Anthem - The Review (2019)

this is part one of a two-part anthem review this video will focus on anthems campaign story mission design core gameplay early lute game and technical state the second video which will cover anthems endgame rhythm high difficulty scaling class design and build diversity systems will come in a few weeks time after I've had the chance to fully explore these this video will contain minor spoilers to highlight examples but none of that should undermine your appreciation for anthems main story elements do note that I do show footage of the last boss in 1998 Bioware released Baldur's Gate a game that took the pen and paper RPG that people had been playing for decades and put it into people's computers practically inventing the C RPG genre overnight the sequel Baldur's Gate 2 released in 2000 went on to become the most acclaimed C RPG of all time eclipsed only recently by divinity original sin 2 it took 18 years to make a game as good as bald as Gate 2 in 2003 Bioware released what many people would consider the greatest Star Wars game ever made Knights The Old Republic combines some incredible writing and characterization with some competent and accessible RPG systems to deliver one of the best star wars adventures outside the movies in my view and in the view of many others 16 years later they're still has never been a better Star Wars game made in 2007 Bioware who clearly understood the magic at the heart of the Star Wars DNA released their own space opera Mass Effect a sprawling multi galactic saga of warring species political intrigue romance and mystery a tale of diabolical peril on an unfathomable scale tempered by perfect quiet moments of loyalty and friendship the Mass Effect trilogy ended poorly but despite this it's light is undimmed and since then I think only The Witcher 3 has equalled it in scale and it's storytelling brilliance twelve years on the original Mass Effect trilogy still stands tall in the pantheon of gaming's greatest achievements in 2017 Bioware released the much-anticipated sequel to the Mass Effect series Mass Effect Andromeda it was a disappointment it was not a bad game but it was a bad Mass Effect game and following on from the bitterness of the Mass Effect 3 ending fans wondered at the Bioware they knew and loved was still there or if the passage of time had seen too much changing of the gaurd or too many new priorities emerge as the reality of Mass Effect Andromeda had set in many people had pushed a narrative that it was the B team to blame developed by Bioware in Montreal instead of Bioware Edmonton the argument went that this wasn't the real Bioware that had made all of these masterpieces it was a satellite office who held the name but not the magic Bioware didn't tell us this story ea didn't tell us story people told themselves that story in order to maintain the hope that the Bioware that had given us so many great games were still there they were simply working on anthem and when it arrived we'd see that Bioware was alive and well and that all our fears would be allayed now having played through the campaign of anthem I can confidently say that the story that many people told themselves was just that it was just a story it had no basis in fact whatsoever because anthem made by Bioware's a team is a colossal disappointment every single problem that plagued Andromeda is far far worse here in anthem in fact anthem introduces a host of new problems owing to its choice of genre and the limited and uninspired way it chose to mimic the worst aspects of that genre without bringing anything of substance to compensate for this copy and pasted banality I know this is a live service game and I know it will be updated with patches and DLC but you cannot unbaked a cake and what's wrong with anthem is baked so deep into its crust that whole components of the game's mechanics and engine would need to be ripped out and replaced in order to fix them I'm talking core components of combat like animation enemy AI hit registration and encounter design I'm talking about loading screens groaning to reveal unintelligible menus leading to only more loading screens I'm talking about the fact that there's only one map and every part of it looks the same I'm talking about the most repetitive feeling campaign I have ever played in a looting game I'm talking about storytelling that is a gigantic step back for these once proud master storytellers I'm talking about shooting mechanics that are the worst across the entire spectrum of the ludus shooter genre and a looot game that is held hostage by the need to monetize the armor your character wears anthem is the worst game Bioware has ever put out the Old Republic was a competent but derivative MMO with an absolutely brilliant story anthem is an utterly incompetent ludus shooter with an abysmal story its lack of vision and narrative is matched only by its horrid technical state where baldur's gate kotor and Mass Effect have a shelf life measured in decades we cannot yet even begin to run the clock on anthems shelf life because the game is so far from finished that it simply would not make sense almost every looter has launched Paulie but anthem feels particularly weak as it fails to heed the lessons of all of those failed launchers that came before it or recognize just how competent and entrench the competition has become over the six years that it has been in development it now enters a highly competitive arguably saturated market with no redeeming virtues and only the faint hope of future improvements to keep it alive if six years was not enough to get this thing into shape then what good will six weeks or six months be some people may find out but the overwhelming majority of people will not be sticking around myself included in its current form anthem is everything wrong with triple-a gaming trench aceing designed by committee missing core features monetized shrewdly marketed buggy as hell and pushed out before it was finished if nothing else I sincerely hope anthem serves as a wake-up call for how broken the Triple A live service development model has become if it achieves this and only this then perhaps Mass Effect did not die in vain the heart of Bioware games has always been their stories gameplay was absolutely incredible in their older games like Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights and Dragon Age Origins but as Bioware moved into the console market their gameplay systems became fast simpler and more accessible there was still great there were just a lot more streamlined despite this their stories remained dense full of imaginations superbly written particularly nights the odd Republic and