Anthem

The last week or so have been really weird for me personally, because of the current climate surrounding Anthem.  It is making me realize how apparently vastly different my tastes in games are from that of the zeitgeist. I mean I have known for years that I am not even vaguely close to the norm for society as a whole.  However I didn’t realize that I was apparently so out of band for how the rest of my chosen community… gamers… felt about games.

See the problem at hand is I love Anthem.  It delivers on a player fantasy of controlling a mech suit and going through interesting combat with anime missiles while allowing me to roam around through this meticulously detailed and rich world with my friends while doing it.  That is a strong player fantasy for me… someone who grew up loving Robotech with all of my heart. Enough that I convinced my parents to take me to a Robotech convention as a kid.

However right now this game is reaping a heap of negative sentiments everywhere I turn.  The worst seem to be coming from YouTubers who are practically branding the game a serial killer and known toddler juggler.  I may be more on the defensive than I should be, because I do love this game… and I also loved another game that these so called “Influencers” completely destroyed.

Now we go back to the whole… my tastes seem to be out of band with the rest of society commentary.  I LOVED Mass Effect Andromeda. I thought it was a great game, and one that did not warrant the ton of bullshit memes that were dropped upon it.  Within a few days of the launch of the game a series of patches came through and fixed most of the issues that were so heavily meme’d on the internet.

However the influencer crew make their money by getting those early clicks within the first few days of the launch of a game.  If you listen to any major YouTuber that is willing to talk shop, they will tell you that they make the majority of their money in the two weeks surrounding the launch of a game.  This is so much the case that often times if a copyright flag happens after that two weeks… they don’t even bother contesting it because the potential money has already been made.

So in order to get those eyeballs they rely the human nature that we are way more likely to watch something that aligns to our hatred of something…  than we are to watch something that either goes against our feelings or aligns to the joy of a thing. This outrage economy has lead us to have people like Angry Joe…  that make a string of videos about them being angry about video games. That is the thing he does… he gets pissed off about things and dresses up in costumes while being pissed off about things.  If you want to be pissed off about something, then bam he has an entire channel full of it.

I’ve been engaging in this on Twitter over the last few days and I feel like…  this isn’t even about Anthem itself. There is a ball of rage about how things are working right now in the video game industry and it seems to have perched on top of this title.  People hate Electronic Arts with the deep burning hatred of a million suns. People are mad at Bioware and feeling wronged by Mass Effect 3’s ending, Mass Effect Andromeda and daring to make a game that is different from the traditional Bioware fare.  People are angry at the live services model and games being released in an incremental drip rather than one big single player epic for that $60… not to mention that the actual price of buying all of the content in most games tends to be something closer to $150 rather than that $60 price point we have stuck in our mind.

People are angry about the perceived lack of value in games right now, however… that $60 we paid in 2000 was worth just shy of 90 of our 2019 dollars.  Because we seem completely affixed with religious fervor to never paying more than 60 dollars for a product or preferably paying significantly less than that…  what we get as a result is missing features or in the case of Anthem a game that is being delivered incrementally as a live service throughout the course of the year.

Over the course of the last 10 days I have spent right at 80 hours playing Anthem and have loved the time spent.  The weekends skew those numbers… but I have legitimately put in almost 8 hours a day in this game. I loved the story and the characters I encountered.  I loved all of the little nuance and detail to the world and the moment to moment feel of the player fantasy of controlling a mech suit in a way that no other game has really delivered on.  So as a result it is hard to watch this thing that I have spent so much time enjoying being ripped asunder by the same people who did a similar hit job on Andromeda.

Which again leads me back to the original statement.  My tastes are apparently completely out of band for the tastes of gamers in general.  So not only am I not representative of the population as a whole, which I learned over and over growing up.  I am also not apparently representative of this adopted community of gamers. So basically.. Like often is the case I feel alone in a crowd of folks who feel massively different than I do.  So in the end… I am going to keep enjoying the game and hoping for the best… and putting on blinders to the people who are hating on it.

