OK, this rant won’t have any bitching about loot but story since that’s what I came to Anthem hoping for lots of based on previous BioWare games.
There’s no way they can deliver anything meaningfully good without revamping the currently-too-vertically-based game world. It’s littered with abandoned camps and landmarks but there’s not enough space (without putting in even more loading screens to other instanced location maps like they are doing with this so-called cataclysm that was supposed to “permanently re-shape the ever-changing world.” This would require a full pre/production cycle of a whole new game and probably not something EA is eager to throw good money at after having spent 7 years and all this bad money.
Like @ShakesMcQueen it needed a larger overworld with room for other cities (at least 1-2 like Antium and the Heliost) or encampments to distribute mission-giver NPCs and establish a layer of meta-strategy. It also should not have been the single-player prison of Fort Tarsis but the whole damn game should have been along the lines of Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2. Those public/world events and those stories of that game’s various classes (along with another BioWare Austin effort SWTOR) are ultimately what Anthem should have been.
Absolutely all of the quotes and claims about the living world are absolutely shit and unfulfilled. All of the quotes from Mark Darrah, Casey Hudson etc were all BS lies. The world is completely lifeless and static with this so-called world-changing event turning out to be a lame score-rush game-mode event.
What a crock. It’s clear they just literally started working on the cataclysm after Anthem launched in its barebones state.
Also not to spoil a 15 year old game, but they should have had the (first!) cataclysm happen in the course of the single-player campaign like Guild Wars 1 did. The over-world should have been instanced like other MMOs (WoW) to allow players to experience the game story together. They oversold the idea (starting from the first damn mission with the character talking about gravity-inverting powers and the limitless possibilities of shaper relics!) and threat of cataclysms (I think of Dragonlance’s apocalyptic, word-changing Cataclysm) that they really should have named it something else since players are immediately exposed to doing so many of these shaper-silencing tasks that it becomes rote and repetitive.
The contracts, missions and factions also have ZERO tie-in or affect on the story or vice-versa. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. The player character’s redemption at the return to the Heart of Rage is totally abrupt and unearned and the excuse is “it’s only act 1.” Well don’t put your fucking world-ending threat in at the prologue! All the shit that’s just hinted at (inter-city travel, raids, striders, expeditions etc.) in overheard conversations at Fort Tarsis: none of it is in-game! No holding off an attack on the fort, noi building up supplies for a war effort.
All of these things are solved problems by other, better games that have come before Anthem!
BioWare also oversold the threat of the Monitor, the Cenotaph and the HEART OF RAGE™. In the meta-sense, other successful MMOs from competent developers with experience in the genre, these big events aren’t just previewed in this manner. Judging from the livestream developer comments about “it might be unstable, we just started working on it” it’s clear they had no well-thought-out plans for this “event” in the narrative sense and players were just to uh…return to non-cataclysm boredom after it ends?
In the meta sense, actual meaningful story content in the form of a world changing event shouldn’t be mechanically dispensed like a checklist item. But that’s exactly how it’s being treated here because clearly they don’t know either and are just making shit up on the fly.
Examples: Asheron’s Call 1 (came out in 1999!) had monthly Shadow invasions that hit various towns,. It was hinted at prior but the devs didn’t go out and lay out in boring, rote detail of the mechanics. Same thing for WoW (granted, the developers had assuredness and confidence about their skills) before rolling out a major raid or boss encounter, especially one that was important to the story like Onyxia or Arthas. I don’t recall (someone correct me if I’m wrong) didn’t lay out the boring meta details of how the fight mechanics would before beforehand–that was for groups (who could communicate in both text chat and voice chat and hey had guilds that they were part of) to discover. Sure, they haven’t spoiled the hows yet of the Cataclysm boss fight but all that they’ve shown so far is extremely underwhelming.
I remember patch notes or previews of upcoming stuff concentrating on the in-game story stuff and not the meta. I could be wrong and misremembering.
…a score rush mode for cataclysm to hit some meaningless leaderboard when you can’t communicate with your immediate group much less a guild? How clueless, delusional, tone-deaf and arrogant are Ben Irving and BioWare?
