So yesterday was a bit of a busy one for me. I ended up only working half a day as my wife and I got our first round of Covid-19 vaccinations yesterday. I am shocked and amazed that we have at least one round down after hearing all of the horror stories about family members trying to get theirs. It required a bit of a drive however and my phone battery was a little low so I mostly stayed off social media. When I get back home eventually and log into twitter I see a reply from a friend of mine stating that I sounded prophetic about Anthem Next yesterday morning. Of course this lead me to start googling and apparently there was an official announcement about the future of the revamp in BioWare Blog form. The most relevant bits are as follows:
In the spirit of transparency and closure we wanted to share that we’ve made the difficult decision to stop our new development work on Anthem (aka Anthem NEXT). We will, however, continue to keep the Anthem live service running as it exists today.
Christian Dailey – BioWare Blog
So I guess that is it and now the grieving can finally begin. So yesterday when I said I didn’t think it was actually going to happen, there was a part of me still holding out hope to be proven wrong. I liked the mess that was Anthem quite a bit, but ultimately reached a point where it didn’t feel like my time invested in the game was worth it. Even then if you go look at my Origin profile, I logged 214 hours of gameplay before I ultimately gave up on it. I was pretty damned invested in this game and I wanted it to succeed, but I think we all sorta saw the writing on the wall. Much like the other gut punch of the week, the closing of Fry’s Electronics… it wasn’t a surprise but it still really hurts to see it happen.
What Was Wrong?
So each player is going to ultimately have their own hit list for what went wrong with Anthem, but for me personally it boils down to two points. The first is that the game just needed more content simple as that. The story that you play through in the campaign felt like the opening chapter of a much larger tale. I believe that the intent was to do seasonal content drops that moved the story along and because they had to spend so much time triaging launch issues, this original plan was completely scrapped. The problem with this however is the base version of Anthem almost feels like a Demo for what the final product should have been.
Not only was it missing Story Content but it was missing activities for the players to participate. The game needed easily two to three times as many Strongholds as were available so that you could string together a good play list without it feeling like you were always getting the one you liked or the one you didn’t like. Ultimately the game in its current state has four multiplayer activities that matter:
- Tyrant Mine – The Bug Hunt One
- The Temple of Scar – The Protect the thing from the Scar One
- Heart of Rage – Doesn’t Open Up Until You Beat Game
- The Sunken Cell – Patched in Post Launch
There simply just needed to be more of these. If you had eight of them instead of four then I think that probably would have felt like a reasonable play list. Destiny for example has 15 Strikes in their current playlist and there were an additional 7 Strikes available prior to Beyond Light. At the launch of Destiny 2 they had 6 Strikes which seemed a bit tight but they rapidly patched in additional strikes with the first two content drops, which landed as planned without interruptions. Basically Anthem just needed more across the board of content to do at all levels because it very quickly became repetitive.
Misunderstanding Their Loot Model
The other major problem that Anthem had was that I do not think at a fundamental level they understood their own loot model. As an avid Diablo 3 player… I fully understood the type of loot that I was receiving. In D3 the loot is plentiful because it feels good to get shiny things, but any given item you get is usually deeply flawed in some way. D3 gives you ways of fixing this but makes it extremely expensive, so the alternative is to just keep doing content until a better version drops. The challenge there however is that in order for this flawed but plentiful loot model to work… the loot needs to flow like water. You need to be deluged with reasonable gear candidates so that from the dross you can piece together a few gems to make a reasonable gear set.
In Anthem there was a massive difference in functionality between a good item and a bad item and this felt awful especially considering how rare it was to get a Legendary item to drop. When that Legendary was something that you either didn’t need or couldn’t use it was extremely demoralizing. I think this was improved a little bit with the Cataclysm they introduced and the ability to target specific gear slots, but at that point the player base as a whole was largely gone. I attempted to play the Cataclysm several times but was never able to matchmake a full team and usually speaking it was just me and another player trying to make it work.
A Last Hurrah
So of those two problems… they cannot fix the first one because the team is being pulled off the project. There will be no more content trickling into the game and that sucks. However since loot setting should just be some server variables if they did things correctly… they could maybe tweak the generosity a bit. Were I BioWare, I would crank up the loot and let those who want to play the game at least do so in a method that fits the gear model that they ended up with. Let the magical 8 sided dice that aren’t called Engrams reign down from above and cover us in sub part loot options for the slim hope that maybe just maybe one of them will be useful! For me personally that would have gone a long ways towards keeping me engaged.
I enjoyed the core gameplay loop but I ended up in a place where it felt like I just could not move upwards because I wasn’t getting the gear needed to keep moving upwards. I was fine grinding the Hive Tyrant over and over and over again so long as there was a loot payout but when I could run for four hours and see a single hint of lime green… it seemed like my time was better spent doing literally anything else. Cranking up the drops would help to salve the community a bit, if there even is a community anymore. The few times they screwed up and accidentally turned the loot up to eleven were some of the most enjoyable periods in the game for me. I happened to catch a few of these lucky streaks and it felt AMAZING.