This week has been a weird one…  but I will move past it because I have a game that I am enjoying playing.  The folks that are bashing Anthem just have some hatred for something they are apparently not enjoying.  I will gladly take a game I am having fun with over being told I shouldn’t be enjoying it. Maybe at some point in the future my tastes will once again align to the Zeitgeist but for the time being I am going to latch onto Anthem with both arms and hold tight because this game takes me back to running around the living room with a Cyclone and an Invid Fighter having elaborate mech battles.

This morning I thought I would do something a little different and try some show and tell.  One of the data sets that I have been thus far unable to find is a list of all of the Masterworks that can drop in the sub Grandmaster 1 modes.  The devs talked about this during one of the streams but there is a partial loot pool available before you enter the Grandmaster difficulty levels.  There are a few Masterwork weapons that can drop in Easy, Normal and Hard difficulties as a sort of way to help ease your progression into the Grandmaster tiers.  However no one specifically calls out what these Masterworks actually are.  Seeing that GM1 drops you off the deep end into a pool that includes all of the the rest of the weapons, components and inscriptions…  if you are wanting a specific weapon that CAN drop at lower tiers…  it will be by virtue of a smaller loot pool much easier to get in a lower mode.

I apparently have been extremely lucky, combined with the fact that I have been running content with friends nowhere near my level range…  which means we are choosing Normal difficulty instead of something more difficult.  I am still seeing a significant number of Masterworks dropping for me personally, and as such have pieces together most of the weapons available in this loot pool.  I have a sneaking feeling that there is an Auto Cannon and a Grenade Launcher available as well… but seeing as I do not main Colossus I have yet to see either of these.  I have however been spending a lot more time on the Colossus in an attempt to get one of them to drop so I can complete the list.  Additionally this will let you see what I mean by there is some Diablo DNA in the way this loot works.

Assault Rifle – Elemental Rage

I got my first masterworks to drop sub level cap… and this combined with the next one that I will talk about dropped at the same time.  Unfortunately I have not earned a higher light version of this weapon, but I have been working on unlocking the pattern so I can craft one.  The perk of this weapon is Veteran’s Furor which cause a buff to stack anytime you hit an elite enemy.  When you gain a stack of 20 there is a audible sound queue to let you know that your buff is completely primed…  at which point your next elemental damage ability deals 5% bonus damage per stack so more than likely you are going to use this for 100% bonus damage when you hit a full stack.  Other than that it is based off the Defender Assault Rifle which is my favorite of the available options and full auto with manageable recoil.

Heavy Pistol – Avenging Herald

This was the second weapon I got and ever since have gotten a lot more of them.  This is considered to be one of the stronger early Masterworks because of the fact that its perk can stack.  The perk Raptor’s Deadeye gives you 200% increased weapon damage while hovering, and this is a suit level ability and not specific to this weapon.  So that means you can throw this is your second slot and utilize it with whatever primary weapon you have equipped.  Additionally the buff stacks if you are dual wielding these, which could be extremely brutal for storm builds given that the weapon has a shockingly long effective range for a pistol.

Light Machine Gun -Artinia’s Gambit

This was the third weapon that I got to drop, and honestly end up using it more than pretty much anything else because I tend to favor LMG/Assault Rifles greatly.  If I spent the time to earn the Elemental Rage pattern, this would probably get tossed in the vault because it is not necessarily particularly good.  The perk doesn’t have a name…  but it causes a detonation to occur when you reload the weapon.  However it specifically calls out “immediate area” which should instead be read as point blank range.  This is useful if I am feeling froggy and decide to melee something as a ranger which primes the target… and gives me a fast way of detonating said target while I am still up close and personal.  However for other uses it isn’t terribly effective.  If it would detonate the whatever I was targetting…  then it would be a really great option for detonatorless builds.