Mass Effect just fantastic since the moment anthem was announced Bioware fans have been asking themselves and others is this really going to be a true Bioware game is it going to have the commitment to great storytelling that buy away is known for with the exception of Borderlands the ludus shooter genre has always struggled to nail storytelling and fans wondered if anthem would suffer the same fate as destiny or the division their bland stories shoved into the background as players were invited to painfully excavate the law through in-game audio logs or out of game grimoire cards anthem story is absolutely better than vanilla destiny or the division there are cutscenes they have a clear narrative flow the voice acting is actually superb there's a clear beginning middle and end it strives for some stakes and some dramatic tension and it has some characters that work really well it might be considered a decent enough story in most other games but for Bioware this story is just so beneath their legacy it is a very very bog-standard tale about a bad guy who wants a thing for generic bad guy reasons and a ragtag group of people trying to stop him the foundations of the world building here are surprisingly strong there's a cutscene towards the start of the game which really sets the scene for the battle ahead and mythologize is some heroes but that cutscene is literally the only good story beat in the entire game it's all downhill from there the rest of the game you're left looking back at that cutscene thinking why can I just have more of that it feels like the law of the freelancers and the world they inhabit is completely squandered in a story that just crescendos into absolute nothingness and kind of say you thought Mass Effect 3 is ending was bad holy [ __ ] wait until you get a load of this I won't spoil it but yeah anyway let's move on one of the things I found really ingenious about the way that Bioware handled Gamze villain whose name is the monitor is that instead of just making him sound angry and crazy they actually voiced him in the exact same way that josh brolin voices Thanos [Music] he's quiet he's deliberate he's subdued he exudes confidence and she self-assuredness because he doesn't need to bellow to get what he wants he just quietly takes it but unlike Thanos the monitor has nothing interesting to say at all and the voice is actually hiding how one-dimensional this guy is like if you take any one of his lines and then voice it over with a traditional bad guy voice you'd say that there's just nothing there this guy is not Darth Malak he's not sarin he's not sovereign he's not the elusive man he's just a pretender he's little more than a puffed up shirt and the monitor will hold no long term real estate in anyone's mind except remembering the hilariously bad method of his demise so that's plot and I think it's generic whatever but there's a much bigger problem with the story and that's the way that Bioware deliver it and how divorce this delivery is from the core gameplay which is absolutely unforgivable because this is the studio among all Studios ever who nailed a formula that seamlessly merges story and gameplay I'll explain in Mass Effect when I spoke to Rex about the genophage virus that rendered his people sterile all the Solarians that engineered it that conversation wasn't just there as some throwaway anecdote like a law entry in a codex for example that story that he told me would go on to have gameplay implications because I'd be out in the field with Rex and we might meet a Silurian and Rex will comment that he doesn't trust this person because they're a Silurian or I'd do a loyalty mission with Rex and I'd help him discover a cure for the genophage he'll I might even have to decide the fate of his entire species as we learn more about the virus and I get access to new quests and cutscenes and all sorts of stuff based on the decisions that I make and I really cared about this all the more because when I was out in the field and Rex was standing there next to me I could feel the significance of all of those conversations when Rex stood behind me I knew it was because he had my back he wasn't just some NPC I ordered around he was my loyal foot soldier my brother-in-arms my friend anthem has dialogue choices like previous Bioware games do but unlike previous Bioware games these choices mean absolutely nothing to either the story or the gameplay outcomes no matter what you choose the story is always going to be the same and none of it will influence your gameplay in any way shape or form the Bioware genius that linked story and gameplay is completely shattered here and the dialogue is just so [ __ ] boring like man Shepard you never knew what that guy was gonna do or say or who is gonna punch I gave him an extra dose of his meds after the attack say goodnight Manuel you cannot silence the truth my voice must be heard oh my god it was always so interesting to take part in dialogue in Mass Effect or kotor or Dragon Age Origins here it's just so boring as one-dimensional characters bombard you with meaningless anecdotes that you know have no impact on your experience whatsoever yes it's just gonna sentinel Dax is actually everyone in the fort knows that really yes it's common knowledge oh well it's still pretty interesting though right it was the first 50 times I heard it okay I hear you but you're still gonna come to me for all your insight information right I never did so nothing's changed for this No oh good okay so hey do you want to go for a bite or something no I get it next time I swear I'm gonna be a better friend don't be mad I think some of this might have been less painful if it was delivered in the field during the missions it could break up some of them and not any of the gameplay when you arrive at an NPC have a chat with them maybe make a choice that might affect the direction of the mission etc the Old Republic actually did this and it worked quite well here an anthem instead of being woven into the core mission flow almost all of the story is delivered back in for Tarsus where you painfully shuffle from one NPC to the next while they spout dull exposition at you and you occasionally select between two meaningless dialogue options which I swear to God have been implemented to test whether or not the player has fallen asleep the fact that there's no in mission dialogue sequences means that all the expository dialogue has to be packed into the gaps between missions like I would go through every NPC at four tarsus listening to them all speak and this meant that I would be spitting upwards of 20 or 30 minutes between each mission doing [ __ ] all everytime I loaded into