[Bonus] Anthem: The 2019 Review

As mentioned in the Anthem proper episode, Adam and Austin gave their first impressions of Anthem mere weeks after it launched on Adam's old college radio show, CyberPunk FM. 

Take a trip back to 2019: Before the Schreier article, before Mark Darrah's dev diaries, and before this game went on to become one of the most notorious live service disasters in gaming history.  

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Chapters

• 0:00 Before We Begin...
• 0:53 Introduction
• 1:32 What is Anthem?
• 4:19 Loading Screen Hell
• 5:33 Choose Your Weapon... But Not Right Now
• 8:43 Constant Identity Crisis
• 10:43 A Rather Confined "Open World"
• 15:03 Taking Flight
• 20:44 Gear Is Great, Guns Are Garbage
• 25:12 Don't Show, Don't Tell
• 27:48 Lack Of Mission Variety
• 29:25 The "New Era Of Bioware Storytelling"
• 33:52 The Limits Of Imagination
• 34:39 Artificial Playtime
• 37:57 Left Yes, Right Yes
• 39:55 Crushed By The Competition
• 47:25 Outro

Transcript

0:01

Hey everyone, quick note before we get started. Austin and I originally recorded this episode back in 2019, just two or three weeks after the game had launched. We did it for an old college radio show turned podcast I did with a couple friends called Cyberpunk FM. We had just gotten started, so forgive some of the audio and editing issues, but if you were curious about our impressions of this game right after it launched, as opposed to six years down the road on the eve of its demise, then this is a little look into that. As always, thanks for listening, and we hope you enjoy our take on a game which has truly gone by, Bioware's Anthem. This is Cyberpunk FM. Today the punks discuss Bioware's Anthem. And welcome back to another episode of Cyberpunk FM. I'm your host, Austin, and I hope you're enjoying this episode of Bioware's Anthem. I'm your host, Adam, and joining me again today, gaming expert and enthusiast, Austin, how you doing, man? Hey, I love being here. I love being the gaming expert and enthusiast, and we are here to talk about a game that I have a lot of strong feelings about. Oh, that is an understatement. And now we're going to talk about the game that you may want to hold off on for a little while, according to like every review out there. Pretty much, yeah. Just don't jump. Don't run to the store and buy this one today is my recommendation. So for those who may not know, and bless you if you don't, because you save yourself so much trouble, Anthem is Bioware's latest release. Bioware is famous for Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, Dragon Age. Jade Empire. Jade Empire. Maybe not famous for Jade Empire, but an underrated classic, for sure. Underrated classic. But essentially, it's one of these new age looter shooters in the vein of... Destiny, The Division. You know, they all kind of played off of a game like Borderlands that came out a while back. But the idea being that you're in a party, you go on these missions and you kill stuff, you get loot, you upgrade. That's sort of the core loop. It's fun combat with constant loot upgrades, right? This is a problem in Anthem for a lot of reasons that we'll get into, but basically that those moments of fun that are supposed to become cohesive and lead you through that loop of kill stuff, get loot. Kill better stuff, get better loot. They put so much stuff, like obstacles in between that path, that it just doesn't feel like you're getting that same fluidity that you do in Warframe and Destiny and in Borderlands. Yeah, I recently compared it to dumpster diving because I literally feel like you can find some good stuff there, but you have to dig through piles of garbage to find it. There's pieces there that I see that are good. And I'm like, I want... I want more of those pieces, yet you have to go through so many bad things to get there that I don't think it's worth it. And I think you're hitting on something. There's a specific frustration that comes with something that misses its potential. Like, your friend growing up that sucked the day you met him and still sucks, it's like, whatever, that dude sucks. I'm not surprised by any of this. But when you have that friend that was like your best friend growing up and got great grades and seemed to have so much promise, and now, you know, he's like dealing drugs and, you know, he's like, you know, he's like, you know, he's like, you know, he's like, you know, he's like, you know, he's like, you know, he's like, you know, he's like, night shift, like 7-Eleven, there's a different feeling toward that because you saw something that could have been. This is why people are upset with Anthem, right? This wasn't some game that got announced at the last second and fell through and everyone moved on. This is a game people have been excited about for years because it's Bioware's A-Team. And, man, it's... It's heartbreak. You want to just lead us down this list of issues? I mean, there's just so many things wrong with this game. Yeah, our listeners might know that we normally start these reviews off by saying, let's get the negative out of the way so we can just gush about this game we love for 30 minutes. We literally have to do the opposite here, because if we left, if we started off, which we will, we will start off with the things we don't like, but that's just going to coincidentally be most of the podcast. And it's just a mess. OK, so let's go ahead and get into it. And I think the thing that is the most glaring by far, I think everyone's been complaining about the things that have hit me and you just sent us in a stream of curse words every time we boot up this game, is the frequency and length of loading screens. This is just straight up unacceptable in a game in 2019. Like, I'm sorry, it's just you can't do it. These load screens happen every time you boot up a mission, every time you return to the main fort hub, every time. You go into a cave, every time you go into the forge to change your weapons, it's just constant load screens and only one or two of them are short. Like, like going into the forge is a quick load screen, but the coming out of the forge is still a lot of those. There's just so many of them that are like, you're waiting here for five minutes for the load screen to finish. And by the time, like once you get into the load screen, you've lost all momentum of the game because you're just waiting for a load screen to finish. Yeah, so in Anthem, you basically drive these Iron Man suits