriously the least imaginative thing one could come up with, can't believe it doesn't have "Tom Clancy's" on top.

 

[cvv]

It's an incredibly boring setting so it was gonna be meh anyways.

The setting is literally the only thing why I'd be interested in Division. Whenever there's a triple Aaayyy game that looks realistic and grounded and not like Apex, Fortnite or anything by Blizzard I'm potentially interested. Looking around it seems Ubisoft is the only big publisher left that still produces games with adult aesthetics. 20 years of slaying dragons, wizards, mutants and space monsters took its toll and I'm tired of this kiddie shit.

Not defending D2's gameplay tho. I've no idea what this game is about. I'd never thought I'd be even mingling in these parts of Codex but last year I gave Warframe a try and I played for two months straight so apparently I do find lewter games entertaining after all.

 

[Alienman]

Anthem is a social commentary on India and Pakistan.

 

[BlackAdderBG]

The setting in the Division is kind of meh and the devs were doing the usual- in first hour mention the gays. In the end it turned out the bad guy was a planet loving sand nigger that made the virus.

Spoiler

 

[cvv]

In the end it turned out the bad guy was a planet loving sand nigger that made the virus.

So it wasn't a greedy capitalist trying to make some phat lewt? Wow. I start to respect Massive.

 

[Heretic]

Apocalyptic review: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-02-26-anthem-review-shaken-apart-by-its-own-identity-crisis

Mmmm, I luv me some diversity.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

It's an incredibly boring setting so it was gonna be meh anyways.

The setting is literally the only thing why I'd be interested in Division. Whenever there's a triple Aaayyy game that looks realistic and grounded and not like Apex, Fortnite or anything by Blizzard I'm potentially interested. Looking around it seems Ubisoft is the only big publisher left that still produces games with adult aesthetics. 20 years of slaying dragons, wizards, mutants and space monsters took its toll and I'm tired of this kiddie shit.

Not defending D2's gameplay tho. I've no idea what this game is about. I'd never thought I'd be even mingling in these parts of Codex but last year I gave Warframe a try and I played for two months straight so apparently I do find lewter games entertaining after all.

The Divisions snowy, christmas new york is gorgeous, temendous performance for the visuals as well. Even with the E3 downgrade Massive's eye for detail really shone through.

Division 2 is not as compelling visually, but as a game it does seem like it will be better. I got it free with my Vega 56 so whatever either way.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

BTW, there's a good reason why "Diablo with guns" will never work unless it's done either in the Borderlands or in Lichdom: Battlemage (Edit: Or more aptly for the thread, Warframe) style. Have a look at all the modern Diablo-likes. Gear is pretty low-poly, low-detail, quick to make fare. Borderlands was pretty much the same thing, cartoonish style hiding a fairly low-detail model job. Anthem? Welp no, level of detail on models in FPS/TPS games has to be at a completely different level. How many of those can be made quickly? How's that for a sustainable production point of view? It just doesn't fucking work. You can see that with games like Destiny, where the the amount of models is fairly limited (but is somewhat offset with weapon mods).

So, you end up with the worst of all worlds - a game with a repetitive gameplay loop that's also limited by both the weapon/armor model sets AND by the amount of items they'll represent (so, the amount of actual upgrades is also limited). Producing a lot of models quickly ends up either with half-assed models or with a huge and expensive team, and with the way the game performed at launch, and with general climate in gamedev in general and EA in particular, you can sort of guess which side of things they might lean to, if they might lean to any side at all. I mean, if it's not gonna bring much money, why not make it cheap AND slow?

In other words: it's dead, Jim.

How many parts does something like an Armored Core game have in comparison to Diablo games? I'd imagine it wouldn't be too hard to make a bunch of gear, some of it could just be slight iterations on the same model, (it ain't like cars get radical design changes every year) and you could always have little extra bits that attach to the helmet or whatever like Halo has with its customization.

Making a whole shit ton of parts to work on and customize your Javelin shouldn't have been a problem given this games six years of development, and what the whole focus of the game is.

 

[Agame]

Anthem bombed = FAKE NEWS!?



Numba One Sella Bois, Everything is Fine!!!

 

[cvv]

No, it's still probably an utter bomb. Physical sales mean shit these days and we know Anthem sold only fraction of what Destiny sold. And much less than even Andromeda.

Plus the digital sales will be muddled, what with EA's subscription program. Can you actually just create an account, pay 15 bucks, try out Anthem and cancel the subscription?