 Hey everyone. This video is a bit late because my initial plan was to do a video on Metro Exodus. I had that script mostly written and was about to start recording when I started playing Anthem and it turns out that Anthem has So much to talk about that I shelved the Metro video until next week so I could get this out of the way first. Today I want to take a look at a game that is adequate and competent and also utterly soulless. A game that has some parts that are truly impressive from a tech perspective melded to issues that make the game a total mess to actually play. A game with perhaps the worst pacing I've ever experienced and a story that in my opinion leaves you with the inescapable fact that Bungie's terrible Destiny 2 campaign is significantly better and what the company still known as Bioware has accomplished here. Anthem is a failure at every single thing it does outside of its basic combat and traversal loop and even there the game holds itself back in ways that are very disappointing. So join me as we take a look at the final death of what players expect when they buy a game from Bioware after the logo. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that Bioware is the most accomplished Western RPG developer ever. The isometric D&D type RPG, Bioware was basically the creator of that. The 3D turn-based RPG, Bioware perfected that. The 3D action RPG, Bioware. The modern cinematic action RPG, Bioware. Baldur's Gate and its sequel are the type of games that got people hooked on games. Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Dragon Age Origins, and of course Mass Effect aren't just good games, they're games that created formulas. Almost all of the popular RPGs in gaming today have their roots and influences in Bioware games and it's basically impossible to overstate how important a game Mass Effect is. Bioware is one of the few companies that successfully simplified RPGs to make them both appealing to a huge mass audience but still deep and compelling enough to stand as works of gaming art. And while we're not gonna run through the entire catalog here, I don't think it's possible to truly understand Anthem's abject failures without looking at Mass Effect for at least a little bit. In 2007 Bioware released a new IP. It is easy to look at Mass Effect and see a simplified RPG with less choice in dialogue than the previous Bioware titles, but there is an interesting parallel between Bioware's Mass Effect and Bungie's Halo, just like there are obvious parallels between Anthem and Destiny. Bungie didn't invent the first-person shooter, not even close. What they did is perfect the first-person shooter for Mass Appeal beyond the hardcore gamer market and make the genre finally feel good on a console. Halo took the basic PC corridor shooter and then expanded the levels and story and basically set the standard for console FPS controls. The amazing thing about going back to play Halo isn't the little differences in quirks. What's shocking is just how much is exactly the same as a modern shooter. Halo expanded the audience and cemented the formula, and that's what Mass Effect did for the console RPG market. You can see the influence of Mass Effect in almost every big RPG released on consoles ever since. The dialogue wheel, the wide scope, the cinematic direction, pacing and storytelling techniques. Mass Effect brought the Hollywood cinematic experience to the interactive medium of mainstream console gaming. If you go back and play Mass Effect now, it's clunky systems and bad combat will jump out at you. What won't jump out at you is it's dialogue, it's pacing, it's storytelling, it's characters, it's player choice. And the reason those things don't jump out at you is because that's just what games like this do now. But that wasn't the case when it was released. Mass Effect was awesome and ambitious because there wasn't yet a tried-and-true formula when Bioware started making that game. It stands as a monument to perfect decision-making. It's streamlining and simplifications went exactly far enough to make the game scruutable to a wide audience, but stopped well short of being a watered-down meaningless linear experience. To this day, it is still one of the greatest games ever made, and very, very few games have even matched it for scope, character and story. Yes, Blinnie, Mass Effect was a good game. What does that have to do with Anthem? Well, I'm glad you asked, because we're about to get to that right now. Anthem. Nothing new. Right from the original Anthem announcement, there was a bit of confusion. It's important to recall that Bioware was coming off of the very badly received Mass Effect Andromeda at the time. I am one of the few people who was fairly forgiving of Andromeda. Its story was disappointing. Its main characters were sometimes poorly thought out and poorly written, but those problems appeared worse than they actually were, because of the inevitable comparison between Shepard and the crew of the Normandy. Mass Effect Andromeda had a lot of problems, from the animations to the kind of phoned-in plot, and its much smaller than advertised scope. But for all of that, Amy Andromeda was not a bad game. Its combat was really good for a cover shooter, and the best in Bioware's history by an extremely large margin. The environments were beautiful, the music was good, it was a game that I thought was reasonably decent. A misfire, sure, and not all it could have been, but it