Could ANTHEM Have Been Saved? A RevEulogy.
The Last Review for the Late Live Service Looter Shooter. RIP.
Ultimately, Anthem is a dead game. But I’m glad I got to play it before it got completely shut down. Despite experiencing its many issues, I could see the vision of the game they wanted to make...
ANTHEM has been removed from digital storefronts, and its servers have been shutdown. It’s a dead game. But I played it when it was alive, and I’m going to review it now. This is my ANTHEM RevEulogy.
History
Its history gives us important context. The short version? Its development was tumultuous, exceptionally messy, and is perhaps one of the most mismanaged video game productions of all time by large corporation, producing a AAA product. It’s a game that was created in about 16 months (out of the 72 months EA gave them for it), and was only actively developed on after release for about a year, where only the largest, simple issues were resolved, before leaving active development, then being canned for good a few years after that. That should paint you a pretty good picture.
The long version? Well, there’s a few. Jason Shreier’s ‘How BioWare’s Anthem Went Wrong’, is a 12,000 word expose. Mark Darrah, the games director, gave his experience and opinions in a 4 hour long YouTube video. I’ll leave it to you to educate yourself on either or both of those, though I’d consider the Shreier article an exceptionally fascinating must read.
What is Anthem?
Overview
Anthem, is a lite MMO, third person shooter, with some RPG elements. You control a character, who pilots a Javelin: an “Iron Man” like exosuit capable of flight.
You’ll take this suit into the open world to complete missions and objectives, for the greater good of humanity. Doing these “contracts” make you what the people call a Freelancer, which are the heroes of this world. In between missions, you’ll walk around Fort Tarsis, the games main hub area, to talk with NPC’s, learn the lore of the world, increase your reputation with vendors or factions, get more contracts, purchase or craft equipment, obtain and tweak suit cosmetics, and further the games primary and secondary narratives.
The first time they set me loose in Bastion (that’s the name of the playable open world), I was amazed. This game, running on the Frostbite engine, looks great, even 7 years after release. And man, the first time I jumped into flight with my Javelin I was agog. It’s super slick, and great to control. There are also some elements of exploration and discovery to its open world structure, and you’re encouraged to scavenge materials for crafting gear back at Fort Tarsis.
All Javelin’s can equip primary and secondary weapons from the same pool. But depending on the type of Javelin you’re piloting will determine the kind of melee you’ve got and abilities you can use.
Combat scenarios are a blend of, go here, kill the things, go to the next place, kill the things. Sometimes you’re playing 52 card pickup while avoiding enemy gunfire, or you’re hunkered down capturing a point (and both of those activities kinda lock you out of flying around). But just about everywhere in Bastion, you’ll be finding things that want to kill you, and you’ll probably kill them first. Sometimes they’re humans, sometimes they’re creatures. Doesn’t matter. Everything’s got a chance to drop loot.
Loot drops vary between weapons, abilities, and passive effects. All of it has a very Destiny 2 feeling power scaling to it where your equipment has the “number” and until the you hit the level cap, you basically just want to equip the thing with the biggest “number” to get stronger. Because of the variety of the loot and its passive effects on your javelin and abilities, there is a surprisingly deep build crafting system.
Then, there’s Fort Tarsis. This is basically the tower from Destiny 2. If you’ve seen any of Anthem’s original reviews from anywhere else, you know this place is not an ideal hub area. It’s single player only, for starters, and then there’s a map marker for every NPC that wants to talk with you, not just quest givers, so there is a lot of pointless drivel if you can’t learn to ignore that... it’s the worst when you just want your contract to play the fun part of Anthem. I’d spend like 20 minutes just talking to people after booting the game up if I wasn’t careful.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I love lore, and especially world building... when it’s good. And sometimes even when it’s mid. But there’s a limit to how much lore I can be force fed before getting tired of it, and it definitely exceeded that when I played. Don’t even get me started on the really watered down dialogue “choices” either... You choose dialogue A or B. They both give you XP, and have zero consequences beyond immediately hearing a line or two of slightly different dialogue.
Anthem’s Big Picture
You log in. Maybe you talk with some NPC’s to pick up new contracts. Check your loadout. Pick a mission. Then get thrown into the open world. While there, you’ll likely be paired up with other players in a lobby to do a variety of missions for the contract. These will see you flying from place to place, completing objectives in varied environments, some even set in cramped, “indoor” areas. You’ll definitely be killing things throughout this, be it monsters or humans, with your guns and abilities. Maybe they’ll drop loot. You’ll get back to Fort Tarsis, check your new loot, talk with NPC’s about the contracts you completed, who then might offer you new ones to pick up, which is where we’ve kind of come full circle.
The Good
Of course, flying and combat are the best aspects of this game loop. It’s got some of the best shooting of any game BioWare has ever made. I also enjoyed the abilities, and liked collecting and swapping them out as I obtained new ones to drop from missions. The discovery element to it was fun. Flying does honestly makes for a cozy time, giving a much needed breather between combat encounters, while also serving as (perhaps too good of) a repositioning tool while under fire, when things get a bit dicey.