the fort and saw a dozen new yellow icons on my map I groaned and can I just say that for Tarsus is the absolute worst hub I've ever been in it is so barren and creepy it feels like a dead City it's so quiet that it hurts my ears to be there but when we get to an tiem when you compare the reality of it to the reveal footage at e3 you cannot be struck by how lifeless it feels the Citadel from the original Mass Effect game like 12 years ago was way way better way more interesting way more buzz to it than what we have here I have no idea how to fix this place but it absolutely needs a rework the first-person perspective as well it's weird the characters all looks sort of cross-eyed and seeing them just stand there looking at you with a no change in camera angle for upwards of 5 or 10 minutes there's a reason they don't shoot movies like this it just doesn't work there and it doesn't work here either so at this point some of you might be thinking mate this isn't a traditional Bioware game they're trying something different ease off that's very fair that's very true this is different this isn't a narrative lead experience it's a Loutre shooter however Bioware in their desire to cater to their existing audience roped in a number of storytelling elements from their narrative lead games and crudely bolted them onto this one they don't work here and the result is two totally separate games out there is the mindless looter shooter and in the fort is the narrative Lee Baron walking simulator Bioware didn't try to evolve their storytelling format to fit a new genre they simply made two totally separate disconnected experience after spending literally 20 years showing the entire industry how to merge those two things seamlessly it is a tragic misapplication of their extraordinary talents all right so let's talk about the word repetition we need to really examine this word and understand it because the entire conversation about this game will pivot on this one word and I'm already seeing it out there right now Bungie has famously said that the job of any game is to find a rewarding 30-second gameplay loop and just deliver that over and over again in slightly different ways at their core all games are repetitive chess move the pieces Tetris and drop the blocks Mario jump on the thing halo shoot the alien Bayonetta kick the demon god of war boy the boy all games have one or two tricks and then they deploy them in different ways I think the goal of game development is to firstly arrive at a really good 30 second loop and then secondly to trick the player into not noticing that they're playing the same 30 seconds over and over again if you've got a really good 30 second loop then you don't need to do much tricking if you've got a PvP game on your hands then real-life opponents that people are playing against will do that tricking for you if your 30 second loop is a little weak perhaps an exceptional story will stop people from noticing there's an infinite number of ways to do this but the goal is always the same get the player excited about doing the same thing over and over again ludis shooters more so than most games are defined by their repetition you do the same missions over and over again you kill the same enemies over and over again you might have some PvP thrown in there for some of them but not in others either way they are very much about repetition so it's critical that these games can nail their 32nd combat loops and do a good job of tricking players into not noticing that repetition now I'm a huge Luther fan I played pretty much every looter over the last like 20 years I've always enjoyed their campaigns because that's the first time I engaged that 30 second loop and it feels new and interesting and fun and also because the first time you play through the campaign missions they feel new and developers typically throw in enough surprises in those campaigns to keep things interesting anthem is the very first time that I've played through a looter and been bored of it before even finishing the campaign this is because the 30 second loop just isn't there and because the campaign is the most repetitive ludo shooter campaign since the dark days of vanilla destiny will talk about the combat in the next section but let's focus on the campaign for now the issues start with the world now don't get me wrong and world is stunning to look at its scale is incredible the verticality is fantastic the natural landscapes are really something it's definitely very very pretty but there is one map in anthem one and it all looks the same every single mission every single one is set in either outdoor ruins or indoor ruins or a cave I look back over all the footage and I can't even remember which mission is which because all the footage looks exactly the same to me it would be like if destiny had launched with just one planet I mean the division had just one city but within that was a huge range of locations anthem just doesn't have that range of locations everything looks the same and I challenge you to go right now and look at other youtube videos and find footage that looks notably different than the footage you're seeing here you won't be able to do it I think a perfect example is here where some [ __ ] goes down in an indoor setting this is a cutscene and there are heaps of people around because we're at this sort of like party thing and I'm not in my javelin suit here mind you I'm just there and then this surprise attack happens and because how the game handles environments I sit through a loading screen for a full minute and then I'm magically in my suit and I'm battling enemies and there's no trace whatsoever of all the stuff I saw just a moment ago in that cutscene not only did this make absolutely no sense but it was just so immersion shattering if the game had a better range of indoor and outdoor settings this would have been avoided because I would have just been able to play in one of those but because everything needs to take place in this gigantic overworld we end up with situations like this as for what you're actually doing during the missions there's three things and three things only number one stand on a point and defend it number two collect rocks and bring them back to a big rock number three collect glowing orbs and bring them back to whatever the [ __ ] this is that's it there's some puzzles thrown in there that you can get past in like 15 seconds but the campaign is exactly this over and over again on the one map inside either outdoor or indoor ruins or caves over and over and over again now you could very easily reduce the division or warframe or destiny or path of exile or Diablo or Monster Hunter world