Damaged Faith
Game development is hard. Decisions like these are not easy. Moving forward, we need to laser focus our efforts as a studio and strengthen the next Dragon Age, and Mass Effect titles while continuing to provide quality updates to Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Christian Dailey – BioWare Blog
There is one more relevant quote from the BioWare blog that I want to talk about this morning. The theory is that they are abandoning Anthem to double their efforts on Dragon Age and Mass Effect projects, which is perfectly fine and probably the most reasonable option. That said I have no faith that BioWare in its current state is going to do anything to support those games either. This is the second big BioWare title in a row that they have abandoned support for prematurely. I was a huge fan of Mass Effect Andromeda and I am still pissed that we will never get any DLC content for that game or likely have much in the way of denouement for the loose ends that the game left. Once again it was a game that told a partial story because you could see them leaving the door open for follow up content that never actually came.
Sure this could be a bad streak for a good studio, or it could just be that the BioWare that we knew and loved is no more and whatever is left is no longer capable of the long-term stewardship of our hopes and dreams. Star Wars the Old Republic is mentioned but that game has more or less been in an extended maintenance mode since the wrap up of the Knights of the Eternal Throne storyline far as I am aware. As gamers we have this bad habit of latching onto a studio and viewing them as something different than the assemblage of the people that were in it. BioWare has been bleeding staff for years and thanks to the Dev Whisperer we have seen the pretty sorry state of their internal affairs. I am not sure at what point they stop being capable of supporting the franchise that we have loved for so long.
Grieving is Hard
Anthem was a wound that had never fully healed but I had managed to scab over a bit and put it out of my mind. Yesterdays news however ripped that scab off and I am once again bleeding a bit. So as such I am a bit touchy about it this morning, and with it comes a certain over dramatic melancholy with my writing. Now I am trying to decide if I want to reinstall the game and give it one last shot on the way out the door or just put the entire thing to bed as a failed experiment. Anthem was a good game and I enjoyed it greatly for as much as we actually got of it. I just wanted more or what was working and more generosity. Folks will claim that they have learned their lessons from Diablo 3, but those same folks seem to not actually understand why that game works. As a player that returns like clockwork every time a new Diablo 3 season opens… I can guarantee that Anthem did not learn that lesson.
This post is a bit disjointed but I also feel like I needed to get it out of my system. My blog often times is therapy for me and when I have written something I can finally start to put it out of my mind. I think this might be the case for Anthem. That said I will probably still be in mourning for a bit.
I think back to Diablo 3’s launch and what a clusterfuck that was. Anthem launched in a much better place but never got a chance to build. I think maybe it’s a different type of grief for something with potential than something that was fully realized. I think the former hits harder than the latter.
I’ve tried to write a blog post on Anthem three times now and I’m struggling to get coherent thoughts out for a fourth time. Some of the stuff it did was great, like the graphics, story, basic movement, and motion capture. I still listen to the soundtrack as background noise when I’m working. But it really did never gel together into a cohesive whole.
Anthem was a weird beast. A looter/shooter has two things it needs to get 100% right, and other things that can evolve over time. The shooter part was solid. The moment to moment stuff was great. Had they been able to meet their content roadmap, it would have been something to see that shooter part expand to more areas.
The looter part was horrendous. In a way that boggles the mind, really. Every lesson learned in industry in how to make it work was ignored… even the diablo devs gave them point by point feedback on making it better, and they didn’t. The looter part is the carrot, and when that part is broken, then you start snowballing into other areas.
D3 is a looter/hacker game. The combat part has always been solid. The looter part was bad (not AS bad as Anthem) at launch where it was easier to play the Auction House than play the game. It was 2 years (!!) between D3 launch and RoS, with the only real notable change in the monster power toggles in that timeframe. Blizz through money and people at the problem and rightfully got rid of Jay Wilson.
BioWare leadership owns this. Here’s hoping they learn something from it for DA4/ME4 and get back to building games they want to actually play.
SWTOR did get a decent expansion about two years ago. I would put it on par with Makeb or Revan. There was a very long stretch, while Bioware was apparently dumping most of their resources into Anthem, where it really was pretty much in maintenance mode (something like 30 minutes of content being released a year). New stuff still isn’t coming out nearly fast enough that I find it to be a good long term subbing prospect. But I will go back whenever the next expansion drops, if that ever happens.
I never played Anthem, but as an outsider the loot issues I read about were really puzzling. It sounded like the major draw of the game was as a loot shooter, and most of the loot sucked so badly that it wasn’t even worth checking the stats on it. I know Bioware hasn’t really built games like that before, but you would think someone on the team would have played any of the dozens of games that do things better. DIII (as you mention) if nothing else . . .