wasn't the catastrophe it was made out to be. There were several really great characters, and some of the storylines were actually quite excellent. Its main flaws were technical problems upon release, and its significantly worse dialogue system. Andromeda was the first sign that Bioware had lost its magic touch. Their uncanny ability to make things deep and accessible had finally erred too much on the side of accessible. Andromeda was the first time the scales tipped so far to accessible that the game's greatness was lost. For all its promise and all of Bioware's resources and talents, Andromeda ended up being just a pretty good game and nothing more. The reaction owed as much to the astronomical standards the studio and the Mass Effect series in particular had created as it did to the game's inherent issues. If it had been a new Bioware series called Space Adventure, it would have gotten quite a different reception than Mass Effect 4. What if we took all the things that made Mass Effect Andromeda disappointing and doubled down on them? What if we identified everything that fell short and made that a laser focus of a Bioware game? Imagine what that would be like. Well, you don't. If you're willing to spend $60, which I do not recommend, or $14.95 for one month of origin premiere, you can see precisely that in Bioware's big gamble, Anthem. Anthem has been in development for six years. Six years of work from one of the gaming's largest and most storied developers with the full backing of one of the largest and wealthiest publishers. And for all those years, man hours and financial backing, what do you get? Anthem is Destiny with less interesting loot, less interesting combat, less interesting levels, less interesting world design, less interesting missions, less modes, less variety, less content, less. And as insane as this is for me to say, remember I have several videos explaining how bad Destiny and Destiny 2's in-game narrative is. Anthem has a story that is significantly shittier than Destiny 2. How? How did this happen? How did Bioware produce a story that is worse than... 30 Seconds of Fun Listen, if you're going to be upset that I compare this game to Destiny, I don't know what to tell you. The game is clearly and obviously designed to be a mass-effect Destiny, and it is pointless to discuss the game without addressing its main competitor. Bungie has a famous credo that developed out of the design imperatives of its Halo games. In Halo 1, there was maybe 30 seconds of fun that happened over and over and over and over again, so if you can get 30 seconds of fun, you can pretty much stretch that out to be an entire game. The core idea behind Halo and then Destiny afterwards was that the most important thing is to find a gripping 30 second gameplay loop, and then come up with different ways to engage the player within that loop. For Bungie's unbelievably playable Destiny games, that boils down to moving, picking targets, and shooting them. And it works. Holy shit, it works so well. But that shouldn't be confused with having only those 30 seconds. Yes, Destiny boils down to moving and jumping to avoid projectiles, defeating mobs of enemies with grenades, melees, guns, and supers. Each and every one of those pillars, mobility, tools, and gunplay, is razor fucking sharp. Meleing an enemy feels good. Shooting an enemy feels good. Grenades, jumping, supers, it all feels equally good. No matter which tool you are engaging at any one moment, it feels really fucking good. And it would be easy to think that because Bungie has that loop that nothing else really needs to be done, but Anthem proves this wrong. Destiny has a wide variety of combat encounters. Levels are exceedingly well designed. There are only six enemy races, but within those races are wildly different enemy types, and they are carefully mixed together to create nearly perfect combat moments. There's a clear and obvious combat formula, but it's iterated on consistently and imaginatively to produce a thousand different moments for the player. On top of that, Destiny strikes, its raids, and even the open world and story missions are almost all very carefully and deliberately designed combat arenas. Bioware clearly focused on the 30 seconds loop, and while it's often pretty good, it is almost never better than pretty good. And there are several crucial reasons why it repeatedly fails to rise to greatness. Anthem's combat and mobility are made up of impressively fun, discreet moments. While playing the storm class, freezing an enemy, and then calling down a bolt of lightning to get a chain combo feels really good. Flying around feels really good, but that's it. And Anthem doesn't even succeed at fully embracing these otherwise excellent moments. Those two things, space magic and flight, are THE core of Anthem's appeal. But its flight mechanics are balanced with an overheating system. I'm sure the idea here was to...actually I really can't think of why this is so. Having your javelin overheat if you don't fly in water every 30 seconds doesn't make the game harder. It doesn't add strategy or tactics, it's just annoying. You've got one wholly new and interesting facet to your gameplay. One thing that separates it from every other game on the market, flying. That's it. That's the one major gameplay element you can't get in Destiny. It seems to me that everything possible should be done to maximize the freedom and joy that flying gives the