The performance capture, at some points, really worked for me. The characters can be quite expressive. I think most players would consider Owen to be a really annoying character. But, I thought he had some great charisma. It sounds very ‘Jim from The Office’, but sometimes, he would make a weird face because of what some other character is talking about and I’d have an honest chuckle about it.
The music by Sarah Schachner is wonderful. I love myself a good strong motif, and the one here is fantastic. Schachner does an incredible job blending a choir with robotic voice modulation to not just make a unique identity for the overall OST, but beautifully encapsulates the feeling of the lore being rooted in fantasy-like mysticism, told through the lens of science fiction. The soundtrack, in particular, is one of the standout pieces of this entire game, worth a listen on its own merit.
The Mid
I’ve neglected to mention the story. It never completely clicked with me. On one hand, I love how committed they are to keeping this new world grounded in it’s strange lore. But on the other hand, it still feels like it lacks a layer of polish. To be more specific, I can’t take them seriously with some of their word choices.
When characters talk about “the heart of rage” they’re referencing a very specific storm event in the Anthem timeline. It was so bad it was like a mini-Armageddon. Now, bad, supernatural storms are a big part of the Anthem mythos, called Cataclysms, but this one was so bad the wind threw boulders. The wildlife got really angry. Bad guys took advantage of the chaos and overthrew a big, peaceful city. A lot of people died. It was devastating.
Your character survives this (in fact, it’s the tutorial), so you always hear people talk about how crazy the heart of rage was, and it sounds silly every time it’s mentioned. “Ah man. You were there, at the heart of rage?” It doesn’t sound right to me. My gut tells me the direct influence was BioWare looking for an antonym of “the eye of the storm”. They should have kept iterating.
One more example. “Shaper” is the name of a civilization that left behind advanced technology, when they “vanished” from the planet Anthem takes place on. Instead of their stuff having unique names, it’s always referenced as “Shaper + object”. So characters always talk about Shaper doors, Shaper energy, Shaper relics, Shaper ruins, Shaper puzzles, Shaper tunnels, and last but not least, Shaper keys.
BioWare understandably didn’t have a lot of time to refine this stuff, but by the same token, we can definitely see that in the writing. It’s missing that refinement that probably would have happened if the game had a normal development cycle.
Despite my nitpicks, the lore connects really well on paper, in fact, there’s a beautiful wiki for it if you’re ever curious, but in game... it does not flow, which is a shame because it’s a very strong, new Sci-Fi fantasy series. But backing the writing, is its presentation. There’s a very real limitation with what can be adequately (and interestingly) explained through the a first person perspective in the hub area, just talking with people. Which is where most exposition is given.
Anthem’s enemy variety is also pretty middling. Everything dies the same, and not much thought is needed for that. The depth of combat doesn’t go further than understanding target priority. The anti-air turret will absolutely wreck you. So take that down first. The flying enemies can find you behind cover, which will become an immediate threat. Elite enemies deal more damage to you. That sort of thing.
The mission variety is also, not great. I expressed it earlier, but want to reiterate that it really is variations of flying somewhere to kill things most of the time. After a solid 10 hours you can really start to feel the repetition start to weigh on you.
I genuinely think the real missed opportunity with Anthem is flight combat. You may be surprised to find that there is none. The few flying enemies that do exist, you fight while on the ground. There are no enemies that chase you around in flight mode. No Javelin dog fighting. I believe if they could have doubled down on a couple more gameplay mechanics and a few more mission types that focused on the flight systems, the game’s mission variety, at that point, would have reduced or even removed my fatigue with the general gameplay loop.
But there wasn’t, and I got hit with a lack of desire to play the game after about 20 hours. That’s all it took when I decided, that I’d had enough. So let’s talk about some of the really bad stuff.
The Bad
Here’s what happened to my motivation to play: The story came to a grinding halt. I needed “the MacGuffins” from some tombs in Bastion to keep it going. These are locked behind several different requirements each. Some of which, I genuinely did not understand how to complete due to a lack of in-game explanation, which I looked for, but could not find.
Those I understood, I attempted to complete. Until I forgot what they were. You might think to open the contracts menu to refresh your memory. They’re not listed there. Annoyed, I loaded back into the open world, went back to the tombs, and PHYSICALLY wrote the requirements I needed, down on a piece of paper. My gaming instincts could not believe this was what I had to do, so I looked it up online. Turns out, my instincts were right and the information is in game. But that info is buried deep within several sub menus… in the games codex! Where the lore is organized! Even still, after finding the entry, it did not further explain what to do to complete these things.
Perhaps more annoying is that some of the requirements are a forced grind, such as hitting a certain pilot level. Because the story has been stonewalled, that would have seen me repeating old missions, which is understandable in this genre. But I was level 11, and the level they wanted me to hit was 16. Seems like a small gap right? But, this would mean almost doubling my in-game hours to reach. Or so I assumed. The experience gained from each mission completion, counted for less and less as each level up hightened the necessary threshold. It was a daunting to fathom.
