anthem

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.

I am still sick this morning, but I am hoping I will feel better throughout the day.  At this point I have taken off a day and a half and in my position that only worked because I had a couple of very light days meeting wise.  This is the worst part about being sick as an adult the feel that you need to keep working through it or else things will fall apart.  This is complicated by the fact that I have something silly like 400 hours of sick leave banked…  but if we take more than 40 hours in a six month period human resources seems to freak out about it.  That means in practice that I try and ration my usage just in case something goes horribly south like last January when I got the actual name brand flu.

I am still playing a not insignificant amount of Anthem.  At this point the Origin client has me at 33 hours since the spreadsheet launch last Friday.  Were it not for a handful of circumstances that got in the way of my gameplay that number probably would have been much higher.  Still that is a fair amount of time to log into any game during its first week, and in part a good deal of why is that I have been sitting on the couch trying not to die from horrible feeling.  The last two days have allowed me to log more time than I normally would have into a game like this and as such I am further along in the storyline than I probably would be otherwise.  I am sorta sensing I am either near the end or near some sort of a bit confrontation…  and because of this my natural delaying tactics have kicked in and I seem to be doing anything other than playing the main story quest.  I’ve done this at several points now… where I completely farmed down everything else that was available to me other than the main story quest and I am going through that pattern once again.

As far as my loadout of choice goes…  you can see what I have equipped at a high level in the above screenshot.  Firstly the combo I am leaning heavily on is Inferno Grenade to apply a status and Pulse Blast to detonate said status.  Both items deal a lot of damage on their own, but when combined they do a fair job of destroying the Scar bigbois.  If you can land the grenade and the pulse blast at medium to close range you can often times two shot them.  As far as weapons go my loadout of choice there tends to be either an Auto Rifle or a Light Machine Gun for slot 1 and a Marksman Rifle for slot 2.  This gives me a good combination of up close melting power with the ability to pick off targets at range if I so choose.  The reason why I go Marksman over Sniper is the fact that if I run out of primary ammo…  I can still kill things up close and personal with a Marksman Rifle whereas I really cannot with a Sniper.  I am currently suffering a drought of Inferno Grenades and since the Blue Pattern doesn’t seem to exist in the game right now I don’t have a crafting option to make up for it.

Last night a little over 4 gb patch landed and it took forever to download…  which at first I thought was Origin being Origin…  but in the end I realized that it was my gigabit ethernet card being dumb again.  I have this bug that if I ever need to cycle the router…  my network card for some reason drops down to 10 meg mode.  The only way to get it back to its full speed is to disable the NIC and re-enable it again.  Once I went upstairs and took care of that the patch finished in seconds.  You can see the full patch notes here, but there are a large round of major tweaks.  The first big noticeable one for me personally is the above screen that you now see whenever you hop in your Javelin.  It simplifies your gameplay options rather than the weird pick an icon on the map method that previously was employed.  It greatly streamlines the process which I appreciate, and definitely makes it easier to get into QuickPlay or Freeplay faster.

As one of the folks loving the game… it feels real bad to see a lot of the free floating sodium that seems to be surrounding this game in the content creator community.  I am not entirely certain what they were expecting, but the camp seems to fall along two lines…  either the game isn’t as good in the moment to moment gameplay as other titles on the market or that the game doesn’t have the rich storytelling that Bioware is known for.  There is a third camp of trolls that just like pointing out bugs in games and being an asshole about it, but I don’t really consider them to have any merit since we live in a magical time where one massive patch like  the one that rolled out yesterday can fix a ton of them in a single pass.  I feel like the first two however have merit, but I think it is more likely a case of misplaced expectations rather than problems with the actual game itself.  What I went into Anthem expecting was something that felt like Mass Effect Multiplayer combined with some story building and a bunch of characters on the same tier as Doctor Chakwas, and that is more or less what I received.

In truth what I got was a game that felt way better than Mass Effect multiplayer, and a cast of characters that I feel are way more engaging than Doctor Chakwas was…  that ultimately weave a story about this new world that I am interested in exploring.  I never expected the gunplay perfection that is Destiny, but what I gained instead was the ability to move freely and think in all three axis to solve combat problems.  I think there is a lot of depth here in what we can do and the builds that we can create, and it also gives them a ton of room to grow the experience over the coming year.  They have already stated that they intend on adding new gear and new Javelins, which will keep remixing the experience.  The only glaring problem I see right now is the fact that there are only two strongholds at launch, which based on my experiences with FFXIV patch cycles…  two is never enough dungeons to keep players from getting bored out of their skulls.  With QuickPlay being the equivalent to the FFXIV Roulette system…  players are going to have the dungeon they like to play and the dungeon they really hope they don’t get which is always the case.

Tam however was completely right about me and QuickPlay.  Right now when I don’t necessarily want to engage in something seriously…  I hop into QuikPlay because in general in my experience it tends to put you in towards the end of a mission.  I’ve joined literally moments from getting awarded treasure which also feels odd…  but more often than not is an easy two blue items and a small bit of experience.  Last night I experienced my first time that it dropped me in from the very start of the mission, but even then it felt pretty chill because it wasn’t MY quest completion riding on the line.  I knew that if I needed to bail I could exit out at any point, but in practice worked my butt off to make sure that the other player got through the mission.  It is so weird how when I join other players I tend to do way better than I do when I am completely solo.  I think it might simply be a case of having already experienced the mission and intrinsically knowing where I should and should not go in order to complete it.