Machine Pistol – Unending Battle

Prior to getting this weapon I had never really used a Machine Pistol in part because it didn’t seem like an archetype that I really was super interested in.  However this is effectively a submachinegun from any other game… up close melt machine that does nonsensical damage but you have to pretty much be at point blank range.  The perk is called Gladiator’s Wrath and feeds into this role for the weapon because hitting an enemy in point-blank range increases weapon and melee damage by 110% for 5 seconds.  It would have been better if it was some sort of a stacking buff, but I will take it and it really does make this weapon helpful for clearing anything that runs up on you.

Sniper Rifle – Wyvern Blitz

This is the weapon I have used the absolute least, but pairs nicely with the whole hovering makes weapons awesome trope.  Snipers are just not my thing, but having used this a little bit it seems perfectly reasonable.  Pending you can hit a weak point…  doing so while hovering increases the damage by 40%…  and if you have an Avenging Herald in the second slot…  it gains another 200%.  I really can’t say much since I don’t use this style of weapon much… it seemed adequate for sniping things.

Shotgun – Papa Pump

Papa Pump has probably the best name of any of the weapons I have encountered and is an upgraded version of the Scattershot…  which is a weapon that really wants to be fired in close range.  One of the interesting things about this weapon is that reloading gives it a 100% boost in damage… and this stacks to 2.  What this means in practice is if you are in a situation where you can pump this twice in a row as it were you can get a 200% boost for 15 seconds which is probably more than enough time to unload one entire round of shots.  I have not been able to use it much but this seems like it is going to be a boss melt weapon, or at the very least taking out elite and legendary mobs.  It helps that it looks as cool as it sounds.

Marskman Rifle – Thunderbolt of Yvenia

While the “Scout” is not exactly my favorite of the Marksman Rifles it does a reasonable job of representing the closest thing we have to the Destiny Scout rifle in Anthem.  The unnamed perk is that the weapon has a 33% chance to strike the mob with electrical damage…  that does way more than the actual shot.  In practice this just nukes whatever you are targeting whenever the proc occurs, and it also has a side effect of completely wrecking mob shields.  This was the very last weapon that I saw drop in the list I am showing off today, but it has immediately become my secondary weapon because my preferred build out for Ranger is a LMG/Assault in slot one and a Marksman in slot two giving me a lot of flexibility of engagement range.  So far I am super happy with how this weapon feels.

Just to summarize what I said before.  All seven of these weapons can drop in any of the game modes, including Easy if you get lucky enough to see a Masterwork drop there.  I am not really sure if there is any rhyme or reason about how Masterworks drop, but I have tended to see them most off from boss encounters and treasure chests at the end of world events.  My first pair of Masterworks dropped from the encounter that asks you to fight three titans at the same time… and each one dropped from a different titan.  I’ve been fairly lucky in that I am getting a couple a night regardless of what I happen to be doing.  Where I am less lucky is in actually getting components and abilities to drop while doing Grandmaster 1 content.  Regardless I thought I would give the players who might be reading my blog and have yet to hit the level cap a preview of what they can get from the lower level modes of the game.

This weekend was the weekend I entered the end game of Anthem or what currently exists as a placeholder for what is likely coming.  On Thursday I finished the main story quest and because I spent time burning down side quests between steps in the main story quest…  it meant that I more or less also finished the sidequests at the same time.  I have a handful of contracts that I could be doing but instead Friday night I opted to level through QuickPlay, seeing as that appears to be a game mode tailored for my proclivities.  I’ve talked before about my favorite way of playing Monster Hunter World is through what I refer to as “SOS Roulette” in which I just accept SOS flares from other players instead of starting my own missions.  QuickPlay is sort of like that in that you are helping to fill the party of a mission already in progress.

When QuickPlay works, it works beautifully and it is a really fun way to hop in and revisit content you have already seen before and gives you a decent chance of earning rewards.  At a minimum even if you join as the mission is finishing you see to get at least two on pilot level rewards…  so for example while I was leveling those were blues and occasionally purples…  but now they are purples and occasionally masterworks.  I said “when it works” because there are key issues with the system in the form of a number of very bugged quests that you can get thrown into.  Both of the two screenshots above are examples of endless missions that will never complete.  At least in the case of “Defeat Dominion Troops” you end up with wave after wave of things to fight allowing you to build up a bunch of experience before eventually bailing out.