any game you want down to its most basic and repetitive elements and say well other games are just as repetitive sure but as I said part of the equation is to trick players into not noticing the repetition anthem fails to do this more than any other letter I have ever played its repetitiveness is immediately apparent to you after about the first two or three missions because it does not have the window dressing to obscure it its structure is presented to you at the very start and it never ever changes throughout your entire campaign or even at the end game for that matter it's clear that Bioware just don't have the imagination to keep things fresh like this mission here we're after kill this monster thing cool fine killed him but then you go into the next room and you now need to kill two of those guys at the same time okay fine done then when they die you literally need to kill the exact same enemy only this one has like way more health all four enemies were identical but for their hit points and you kill four of them in a row and that's the mission there are other examples like this throughout the game it is not an isolated example so right now I feel like I've made this point as clearly as I can but I know there's a lot of people out there that won't accept it and we'll just say it doesn't make sense to call anthem repetitive but not destiny I get that it's not possible to objectively prove why this game feels more repetitive than any other ludus shooter I've played I'll just say that I've played twenty years of luda games and I've never experienced something as blatantly repetitive as this if you don't believe me then you are certainly more than welcome to try it for yourself the one time where there is some variation to the mission structure is it about the game's midpoint where in order to progress the story you have to unlock four tombs hidden in the open world so when you get to these tombs and when you find them you learn that you need to complete a bunch of challenges to get them open and I think okay that sounds pretty cool like where this is going this list of things that you need to do is it presented to you in a clear easily accessible UI you instead need to dig through three layers of confusing menus to get to them and I swear to god most people just won't find this [ __ ] and they'll have to keep coming back to the doors I bet you any money that will happen anyway the [ __ ] you have to do merely kill 50 enemies complete five world events harvest 15 materials collect 15 chests excruciating boring filler and when you do finally do all of this [ __ ] each of the terms you open it's just a [ __ ] room there's nothing in there at all no interesting boss or some cool item drop that you're like yeah that's awesome nothing but a stone slab and a text box I could not believe it this quest completely holds any momentum that might have developed for you at this point in the game it's a solid two to three hour slog through utter banality before this I was feeling like yeah I'm not really enjoying this I don't know but after this quest and what it forced me to do and how much of a showcase it was for all of the game's problems I was like oh yeah this definitely sucks so just as an update to this we'll pause for a second I know that during my recording scripting etc of this video Bioware put in an update and changed this quest they made it so that the requirements are actually tracked from level 3 onwards which means that hopefully by the time you get to this quest you don't need to do this quest anymore a lot of people are taking that as evidence of yay by always listening and this game's gonna be great now but what they've essentially done is chopped about three hours worth of content out of their campaign if you think that's a good thing and that's a sign that this game is in a much better place now cool I think it's pretty strong evidence that the game was never in a good place to begin with regardless this quest highlights a lot of the game's issues that have nothing to do with this quest itself and I'll explain those now I mean for example not only is the quest UI totally confusing but the map UI is beyond useless there's no information on this map at all it's just topography so if you want to know where you might find a chest bad luck you can't there's nothing there and world events these aren't marked on your map either so you don't know when they're happening this means that when you do find a world event you're almost always doing it solo because the map is huge and everyone is just so spread out and they have no idea that an event is happening in another section of the map it makes the entire world event staff just horrible because you're doing content that is designed for multiple players all on your own now you won't believe this but in free play if you're playing solo and you get downed you cannot raise yourself you have to sit there through a loading screen and then get teleported to the nearest launchpad which may be really far away from where you were and if you don't remember where you died on the map then you can't get back there so if there was some world event happening that you needed to finish for this quest and then you died in the middle of it you just can't get back to that world event because you don't know where it is free play is completely borked it needs a complete user experience overhaul and this long two to three-hour quest illustrates that absolutely perfectly beyond this I really do not like the way that auto matchmaking effects campaign missions firstly I think playing with a squad of people really sucks here I'd much rather be playing this campaign with a squad of NPC freelancers like those I'm conversing with back at four tosses that would create a much stronger narrative link between gameplay and story than currently exists instead I match with three random people and we can't talk to each other because there's no chat window and PC there's no ping system so we can't coordinate our attacks or combos it feels like I'm playing with three randomly selected AI BOTS also the game back feels missing team members so if you're doing a story mission for the first time you can be match made into a mission that's halfway through or basically finished so you'll just miss that portion of the story entirely this was perfectly typify adhere when a straight man named Segal was completing the last mission of the game and a random level 3 dude joined them it was just crazy does that mean he's on a new Titan or something quickly is it quick plate he's just accidentally spoiling the end of the game for himself hey white Paco have you ever done the story mission in this man