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Anthem -- The loot, our Destiny

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The E:
So I've been playing this game for a few hours now. Time to have ~thoughts~.

Overall, I do like what I'm seeing here, but this game strikes me as being curiously indecisive and unfocused. On one hand, this wants to be a multiplayer experience: Whenever you go do the shooty bits, you are more or less forced to do so with a team of people, be they friends or randoms. Most of the gameplay seems balanced around things being tackled as a team; this isn't too much of an issue during missions (because everyone knows what to do in those and generally stays together), but in freeplay (Anthem's equivalent to Destiny's patrols), you're mostly alone on a pretty big map with no real points of interest or advertised events to draw people together.
On the other hand, the game's storytelling is that of a typical Bioware game in the Mass Effect/Dragon Age tradition. Between missions, you're dropped into Fort Tarsis, where you pretty much do the same things you would do in between missions in DAI: You talk to companions, vendors, all that stuff, then you head back out.
In Destiny, it's possible for a fireteam to stay together for a long play session; In this, if team members drop into Tarsis, the whole flow breaks apart a bit.
As a result, the MMO and SP aspects of the game are clashing in a not quite comfortable way; It's going to be interesting to see how this is going to change over time.

That said: Looking at each of those clashing aspects separately shows a game that has a good start, but could certainly be improved over time. The in-mission gameplay is tight and fun, Mass Effect Andromeda's combat but with more jetpacks and stronger class systems; The various Javelins have clearly defined roles and somewhat different gameplay each, and experimenting with loadouts and play styles is good.
The story is solid: the writers are pretty good at introducing characters and stakes, and the voice cast is stellar. There's an extensive in-game Codex similar to the Mass Effect and Dragon Age games; there even is an in-game mail system that people use to communicate with you.

On the technical side, this is pretty solid. The major bugs plaguing the demo weekends seem to have been fixed. It runs reasonably well on my (admittedly beefy) rig (An i5-6600k, 16 GB of RAM and an RTX 2070), but there's one massive issue: Load times. Whenever you move from Fort Tarsis to the open world or a mission, or from the open world into a dungeon, there's a lengthy load screen waiting for you. Where Destiny hides these things between pretty transitional animations, all you get here is a load screen with a bar filling up.

In terms of monetization, this game is certainly better about it than Destiny. While you are pointed towards the cosmetics shop pretty soon, the game isn't really insisting you interact with it, and even in the absence of bought cosmetics, the degree of customization on offer right from the start is pretty decent.
Given that you earn the MTX currency at a pretty decent rate just by playing the game, I don't see any particular need to keep spending money on this.

More words to come as I play more.

The E:
Pictures!

MP-Ryan:
I echo The E's thoughts.

PC controls, which were my main gripe from the demos, are fixed.  Combat is fun, satisfying, and has some depth - it's a little frenetic right now, but I think that's by design.  Javelins are powerful, responsive, and it feels like you really are a serious badass, made even more badass by a team.  This is also a distinct departure from the ME coop experience, as there you always feel a little underpowered until you hit the max level and loot tiers.

It's definitely a game to be played with friends, though.  While you can solo it, and the world-vs-between-missions balance is a little weird, you usually end up a squad and that's made quite a bit more fun by having other people to talk to.  That can also interfere a bit with in-hub dialogue, so striking a balance is still a bit up in the air.

It is nice to see that, as an $80 game (here in Canada), not only are microtransactions restricted solely to cosmetics, they are all reasonably attainable with in-game play.  This isn't another case of Andromeda or Battlefront II where they've built a full-priced paid game and then decided to screw the customer base into paying for digital items necessary to actually play the game.

Regardless, I discovered that by buying Origin Access Basic for one month, getting access to 10 hrs gameplay, and then 10% discount, I actually paid less for the game that I would otherwise.  And yeah, E, I preordered today.  So when weekend timezones work out, you've got a transatlantic buddy.

And for everyone else... HLP_MP-Ryan on Origin.

The E:
I really wanted to like this game. For a time, I even fooled myself into thinking that I did, that it wasn't so bad and that it could actually be good.

I was wrong about that.


One of the things that struck me was how unpolished the game was, how several of its design decisions actively were at odds with each other.

Turns out, there's a good reason for that.

I am so glad sometimes that Jason Schreier and Kotaku exist. Gaming needs good journalism like that.

Spoon:

--- Quote ---Perhaps most alarming, it’s a story about a studio in crisis. Dozens of developers, many of them decade-long veterans, have left BioWare over the past two years. Some who have worked at BioWare’s longest-running office in Edmonton talk about depression and anxiety. Many say they or their co-workers had to take “stress leave”—a doctor-mandated period of weeks or even months worth of vacation for their mental health. One former BioWare developer told me they would frequently find a private room in the office, shut the door, and just cry. “People were so angry and sad all the time,” they said. Said another: “Depression and anxiety are an epidemic within Bioware.”

“I actually cannot count the amount of ‘stress casualties’ we had on Mass Effect: Andromeda or Anthem,” said a third former BioWare developer in an email. “A ‘stress casualty’ at BioWare means someone had such a mental breakdown from the stress they’re just gone for one to three months. Some come back, some don’t.”
--- End quote ---
Working in the triple eeeeeyyyy industry always sounds so fun and uplifting!

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