Holy shit… I just got two Masterworks from the same mission pic.twitter.com/LNlWzsKoIC

— Belghast 🆚 Sexy Danger! (@belghast) February 23, 2019

On the positive… I got my first two Masterworks from a Quickplay that dropped from the very same mission.  The negative is that Masterworks are sorta like Legendaries in Diablo 3…  and anytime you get one to drop before you hit the level cap of 30…  it is a crying shame because there is no way of infusing it up to be a valid level.  For reference…  Purples cap out at 36 and Masterworks at 45…  so seeing as these are 38 at the time they were are really awesome boost in level but quickly turned into vault trash.  However one of the cool things about Masterworks is the ability to earn the blueprints, so at some point I need to spend time with Elemental Rage killing Legendary mobs so I can earn its blueprint and craft a proper level 45 version of it.  Basically if you are joining quick play and see either “Defeat Dominion Troops” or “Hunt Down Beast” as the active step in the quest…  you are likely going to be in a bugged instance because I have never seen either complete successfully.

I’ve come to realize that at its core… this game is “What if Destiny were more like Diablo 3”.  Which completely explains why I have latched onto it so hard because I love both Destiny and Diablo 3 and apparently this amalgam of the two with a touch of Bioware characters thrown in?  Moving my way from Normal to Hard and now to Grand Master 1 has felt a lot like progressing through the ranks in Diablo 3.  I reached a point where Normal was too easy… and then I bumped it up to Hard.  Now I have reached a point where Hard feels too easy… and I am dipping my toes into Grand Master rank 1 which seems like the equivalent of that jump up to Torment 1.  As such I am mostly Quickplaying my way into groups that are already doing GM1 because I am in that uneasy boundary between the ranks…  where I can kill things…  but just not efficiently enough by myself to take on waves of them.  It is that feeling of pushing too hard too fast into greater rifts and hitting a bit of a quagmire where you are not progressing fast enough to fill the bar in time…  but you are progressing.

I figure a few more pieces of gear and I will ease that transition since at the moment other than weapons I only have a single masterwork item that was usable.  Another thing “for reference” is this apparently is what the weekly maximum of the Alliance system looks like.  I currently have five players on my friends list who have capped out at Rank 10 and as such that gives me a maximum contribution of 10,525 gold that I am understanding the system should be given to me at reset.  It was relatively easy to hit the cap and if you are playing with friends…  it seems EXTREMELY easy to cap out each week.  We spent some time yesterday running around and killing the Titans for the current live event that ends in a few hours.  We actually killed enough stuff that we started to the cap of what you can actually store in your inventory.

All in all… still having an excessive amount of fun playing Anthem.  Sure the game has issues and we spent a good chunk of this weeks episode of AggroChat talking about those…  but I don’t feel like ANY of it is beyond redemption.  The only reason why we are concerned is because EA is notorious for making short sighted calls when it comes to games and studios.  I hope they give the time to Anthem to become the game we all think it can be.  If they can hit a cadence where there is almost always a live event up like the Titan hunt, and there is a steady release of more stuff into the world…  this game is going to be really enjoyable.  I can’t believe I am saying it… but I think for a live service game to succeed they are going to have to follow the model that something like Dragalia Lost does.  Have a constant string of new things for the players to engage with so that the waits between major content drops feel shorter than they actually are as a result.

What are your thoughts, are you enjoying Anthem or did you check out?

Last night I got the credits roll for Anthem.  It happened sooner than I would have liked but considering what sort of game Anthem was…  it honestly provided about as much content as I was expecting.  At the point of finishing the final mission I had logged about 37 hours worth of game play.  It took me roughly 20 hours to get to the point in Destiny 2 where I had beaten the main story arc for the first time.  It is hard to actually compare the two however since I didn’t really focus fire the Main Story Quest in either game.  There was a lot more distractions along the way in Anthem and I took them and latched onto them with both arms.

