Anthem is the newest game to come from the good Canadian folks at BioWare, best known for their Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age and Mass Effect series, which have all done a tremendous job of blending rich story, (arguably, the illusion of) making your decisions matter, massively beautiful maps to explore and combat that stays fun despite being somewhat repetitive. Anthem comes on the heels of Mass Effect: Andromeda, a game that I reviewed and really should have been much harsher on due to the sheer magnitude of things wrong with it from launch, half of which they didn’t even BOTHER to fix with a patch AND–!

Whoa, yeah, okay. [Clears throat] So, I haven’t been the happiest with BioWare lately, but I was willing to give them another shot to not fuck up a game on day one, which, they kinda totally did. Of course, being the savvy consumer, I waited until DAY TWO to get the game, showing them exactly how distrustful of them I was, right as I handed over my $60. TAKE THAT, GUYS!

Let’s start here: Anthem is a strictly online third-person shooter with RPG elements that puts you in charge of one of four styles of Iron Man suits called “Javelins.” People who fly Javelins are considered to be a guild of “Freelancers,” who take on “Contracts” put forth by the local populace for, get this, compensation. Now, I know these guys sound like guns for hire, which they totally are, and, you know what, this will get confusing so I’m just going to cut out the naming jargon bullshit and calls them as I sees them:

Humans seemingly exist on some very distant and hostile jungle planet, presumably because some really ancient and now extinct race put them there and also left a bunch of old tech around that has shockingly become unstable with time and is now causing big “natural” disasters. Bad people want to control this tech, and you just want to shut it down and make a few bucks along the way while helping out your new adopted community. There’s a lot of lore to the series, but the game does such a terrible job of explaining it with any relevance unless you dig into the library of text available to you from the start. If they made any of it sound interesting, I probably would have, but it really just feels like ham-fisted ways of trying to explain why they chose a dumb name for a faction like “Sentinels” instead of coming up with something actually original. Guess what the Sentinels do? THEY GUARD THE CITY. Read more in your Codex!

This wouldn’t be so bad if the characters felt remotely real or had more than a puddle’s worth of depth to them. Every character I’ve encountered  can be put into one of the following three buckets:

1. Grumpy but will come around once you help them out
2. Cheeky (read: annoying/awkward) as all hell
3. Trusts you wayyyyy too much and wants you to make all their life choices for them

I’m going to blame the writing here, but the voice actors don’t really do themselves many favors here either, which is surprising when you realize that folks like Jack McBrayer and Kristen Schaal are among the cast. The conversations mostly don’t feel natural, just, forced. They don’t flow and can go on for far too long while characters have some pretty wild mood swings, and sometimes they don’t even have a point. Even just passing people in the halls and overhearing their conversations makes me wish they were just silent instead. I caught this bit of dialogue while passing two NPCs the other day:

Woman 1: “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but your husband… didn’t make it.”

Woman 2: “What? But, there were so many ‘Lancers sent out that…”

Woman 1: “Reinforcements weren’t able to get there in time. I’m sorry.”

Woman 2: “Oh no, no no no no…”

Woman 1: “I know this can be hard, but if you need anything please feel free to let me know.”

The writers put as much care and thought into casually comforting someone about their significant other dying as I put into a two minute work email. IMMERSIVE!

In other BioWare games, when interacting with another character, you can ask questions if you wanted to know more about something. Instead in Anthem, you have to sit there and listen until you get the chance to make choices like this:

That’s not ‘Shopped, and while it might seem a little unfair since it’s the only instance I’ve run into that blatantly gives you no choice, I’d argue it’s perfectly representative of how the two choice conversation options work in this game: it doesn’t fucking matter. Personality-wise, you can either be well meaning and kinda sassy, or just a dick. And when you’re a dick, man do characters get pissy about it. Maybe you shouldn’t try unburdening all of your issues on a random stranger in the market next time, dude? After nearly every mission, a gaggle of these new conversations open up in the hub area, some of which offer missions, but too many are completely pointless, save for maybe providing a small reward. Where’s the “I don’t really want to hear your meandering story about how you think some alien creature I’ve never heard of is cute, but I sure do want those random faction points I might get from listening!” option?

Okay, so if you’ve read this far, you probably think I hate this game. Well, you’re right: I hate everything that goes on outside of wearing your Javelin. After you see this animation though

shit gets AWESOME. Maybe it’s by design to bore you senseless before sending you out to kill things in a mech suit so that it seems that much more exciting by contrast? I don’t know, but ultimately the payoff has been worth it.

Whether you’re launching into a mission or just deciding to go free roaming the planet, the first thing I noticed is just how beautiful and rich the environment looks. Playing on a PS4 Pro with 4K and HDR probably helps this a bit, but having played a lot of games that just retread the same textures and layouts, I can tell that a lot of effort went into the world and its creatures. Between exploring caves and old ruins, diving into the depths of numerous underwater areas or just flying through the sky, every area feels unique, thoughtfully laid out and the creatures are truly and distinctly alien.