Ultimately I am still having a blast playing the game.  I suggest you push past the criticism and give the game a shot for yourself on Friday.  Right now some of the biggest critics also seem to be some of the biggest supporters of Anthems competitor The Division 2, so I question their motives.  Seeing as Division 2 releases almost exactly one month after Anthem…  I am wondering if they are concerned that a success for Anthem would pull away players from The Division.  In my case at least after playing both Demos… I was way more engaged with the story and interactions in Anthem than Division 2.  I personally hope both launches are successful and that they both find their communities.  I realize there are a limited number gamers and due to the unrealistic expectations of investors… it turns a game launch into a zero sum experience, but I just wish it didn’t cause so much salt and hyperbole.

At this point I am trying to keep my blog fairly spoiler free given that the game is not out yet for a ton of people.  I still find that concept really odd, but I am pushing past it because I see that as an EA thing and not necessarily a Bioware thing.  When I have a major fork in the road coming up in a game I tend to spend a significant amount of time avoiding it.  I am not sure why I do this thing but it happens constantly.  I am in the final stretch to the “end” of Assassin’s Creed Origins…  but have not played the game since I realized that.  In Anthem I knew something major was about to happen, but I was not exactly sure what… and as a result I spent most of my evening avoiding playing through the only quest that I happened to have in my journal.  As a result I spent a lot of time roaming around last night in Freeplay mode while watching Umbrella Academy, which seems pretty great so far.  However given the events of the quest that I had been seemingly avoiding…  I wish I had done this at the beginning of the night rather than the end of the night so I could see more of the story.

Anthem threw me its first loop, because up until now most everything had largely been predictable.  I was not expecting what happened last night to change the entire tempo of the game from this point forward…  and I like that a lot.  So often my wife and I will be watching something on television…  and I throw out a random statement as soon as I get the idea a thing is going to happen.  The other night it happened during one of the medical procedural that she likes to watch, and they were setting something up…  and I blurted out what I thought they were setting up.  In the end it turned out to be exactly what I was thinking because earlier in the show they had set up a character only to kill it off, and talked about a specific medical procedure as an offhand reference.  This happens with games as well that often times I can see the train coming before it arrives at the station…  recent example when FFXIV introduced the “Shadowhunter” character I pinged Tam who was further along in the story than I was at that point and made my guess that turned out to be completely on the nose.

As such I really appreciate it when a game can throw me for a loop and in hindsight all of the clues were there waiting for me…  but I didn’t piece them together because I was too engaged with the content to notice the signs.  I love it when a game shocks me…  and even though this is probably on the lower tier scale of shocks it was still an extremely good experience to go through.  If you have played through the content to this point you will know what I am talking about.  However please keep the comment section spoiler free in respect for the people who have yet to get their hands on the game.  Some folks are stuck behind having played their 10 hours already, and another batch simply purchased the game and cannot play because they can’t or won’t pay the $15 tax to get immediate access.  However I find it refreshing that the game can shift gears and change what sort of a story that is playing out in front of us.  The fact that I am wearing my N7 decal (which I spent my accumulated coins on purchasing from the Forge) makes the above screenshot feel like a Mass Effect game seeing as I go with the green, red, black and white color scheme in that game as well.

Another thing I thought I would mention this morning is something that had been bugging me up until this point.  In my friends list I would see players with backgrounds behind their name and could not for the life of me figure out how to set this.  Copious amounts of googling yielded no results either with me calling it a Nameplate or even after getting the correct term a Banner.  I realized in yesterdays post that my friend Naithin had one of these nameplates so I figured I would ask them about it.  So in order to get to the above screen… you have to hop in your javelin and then click over to the squad tab that is shown on that screen.  You will see a number of options and one of them is hold right mouse to change banner image, or I assume something equivalent will show up if you are on a console or using a controller.  This will pop up this screen and give you a bunch of different pictures and backgrounds to choose from…  I have no clue where the larger image is used but the textured background shows up pretty much everywhere in the game.

I think now is the time for us to talk about one of the glaring issues that Anthem has…  it has a horrible UI.  I am certainly hoping that none of my friends at Bioware were responsible for said UI, because I would feel bad in saying this.  However it just does not behave in the manner that I would expect it to… and everything seems to be more cumbersome than it should be to interact with.  The fact that I could not for the life of me figure out how to change my nameplate is a prime example of this.  It required me to be on a very specific screen that I never actually clicked over to in order to find it.  When I have set up a squad I have done so before actually getting in my Javelin, so it seems like an odd design decision to bury that option on a screen you can bypass ever going to.  However I thought I would post it on the blog in case like me you were curious and clueless.

I spent a little time trying to play the Storm again last night… and nope…  I am absolutely a Ranger through and through.  I just feel squishy as a Storm as compared to how I feel in the Ranger.  I know it is largely a play style thing… and my default play style is to get up and personal in the heat of the action and run around dodging incoming attacks.  What the storm wants you to be is a hovering long ranged damage platform, that casts spells tactically on the battlefield below them.  I should probably give Colossus another try and play with the slam all the shields nonsense it offers.  When I hit my next unlock I will likely be spending it on that Javelin.  However my true love will probably always be the Ranger.  I hope you all find that Javelin that is the perfect fit for you as the game officially launches this coming Friday.  Strong Alone, Stronger Together!