player, but no. In fact, to be perfectly honest, moving feels better in Destiny than it does in Anthem. Which might have as much to do with its reversal system as it does with Destiny's superior performance, and we're not even going to talk about technical issues here. I'm sure all of those will be fixed. My complaints go much deeper than that. So how about that combat loot? Let's equate Anthem's space magic and supers to Destiny's grenades and melee's and supers. They're on more or less similar timers, although Anthems are for sure on shorter cooldowns. And like Destiny, it looks, sounds, and feels really fucking good to use the Combat Space Powers kit in Anthem. But there's one crucial thing missing here. Anthem's gunplay sucks. Badly. The guns do pitifully bad damage. They sound bad. They perform shittily. Reload times are infuriatingly slow. There are very few weapon types, and within those archetypes there are very few subtypes. There's a shocking lack of imagination in the weaponry Anthem offers. Mass Effect Andromeda probably has 10 times as diverse an arsenal as Anthem, and Anthem is a game that offers only its combat loot to engage the player. There's nothing else here. I have no idea what genius thought this was fun, but Anthem's enemies can stun you and interrupt your reload animation or your casting animations, leading to frustrating moments where you quite literally can't do anything. This might be more acceptable if enemies had actual animations that warned you of these attacks, but unfortunately Anthem's enemies are terribly animated, lifeless target dummies with hitscan weapons. It's extremely common to lose all of your shield and health while having absolutely no idea what's happening. It's either shooting you or from where. The gunplay is so pedestrian and boring that nearly half of your combat is spent looking at the cooldown timer, waiting until you can do the fun thing again. Now this doesn't mean cooldown should be shorter, it means that guns should also be fun to use. And the game should not have limited you to two abilities. Anthem's short combat loop is fun, but incredibly shallow. While its combo system is the most fun thing it's got, it's also something that greatly restricts variety and player freedom. Because so much of combat depends on those combos, you'll need to take very specific groups of powers. You need a primer and a detonator, so almost all the powers don't work together or are basically useless. In 50 hours, I never once found something better than the powers I literally started the game with. And there simply are not enough of them. Anthem's gear and loot grind is tedious because you get the same five things over and over and over with nearly pointless tiny stat increases. They don't even look cool. Anthem has almost zero build diversity outside of simply using a different javelin class. Destiny of course strangely limits itself to only one exotic weapon and one exotic armor at a time. But the exotic pieces are tremendous game changing pieces of gear. There's nothing like this weapon in Anthem. Anywhere. There's nothing you get that utterly changes your combat experience. Anthem has very little going for it outside of its combat. And if that was going to be the case, there needed to be far more variety within that combat. Players needed to have four skills at their disposal. They needed weapons. I do amazing things. You will exhaust the depths and the nuances of the combat system within 45 minutes. And then all you'll be left with is repeating that one 30 second loop exactly over and over again. That is absolutely crushing for a title in this genre. All of that is annoying. But even with the systems I've just criticized, there is at least admittedly still that very good 30 second combat loop present. But the most serious problem with Anthem's gameplay loop is that it never once does something new with that combat loop. Once you've played the first mission in Anthem, you will have already plumbed the depths of its gameplay systems. Anthem has two enemy races and they are absolutely identical in gameplay terms. Enemy AI is disastrously awful and variety is non-existent. The Scar and the Dominion feature fodder grunts, fodder grunts with double health, shielded dudes, and then heavies that are basically enemies in javelins. In Destiny, there is a difference between fighting the Vex, fighting the Fallen, fighting the Taken. They all share basic enemy classes but each race and its units behave in fundamentally different ways. The Hive aggressively rush to player and try to win with numbers and brute force. The Fallen use cover and skills and multiple tactics, the Vex teleport around the player. Destiny will often then pit the player against a couple of the enemies at once and almost all of its arenas are designed around these combat encounters. Destiny also has a dynamic AI that changes based upon the difficulty of the activity. Anthem's major, often crippling flaw, is that while that few seconds is fun, it is never iterated on. The maps don't change anything. The levels are pretty but don't feel like they were designed with gameplay in mind and the enemy AI is simply hilariously boring to fight. There is so little enemy variety in Anthem and the two main factions function exactly and I mean egg exactly the same. The Hive are not a reskin of the Fallen. The Cabal and Vex are not simply different models. They have unique abilities, unique units, unique arenas, unique