Anthem

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.

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.

As you might have been able to tell from my blog, and the lack of coverage…  I’ve more or less stopped playing Anthem.  Apologies for using a memey screenshot to lead this discussion off but I somewhat feel like it is fitting for the current state of the game.  Anthem does an awful lot right when it comes to the moment to moment gameplay of what it feels like to pilot a mech suit into combat.  Once they fixed the controls from the early alpha testing…  flying a suit feels amazing and using those same controls to move around the battlefield during combat feels pretty great as well.  Additionally I was a huge fan of the characters that were introduced with Anthem and the story arc that was played out…  even though it largely felt like the opening chapter of a much larger experience that we have yet to see.  I think Bioware had a lot of ambition with this game, but due to all sorts of reasons outlined in the now infamous Jason Schreier “How BioWare’s Anthem Went Wrong” piece on Kotaku…  the game that was released simply did not have enough focus or time to incubate into a finished product.

I legitimately feel bad for the crew after reading that post, but I am also left with the competing interests of being a consumer that bought in hook line and sinker into a broken product.  I think given time and money and resources and sufficient good will from the community…  Anthem is a ship that could right itself.  However on many fronts things are not looking stellar as we move into May some almost 3 months after the early access release began.  As many users I spent a good part of April waiting on a big patch they were supposedly working on that would in theory fix a lot of things.  While 1.1.0 added a new piece of non-story content and provided some quality of life changes… it also failed to deliver most of the things that were on the road map for April.  More damning however it did nothing to fix the core problems that the player base has been chanting since day one…  that there were issues with both the quality of loot drops and the quantity of the highest end drops called Legendaries.

April was the month that I more or less stopped playing.  Mentally I was thinking to myself…  what was the point of grinding when there was supposedly a patch to fix all patches just around the corner.  At the beginning of that month it sounded as though the patch would be landing at any day…  and as we reached the tail of the month and the eventually release of it on April 23rd as a community the expectations were pretty high.  From what I hear the Stronghold that was added is in fact a really good experience and was not plagued by a number of the bugs that the earlier strongholds had.  I say “from what I hear” because even if Sunken Cell is the best experience in the world, it does nothing to fix the fact that BioWare built a game different from the one they were intending to build and have done nothing to fix the core loot issues.  I just cannot be bothered to log in to play through any more content when I know all that will be waiting on me at the end of the content is a sea of trash purple drops that force me to play a constant game of inventory management just to stay ahead of the tiny 250 item vault limit.

I feel like I need to dig into the statement I just made that BioWare built a game that they never intended to make.  Once again if you follow the Schreier piece it tells a take of a game studio that wasn’t exactly sure what they were making part from it absolutely not being a “Destiny Clone”.  They leaned heavily into the comparison to Diablo 3, but the problem with that is it denotes a very specific style of game-play.  In Diablo 3 post Loot 2.0 update the drops are plentiful with a bad luck timer ticking in the background and making sure that you get a drop every so often that scales with difficulty.  The reason why it is so plentiful is that a good number of the drops end up being randomized to be not that great for whatever build you are going for… but they become workable until you can get something better.  Getting something better is not a case of praying for the drops, but instead a case of applying time because eventually the thing you want will drop.  I know this for a fact given how many seasons I have completed at this point and managed to get all of the drops I needed for a specific build.  There is a high chance that you will see literally every item that can drop for your character during the course of a season.

The other thing that the Diablo model has going for it is the fact that the game gives you a number of levers that you can pull to help defeat bad luck streaks as well.  They have a machine of sorts called Kunai’s Cube that allows you to pour crafting materials into it to get a Legendary item for a specific slot.  Similarly doing higher tier stuff in the game rewards you with Blood Shards and you can spend these with the merchant Kadala in order to again get a chance at items for a specific slot.  As a result through a combination of playing the games and getting drops and targeting specific gear slots you can pretty effectively get the items that you were actually needing.  It feels as though you are always working towards the goal of getting your full set of gear needed for your specific build, and even when you get gear drops that are less than perfect the game has an enchanting system that allows you to swap a single stat on an item to help fix the problems with any gear.  Again the game is exceedingly generous with its drops and also gives the player systems in order to mitigate any issues that might occur where they aren’t getting the items that they actually need.