and you come back in between missions to, you know, resupply, repair, re-equip, whatever. But therein lies a huge problem with how that actually comes through in the game. So for instance, let's take a game, literally any other looter shooter or any other loot based game. Let's take Diablo, Path of Exile, Destiny, Warframe, whatever. A huge list. When you kill an enemy and an item drops and you want to try that item out, what do you do in those games? Well, you go into your menu, you equip that item, and you try it out. That's it. You missed the part where you pick it up first, but yeah. Well, I mean, I assumed that you already picked it up. The point being though, it's like once you get that item, you simply open an interface, equipped it, and then you can try it out. Here is how you do that in Anthem. First, you pick up an item, and on the screen it just says rare item or common item. No idea what it is, but you got it. Then, at that point, you're either going to finish your current mission or quit your current mission. Sometimes quitting is preferable. Then you hit a load screen. And not a short one. Not a short load screen. This is about a minute, a minute and a half at least. A decent sized load screen, yeah. Yeah. On a PS4 Pro, by the way. We're not playing on a base PS4. This is a PS4 Pro. We both have Pros. Yeah. And we both have good internet connections, too. Yeah. And so then, thank God they eventually added in the launch bay thing, which makes this a tad bit quicker. But originally, you would come back to Fort Tarsis, where you are in a first-person mode as far away from the forge as you possibly can be, after you slowly walk in a... in a mechanical style that is not reminiscent of anything else in the entire game. Slowly, all the way to the forge, hit the forge, load screen. Once you're in the forge, you can then equip this gun that you got. Then you exit the forge and go to a load screen. Then you queue up for a mission and go to a load screen. And then finally, when you get back in the game, you pray to God that you like this gun that you just equipped, or else you're about to do all that shit all over again. Like, God forbid you don't like the changes you made. It is the most tedious... awful system, because it's unnecessary. And that's the only way I can kind of look at this, is that it's not needed. You don't have to do all this. Just let me equip the item in-game when I get it. It's there. I picked it up. Like, it's on my person. Like, I don't know why I can't use it. You know? It feels... It feels redundant. It feels unnecessary. And it takes you out of the experience. And that last thing you said is the worst part. We were kind of talking before the show how we think we understand where this was coming from a thematic standpoint. Like, the idea is you have this base of operations in Fort Tarsis, and when you leave it, you really are leaving, like, the last, like, stronghold of humanity. You're going out into this post-apocalyptic wilderness, and it is supposed to make you feel like make sure you have what you need before you leave. The problem is that these missions are only 10, 15 minutes long. 20 minutes max. So there's a lot of going out and coming back and going out and coming back and going out and coming back. And every time you do that, you have to go through this awful process of, you know, salvaging your equipment and upgrading it and reloading it. And so you never get that... that theme of, like, humanity's last bastion against the forces of nature. It's, no, I just have to go through a lot of shit to do basic things in between my 10-minute missions. And that... I think that is basically just two ideas that are really at odds with each other in this game. And a whole lot of this game feels that way. It feels like ideas that are at odds with each other. That aren't meshing cohesively. Or even also just things that take too many steps to get through. Like, those things that we're talking about right now can apply to most things in the game. Yeah. This, um... This missing the mark of what they want you to feel like versus what you actually feel like is something that can be applied to almost every criticism we have on this list. It's just very clear that, like, what they thought they were doing and what they did are just not even close. Right. Which kind of leads into the Fort Tarsis idea as a whole. As what this city is supposed to represent. And this, like you said, the last bastion of humanity. This is all that remains. And it feels boring to go through. There's no... Nothing really happens there. None of the ideas that the game is trying to give you from a thematic standpoint actually come across in the gameplay or really even the story. Like, these thematic themes aren't present. They're really not. And it's really disappointing compared to some of these other games we were talking about. Like, um... You know, like, we've been playing Odyssey. Dude, I can get into the city of Athens, which, you know, is not a one-for-one scale model of ancient Athens, but, like, it's really nice looking. It's huge. There's all this stuff. And when I want to leave, I just walk out and go. It would be really cool if the open world in Anthem was like, you're in Tarsis, and when you're ready to go, you fly out of there and you really do feel like you're leaving it behind. But it's not. That would be incredible. That would... It wouldn't solve a lot of the problems of the game, but it would give that feeling that I think they're trying to give you. And it would make a more interesting and dynamic world all around, I think. But so much of this game is bogged down by, like, loading screens and having to, like, go into menus to do things. And it just... It doesn't feel like a cohesive world. Because there's so many times that you're jumping from, like, oh, I have to enter into this cave now that will trigger another loading scene. But it doesn't feel like the open world like Odyssey does or like a lot of open world games now do. Like, so many open world games are seamless open worlds now. And this game has so many moments where you're taken out of the open world to usher you into a little, small, confined area that you will then leave and hit another loading scene to get back into an open world that's pretty boring outside of the place that you're going to. There's nothing there. I think the best example of what you just said is how when you launch a mission, you're standing outside Fort Tarsis, but when