AI. The Scar and Dominion are basic, simple reskins of each other. I spent more than 50 hours in Anthem and I cannot differentiate the two. What's more, there's something frustratingly chaotic about Anthem's combat rhythm that is only exacerbated by its mystifyingly horrendous enemy spawns. Games need to spawn enemies somewhere, of course, but this seemingly simple thing is actually pretty important. Back to Anthem's main competitor. Extra credit in its one episode on Destiny compared it to the original Law and Order, not SVU, the good one. And that amazed me with how insightful it was. My wife and I used to watch Law and Order on repeat. We had all the DVD sets and it's basically what we would watch at night. There was a comforting formula that was both interesting enough to hold your attention but also simple enough to not require too much thought or introspection. Law and Order, like Destiny, is media comfort food. Destiny's enemies spawn in simple, predictable and obvious ways. Missions and levels feature doors with a hazy black texture that tells you enemies will spawn from them, or enemies drop in from ships. The spawns are all easy to identify and the most missions are easy to anticipate and come to grips with. Getting good at Destiny means figuring out exactly how and where enemies spawn and nuking them the second they appear. It is immensely satisfying to run through strikes and know exactly where the enemies will come in so you can destroy them quickly as a group before they can even start firing their weapons. Even the enemies that spawn out of thin air have a long animation to let you know what's coming. The Vex have a ring that fades in over about 10 seconds for each group of enemies. Anthems enemies spawn in chaotic and impossible to anticipate ways. A big spawning pool will appear and just repeatedly pump out enemies seemingly at random until the game decides it's done. What this means is that unlike in Destiny, you can't react to each individual enemy wave. You can't anticipate and plan. These little pools just keep pumping out enemy after enemy after enemy until it's time to go. It's not something that ruins the gameplay but it's a system that isn't good. It simply doesn't feel good. It doesn't give the player a feeling of control or any ability to anticipate where things are coming from. And enemies just spawn everywhere meaning almost every battle ends with players flying around looking for the last fucking red bar idiot that's hung up on a rock patiently waiting to be killed. You can fly on to the next enemy spawner. The combat encounters are filled with systems like this that are functional but not great. And if your game is going to be only about the combat, everything about it needs to be great. If there's one thing you can say about Destiny, it is that every single aspect of its combat is highly designed, nothing feels arbitrary. Anthem feels like whole sections of its combat and enemy design is ad hoc or barely designed at all. It can make combat encounters feel very repetitive in a way that Destiny simply do not. Anthem takes its 30 seconds of fun loop and simply copy and pastes it ad infinitum. It never wants and I mean even once. Try something new. It never gives you an interesting new location. It never surprises you with a cool arena. It never challenges you with a new mechanic or a new enemy or a new encounter. If you played the first mission, you have played Anthem. Period. It's a Bioware game. Bioware went to great lengths to assure fans and potential customers alike that they'd done something they were proud of and that hadn't been done before. They kept repeating a slogan they'd come up with, a slogan that signified why this game was necessary and what was going to set it apart from other shared world shooters. That slogan was, Our World, My Story. I admit to being highly intrigued by this slogan. I've long been interested in why multiplayer stories are so fucking bad. There has been a shitload of excuses made by developers and video game writers through the years, things like, it's hard to tell an individual story to hundreds of players. These excuses always seemed pretty thin to me and so I was honestly excited for what Anthem could do here. Destiny with Mass Effect Story? Sign me up man. Well, now it is clear that all those excuses were just excuses. The reason stories in multiplayer games have been garbage is the same reason most stories in single player games are garbage. Shitty writing by a committee of shitty writers doing everything in their power to not say anything at all. I am sure everyone involved in writing Destiny 2 and Anthem and Guild Wars are nice people with wonderful families who treat their pets well. But they're also either disastrously bad writers or they're operating in a system that is fundamentally broken. Writing teams will occasionally work well in comedies because jokes are very hard. But when's the last time you had a great novel written by 31 people? That would be never because one person has something to say, 31 people have a collection of platitudes. Bioware made a big hoopla about Our World My Story. The million dollar idea of how they solved this problem was that the story of the game is utterly separated from the gameplay of the game. Players would have a solo, instanced hub where they interacted with NPCs, engaged in dialogue and had their choices shape the world. And it makes sense as a theory doesn't it? Let's take a game