you need to leave this is boil you need to leave right now this is a spoiler for the end of this game you need to leave oh ok ok if you don't encounter these issues you'll almost certainly find that because the load times are so long your team gets ahead of you so you're often teleported from your current position to them with a loading screen thrown in there for good measure and the warning you get before this literally obscures your jet bar so you can't see if your Jets are about to overheat so like you're racing to get there as fast as you can to avoid another [ __ ] loading screen but you can't see if you're about to crash my god what the hell has been going on at Bioware for the last 6 years I'll make the point that nowhere in the entire campaign do you get a single impressive piece of loot that might pique your interest about the broader loot game there isn't one drop that makes you go [ __ ] yeah instead it's all just collecting some new abilities that have slightly better stats and some other stats that don't even make sense yet I won't speak about the loot stuff in detail here in this review I'll save that for the next but I will say that I am very concerned about this aspect of the game and I worry that the decision to remove Armour from the drop pool has made every item feel like a stat stick rather than a satisfying piece of equipment that the ludus shooter genre thrives on when you do make it through the campaign after about 15 hours mind you you'll be at around level 20 or so and then you'll have to continue to grind the same [ __ ] until level 30 at which point the real end game gear grind begins but like why the endgame didn't begin at level 20 I'll never know I guess they just wanted to Pat it out further by giving you 10 useless levels to play with and at that point you're now running the three strongholds over and over again doing repeatable daily missions and doing free play for whatever reason the strongholds by the way are the one you did in the demo and then there's a new one and then the last mission of the game is reused as the final stronghold you literally just run through the last mission over and over again that's the end game anyway I'm not going to talk about all that now I want to fully explore the endgame properly before I pass judgment on it but I will say that I am NOT looking forward to playing that endgame not even a little bit let's come back to that core 30 second gameplay loop thing I spoke about earlier I think most looters have launched with a fairly solid core gameplay loop Borderlands destiny Diablo path of Exile Monster Hunter division they've all got combat rhythms that felt really good even if the games themselves had some broader problems and yes many of the games in that list did have a lot of problems it still felt pretty good to play those games I think a big part of that successful ludus shoot of combat loop is moment to moment decision-making so we're definitely for example as with Halo before it I need to look at which enemy I'm facing and consider their movesets and tactics I need to consider my available resources like ammo and grenades or my abilities being on cooldown I need to think about which weapon I should be using maybe something ranged like a scout rifle or perhaps something up close and personal like a shotgun I need to consider things like cover or how exposed I might be at a given time hell I need to consider incoming projectiles since most of the bullets in destiny aren't hitscan so I can actually dodge them if I know what I'm doing I think that the 30 second loop is about knowing all these things and overtime sensing them and being able to make smart skill based decisions within that framework my biggest concern with anthems combat at this point is that I don't think it's made up of lots of tiny decisions I think it's about engaging the most brain-dead and uninteresting enemies I've ever seen in a looot of shooter and using your two abilities on cooldown while shooting your woefully ineffective gun over and over again until all the enemies are dead or you are unexpectedly one shot I will admit that I found anthems gameplay really enjoyable when I played the demo and I said as much in my preview but I was expecting that the combat model would evolve over time as I fought new enemies or gained access to new weapons and abilities that evolution just does happen here but the game's missions designed the way that they are the one-dimensional nature of combat West then very quickly enemy design and AI is a really big part of the problem now I don't expect looter shooter enemies to be particularly intelligent but anthems enemies are particularly stupid they just stand there they don't do anything like nothing I mean at least the divisions enemies will flank you or Destiny's enemies will teleport around you or take cover or whatever and there's enemies they just stand there or they just run at you in a straight line I think the combat has also been designed exclusively with group play in mind which is fine if your admissions but if you're doing solo free play whatever then problems emerge immediately I do think that the HP gap between the low-level enemies and the shielded enemies is too high I feel like when I go up against a red bar enemy I can immediately melt them but anything with a shield is probably gonna ko me if I try and 1v1 in without some form of crowd control like a freeze or something enemies do have weak spots to shoot at but it never feels quite right like the shield guys for example they had these massive shields and their weak spots are behind them again this is totally fine if you're in a group but it's really frustrating if you're playing solo you just can't hit that [ __ ] just becomes so annoying enemies also don't have Telegraph's to tell you what they're about to do or where they're about to do it the way the enemies spawn is also really bad like there just appear out of thin air and I think an important part of like encounter design is saying alright this group of enemies will appear from here and that group of enemies will appear from there and then this guy will come up from there so that a team can sort of plan around that and use their abilities to control the flow of battle because enemies and anthem just sort of materialize out of nowhere none of that ever happens you can't ever lock down specific locations with any form of strategy like you can in many many other shooters I just think the overall behavior patterns of enemies is not conducive to interesting counter play with a wizard in destiny I know that I need to pop their shields and burn them down in that time because they will dive for cover because that's