Anthem is sorta like a kid who only read the first chapter of a novel and is now trying to pass the test in English Lit.  They got the part where the gear is randomized, but were apparently absent on the days they talked about all of the ways that Diablo 3 tries to help mitigate any times when the random loot machine isn’t working as intended.  Additionally they seem to have missed the part where if you are building a game with loot that swings wildly between “god rolls” and “garbage fire” that you have to make sure that the drops themselves are plentiful so that sharding an item doesn’t feel like you just destroyed what amounted to several hours of your life.  Legendary drops in Anthem are still fairly rare in that you may see one in a nights worth of play or you may not.  In theory they should be guaranteed drops from the end boss of Tier 2 or higher content, but instead they are an exceedingly rare drop from any encounter in the game which means that you realistically need to clear every single trash mob so that you don’t feel like you are missing the opportunity to see a Lime Green diamond on your screen.

The rarity of Legendary drops feels more akin to Destiny 2 and getting an Exotic Weapon.  The challenge there however is that an Exotic weapon when it drops is the only version of that weapon you will ever need, because they had the foresight to make all Exotic weapons drop with static rolls.  I have a handful of legendary weapons at this point and none of them are what I would consider to be a good roll for the specific type of weapon or damage that is being dealt with them.  You use them because they are significantly higher level than Masterworks, but they don’t necessarily feel great to use or at least good enough to account for the time spent in acquiring them.  It takes Legendaries to grind to get more Legendaries to grind to get more Legendaries…  and at some point the incentive feels bad and not worth the effort you are expending to get it given the interval of drops seems to ranges from 30 minutes to 300 hours.

The other major issue with Anthem is that months into the game we are still encountering massive issues that tell me that the game itself behind the scenes is held together with duct tape and bailing twine.  On May 7th they released a minor patch, large with the purpose of removing the Elysian Cache reward system from the game.  I could go into how dumb of an idea I think this is since they removed content from a game that already feels like it doesn’t have enough content… and didn’t replace it with anything.  However they did state from the beginning that this was a temporary system and in theory was designed to apply enough friction to keep people grinding until they had gathered all of the 160 or so loot possibilities.  The issue however is that when they released the patch they also inadvertently removed loot drops entirely from a handful of encounter types in the process.  This has been a pretty common cadence with Anthem so far is that touching one system seems to often times wreck what would seem to be an unrelated system.

One of the things that always impresses me is a PC case that has extremely neat looking cable management.  However often times if you pull off the opposite panel on those cases and you see a rats nest of wires in all sorts of odd places in order to achieve what appears to be a polished look on the visible side.  This is what I feel like Anthem is probably like once you peel back the pretty facade…  a game that has gone through so many rapid iterations and has lots and lots of “temp” code still in place to try and hot wire systems so that they work.  I’ve written more than my share of this style of code when we were rushed to meet a deadline and couldn’t be bothered to follow best practices when so much needed to be done in such a short amount of time.  Crunch makes you do really dumb things that will ultimately bite you in the ass in the long run… and I feel like Anthem is a game full of Crunch decisions and compromises in order to ship a product that was not ready for shipping.

The challenge however is once they released that road-map, to some extent they are being judged upon it.  It is hard to stem the hemorrhaging of all of these short term decisions when you are being pushed to make even more of them.  At this point however… I think the race is over and they lost.  It is far too late to be able to create a narrative of “we had a rough start but everything is on solid ground now” as has been the case with so many MMO launches.  The time has come for them to take their time and figure out what kind of game they want Anthem to be…  and then start working towards that FFXIV A Realm Reborn resurrection narrative instead.  Anthem is dead…  long live Anthem?  At this point I could be grinding for Legendaries, but even then I am not sure what the point in doing so would be?  There is no real end game in Anthem as of yet, no raid to be gearing towards and not even an equivalent of the Destiny Nightfall.  The only end game to the grind is more grind and once I realized that…  and the fact that loot would theoretically never get fixed I checked out of the game.

I am however keeping tabs on it as is the case with this postmortem of sorts.  I want Anthem to have one hell of a comeback story, much like Destiny did with Taken King…  and sadly Destiny 2 did with Forsaken (because they should have learned the damned lessons the first time).  The negative of the life and death of Anthem has been that it seemingly has soured my tastes for looter shooters in general…  since I seem to have also ejected from Division 2 and cannot seem to get back into the groove of Destiny 2 either.  So now I largely wait and hope that BioWare Austin can pick this game out of the dirt and turn it into something we actually want to play.