like Fallout New Vegas or The Witcher 3. In those games important NPCs can become hostile or they can leave or die based upon choices you make in the game. This is impossible in a game like Destiny or World of Warcraft because regardless of what I do Zavala needs to be at the tower for everybody else. A quest giver in Stormwind City needs to be there no matter what I do, what choices I make or what I say. You can see this painfully clearly in Fallout 76 where the solution to this problem was to simply not have any choices at all. I can imagine that at the very outset of development this was a central problem they set out to solve. If Mass Effect had been multiplayer you couldn't have had the big choice with Ashley or with Rex. How could I kill Rex if other players still had him alive? But those very choices are literally the core of what makes a Bioware game. To the point that I'd argue the Rex storyline in Mass Effect 1 is the most famous and remembered of Bioware's catalog. Those kind of choices define what Bioware has been and they are just as aware of that as we are I'm sure. So early on they hit on the idea of the Instanced Solo Hub. Shared open world solo story and you know what that's actually a rather clever solution frankly. It honestly does solve the problem, it would have worked. But thing is in order for that to work they would have needed to give the player actual choices beyond assault rifle or marksman rifle and the game simply does not. These memorable game changing choices in Bioware games or Fallout or The Witcher generally arise out of two possible systems. Either by choosing how or if you will accomplish a mission or through the dialogue systems. The first one is out because Anthem has zero player choice in its mission and combat system. Your choice is gun or magic and the answer is always both. So naturally the place to keep these choices the kind of choices that Bioware is known and loved for is in the dialogue and NPC interactions. There's been a very consistent direction in the complexity of Bioware's NPC interactions over the years. It started out just as verbose and wordy as the old tabletop RPGs. You did a lot of reading in old Bioware games. Then with Dragon Age and Mass Effect the whole dialogue wheel was introduced. This system made to make a dialogue system palatable to the action game audience is harder than it looks to pull off. Mass Effect's dialogue gives you a brief summary of what Sheffard was going to say. It wasn't a direct Fallout or Baldur's Gate style choice. You looked at the options, picked what best summed up what you felt and then watched to see what Sheffard would do. This leaves open the possibility that unclear writing will cause a player to pick something and then watch as the actual dialogue isn't what they thought it would be. And of course this did happen in Mass Effect, but amazingly it didn't happen very often. Why do you think that is? It's because Sheffard was an incredibly well written, well developed character and the choices you were offered were all quite different while also being totally believable for Sheffard. Sheffard's writing and performances were so strong that all the options felt like flavors of Sheffard. And this system allowed a player to say what they wanted while amazingly still being delighted and surprised at how Sheffard said it. Whether he was punching someone or hanging up on the council or making a joke, Sheffard is a strong, memorable character and we cared what he had to say. The characters he interacted with were deep, complex, real characters that we hated or loved or cared about and those few choices they gave us were exactly enough. They were enough to make us feel like our decisions mattered and they were enough to keep us interested and they were enough to offer plenty of places for dynamic changing outcomes. And most importantly, they were few enough for your average FPS player who simply wasn't interested in reading pages of dialogue between his actions. This system was a triumph, the absolute pinnacle of the compromise between accessibility and depth, a console RPG. Then came Andromeda. And as much as I defended Andromeda, it was significantly worse than the first three Mass Effect games and its characters and especially its dialogue system were a massive step back. Andromeda simplified the dialogue system again and what's worse is it suffered massively from Fallout 4 syndrome. The stated effort of Andromeda's change was ostensibly to give the player a better idea of what was going to be said and allowing for more moral ambiguity by doing away with the Paragon and Renegade system and labeling dialogue choices by their tone. Emotional, hopeful, professional, dickish, and sometimes flirty. Maybe this system would have worked with Shepard, but the writers are such poorly written, poorly characterized, bland, blank slate video game avatars it was impossible to have any idea what you're going to say based upon the options a player was given. There is no writer. There's just an exposition hole. When the player can't know what choice they're making, all interactivity is lost. It becomes a guessing game, a press button to continue cutscenes system. It's no longer a dynamic story enhancing gameplay system. It's a choice that only remains because Bioware games have choice. A remnant of Bioware games. At the time Andromeda released, I was on the fence about whether this change was made because the team made an honest