you turn around, it's just a gray wall that you can't fly over. So it's completely unrecognizable as being the place you just left. Because your experience inside of it and your experience right outside of it are separated by both, like, a loading screen and just a total disconnect of what... you're experiencing in there and out here. It's two completely different types of games in and out because Anthem had this idea of giving you a single player narrative within the walls of Fort Tarsis while giving you a co-op experience outside in the world of... I don't even know the name of the world. I've heard it before, but I don't know it because that's how little the game makes you care. I think it's actually Bastion. Bastion? Okay, that's what I wanted to say, but I didn't want to sound stupid. Yeah, but I might not even be right about that because you're right. They don't... Like, this game does not do a good job of making you care about the words they're constantly throwing at you. Right, and the single player experience within the walls of Fort Tarsis is literally told in a first person point of view for some reason that I still don't understand. It's really jarring to have this, like, first person perspective and then jump out into this third person Iron Man suit flying around the world. There's just such a disconnect between these two types of games. And it doesn't... It never meshes, at least to the point that we are. From what it seems, it never will. Everything good is, like, just immediately spoiled by something that's not. Like, you'll go through this really cool dialogue sequence and you're like, that guy was entertaining, that writing was really well done, these facial animations look so much better than Andromeda's did. But then you do your slow walk over to your suit as you hear the guy that's like, well, hey, freelancer, did your run go well for the 40th time? And you're like, which is too far in my plans. And... And, yeah, it's... Again, it goes back to that thing of, like, this game is frustrating because it could have been so much more. It wasn't something I had no expectations for, it was something everyone had expectations for. Right, and there's moments of greatness there. Like you said, there's some conversations like, hey, that was actually pretty good writing. And then you're immediately taken out of it by the world that's completely empty or Tarsus that really has nothing else going on except for, like, six characters that you can talk to. And, like, they never give you incentive to engage with those characters or that world to me. I've never felt like anything I do will change that world. And I hear it does, but the game has never given me a reason to believe that or to want to engage in that because the characters aren't interesting enough. The dialogue isn't quite there. Like, it's good, but it's not enough that I'm compelled to talk to everybody. And the conversations, the conversation system is just, it's just completely there to be superfluous. It's a completely superfluous system. Yeah, we'll get into the conversation a little more later. But I wanted to address this theme of, like, something good happening, but still just having enough crappy components to it to where it's weighed down. Because I feel like this really fits the flying. Because the flying in the game is easily the best part, right? For the most part, it's a ton of fun. It feels really good. It looks beautiful. It's fun to explore. There's a sense of weight to the flight that is hard to really describe in words, but when you actually do it, like when those thrusters kick in and you get that little boost and you start flying, you just, you sit back and you're like, holy crap, that was cool. Like, it feels so good. Every time I jump off that platform to take flight, I'm like, man, this game is cool. And then immediately I'm like, God, this game sucks. Yeah, and it's because of the, so basically in this game, guys, you have a heat meter when you're flying, essentially. Your suit overheats as it's flying. And fair enough. It takes a lot of energy to keep up a giant chunk of iron in the air, right? But the issue is that it, flying is your main form of traversal in between the fighting you're doing. So you start at point A, you got to get to point B across the map, which by the way, you have to do with no waypoints. Yeah, and no fast travel. And no, I'm getting off topic because there's... Nothing that 90% of games have. There's so much to complain about, I can't even finish one complaint right now. Before others enter their way in. I'm sorry. But basically like, I feel like in combat, the flight's good because when you start to take off, if you get shot too many times, you overheat really quickly. There's certain enemies that shoot, I think fire damage does more overheat. So it's like they ground you quicker. And I get that because they don't want you to be able to just fly away from every fight. No problem with that. The problem that comes in is when you're just using it as traversal and you can't be in the air more than 12 seconds before having to land because you're going to overheat. And when you, when you're, your meter is almost full and you stop, it shrinks quickly. But if you hit that overheat, you're waiting 10, 15 seconds before it cools down. And it's just such a nightmare. And they have... There are ways... Yeah. Yeah, there are ways to not, or to lessen your overheat. You can fly near a river and you'll overheat a lot slower, but it won't drain your meter. Like your meter will still go up. It will just be a lot slower. And then you're confined to this river for the whole time that you're traveling the map. Instead of taking flight in the air like you should, as you know, your Iron Man suit would make you think you could, you're stuck gliding along this river path for half the game. And you know what we call something that's restricted to paths on the ground? We call that a car. Or we call that a boat. It's not a fucking plane. That's for sure. Right. There's no excuse for why your flying Iron Man suit should be limited to set paths on the ground. And the only way to completely get rid of overheating, or like to completely shrink your meter while in mid-flight is to either pass through a waterfall or dive underwater. The problem is there's not enough waterfalls I feel like laid out in a way that makes continuous flight easy or even possible. Yeah. And sometimes it's even hard to tell if there's a body of water. Like