The wall at this point is entirely intentional. In “How BioWare’s Anthem Went Wrong”, we read about this very thing: “it became clear to everyone that the game wouldn’t ship with as much content as fans expected. They came up with some artificial solutions to extend the campaign, like Challenges of the Legionnaires, a tedious, mandatory part of the main story that involves completing grindy quests in order to access tombs across the game’s world.”
It would have been the perfect time to grind for loot, but I couldn’t be bothered with it. While fun to pick up and experiment as I played, weapons and equipment never felt “grind worthy”. Probably, because the game never explains what is grind worthy, or what the loot tables for activities are. I had no idea what a Legendary piece of equipment could even do, let alone what it looked like, or where I’d get it from. A total faiure of communication, more than anything else.
Even if I decided to grind for loot, Anthem relies heavily on its moment to moment gameplay to keep you engaged, long term. That gameplay is genuinely good at times. But it failed to be great enough to have that needed hook. If other parts of Anthem were good enough, they could harmonize, and elevate my overall experience to make up for the lacking hook here, giving me pseudo-enjoyment for grinding loot. But that was not the case.
Can the Game be Fixed?
The real question on everyone’s minds, is could Anthem have been fixed? Would Anthem have been salvageable if it stayed online in active development. Would Anthem NEXT, the planned update to overhaul the games systems, really have resolved this games lingering issues? If not, could future updates after that, have fixed it? If the game came back online today, would it be salvageable now?
I think it’s not so much an idea of CAN Anthem be fixed. But rather, how much time would be given TO fix it. Because, there is a very real alternate universe in which Anthem got enough development time to mature from, what was essentially an Early Access game, into a competent full-featured live service game.
Its core issues, to me, aren’t so much foundational issues, as they are issues of polish. You could probably surmize as much reading the past few sections. But for us in our current timeline to get Anthem to that point of total polish… it would probably require BioWare to have an exceptionally large amount of money. That money translates directly into active development time, which absolutely would in the long term resolve the issues I saw and experienced while playing. In the best timeline, this eventually leads BioWare to seeing beautiful green dividends on Anthem with a dedicated and growing player base.
But that’s all fantasy. The business optics we publically know tell us that much. The doomed launch numbers, in particular, sealed its fate from the very beginning. As a gamer, I would have loved for them to believe in sunk cost fallacy, developing Anthem until it got into better shape. But EA is cutthroat and money first. They saw the end of Anthem within the first few months of sales, but generously gave it a few extra months of grace before finalizing the roadmap to pulling the plug.
There is a silver lining. And it’s that, after all this, BioWare still owns the bones. I genuinely believe that they could end up doing an Anthem sequel that could be successful. I do not think it should be a live service game, but say they take the Borderlands route. Improve on systems already made. Get some passionate developers on the project. I absolutely think it would work and make mad amounts of cash. Hypothetically of course.
Because look. The hard part of creating the foundation to a series is done. It’s backed by some good lore, fantastic art direction on many fronts, and has pretty passable moment to moment gameplay. Pre-production for the next game would just be adding a few things, tweaking what they knew didn’t work, and making a new story. The concept just needs a heavy amount of polish. Polish that comes with sequels.
Maybe sinking more time and money into such a project is way more far fetched than fixing the Anthem that existed, but man. I’d hate to see this series completely die, because it’s so easy to see the potential it had, and still kind of has.
Concluding Thoughts
Ultimately, Anthem is a dead game. But I’m glad I got to play it before it got completely shut down. To see it and experience it first hand.
As I get older, it’s becoming easier for me to see and appreciate the artistic intent that goes into things. Even traditionally “mid” things. One of my favorite memes from twitter in recent years is “there are cathedrals everywhere, for those with the eyes to see”.
We can argue there are better games, far more worth our time, of course. But in these increasingly “AI” driven times, it’s getting more and more beneficial to be able to appreciate the efforts behind any piece of human made art, wherever we find it. It is a genuine shame that Anthem is removed from the world, only to live on in a medium it was not designed for, via videos online. It’s exceptionally sad not just for the consumers who paid for it now being unable to return to it, but for the many artists and developers whose blood, sweat, and tears created the game, through what was a very stressful time for many who worked on it.
Anthem isn’t the exception, either. While it is the topic of this video, there are many games are unplayable today, some becoming such as recent as... right now in fact. Within less than two weeks of the publishing of these words. This loss of art in the world is a modern travesty that should not go unnoticed.
For preservation sakes, I hope Anthem is restored and playable again. There are rumblings of a community attempting fixes for just that, but even if successful to some degree, it’s gonna be a long road. I hope something is done in an official capacity. Because, even beyond preservation, despite my experiences within it and my abandonment of it...
I think I’d still go back to play more of it.
Thanks for reading.