effort to shake up the system so it didn't get stale or whether it was yet another simplification made because of a deep lack of respect for the audience. That question is answered by Anthem. I remain baffled that a company could rise to prominence and become one of the most successful game studios of all time through their creation of deep, complex narratives that come to the conclusion that to continue being successful they need to do away with the deep, complex narratives. Anthem thinks you're an idiot. It thinks you have no attention span. It thinks that you can't follow a story deeper than a puddle. And it thinks that three dialogue choices was one too many for you to handle. Now you get two. Even if the game and characters were well written, two choices is getting to the point where it's no longer accurate to call the dialogue a gameplay system. It's now become the illusion of a system. A binary choice leaves no room for nuance. It leaves no room for exploring characters. It leaves no room for choice at all. But if the dialogue had been interesting, the story well written and the narrative rich, maybe it would have been possible to make a dynamic, interesting web of choices, two dialogue options at a time. But that's not what's here. The actual synopsis of what the player is going to say has been simplified still further. Early games had entire paragraphs written out. Mass Effect had sentences. Anthem gives you like three words that vaguely suggest the gist of what your dude may say. And then he usually says something else. The entire point of this system and the slogan Our World My Story was to solve the multiplayer story problem by giving players a bio-ware story in the solo hub. That means dialogue and actions that change the story. But that is simply not here at all. I don't know if they ran out of time or just didn't bother but nothing you say matters at all. The only change I was ever made aware of was that a pond in Fort Tarsus got cleaner from something I did. I know because there was a pop-up box telling me that the pond got cleaner from my actions. Awesome. My story. Riveting. Even if they'd actually implemented this system, as I'm sure it was originally envisioned, I still don't think it would have mattered. Because I could not possibly give two shits about any person I ever met in this game. Faye is cool but hardly interesting. Who is she? She's the lady who helps you pilot your suit. And she likes a serial radio show about javelin pilots. Compelling. Here's a hot take for you. Mass Effect Andromeda is a better game with a better dialogue system, better characters, and a better story than Anthem. Mass Effect Andromeda was a disappointment for people like me who are big bio-ware fans but as I've said before, I think Andromeda got a bit of a bad rap. It's technical and animation issues were real but overblown and that meme parade only served to exasperate what would have been a fair and reasonable critiques of the game. Its disappointment is entirely tied to its title. The words Mass Effect carry a heavy burden for a title and Andromeda doesn't live up to it. Its story was pretty decent but not on the same level as the original trilogy. And while it's true that some of its characters could be annoying, its bad guys were kinda simple, and its dialogue system was a step back, it's also true that there were some compelling characters and stories and while it was inconsistent, it hit narrative heights that Anthem never even tries for. Its levels and combat arenas felt more designed and interesting to fight in. Its open world areas are more diverse and have more to see and do. It at least has a story. Andromeda's biggest disappointment was that it didn't fully deliver on all its set up. There's an interesting part at the beginning when you set up the first colony on Eos. You're presented with a choice of making it a research outpost or a military outpost. The players told that this choice will define how the Andromeda initiative is perceived in the galaxy and will be an important choice going forward. And the fact is, it actually doesn't matter. It doesn't change anything. But even though that choice never mattered and ended up being disappointing, the fact is you don't realize that until the game is over. It hangs there as a possibility and allows one to role play and at least believe his choices mattered. Anthem doesn't try. Ever. Andromeda strives and fails and the lesson Bioware seems to have learned is, never try. And anything you do try make it simple because the audience are idiots. But how can that be the case? Surely I'm exaggerating, right? One of my biggest complaints with Andromeda is the same issue I had with Destiny 2. There seems to be a movement towards a kind of meta self-consciousness in media writing these days. And what I mean by that is, in an effort to shield themselves from critiques of cheesiness or blandness, games and movies have moved towards a tone of quippy self-reference. It seems like games refuse to try and have any stakes. Destiny 2 became a game that was constantly winking at you. Scott Ryder is a bland collection of quips and jokes. In the first mission of Andromeda, Liam says this. I think I really pissed that one off. Maybe because I shot him in the face. Not only does this make it very difficult to establish real drama, it's immersion breaking and unrealistic. This isn't how people behave. This isn't how they think or how they talk. It's how