you might be flying along the ground and you're like, okay, is this an actual body of water that I can dive into? Or is it just like, you know, a shallow area that I'm going to land and have to run and completely kill all my momentum? And it's almost always. It's almost always that. And even if there is a place to go underwater, there's nothing to do once you're down there. So you just immediately dive and back up. You cannot fight underwater. You move like at a somewhat reasonable pace, but you're kind of just still flying. But there's actually stuff underwater like materials, which kills me because like, if the only reason I'm diving underwater is because you think it looks pretty and so I can feel like I can participate in your shitty crafting system, try again. Like, just, just why is it there? No. And, and there, and the thing is like, there is materials and crafting items down there, but you can get all of that above land as far as I've seen so far. I haven't seen anything unique to water. That's true. So it's like, why am I doing this other than to cool down my suit? There needs to be either extended, extended timer before you overheat or more ways to cool down your suit. And then, not only are you constrained by kind of the rivers what we were talking about, you can still fly away from those if you want to, but what you can't do if you want to is fly over hills and mountains. You, you can fly in this game. You have this huge open world, but you're still constrained by these invisible walls that sit right at the top of these mountains. So if you're thinking to yourself, oh, I'll just fly from point A to B, you're not going to do that. You're going to be winding in between these valleys, following these rivers, and you're doing it with a really unhelpful compass, no mini map whatsoever, and in actual fact, it's an actual map that when you pull it up, it takes sometimes five to six seconds to actually display the terrain around you. Yeah, and you're still flying because this is a multiplayer game, right? So you are still on the move while you pull open the map. So I am now waiting on this map to load while I'm flying through the air, crashing into a mountain, killing all my momentum anyway, and I still don't know the path I'm supposed to take because the mountain isn't, because the map isn't laid out in a very, like, easy to follow manner. It's, so many of these things may sound like small complaints, and some of them are on their own, but when you combine it all together, it just makes for a really tedious and hard to enjoy experience. Do you remember when we reviewed Spider-Man and we talked about how we never used the fast travel because the web slinging just felt so great and was so efficient you never needed to? It, this game should be the same way with flying, but it's just not. Yeah, and, and when, when you are flying, it feels that way. It's like, why would I ever want to fast travel? Because you're grounded because you're overheating in ten seconds. Why would I ever land on the ground? Oh, because I'm going to be forced to. It's, it's just, we need to move on or else I'm just gonna have a hangover. It doesn't give you the freedom that you should have in a game that feels like it's about freedom. The game feels like it's supposed to be about freedom, and yet there's so many little things that restrict you and prevent you from actually enjoying the freedom that you should have. And they pop up constantly. It's not something I'm dealing with once an hour. Right. It's dealing with a dozen times every ten minutes. It's every play session you are going to run into these problems. Guaranteed. So moving on, I guess, um, let's get into the, the weaponry and the skills. And I think we both agree that the skills are actually quite a bit of fun. The, the ability, they call it gear, I guess. It's, it's the, the non-gun equipment you're using. So, you know, this guy has like a rocket launcher on his wrist and, and this person can kind of cast these elemental abilities. Those feel pretty good. They're easily the best part of game, of the game outside of the, like, actual core flight mechanics. I think the gear stuff is the best part of this game. And even some of the passive stuff, I was having fun mixing and matching last night. Like, uh, the Colossus, which is kind of your, your big heavy mech. He pulls out this, this shield in front of him and he can charge and like shield bash people and run into it. And I was equipping items that made that do more damage. So I kind of, uh, had a more melee centric guy and I got some more armor and so I could, I could stand some damage and it was, it was a cool feeling that I could use these abilities to kind of do what I wanted. But I also noticed how little I was using my guns. Yeah. It, as the storm, kind of the, uh, I've made the storm, which is the elemental kind of mage class casting a bunch of lightning bolts and fire and blizzards and stuff. Like, I'm doing a lot of crazy elemental damage. I rarely pull out a gun because it does almost no damage and it's just not fun. Like, the, the gunplay is fine. It's adequate. It's serviceable. But the gear stuff and comboing that gear stuff is so much more engaging that you never feel compelled to use your main weapons. Yeah. You're pretty much only ever using it because you have to because there's just too much cooldown on your skills to only use those. Otherwise, like, and, and some of the, not all the guns are this way. You know, I really enjoy the auto cannon on the, on the heavy mech. Um, the, the, the heavy pistol I found was kind of fun. The sniper rifle's okay. Yeah. But like, the assault rifle and the shotgun both just feel like your most generic third person shotguns. I, I will go the rest of the game without using them if I can. It's, it's just not worth it. And you get, you get a bunch of weapons but they all feel exactly, like, you get a bunch of different weapons in the same clad, you get like six different light machine guns but they all feel exactly the same. Like, Yeah, we were kind of talking before how an Apex, you know, their shotguns, they have an automatic shotgun, they have a pump action shotgun, and they have like a shotgun pistol. And Anthem just has like your space shotgun, whatever. It all feels the same. Right, and does more damage, which is, I mean, fine, I guess, but it, it makes the loot feel a lot less compelling. When I get a new, when I get new gear, I'm always excited to see what my new gear is