But both Destinies were technically solid and excellent, now and at launch. Anthem is not.
Both Destiny and Anthem seem to have some serious problems with the production of content in a timely manner, though.
Actually I believe that if Anthem had the technical performance of Destiny it would be at least twice as popular despite all the other issues with design and content. When you have this style of game that you expect to play for many, many hours then it’s mandatory, the utmost priority, THAT IT RUNS WELL.
But you guys (I mean in general, not the one I quoted) need to realize Anthem (and Andromeda) didn’t get low reviews because of some conspiracy, but because they are poor games. It’s true that there’s an amount of “dogpiling”, but it’s the same dogpiling you see now on Apex Legends: it cuts both ways.
Guess what? Apex Legends, a game some people play 10 hours a day… RUNS WELL.
Game developers keep underestimating how much the “running well” part is important.
The low review scores, and general opinion, is due to the emergent effect of the mixing of different aspects of the game that are bad: bad performance, loading times, bugs, misery of life (opposed to quality of life, like being able to change your loadout), non existent AI, “bad shooting” (again due to non existent AI).
The game is “fine”, but when you add up all of those chores and unpleasantries, the emergent taste is mediocre.
And what’s the “skill and mobility” of enemies in Anthem? Because this is the problem and why some people say it’s “shallow”. The fact you can fly around it’s fun on its own, but it’s almost completely detached from the core. That is shooting enemies. Enemies that cannot fly around and can’t even navigate around a rock.
The only difficulty is for being one-shot. The gameplay just isn’t there.
I’ve seen some comparison to Monster Hunter, but MH is successful because of the MONSTERS. Because they have at least some patterns that you have to learn, like a boss in Dark Souls. They are fun because they feel like real entities. They have clever design, animations, coding. Anthem is Monster Hunter without the monsters. In Anthem they completely forgot to create the stuff you are supposed to shoot at, and that makes the shooting meaningful and fun. You’re shooting at placeholders.
The problem is that Bioware probably just doesn’t know how to make that game anymore, even if they tried. The mistake was moving away from what they knew how to do, and the result is that now they can’t do anything of value regardless of what it is.
And no, Anthem is disliked by the people who expected a better Destiny, Warframe or The Division, and Anthem is not better at all.
This is like all those mmorpgs taking a shot at World of Warcraft despite not being even remotely close as good as WoW. Despite those Destinies having their own large pool of issues and not being exactly unassailable. People were expecting Anthem to DESTROY Destiny, especially right now that Destiny is going through a very long drought of content that is going to fee like a slog through the desert until next year (on top of rumors that Destiny 3 won’t be on PC, so you also have that big market untapped if you wanted to take a bite…)