Marvel script writers make comic book heroes talk. Andromeda's writer vacillated between all shucks, platitudes and fourth wall breaking quips. How does a writer expect me to take a story seriously if the characters in the story don't? Every time, Anthem reaches for drama with its music, it simultaneously shoots itself in the foot with comically terrible direction, groan-inducing dialogue and constant quips and jokes and they're not funny. The game is nominally about saving the lives of everyone in Fort Tarsus, but you wouldn't know that from the way everyone is acting and talking. And even if stakes had been established, I don't give a crap about any of these people. They're all cardboard cutouts, viscerally unreal and leaden and dead inside. Anthem suffers this in spades, while piling almost every other story ruining cliche it can. The narrative is about one hero who needs to stop the big bad guy from getting the big bad thing to do big big bad things. I think the game is clearly in love with its javelins and they're a fun gameplay mechanic, but to make the plot MacGuffin literally be a mythological old javelin is a level of self-reference I find absurd. I'll touch a little more on how terrible the story works when I go over the campaigns pacing in a minute, but what actual story is here is derivative, uninspired, unimaginative drivel. I quite literally can barely remember two story beats and I finished the campaign on the 20th. There are a total of two characters who have any personality at all and your character isn't one of them. Your character doesn't change, doesn't grow, doesn't learn a damn thing, he only gears up. The whole story is literally about gearing up, that's the plot of Anthem, getting your dude geared up to take on the big bad. Scott and Sarah Ryder make the player character and Anthem look like Shepard. A main character, this bland, lifeless and vanilla isn't an accident. It's the same thing that's on display in Andromeda or in a game like Destiny. The idea is to make the player feel like the character. Anything that would separate you, the player, from inhabiting the character is immersion breaking. We need to make sure that you feel like the universe's greatest fucking hero. Not that you feel like Shepard, you have to be Shepard. This is accomplished by making a main character as invisible and unintrusive as possible. In Destiny, you are the character. Your avatar has no voice because if he did you'd realize it wasn't your voice and it would all fall apart. I don't know how this idea took shape in the industry but it is a stupid crock of shit regardless of what their focus groups told them. All of the very best games ever feature strong, complex characters from Geralt to Aloy to Shepard. I don't need to be the center of everything. I live with me every moment of every day. The game is going to even try and have a compelling story. It needs to have characters that feel real. Especially the player character. My enjoyment of the Witcher 3 wasn't hurt by having to be Geralt. It was enhanced by it. Playing as Shepard wasn't an impediment to being drawn into the Mass Effect universe. It was THE crucial ingredient. Your character is nobody in Anthem. He doesn't even have a fucking name. He's called Freelancer, which would be like everyone I know calling me contract supervisor. Or my wife being known as registered nurse. And that level of characterization is as deep as it gets. You are called Freelancer because that is the sum fucking total of what you are in Anthem. You are the suit and nothing more. It is simply impossible to tell a good story with these self-imposed rules. If the player character has to be so much of a blank slate that he doesn't even have a name. How is it possible to ever identify with him as a person? It isn't and you're not supposed to. You're supposed to identify with his suit and with the loot that pops from chests. This, allow me to remind you briefly again, is a Bioware game. The entire reason this game should exist and be played is that it's Bioware's take on the live service game. Meaning it's a live service Bioware game. But it's not. There is nothing about this game that's Bioware at all and the pathetic and meaningless dialogue system is so shallow and pointless it actively fucks the game up. Anthem would be better if it was simply stripped away. What's here is a pointless waste of time, a miserable and measly reminder of the game I could be playing. It constantly interrupts the only thing the game does competently by ramming in a concession. A shrugging apology or a back of the box checklist. Don't worry it's got dialogue options kids, it's still a Bioware game. But it's not the mere presence of a dialogue system that made Bioware famous. It was a fully fleshed out dialogue system in the hands of a well written interesting character. It was a system that allowed players to interact with other interesting characters and have a real impact on a story outside of shooting things. Every time you aren't in the javelin it is painfully clear the game is going through emotions. It doesn't want to do it but it did in any way because that's what's expected of them. If you simply took Mass Effect Andromeda's story and dialogue system rider and all and put it into this game it would be incomprehensibly improved. And the best story ever in a multiplayer setting and certainly in the Looter genre. And that story isn't even that great. That's how bad this story