like. But anytime I get a new weapon, I'm like, all right, I hope that has a higher number than my other one or is a brighter color because that's the only thing that I'm, that I'm going to use it for, you know? It, it's not a game that I think has really figured out their loot and maybe at higher levels they have. Maybe there's, there's weapons that change things up, give you unique effects on abilities or something. That's very possible. We are not that far in the game, but in the first 10, 15 hours we played, there's nothing like that. Every gun is just... Which I hear, which I hear is about half the campaign. So, from my understanding, we're about halfway through. Maybe we'll find out. Yeah. And yeah, what I wanted to add onto this was that I, I feel like someone at EA went to BioWare and was like, hey, if you make any ability that looks anything like a Mass Effect ability, we're firing you. Because, because that, you know, BioWare has worked on three Mass Effect games and they came out with some really fun skills in there and some really cool guns. And, and Anthem just doesn't seem to have any of those. You know, a couple of them here and there, but anything involving physics manipulation with the pull and the push and the singularity, that's all gone. All the cool biotic abilities have really no equivalent in this game whatsoever. Yeah. Even though there are side effects, there are psychics, right? Aren't there psychics in this universe? Uh, yeah. They're called like psychers or cyphers. Cyphers, cyphers, yeah. Yeah. I think it's called cyphers. I think it's supposed to kind of be the Mass Effect equivalent of a biotic. Uh, cool, but you don't get to use them. Yeah. I don't understand that at all. And, and it seems like they can't actually, like, they're just like telepaths, maybe? I don't know because the game never made me care enough to find out. I don't know any of its concepts to you in a way where you might care. Not even, and this is not even from a story perspective, it's even worse when it comes into a mechanics perspective. It rarely tells you basic functions of the game. It's like, hey, you can fly and you overheat and here's how you equip stuff. But, like, it doesn't tell you how to combo. It doesn't tell you, like, what the benefits of a lot of things are. You get tool tips sometimes and information, but even then you only get one per loading screen. Yeah, I'll go ahead and continue this line of thought. The crafting and inventory system is actually, I think, fairly elegant, but I only know this after fucking around with it on my own for about five hours. Like, the simple things they could tell you to explain, they just don't. I mean, at the end of the day, how it works is, like, the more you use a weapon or a piece of gear, after you do it enough times, you get the blueprint for the next level of rarity. So you start off with common guns, and if I use this gun enough, I'll get the blueprint for the rare version and then, like, the ultra rare version, whatever. This is not really explained anywhere other than, like, tutorials buried in the main menu. But it's simple enough, but you just, there's literally nothing indicating this to you. Right. So you don't know about it until after you've done it or, like you said, looked up YouTube videos. I'm gonna get a better assault rifle if I keep using those or I'll get a better sniper rifle if I keep using that. Great. I didn't know that. Yeah, I was trying out a bunch of different weapons just to see what they were like even though I knew I probably wouldn't use most of them. And now I wish I had saved some of that time to just, especially, the guns are based on kills, but the gear is based on missions completed and world quests completed. So it's like, you can go in free play and just kill stuff with guns and you'll actually make progress toward that, but if you're not actually supposed to like that, no idea. Makes no sense. That makes no sense. Uh, and, let's see, when you're equipping items, there's a different icon whether it's equipped on your current build, another build or javelin, or not at all. No explanation whatsoever. I kept wondering why there were random symbols that wouldn't let me sell gear. It was killing me. It's actually a really good system, but again, do they explain this to you at all other than buried under tutorial menus that you have to, like, oh man, I can't even think straight why this game is so poorly designed in so many ways. And yeah, let's, let's talk about some of the mission variety a little bit because this was something that I think if they had nailed a lot of the other stuff would have been forgivable, but ultimately we have, uh, go kill this guy, go protect this radius, and go deliver this thing to this place. The most generic, like, EverQuest level 1998 kill three rat kind of missions you can come up with. That's awesome. all you ever see and or some very slight variation of that. Yeah, I know last night we managed to run into something that was like fly through these green floating orbs and we were like, what the hell? Like, something new? And it turned out to actually just be the lamest thing imaginable. You didn't have to do them in any order. There wasn't a, a like time limit that was of any real importance. I mean, you had like three minutes and it was just another thing of like, dude, who, who looked at this and said, this is what we wanted. It couldn't have been anybody. It had to have been, this isn't what we wanted, but it's too late now because it's just all so bad. From a, from a mission variety standpoint, especially everything feels like it's, you know, from 10 years ago. Like it, none of, maybe the set pieces, maybe there's some like cool set piece moments later that kind of give you some more of that variety and at least are cool. But so far from what we've seen, all of the stories segment stuff is very, just collect this thing, bring it back to this person or you need to go find this person in the wild. Like there's no variety. It's all find a thing, bring a thing back or defend a thing. That's it. And then when you're on these missions, you're getting these little calm chatters sometimes, but it's like, dude, I'm actually on a calm with real people right now because that's how you designed this game and we're talking. So I'm not always going to hear what this asshole has to say so you're trying to explain your single player story to me through the multiplayer part of the game where you've designed