lol “Dragon Age veteran” title doesn’t as much value as the article seems to think.
I’m sure whatever NDA I signed is extinct now.
I’d imagine these comments are being made as a some thought experiment kinda deal. I play tested one of their concepts for Anthem Next. It was unremarkable, and the majority of the session was them trying to narrow down why people played Destiny. It was obvious what audience they wanted. The guy running it was visibly annoyed that my looter shooter of choice at the time was The Division.
It wasn’t going to be anything without a lot more work. The flying was nice. Everything else was still painfully generic. There’s a reason it got canned.
“Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months before launch,” Darrah continued. “I don’t know that they still work, but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered. The reason you do this, it pulls away the costs of maintaining this game. So rather than having dedicated servers that are required for the game to run, you let the server run on one of the machines that’s playing the game.” This, he added, could have worked alongside an additional move to add AI party members to the game, allowing people to play it like a single-player game.
Fuck, man…all the reasons to do so are spelled out right there.
I’ve watched a few videos on the game and with this claim, I think they would have needed the ten years that NMS had, but there just isn’t as much of a unique idea underneath. Unless I was missing something Anthem was just a really pretty looter shooter with a cool suit.
It’s a pretty game, I’ll give it that, but they would have had to strip and rebuild the gameplay loop pretty much from scratch to make it that much of a success story.
Agreed!
NMS kept listening to feedback for years before it turned around, slowly building up good faith with each free release.
But let’s say Anthem Next magically turned it around. All that good faith will be gone when EA will try to shoehorn more looter shooter microtransaction BS and fuck everything up over and over again.
I mean, some looter shooters are successful. Division retains some popularity, Borderlands 2 was well loved.
I can believe that scattered around, there were cool ideas in Anthem’s development if they could just retain focus/planning. I think in that time, we were just seeing way too much meddling in development based on trends.
“Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months before launch,” Darrah continued. “I don’t know that they still work, but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered. The reason you do this, it pulls away the costs of maintaining this game. So rather than having dedicated servers that are required for the game to run, you let the server run on one of the machines that’s playing the game.” This, he added, could have worked alongside an additional move to add AI party members to the game, allowing people to play it like a single-player game.
Ok, this is even more heartbreaking now. I loved the concept of Anthem and had a fair bit of fun with the game in its current (prior to shutdown) state and was hopeful that the “Next” project would overhaul it into something great. I still don’t blame EA for their decisions in this case; Bioware fucked around for way too long during development and the overhaul project was most likely seen as too little, too late… or too expensive.
It could have been the next Destiny.
EA fucked up
I once contacted EA support over a used copy of the Mass Effect trilogy (the trifold case that held each game). I thought my game had a glitch, which turned out to be a common Xbox One backwards compatibility issue. I kept getting an error telling me I needed the DLC installed for ME1 to play the base game. All I had to do was reinstall the game.
EA Support just said go buy a new copy. I don’t think I could even find it. I didn’t even have the complete packing. They straight up didn’t want to help me.
EA moment
After the litany of fuck ups Bungie did, nobody should want to be the next Destiny.
C-suite drove that game into the ground with dogshit decisions for the past 3-4 years, and that’s just the game itself- the way that studio treats their devs is abysmal.
Destiny was fine. Bungie was the fuck up
And I “could have been” a millionaire if I bought cryptocurrency in 2010.
Hindsight’s 20/20.
I almost caught the biggest fish of my life yesterday.
But Dragon Age sucked ass.
I mean, the first one was good. It was all downhill from there, sadly. The second was decent, but suffered from a ton of re-used assets and a dumbed-down combat system. By the third, it seemed like they were trying to make a single-player MMO, which just made no damned sense to me. Never played the 4th. Maybe I’ll get it for free at some point and check it out.
Honestly Anthem was so fucking good. It’s a victim of the internet hate machine.