how what they're programmed to do and anthem enemies don't have interesting AI quirks for you to learn and master they just either stand there or they run straight towards you much of this is exacerbated by the fact that enemy damage is hitscan meaning that they aren't projectiles that you can see and dodge there are definitely some of those but there's also a lot that isn't that so very often you'll just find yourself at low health wondering what the hell is shooting at you and what's damaged you these instant sources of damage are everywhere and they are so annoying and they force you to take cover to wait for your shields to recharge this game desperately needs some kind of instant heal or heal over time or something I'm so tired of suddenly taking damage from out of nowhere and then having no way to patch myself up other than just to wait it out behind a pillar and now I know a lot of people hate destiny but one thing it absolutely nails is it gives lots of subtle hints to the player about incoming damage like sound for example you can hear when an enemy is behind you in destiny so you know you're about to get hit the enemy's here they just don't make sounds you have no idea if there is something behind you about to KO you you are not getting all the information you need to be an effective combatant this has made even worse by environment design like so often I don't have cover to work with at all like look at this mission they want me to defend this point what the [ __ ] am I supposed to do here there's no cover I have to tank every bit of damage coming at me because there is literally nothing else that I can do I really could not believe this when I saw it now I mentioned abilities before there really isn't much to your abilities other than just using them on cooldown they're up so often that you never need to make real decisions with them you just throw them out in anything because they'll be up again almost immediately I really believe that if you doubled or tripled the number of available abilities and give them longer cooldowns and more interesting utility you actually really have something here but right now this feels like playing Diablo 3 when you only have two abilities and they're basically always available the ability system just needs a lot more depth I'm particularly worried about the melee javelin and their viability from what I've seen so far melee in this game is incredibly janky with really bad animations and hit registration I'm always just moving through my target instead of staying on them there's also just one melee button that you're constantly spamming so there aren't like melee combos or whatever my attacks also just seem to stun lock enemy so they can't do anything in response to me leaving me free to just spam until the one time when that doesn't work and it's turn around and one-shot me I just don't know that this has been fully thought through because most of the bosses it just isn't safe or effective to engage them at melee range if you've built a class that's designed to be a melee class you need to design encounters that allow them to contribute I'm not firm on all of this at this point I definitely need to test it out more but from the six or seven hours that I've played with this javelin it's definitely not working to top all this off there's just this constant delaying everything combo notifications seem delayed enemy death seemed delayed using your abilities feels delayed reloading feels delayed it's just this feeling that you're lagged no yuan it just doesn't feel snappy and responsive like it should I said earlier that a Ludo needs to nail that 30-second loop I think it's fun to fly around an anthem I think it's fun to use your ultimate and blow [ __ ] up I think it's satisfying as hell when that combo sound pops and you know you've done some big damage but I think that 30 seconds is made up of lots of pieces big and small and I think that anthem is missing far too many of those pieces at this point I've heard this argument put forward that this game wasn't really released this week it's actually gonna be released on the 22nd which is when the day one patch will be deployed and this week was just early access [ __ ] off look at this chart does it say early access incomplete game early access broken game no it says early access full game you sold this to me and others as the day I got to play anthem it's launched if you're gonna make it available to paying customers then then that should be when your day one patch arrives and on the matter of the day one patch can I just say anyone that thinks that this patch is gonna fix the game you are lying to yourself and others Bioware has had six years to get this game ready this game is so far from complete do you really think that an extra seven days is the cure for what ails this game yes there will be some things fixed I've seen the day 8 patch notes there are important fixes in there but there is a lot of broken [ __ ] in this game and this patch is not going to fix all of it so stop spreading that [ __ ] around this is why publishers are shipping so many broken games these days because they can rely on an army of idiots who will not only accept it but also defend it to the death in the comment sections and on reddit because yes right now the game is broken as [ __ ] just to paint the picture for you on the last mission of the game we had to restart the mission halfway through because a door wouldn't open so we just wasted 20 minutes of our life then we got to the boss and I got downed and for no apparent reason I got sent to a loading screen where it just said cinematic in progress for three minutes and then after that I got our notification saying I had completed the mission despite the fact that I did not see the boss die nor did I see the cutscene that followed it I had to look that [ __ ] up on youtube anyway when I got back to the tower the audio glitch kicked in and when I finally regained control of my character I found that the controls had stopped working and I had to alt f4 the game ironically this was the second time I missed a critical cutscene because of the game bugging out and I only found out that I missed it afterwards when the in-game mission chat started talking about how someone had betrayed me and I was like what the [ __ ] he betrayed me when did that happen I had to go and Google that on YouTube as well I think one of the bigger issues as well is just how long it takes objectives to update I mean watch this what the hell is going on there this happens all the time you're just standing there waiting for the game to register that you've done a thing so that you can then progress to the next