it to where I'm always talking to other people. It's like, come on, none of this meshes at all. Exactly. The two things don't go together. There's no, maybe there's a way to do it, but I've yet to see in any game and especially in Anthem a way where they can mesh a really like unique, interesting story with playing with people because you're talking to those people. Like, the game wants you to engage with your friends that you're playing with or even the randoms that are in the world with you. Like, the game wants you to engage with those people but also wants to tell its story too and you can't have both. You really can't and, okay, I say you can't. Maybe one day someone will figure it out, but I'm with you. I've yet to see a good example where someone keeps that single player quality in their story while people with the names, you know, 420, Blazit, whatever, are running around next to you. It's really hard to have all those things coexist. I mean, I remember this is my problem with The Old Republic when I started playing that MMO is it's like, yeah, cool, I'm supposed to be like this super badass Jedi who's the leader of this squad and I do these things, but there's a guy next to me with like a purple mohawk and he's doing all the same stuff and in fact, he looks like he's better at it than I am. So, why don't you just let him save the planet? It's just, I don't find that those single player stories work well in these games and maybe I'm just too picky about it, but. Well, one of the things that I've always felt these games have done well, you know, MMOs for the longest time and even things like Destiny have built interesting worlds and compelling universes around them with some interesting lore and that stuff may be here in Anthem, but it never presents it to you in a way that I've found compelling. Like, they give you a bunch of codec pieces that you can go and read up on or Cortex or whatever it's called. Oh God. You can go in and read a bunch of stuff if you want, but the game, the story and the world never presents that information in a way that's at least made me care about it. It would be one thing if they were basically like, here's a novella that you need to read to understand. Cool. What it actually is, is here's a novella you need to read to understand. Now, I'm going to rip all of the pages out and scatter them around the world one at a time and you need to go collect them first. It's like, no, I'm just actually not going to care about your universe is what's going to happen. Right. Mass Effect did a good job of giving you those codex entries after like, you got the codex on Asari because you just met an Asari. This is like, you find a journal entry in a corner and it's like, did you know about the cataclysm? No, no, I don't care. Right, Like, did you hear about this character or this thing that happened or did you know about those events or why I should care about those events? Whereas Mass Effect and a lot of other, you know, good RPGs will introduce story ideas and characters and things to you that make you want to read about them and learn more about them and kind of dive deeper into their culture, their worldview or whatever like Mass Effect does. But this game gives you all of that stuff like front loaded. It's like, here's all the stuff to read about but you don't care about it yet so you're not compelled to read about it. I think one glaring example I saw with the story and it not really coming across was they, at some point there was some big event that like killed most of the mech drivers which they call freelancers and so you're supposed to be one of like the few remaining freelancers remaining, right? But the problem is you're only ever in a mission with three other people at one time anyway and in Fort Tarsis there's only ever you. So, whether or not there's 30,000 of these guys, it doesn't matter because in any context you see it in, it's the same. Yeah, and I didn't know any of those people in the first place so like, they don't give me any meaningful connection with the world of the freelancers or anything before these events happened. So it's like, okay, that person died, cool. Like, I feel like we have been given a stick and told to pretend it's a lightsaber is almost how Anthem feels. There's so much stuff and you'll just like fill in the gaps in your head and you'll be okay with this, this and that and you'll make it make sense. No, it's all too glaring for that. Yeah, and like, I'm the kind of person who does that. Like, you know, I still play with sticks. Yeah, like, we've talked about things and I will like put pieces together that are just super small and I'll be like, no, no, no, look at it this way and you can piece all this together and it all makes sense even if it really doesn't. I will find a way to make it make sense. This game doesn't even give me enough to do that. Like, it just, it doesn't even make me care enough to try and put it together. It's true, man. And then, on top of all that, so let's say, okay, I am buying into your bullshit and I'm convincing myself this is a great game and I'm just going to charge forward. Well, I'd say about, I don't know, 10 levels into the game. Can't be more than eight, nine hours. Probably less than that. And this is very early on in the game. I want to emphasize that this is before you even get access to every mech, right? You only have two. Two of the four. There's almost no way you have more than that. You find out that there's these, like, these dead, famous freelancers that want you to complete these trials. Okay, cool. I like completing trials. This is pretty standard Bioware. Go do four things before you do the one big thing. Well, it turns out what this is is essentially, like, an achievement checklist. New 50 weapon kills, whatever. 