Anthem released roughly a year ago at this point. Technically it released on February 22nd and I am writing this on the 26th but for sake of argument a year has passed. I had so much hope going into the release of this game. I had hoped that maybe just maybe it would find a way of uniting my friends who love Destiny with my friends who love Warframe, because the game sorta felt like it shot down the middle of those two fandoms. The awesome thing is that for a brief while it did exactly that because it provided really fun Iron Man fantasy with some interesting quest design and writing representative of what Bioware can do.
The problem is that all of this ended pretty quickly once we entered the end game, which effectively was the same things we had been doing up until that point. At launch we had three strikes… the two you were introduced to early on during the story and one that effectively was the end mission to the game. The Sunken Cell was added in April of 2019, but ultimately the writing was already well on the wall at that point and I am not certain how much it actually added to its hemorrhaging player base. I stuck around for roughly two months of grinding my face against these “strikes” and doing a whole lot of open world exploration in an attempt to keep making my numbers go bigger.
I was an active part of the Discord and participated in friend exchanges through Origin which ended up with my filling my list with hundreds of names. However even taking that into account one year later the only person who has been on fairly recently is Jaedia. The core problem for me was them ratcheting down the drop rate of Legendary items, and sticking to a throwaway loot system like that of Diablo. Diablo is a game that is based on rapid iteration of loot for you to find the one item out of hundreds that works for your character build. Stingy Legendaries means when you finally do get one, it is more than likely trash… but you are going to keep using it because of the item level boost which feels awful. The fact that raids never materialized really drove clear that ultimately there wasn’t much of a point in maxing out your gear in the first place.
The truth is that this mornings post is spurred on by the fact that Bioware is offering an anniversary gift to players and I wanted to make sure anyone out there that still might care is aware. Effectively you have between February 25th and March 24th to log into the game and claim them. They will automagically show up in your vinyls and materials and represent 1 new Wrap for each available Javelin and a new material called Painted Metallic Flake. Other than that the fort has been redecorated from the winter holiday theme to that of a spring one with increased greenery and potted/hanging plants. Bioware is supposedly working on “Anthem Next” a complete rework of the game from the ground up and I hope they can somehow pull off a Destiny Taken King, Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn or a Diablo 3 loot 2.0.
Anthem was a really great tech demo, and I am hoping we can at some point see the game that it ultimately was meant to be. For the time being however you can keep playing the shambling corpse of a game and keep chasing the hopes of seeing lime green appear on your screen. The cataclysm events seem to largely be active at all times, which is probably a good call given that a game in desperate need of content probably should never be removing it. I’ve done a few of them and they are enjoyable enough, if you can actually find a party. The last several I have done however involved me and another player trying to complete them because we were never able to match make a third person. This all depresses me terribly and I hope that maybe just maybe we can see this game rise like a phoenix from its ashes some day.
I hope it can succeed, had the origins and template of a successful game but just…didn’t. To be clinical though, is there enough demand and goodwill to soft relaunch the game or move on to something else. Given the damage to the brand you’d have to assume they or at least a large majority of the studio were working on DA4 given the teases over repairing the damage here.