My hobby is video games, but some people’s hobby is hating things, and those people decided that Anthem was the next thing to hate. The hate was insanely disproportionate to the actual problems that Anthem had.
The endgame grind needed some work, but that’s always the case with a live service game. Comparing it to Destiny, which had been out for five years at that point, there wasn’t a lot of content. Comparing it to video games in general, it was fine. Easily worth the cost of a new game.
Graphics-wise? Top notch, triple-A.
And as far as gameplay, the actual most important part of a game? Anthem was a fucking masterpiece. The combat was fun and varied. Classes were distinct.
And the traversal was the best I’ve ever played. Soaring through the air like Iron Man and dipping into a waterfall so my suit doesn’t overheat is one of the video game highlights of my life.
But the internet ruined it. The same outrage machine that was built to respond to things like “a sense of pride and accomplishment” was turned on Anthem, not because it was that bad, but because there wasn’t anything else particularly hate-worthy that week.
I think the worst thing BioWare did was ban people for loot exploiting when all they were doing was flying around in a loop collecting chests as they spawned. The players weren’t doing anything the game didn’t allow and banning them really created vitriol in the community. When added to the lack of end game, the player base just never got any growth momentum. It was really sad, because I was a huge BW fan and that game plus the loss of the Doctors really wrecked them (thanks EA /s). You could see the potential in Anthem, but it felt like a a great game engine waiting for the game to be written for it (honestly similar to pre-Forsaken Destiny 2, but even that had more content).
It’s got a 61 on OpenCritic, and Brad Shoemaker of NextLander said he thought long and hard about giving it 1/5 stars at the time (ultimately giving it a 2/5) because the game didn’t even really work when it launched. That wouldn’t really indicate it was just something the internet wanted to hate that week.
I played it at launch. It worked fine for me.
But yeah, some players had technical issues that were quickly patched. That’s how launches work nowadays. The reaction seems justified in a vacuum, but if you compare it to how glitches affect the scores of other games, it’s weird.
Cyberpunk 2077 still got good scores despite major technical issues that took a lot longer than a week or two to fix.
I can go buy the re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-release of Skyrim and still encounter the same game-breaking bugs that I encountered fifteen years ago.
So I still feel like Anthem got treated unfairly here. If it was some bland, unimaginative game that didn’t do anything else well, sure, I get why they wouldn’t pull their punches. But again, the gameplay was immaculate. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better game treated worse.
A big site redesign just happened at Giant Bomb, so I can’t view the review, but there’s typically a difference between an always-online game not working and some of the things you listed. Cyberpunk was reviewed on PC, and it mostly worked fine for a lot of people on PC, which is what the early review codes were sent out for. Skyrim crashed a lot but kept plenty of auto saves so you rarely lost progress. In an always online game, the functionality just isn’t there if the problems are related to server infrastructure. In fact, this is rarely punished in review scores, and the likes of the latest Flight Simulator are the exception rather than the rule for it.
But even when there weren’t infrastructure problems, people still weren’t thrilled with the game that was there when it worked.
Some were, some weren’t. I was thrilled.
And then the hate grew to the point where it was a meme, where everyone “knew” that Anthem was bad, even people who hadn’t played it. Then it was over.
I’m glad you enjoyed it, but that reputation spread because reviewers had a bad time with it. It wasn’t, like you said, because the internet just needed something to hate that week. And since it never got a No Man’s Sky esque update, I doubt the consensus on it would have changed much even if more people had given it a try after the fact. They certainly had the opportunity with steep discounts over the past few years. In that time, Destiny got plenty more attention and two or three other Borderlands games came out.
I don’t think we played the game because Anthem was boring. I enjoyed being Iron Man but after an hour. But after that, it was kinda same ol’ for the next few hours.
I had more fun with Suicide Squad, because the city was awesome and the story was at least passable.
I did like the first hour - no question. But I think Anthem needed to cook some more. A lot more.
Sure, Jan.