90% of them, pretty reasonable. The last 10%, they're things that you and I had to spend, like, two hours specifically trying to obtain and accomplish. They weren't organic. They were not happening normally, at least not at any rate that was acceptable. Right. And so we end up, like, looking up a YouTube video to go see where these collectibles are so we can get enough collectibles to go do the challenge. And then it turns out that was the challenge. I thought we were opening up the tomb doors to do some cool mission. We literally complete this checklist. Man, I was just, I almost just uninstalled it at that point. Like, that was so disappointing, so lazy. It killed me. Yeah, so the tombs are easily one of the, like, most momentum-breaking parts of the game I've seen so far. Maybe almost any game that I've seen so far. Like, it, that's a bit of hyperbole, but it literally just takes you completely out of what you're doing to make you do a lot of things that don't feel natural. I, I played as the storm, so one of these achievements is like, hey, constantly melee things. You have to get 50 melee kills. The storm does not melee. If you were in close range, you are dead. So, I had to switch my, I had to switch my javelin to the colossus and I had to grind out 50 melee kills because I had, I had not gotten any of them. So I had to sit there and purposefully grind out 50 melee kills. That is just bad game design. They didn't factor in who would be doing what, like what classes you'd be playing, how you'd be playing. They want you to do all these things that aren't natural to your playstyle or even your javelin's playstyle. And that is, to me, unacceptable. And then like you said, to get into the tombs and to literally just pick up an item and then leave was the most like, just unsatisfactory feeling because I was waiting for something cool. And I was waiting for something. Like I did it, I finished your trial, I'm going in and then I just picked up an item that I couldn't even see the name of. It's... That's true. You opened up a tomb in order to get rare item. And, and the worst part is I think you get like four rare items from this quest. I trashed three of them that weren't any good. Like... I don't even, I don't even remember which ones I got from the thing because it was just like, all right, great, I got another rare item. Cool. So much of this game just feels like building up to something cool and then it's just, I'll let down. I think at this point we've more or less touched everything on the list. I want to say a little more about how disappointing the conversation system is. Okay, so you know, I played Mass Effect. By the time Mass Effect 3 got around, you really did get down to just like a couple choices. But, those choices would change things. Even if you really only had like a yes and a no or a paragon and renegade. You saw the effects play out. I mean, the scene in Mass Effect 3, spoilers ahead, where you shoot Morden in the back is to this day one of the most just like gut-wrenching, like I can't believe that just happened. Like, oh my God, I have feelings more than any like book or movie I've ever read kind of thing. And so I'm just, I expect something approaching that level in a Bioware game. It doesn't need to be that level. Nothing will come close to Mass Effect 3 in that regard. There's just too much build up for Mass Effect 3 to hit that level. But even something remotely close to that level, to have a conversation with someone where I make a choice and that choice is different than if I had made the other choice. We were making the joke earlier. On the screen, you have left yes and right yes. Like, those are your two choices usually. They literally, it's rarely even a like negative, like a positive or negative response. Like, it's just like something like, yeah, I'll do that or okay, that's cool. Like, that's what it feels like. It's just two different little things in the fort. Like, there's a guy complaining about this fountain and if you talk to him enough and give him some ideas, he like fixes the fountain and the water comes out. And that's cool. I think those things are cool if that wasn't like the only changes that your choices have. Yeah. And if I felt like the game incentivized me to do that. Yeah. Or if I cared about Fort Tarsis at all to any degree. Right. That might also help. And maybe I will. Maybe I'll go talk to these people and fall in love with the characters. But so far, nothing that the game has shown me gives me any indication that that will happen. And you know, this is kind of the point I'd want to sum everything up with is at the end of the day, games, they do not release in this isolated vacuum on their own. They're released next to competition, especially a game like Anthem, where it's not just coincidentally similar to other games. It's very clearly, if not directly competing with, very clearly inspired by big games on the market right now. And when you compare every aspect of this game to other games, the only things I can think of they do better than anyone else is the fact that their mechs feel very different than each other. Whereas I felt, say like Warframe and Destiny Classes didn't feel that different. And the flight's a lot of fun. Nothing else. I mean, what graphics, maybe. It looks really good, but nowadays every game looks really good. Mechanically speaking, it falls short like everywhere compared to its competition. Pretty much. There's almost nothing that Anthem does fundamentally better than any game else on the, any other game on the market. Except for flight and the uniqueness of your classes. And that's, that's it. Which, which is a strong core to build off of. Because again, if you can, if you can come up with some missions that really incorporate the flying aspect and you put in some unique abilities and I actually have to have to go fight my way through like an aerial battle, Destiny's not giving me that. Warframe's not gonna give me that. Like, that would be an awesome unique experience. There's nothing going on in the sky. Ever. You're just flying through it. Well, I mean, there's too many ways that the game hampers your flight. You'd overheat and crash back to the ground. You know, like, there's just too many little things that the game does that are bad design decisions that hamper what could be a good core. That is a good core. Yeah. The, the core flight mechanics and the core like gear classes, you know, the, the things you can do with your different classes and what happens when you get four unique classes together and have, like, those different play styles, that stuff is cool. Comboing people is fun. Like, having your Javelin, uh, like, having my Storm Javelin, you know, create this, like, big fire, like, blast, and then having your Colossus set off an explosion in the middle of that will give you a cool combo. It's a satisfying sound. It throws the word combo on the screen and it's like, hey, that was cool. There's nothing there. There's nothing surrounding that core and it makes for an experience that's just not that fun. And, you know, we, we've already sunk our money into this game. So, we can potentially just ignore it for six