Anthem - BioWare's take on Destiny

So…emphasis on multiplayer and action. Not what I want from Bioware. I am curious if it is even playable in singleplayer and how strong the narrative will be. Maybe it will pleasantly surprise me, but I doubt it. Graphics did look spectacular, but then that’s Frostbite for you. Anyway, Metro is where it’s at for me.

There were four games over 10 years. That’s not nothing.

[quote=“mono, post:3, topic:130158, full:true”]“Uhh, what key brings up the auto-target?” “Tom you targeted the mortar on our own ship.”
" Oops, I fell off the cliff, can you rez me?"
@Jason_McMaster! Why’d you run me over with that hovercycle?!?!”
[/quote]

It’s like looking directly into the future!

Is this really MMO-lite?

Everyone asume that it is, but we don’t really know. Maybe is more like Wildlands, that once you have everything upgraded you just pack your things and uninstall the game.

In the gameplay video, the way that she picked up the named gun and already knew what it was, the way they talked about “have you been in this area yet? No, I’ll go in there with Tim later, he needs to level up”, etc. It all sounded very much like Destiny, not Wildlands.

Ok. Then they have a tall mountain to climb.

Is not easy to make a MMO, lite or not.

Wow this came out of nowhere, or I’m living under a rock.

I’m 60 seconds into this trailer. Where were these artists when they were making Mass Effect Andromeda? What the hell? That guy’s face is… great!

EDIT: Alright, I finished the trailer. This looks like what Mass Effect Andromeda should have been. Why did they make this game and also make Andromeda? Why not just make this game and call it Mass Effect? It looks like the same universe. Jump suits, guns, alien planets, Frostbite, etc.

According to the Kotaku article on Mass Effect Andromeda, the new studio Bioware Montreal was the one working on Mass Effect, and some of their team felt like they kept losing key team members to Bioware Edmonton who were working on Anthem. So Anthem was draining resources away from the Mass Effect team. It’s not a particularly well written article, unfortunately. It’s very dry and clinical in all its reporting, but it is informative and worth checking out just for that.

One’s an RPG (fairly light, admittedly) and the other’s a multiplayer shooter?

It was weird listening to professional VOs pretending like they’re playing as RL players.

Yeah, it sure was.

It was extra strange because it was a mismash of the two things. In the beginning the voice actors were clearly voicing their roles in the story, but then the other player joins in as they leave for the mission, and from then on, the same voice actress that’s playing as the player is now voicing a player in multiplayer game. So weird.

At least when Ubisoft does this, they stick to one or the other. Either the voice acting is part of the story, or the voice actor is playing a player playing the game with his or her friends. Not both.

Jim Sterling often critiques the use of professional VO’s putting on a performance while pretending they’re real life players. He did a video about it back in 2015 and he provided a more representative sample of mulitplayer dialogue edited over The Division’s E3 trailer that used the same technique. It still makes me laugh.

The video starts at the moment I am referencing.

The voice over did confuse me too, I thought all the team chatter was scripted in-game stuff for a little while. When the main character came across a large creature and then said something like, “That’s a problem for another day,” I was thinking hey, you don’t get to tell me that, video game character!

Yeah, when the one character joked about needing the XP I thought, “That’s some meta voice dialogue”. A little weird.

I remember a failed MMORyzom that had groups of animals. Is the type of thing that gets disabled first because uses cpu and seems as “fluf”. I guest thats not a problem when is the players hosting the instance. Anyway is kind of hard to have a realistic natural world. You can fake something like animals idle in some part of the forest,… from release day, till the end of time.

Kind of like that frame in Destiny that is cleaning the floor since release.

Other problem is MMO’s are terrible games, and people don’t want surprises. People would hate to do a quest where they have to hunt tankgorillas, if the tankgorillas move randomly in the forest so are not in the same sport all the time. People hate this type of unpredictible, and that kind of enforce the already ugly levels of statism that a mmo world have.

MMO’s are really games where nothing happen, nothing can happen, and nothing will make a difference. Like worlds inside a toy crystal ball.

So much truth here.

I’m looking forward to fourth wall breaking future where characters im playing make remarks like “Man, I should’ve purchased the Elite Gamer 2-day XP boost and 13 loot chest microtransaction pack today, I could’ve used the extra help!”

Agreed. I hate that about MMOs. Destiny got around this by having lots and lots of instanced missions. So the story doesn’t have any big effects on the hub areas where everyone runs around and shoots things that respawn, obviously, but big changes take place on the edges of that world, where you go into instances where you kill big bosses and it gives you the feeling of going through a big story, like in a single player game, instead of a static world, like in an MMO. Basically I think the key is that the instanced areas in Destiny are bigger and more numerous than the static areas. So unlike something like Everquest or DAoC or World of Warcraft, it doesn’t feel static. At least to me.

Another thing Destiny did was adding these public events that kind of make the world interesting.

Then is possible for two public events to happen at the same time (like satellite and two factions fighting each other).

And on top of this, they add time limited options, like the knights, that added a layer of change to the world, if a bit thin.

Oh! Very true! I forgot about those. Those did add a nice variety to the static areas.