thing there's a whole bunch of other little stuff like buggy cutscene animations and so much rubber banding and whatever else but nothing compares to the destructive might of this games loading screens I've played morrowind on the original Xbox if you've played that game you will know that load screens in that game were legendarily bad they are way way worse here in Anthem they are the worst loading screens I've ever experienced in a video game they completely destroy the experience I want to look at your loadout loading screen I want to close your loadout loading screen want to launch into a mission really long loading screen talk too long to load another loading screen while you get teleported to your teammates go inside a cave another loading screen come outside of said cave another loading screen finish the mission loading screen arrived at the post reward screen which is completely [ __ ] useless by the way why is this in the game anyway close the post reward screen loading screen arrived back at fort Tarsus want to equip your new upgrades I think you get the picture at this point the load screens in this game are the absolute antithesis of the immersion that this game is trying to create and I'd remind you that it really didn't need to be this way if you've played the division 2 beta you'd say that they instance the entire map of Washington DC including internal spaces and your settlements and the missions and the dark zone it's all there without a single load screen you can access your inventory whenever the [ __ ] you want anthem feels like it's running on technology that is at least a full generation out of date and unlike things like new content this stuff cannot be patched because it stems from the Korg engine you cannot fix this stuff overnight it is deeply baked into the equation we might see some minor relief here but I wouldn't expect major changes to anthems load times until anthem to the longer the short of it is that this game after six years in development and just tremendous amounts of hype and marketing and everything it was just absolutely nowhere ready to be shipped it is buggy as hell built on the wrong tech and feature incomplete I love Bioware I love ludus shooters I love Ironman this game was tailor-made for me there literally could not have been a more perfect concoction of ingredients and yet the result is bitterly disappointing to all of those that are enjoying yourself despite the issues I'm actually really glad about that the purpose of my reviews is never to convince someone that they shouldn't like the thing they like it's just to provide my own perspective on it in the hope that someone else might find that perspective useful to them lots of people I know enjoy fallout 76 that's great I'm honestly glad that they found something that they enjoy same here with anthem but let's be clear this game has a lot of problems and we shouldn't excuse it because it's a live service game over the last five years the definition of live service has gone from will add even more awesome content over time to will add the content we should have had at launch later on to will launch a broken incomplete game now and if you pass enough microtransactions will fix it and maybe add some content this game is not finished the fundamentals are not there the game needs a massive amount of fixes before it's even been released and you want to talk to me about new content I don't even know what to say this model is broken destiny proved it the division proved it destiny too proved it again now anthem proves it companies are launching these multimillion-dollar boondoggles with the promise of forever without even being able to satisfy the here and now it's like building the Titanic to in drydock and then pushing it out to sea without testing if it even floats and we're not in getting the Titanic Assassin's Creed Odyssey had a map many many times larger than this it had a better more functional combat model it had plenty of abilities and build diversity it had tons of cosmetic item ization it had a sprawling 60 our narrative campaign with dialogue choices that directly influence the story it's 2019 and Ubisoft are making really good narrative driven games and Bioware is making shitty repetitive open-world garbage if that doesn't make you worried for the future of Bioware then nothing will I'm sure a number of people are gonna feel like I'm being really harsh because every ludus shooter besides Borderlands 2 has launched in a pretty shitty stain and took a while to get good so you know why can't we apply the same logic here to ant them but it's like well we've got a lot of learning behind us you know with the regards to this genre you know we've got a good 5 or 6 years at least seven years since Borland's - I think well you know we can sort of say well what mistakes what might we not want to make this time anthem just feels so unaware of everything that's come before it in that genre and it's making every single one of the mistakes again except it's making it worse but more than that I feel like here with anthem by the way I have just been so unaware of themselves I really do understand the desire for a studio to want to try new things you know step into new genres etc and Bioware's done that in the past even with the Old Republic so there's a very bulk standard generic MMO but it had an absolutely brilliant story like even today go back and play it it's such a [ __ ] cool story the way they wove story into the MMO genre in that game it still just holds up superbly well today you know and not just cutscenes but like actual core gameplay stuff where they wove Bioware's magic into it you know it was a unique offering in the MMO space because of what Bioware brought to the table and here with anthem there's just there's just none of that there is no awareness of Bioware's skills no awareness of their capabilities no awareness of their legacy this is just a really really average ludus shooter with none of the Bioware magic and as I said I just feel like by the way made the game and they made it in the wrong way and you know you you can patch stuff you can add new weapons and mechanics and all that sort of stuff but you can't patch in that soul and it really feels like anthem is just missing soul you know it just feels like it has no heart and you know it's the story of anthems like it's this this song that you can hear you know and some people can hear and some people can it's like well Bioware games have always had that anthem running through them you know they've had that thing that people could hear and there's just no sound here at all and that's why I'm so disappointed with anthem [Music] [Music]