I spent a lot of time talking to the various NPCs as new conversations opened up and spent a significant amount of time running down side quest chains.   Pretty much anytime I felt like I was nearing a major jumping point in the story, I went through a sequence where I burned down every bit of side quest content that I had available to me…  which was a lot.  I read the dialog…  occasionally contemplated what was being said and it allowed me to piece together fine details about Fort Tarsis and the extremely rich setting that is Bastion…  which is only one such area of the Anthem world.

If you set out a laser focus on ONLY beating the story… you could probably do it in about 10 hours total whereas the Destiny 2 equivalent of that would probably take you about 5 hours.  Largely I am throwing the comparisons out just to prepare you for the expected scale of the initial content release.  To use another Bioware game as an example… I spent a little over 90 hours playing my way through Mass Effect Andromeda… and yes I am still bitter that we never got any DLC content for it.  Essentially Anthem is a game that provides a bit of story that is adequately scaled for the sort of Looter Shooter gameplay experience that it is.  However there is a richness to the world and characters that Destiny 2 failed to deliver…  without copious amounts of piecing things together outside of the game.

If you are avoiding talking to the side characters or completing the secondary objectives…  then you are honestly missing a lot of the magic that is Anthem.  While the characters are fundamentally different than the ones you encounter in Mass Effect or Dragon Age…  they are somewhat serving a different purpose.  Each character interaction that you have builds upon the larger world that is Fort Tarsis and the territories beyond.  Each story acts as a vehicle for delivering a vignette that fills in another gap in the picture of what is happening… and quite regularly the arc that happens with character A will bleed into the arc that happens with character B and C later down the line.  There is a delightful interconnectedness that happens with Anthem that I greatly enjoyed.

In the above screenshot you can see a fountain in the courtyard of Fort Tarsis that evolves over time from being a completely abandoned moss clogged mess to being a thriving hub for social gatherings.  You can also see the two Lancer statues at the back end of the courtyard restored to glory…  both events happen as you play through the game and interact with other characters creating a subtle sense that your actions really did change the setting of the game.  I think of this as similar to the way that Rowena rebuilds an area in each Final Fantasy XIV expansion that slowly progresses and gets more intricate as additional patch content is released.

Sure there are no romances and you don’t get a cast of supporting characters that respond to your commands, but I don’t think either of these would have worked with the sort of story that Anthem is telling.  That is not to say that at some point down the road there is not room for both to happen, but I think that is not really their focus right now.  However nothing is set in stone because if you look at the sweeping changes that occurred to Elder Scrolls Online between the client that launched and the current juggernaut that exists today.  I have not doubt that tweaks will be applied as we move through the content cycle.  I am very curious to see what the content drops that are coming end up looking like, because I feel like they have equal opportunity to impress or disappoint.

All of the elements of Anthem built up to provide me a very enjoyable experience.  I maybe lucked out and did not encounter much in the way of bugs during the almost 40 hours I have played since last Friday.  Now that additional players are entering the fray, I am hoping that Bioware is capable of scaling the servers up smoothly to provide for a solid “official” launch.  For now however I feel like Anthem is well worth your time and attention in spite of all of the confusing drama that seems to be surrounding it.  I keep thinking that they are playing a vastly different game than the one I have been playing.  Sure there were things that could be smoother, but in the grand scheme of things I have loved the experience so far.

Some additional resources for those entering the game today…  I have been keeping a Roster of players Origin account information seeing as there is no way to import friends from other platforms.  If you want to add your own information to the list the Sign-Up form is here.  Adding friends had the side benefit of helping to progress the Alliance system that I do not fully understand… but it appears to be some sort of gold payout based on your “doing stuff in the game”, and how much your friends have also “done stuff in the game”.  Naithin has talked a little bit about the system over on the Time to Loot blog, but I still don’t feel like I have a firm grasp on it.   I look forward to more of you joining those of us who did the silly thing and paid for faster access to the game.