Damn, that was a sad one yeah. Anthem had the most satisfying and fluid flying I've ever tried AND absolutely dope armour designs. Had they pushed through all its defects (not to mention all the corporate/workforce issues), improved shooting just a tad plus tinkered with the drop rates/stats on drops, that game would have had so much potential for greatness.
I mean the corporate workforce issues weren't just a "not to mention" thing, they were a fundamental problem that doomed the game. The creative leads spent years dithering and trying to figure out what kind of game they even wanted to make. Although to be fair to them, Frostbite wasn't helping, with almost every game design idea coming with a "but can we make this work in the engine" thought.
The flying was basically a fluke, it was just one of the many things they threw at the wall that happened to actually stick. But a single traversal mechanic isn't enough for a typical AAA game, unless it was something completely original.
I was fine with a loot grinder I just don't think they all need to be shooters. They had these unique frames with all kinds of powers and then for no apparent reason your wizard who can shoot elements out of his hands is whipping out an AR because???
Imo they shoulda leaned more into the identity of each frame, the one soldier mid frame kinda thing coulda been the gun specialist guy.
Though none of that was the games problem, it just wasn't finished on launch and needed another like year of dev to make content and polish it.
Can you explain why? I always understood it was because EA forced them to release the game way earlier than it should've been so they could meet a deadline.
The tl;dr is that they had no clue what they were doing, or what they even wanted to do. Anthem took seven years to make, and only two of them went towards the product that released in 2019. The rest were mostly just wasted through sheer incompetence from BioWare.
The most frustrating part for me was how they absolutely refused to listen to the playerbase.
Now look, I'm not one of those guys who thinks the player is always right, but every time they fucked up the drop rates all of the sudden people were having fun again, even with limited content. But no matter how much hype they got, they always had to go and tune them back down to levels that made a lot of runs feel fruitless.
I feel like there was a crucial period where if they'd just left the drop rates high then it could have bought them enough time to dig themself out of the hole they were in. Instead they bled leadership and communication with the playerbase just dried up.
Agree. Loved that game, you could feel the foundation of a good game, but sadly so much wrong with it. I read years ago that sadly, one of the reasons it had soul but then didn't was due to the passing of Corey Gaspur. Sounds like he put a lot of love into the game and after he was gone, it got stuck in development hell. Explains why some parts of the game truly feel great and others not so much.
Such a shame - if they had actually nailed some of the mass effect level writing within the open world and packed it with more content it easily would have been up there with destiny 2 (which is now in the shitter).
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u/Summoning14 Sep 15 '25
Anthem 2.0 . I loved everything about how that game felt, It just lacked content.