Channel: Skill Up

Views: 1,804,446

Rating: 4.6002426 out of 5

Keywords: skill up, skill, up, gameplay, games, guide, anthem, anthem game, anthem review, review, anthem game review, end game, javelin, final review, full game, content, all content, bioware, rpg, shooter rpg, loot, gear, builds, meta, endgame, combat, loot system, loot drops, best gear, anthem story, anthem gameplay, game play, pc, playstation 4, xbox one, ps4, ps4 pro, xbox one x, anthem javelin, campaign, full campaign, anthem endgame content, anthem endgame gameplay, cutscene, movie, angry joe

Id: fhe76p6Tiro

Length: 46min 3sec (2763 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 20 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Nytrel]

I'm curious to see how EA/Bioware will support the game post launch. I've noticed that most games that receive worthwhile content post launch tend to sustain a healthy playerbase and have a good game to consistently play. Even the games that got tons of ridicule manage to find their footing.

[u/Ne0mega]

Watched the whole video hoping for boat comparisons.⛴️

Was not disappointed.

[u/TheAxeManrw]

I mean, with the state of the game I saw this review coming from miles away. A similar review by skillup was done for destiny. I actually like his content as well and I think he has some real valid points here that everyone on this sub have already brought up. The potential for anthem was SO much greater than what we actually received. Time will tell what Anthem grows into. I'm having enough fun though to keep up playing past launch.

​

Edit: Damn this blew up. Thanks for the gold whoever you are!

[u/duffbeeeer]

This thread will be fun.

[u/khrucible]

Oh boy, time to get my popcorn. This one is gona be brutal.

[u/campoanywhere]

The tomb missions - lol. Last night when I finally met all the requirements to enter one of the tombs, I got my javelin in front of the door, cracked myself a fresh bubble water, roasted up a big fat bowl and got 'jacked in' to the immersion, ready to conquer this awesome new zone that was about to be revealed to me.

Fighting in tombs? Yes, bring it. Maybe I'll get to see some class 5 free roaming phantasms! Let do it. Maybe undead versions of the common enemies (just reskin them ffs).

Open the door, walk up to a stone slab.

"Ahh yes, hold P to interact. Maybe one of those walls will come crumbling down and I'll begin my descent into the netherworld!"

that weed is a creeper, really starting to kick. Better hold P before I forget why I'm here

"MISSION COMPLETE".

mfw

[u/Kreidian]

To share my personal opinion: I'm really enjoying Anthem, I think it's a very good game.

But everything he says in his review here is absolutely true.

The devs really need to take every single point he makes to heart and really figure out how to improve the game accordingly if they want the game to last at all. And make no mistake, I want the game to last, but not in it's current state or direction.

​

It will be interesting to see how the devs respond to the current round of criticisms, all of which valid I remind you. They've been very good about communicating in the past, but if this is anything like what we saw with Andromeda, they may well go completely silent in order to avoid addressing their shortcomings. Which would be very telling: proof that the old BioWare is truly gone. I'll remain hopeful that doesn't happen as I await their reaction one way or another.

[u/khrucible]

For everyone who will inevitably listen to the first 10mins and bail, the latter half of the video is the best part and really highlights the flaws effectively.

The comparison to Ubisoft and Assassin's Creed is just gold.

[u/respect_pizza]

Hope people on this sub can look at this review and not complain that Skill Up is just a hater. He brings up many good points that are quite hard to ignore. This game has a lot of problems, and blind praise isn't healthy.