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.
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.
This morning I am going to talk a bit about Snack World a game that I have been playing on the switch. It showed up in January on the North American store front, but has actually been available in Japan since April of 2017. Not entirely certain why the extremely lag between the two other than maybe because of the recent ARPG renaissance someone decided a localization was financially viable? I am not terribly far into the game but I do feel like I have a general feel for the flow of things. Snack World The Dungeon Crawl Gold is a nonsense title, but honestly at least on some level this is a nonsense game.
It comes from Level-5 which may not be a name you recognize but I am almost certain that you recognize some of the games they have created. They are behind the Yo-Kai Watch series, LBX, Fantasy Life, and the Professor Layton series among others. So the pedigree of the game was solid going into it, and the end product feels like this weird amalgam of Dragon Quest, Gauntlet, and Pokemon or more truthfully Yo-Kai Watch. The game is set in the Kingdom of Tutti-Frutti where almost everything is some sort of a food or animal based pun. Instead of Cinderella you have Ciderella who is apparently the leader of an elite strike force of commandos in this universe.
The kingdom is also apparently addicted to mobile technology and everyone has a Pix-e Pod which serves as the mechanical means of accessing all of the things you collect. Your gear is in theory materialized from your device as are the various summons that you can collect and a lot of the early missions revolve around unlocking specific features. The last thing I unlocked was the Pix-e Tunes app which allows me to play specific tracks from the game that you collect while roaming around. The Pix-e Pedia serves as a sort of PokeDex for the game and as you encounter new things you can then go back and view information about them and see what your familiarity rating is with that creature which influences how likely they are to drop a summon card for you.
The core gameplay loop involves setting forth on missions which come in a bunch of forms, but as of yet largely seem to be more open over world zones or multi floor dungeons. You ultimately stay in a mission until one of two conditions are met, either you fulfill the objectives and reach a warp point allowing you to teleport out or your party is wiped. The good thing is even in the case of a wipe and ultimately a quest failure you are allowed to keep everything you have looted up to that point. This mechanic becomes super important when you realize that you are not going to make it through every mission on the first attempt.
The game has a certain measure of mindless grinding needed to move forward, or at least I need it to be able to succeed. Very quickly into the game you are presented a quest to defeat Medusa in Gorgonzola Ruins. When you get the quest you are likely going to be character level 2 or 3 and the quest itself is ranked as level 7. You probably could in theory be able to progress through the zone and defeat it if you are terribly good at the game. I however am not and am having to grind other content in the attempt to level my character up enough to make it all the way through the multi-tiered dungeon successfully.
In theory you could just take it slow and easy and work your way through the dungeon. However the game has a measure in place to keep you from doing this. Remember me comparing it to Gauntlet? I did so because in gauntlet there was a creature type called Death that would rush towards the player and drain their life and was seemingly invulnerable to attacks. You could in theory use a bomb potion if you had one available, but ultimately it became a race to keep mobs between you and it and to find your way out of the level. Something similar happens here when a grim reaper named Popsicle that shows up if you are taking too long to exit a dungeon floor and will begin tracking its way to your location and effectively one or two shot you. There are supposedly ways to defeat this creature but I have not yet encountered them and as a result this is something constantly making me try and go faster.
If you manage to clear an objective you are showered in loot… or at least given some items. There are a number of situational chests that can be gained for various objectives. You get a chest for your first time doing something, another for not allowing any party members to be KO’d, and even one for not taking a sip of health potion. In a good run you can walk away with four or five chests, but the vast majority of these are probably just going to be crafting materials and not anything terribly exciting. I mean unless you are one item away from crafting a new piece of gear, then I guess they would be fairly exciting.
So when I say I am not terribly far into the game, I have yet to beat the first dungeon. I am in a pattern of running around and grinding the early missions trying to level up and gain crafting materials to get better gear. This is a bit of an old screenshot but as of last night I am level 5 and have crafted a full set of Greenhorn gear. One of the videos I watched on taking down Medusa showed the player at level 12, so I probably have a lot more grinding in front of me which gets into the only negative. Right now I have 2 over world missions, 1 slime specific hunt and then the dungeon itself to grind on. It feels like the lack of content diversity may be a problem because I feel like at this early stage in the game I should not be grinding the same thing over and over. That said maybe that is representative of what the game is like as a whole and it might be good that it is at least showing you that early on.
It is a fun little game filled with charming moments, but I can’t help feeling like maybe this started its life as something targeting Android or iOS and then morphed into a Switch title. Level-5 has released mobile games and it feels like maybe it is itemized in a way to push players to buy a little currency. The items sold in the game are using a currency called Gravies, and to buy any upgrade weapons you need somewhere in the vicinity of 50 to 100 Gravies. Having spent NONE so far… I am only sitting at 22, and the “Gashapon” game requires 100 Gravies per attempt at getting the chase weapon. You do occasionally get free draw tickets so I am guessing the way it is itemized they expect no one will actually pay that 100 Gravies cost.
The interaction of running dungeons is enjoyable but I am not sure yet if I am going to gain enough traction to really feel like I am fully engaged with the game yet. However since I have been playing it off and on the last few nights I thought I would at least talk about it this morning. I’m still however on the fence about if I would ultimately suggest it to someone. If you were like me and were looking for an ARPG other than Diablo to play on the Switch, it might be something worth checking out. I think we are all sorta in a holding pattern until the release of Animal Crossing New Horizon.
The last few weeks have been real strange and I’ve had a run of “stuff happening” on Saturday the day that I would normally release this show on. Instead of letting it go yet another week without releasing another back episode, I opted to let this take the place of my normal Monday morning post. Mondays are always rough mornings and maybe just maybe this will let me start the new week with some piece of mind that I don’t have to wrack my brain trying to sort out something to write about.
This show was recorded originally on April 8th of 2015. I sat down to have a conversation with my good friend Liore who at the time of recording was behind the Cat Context podcast as well as some of the podcasts for MMORPG.com. Since then a bunch of things have changed in her life and for the most part I believe she is no longer releasing gaming content, and has instead entered the exciting landscape of cloud computing. I still love to see when Liore comments on something because I will always appreciate her unique opinion on whatever happens to be the question of the moment. I’m also still subscribed to Cat Context in the hope that maybe someday new episodes will start showing up. I mean I am reviving Bel Folks Stuff some five years after the fact so stranger things have happened right?