months, come back, and see if it's good. And, you know, there's some precedent for that lately. Diablo 3, Guild Wars 2, Rainbow Six Siege, Paths of Exile. All of these are games that when they launched were pretty mediocre if not panned and within a year they had really carved out their player base. And I think Anthem can do that. It's just, man, they have a rough road ahead of them if that's their plan. There, there is stuff they can do. There, you know, cut down the load times, change the inventory system a bit. Like, you know, adjust flight but you fly longer. A lot of those little small things to improve could make this a much better cohesive experience. You can't change things like the story at this point. Like, it's there. You'd have to drastically rewrite sections which I don't think they would ever do. No. But, fix that core loop that should be really strong that's currently not because of all the, because of the myriad little problems around it. If they could reduce some of the loading time, let me equip items without going back to the fort and make flying more meaningful instead of just kind of like a spectacle, this could be a fantastic game. I think those are really the only three things they really need to nail to turn this into like a decent game. They would still need plenty more content to keep it going a long time and really keep people around. But I feel like those three things alone could have given this game like a seven or an eight review score instead of the six and fives that they've been getting. Yeah. Like, I'm sitting around a five or a six for myself and I tend to rate things highly and I'm still like, I don't know. This game, it, it's got the pieces. You just, it's so hard to find them. And look, fair enough, five's an average game, but you don't spend six years and hundreds of millions of dollars on an average game. Yeah. Like, this isn't some, you know, double A release that took two years to make or some indie studio. This is one of the biggest publishers and one of the most beloved developers making a game that has been being worked on since, like, uh, Barack Obama's first term. Like, it's, it's a long time ago. And, and this is just really, they don't have to show for it what they should with that much time and money. And it's, it's just, it's kind of the state of the industry in a lot of ways, but it's not acceptable to launch a game and then expect people to stick around for six months to see when it gets better. Like, Yeah. There's too much coming out now. You shouldn't be able to launch games that way in the first place. And like you said, like, Yeah. I can't even keep up. In six months, in six months, I'm gonna be playing something else. I'm not coming back to Anthem to see if you made the game better. Like, launch it in a state that it should be in. If you wanna add content down the line of an already strong game, cool. But if you're trying to make a game better after launch, you messed up. And this is what I worry about is that there are some things that it's like, okay, you can't make your own waypoints. You can't make two weeks. All right? Put waypoints in. Yeah. That's the kind of thing that's like, okay, yeah, dude, I get that maybe you couldn't have all the dungeons in you wanted and maybe some mechanics had to be cut last minute. But like, a waypoint isn't any of that. A waypoint is a basic UI element that I've been able to use since like, I can't even come up with something to properly date how old waypoints are. Like, I can't even imagine what was the time before waypoints? I don't even know. It's like, even there's not even a way to like, select something that's already on the screen and set it as a waypoint. Yeah. Like on the map, there's an icon for this thing and you still can't set that as a waypoint. Why? It points to your current mission. And if you stumble across the world quest, it points to that too. But if you want to go looking for a world quest, well, too bad. You can't go around until you find one. It might pop up on that compass, but you cannot like, set that as a focal point. Like, it's And the compass is, it's like a, it's like a Skyrim's compass where if you can't set a waypoint on it, it's not nearly as useful. And you, and you can't. It's, it's just, it's, to me, it's baffling the decisions that were made in this game to put it in the state that it's in. We're just not done. And, maybe that's a product of it being in development for so long. Maybe that's a product of some of its development chaos, like it switched directors and stuff. Like, maybe it's a product of some of that stuff. But, I don't understand how basic things like waypoints did not make it into this game. It doesn't make sense to me. Well, having said all that, man, you ready to go play it? Yeah, probably. I gotta eat first. Well, thank you guys for listening. I know this was basically an hour of us just ranting about something that we don't like. But, it was really important to the two of us because, you know, we're pretty big BioWare fans. We've played most of their games. We, you know, I wasn't hyped to the moon about this. I tend not to hype games up too much anymore. But even still, this one penetrated my bubble enough for me to kind of get excited about it. And, man, it's just, it's been such a letdown. Yeah, and like, like you said, we're still gonna play it. We'll probably finish the campaign. Yeah. But, I honestly cannot see going past that point. I see nothing in this game to drive me to play anything in the end game. Yeah, actually, there is a universe out there where Adam and Austin are playing this game for months. It's just not this one. And, at least not in this current state that the game's in. This is something that we're gonna maybe finish the campaign and probably not touch ever again unless we're giving some kind of news that's like, hey, Anthem has actually, you know, come a long way and changed a bunch of stuff. Right, maybe in six months when BioWare's put in, you know, dozens of patches and they've, you know, kind of gotten rid of some of these problems and added in more story content or whatever, I'll come back to it to see what they've done with it. But unless that happens, I'm never touching this again. Couldn't have said it better myself. And on that note, thanks for listening, guys. We always, we always enjoy doing these even when we may not fully enjoy what we are talking about. Once again, signing off, I'm Adam . I'm Austin . We'll see you next time..