The flying controls are where this game truly starts to separate itself from many other failed attempts at this same idea. Too many games like this have tried to get far too complicated here, trying to put you behind the controls of a jet and have you manage thrust and brake levels or lock on missiles to small, fast moving targets in the sky while trying not to crash. This game is not an aerial dogfight. Combat takes place on the ground, or just slightly hovering above it. This really cuts down on the complications and actually makes flying, kinda nice. You can actually focus on t he surrounding scenery while just following a little blip of a way point until you get where you’re going. What a novel idea! It’s actually a bit surprising how quickly you can get where you’re going too and not feel like you’re piloting an out of control fighter trying to break a lap record. And, if you hit a wall, you just drop to the ground with a small delay. Thanks for making small mistakes not an instant death sentence guys!

If you’ve played any third person shooter, the combat controls are essentially the same across them all, just in this case, you also have a jet pack. It’s nothing revolutionary, but incorporating the aspect of flying to whoever you want to rain hellfire upon just feels good. It keeps combat fast paced and more direct than hiding behind cover and taking shots at whoever is unlucky enough to wander into your field of view. Not to mention, there are a lot of options for each class. You can completely customize your suit, from your standard weapon, 3 special skills, a host of passive abilities and your entire appearance as you unlock more and earn monies.

If you’re interested in video games, there’s no doubt you’ve heard quite a bit of negative press around this game. Some of it is valid, namely in the things that are or have been broken since the game launched. A lot seem to be around the rarity of item drops, which can be a little frustrating, but this is a complaint I would only associate the most hardcore fans to have an issue with. As a more casual player, sure it would be nice to have more quality gear, but it certainly doesn’t break the game for me. BioWare has continued to try and fix these things with patches, which usually helps, but have also caused some unintended things to break afterwards as well. They are also pushing out more free content, as opposed to paid DLC, which I heartily support. The issue might be that they are more focused in getting the new content out, rather than fixing old problems.

Two weeks ago, Kotaku released this highly in depth article on the making of Anthem, which is not unlike a similar piece they did on Mass Effect: Andromeda in 2017. It’s a monster read, so let me summarize it for you quickly:

• The top management team at BioWare would never make decisions on how the game should be, they just kept building small aspects of it but never put it fully together.
• Electronic Arts (EA) is BioWare’s parent company and recently mandated that all of their studios use the same gaming engine that another of their studios developed called Frostbite.
  • This was an effort to cut down on costs from using 3rd party support and the hope was that internal programmers would become masters at it.
  • Frostbite was built for the Battlefield series, a first person shooter. That’s basically all that it was built to be, and anything more needs to be built into it for each specific game.
• Shockingly, this became an endless issue of what the team wanted in the game vs. what they could realistically program into the engine.
• Since all of EA’s studios were making this jump, their number 1 cash generator of FIFA took all of the Frostbite support, whereas little BioWare was left in the dark until it was about to be abundantly clear they would not have a game without support.
• A mad dash ensued over the last 12-18 months of production, which had already been going on for over 5 years at this point, with next to nothing to show for it.
  • Many programmers and management people left the company before or around this time as well, or had to go on paid stress leave because of the hours/workload.
  • EA also ultimately had to make decisions for the BioWare team as well, including using the flying mechanic of the game and completely reworking the (original and much better) story.
• Somehow, this patchwork of a game came together, albeit messy, buggy, but playable.

This certainly explains why it seems like there are two different games going on at once, between the first person attempt at a story and the actual refined game of flying around and blowing shit up. I know I’ve talked about acquisitions around here before, particularly in the beer industry, and I’ve gone through one myself in my own professional career. The idea that shared resources (accounting, production, marketing, quality, etc.) is actually shared between acquired companies is an outright lie. The high revenue making product (Bud Light and FIFA are prime examples) will always get the immediate support they want, whereas the rest are left to scramble for the scraps. As companies become more top heavy life this, all of the other products will suffer from neglect or a sheer inability to support them.

There is a line in the Kotaku article where they reference the term “One EA” when talking about making BioWare bend to use their FrostBite engine and adopt other guidelines that don’t fit their business model. This hit me particularly hard, because following acquisition my employer did and continues to do the same thing to our branch, spouting “One [Company Name]” as a platitude whenever we have an issue. This is endlessly frustrating since they seem to think everything should fit into the one box they designed for the higher revenue generating businesses. This isn’t an isolated issue, and will continue to become worse as more and more companies follow this practice.

As for Anthem itself, the overall game play itself is fun, you just have to completely tune out the “story” and focus on the rest. BioWare will continue to support the game with free content in the months to come, but offers no incentive for anyone to run out and buy the game right now. If anything wait until more fixes and new missions have been added before making the purchase.

Anthem is available on PlayStation4, Xbox One and PC.

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