is. Andromeda's story is massively insanely better than this. But instead Anthem is a depressing miserable grudging mess of a story. It's the remnant of a good idea gone wrong or maybe it really is just because Bioware didn't have the guts to fully do away with the dialogue system and story the games are known for. Either way it doesn't work. The story makes the game worse. The voice acting is very good throughout the villain in particular is given a great voice acting performance but almost zero script time. He's a guy I think in a suit who wants the power to remake the world. For some reason the game never even bothers explaining why he wants it what he plans to do with it how long he's been trying to get it. Who is he where's he from what's he like none of that never addressed. I think he has about 20 lines in the entire fucking campaign and half of those are delivered while you're shooting him in the face. It's not just that the story is light and shallow it's that it's light shallow and horrendously badly executed. It establishes no stakes does a dreadful job of drawing you into the universe and is ultimately about getting better gear on your javelin. Destiny has a bad story but it's not about leveling your tune. Anthem's story is about leveling your tune. That's the story. Andromeda again failed to live up to the incredibly high standards of what expects from a game called Mass Effect. Anthem doesn't even come fucking close to the quality of Andromeda. It doesn't even try. Its cutscenes are absolute garbage. Its plot is meandering at best and incoherent at worst. Tone, pacing, plot, characters, direction, dialogue. It's all bad. Existently angry at how awful it was. I was routinely pissed off that the game was forcing me through minutes of wandering Fort Tarsus and dialogue when it's so totally obvious that they themselves didn't give a shit about those aspects of the game. Gameplay is where all of the effort went. Fine. But then don't run me through three loading screens and a slow walk around the most lifeless hub ever to talk to lifeless characters before I can play the game again. Anthem fails at every single aspect of storytelling. And you know another game that fails at every aspect of storytelling? Destiny 1. But Bungie isn't Bioware. Bungie made their bones making tight, fantastic shooters and that's exactly what they delivered with Destiny. Bioware made their bones making compelling, deep, rich narratives. Anthem's hype was based in no small part around the dream scenario of a Destiny gameplay experience and a Bioware story melded together. Instead we got a Destiny story without the quality of a Destiny gameplay experience. I mean it's good but it's not as good. I could go into granular detail about plot points and characters but there's just not enough there to even write about. I barely remember a thing about it. It is utterly disposable, totally forgettable and wholly embarrassing from the studio that produced Dragon Age and Kotor and Mass Effect. Please, shut up, please, please shut up. Fort Tarsus is a disaster. There's simply no other way to describe it. This initial vision, the Our World, My Story idea was baked so deeply into the fabric of the game that I'm not sure they ever stopped to make sure it works before they did it. It does not, it does not work. At all. And this central conceit of the design is, in many ways, game breaking. Anthem is painfully broken into three parts. There is the combat game Anthem which is pretty good although shallow and repetitive but it's fun, it's pretty good. There is the cinematic cutscene game which are barely competent and that they aren't broken usually. And then there is the Fort Tarsus walking dialogue sessions which are abysmal. Abysmal. There really are very few cutscenes so almost all of the optional story here is told through the dialogue system. But the really amazing thing is just how little is actually there. We've already talked about how there are only two dialogue choices but what's crazy is just how infrequently you're even given that. You will do a mission and then be ported through a loading screen and then an absurdly long and utterly unnecessary post-mission wrap screen and then another loading screen before you will drop back into Fort Tarsus. Once you're there you will see a bunch of icons signifying people you can talk to. You'll then either crawl walk or crawl sprint to these people who are scattered around the smallest, shittiest, most depressingly fake hub area I have ever seen in a video game. The Normandy was more alive and interesting than this place. The Tempest feels bigger and realer. Comparing Fort Tarsus to the Citadel is downright depressing. Before you make your way to the exciting dialogue the game has in store you might pause and look at some of the citizen robots of your home. There's the Welding Lady. She will always be here forever. Forever doomed to crouch holding her welder out in the air. There's these two here who will always be confusedly looking at wires and occasionally touching this pad thing here. Seemingly to press buttons that don't actually exist. It's all like this. Remember 12 years ago in Fallout 3 where NPCs worked and slept and walked around? Remember that? That's not what you get here. These cardboard cutouts have one spot they stand and one thing they do. Forever. It's creepy. Now you may think this is a nitpick but I disagree. This matters. The idea of Fort Tarsus as a story hub was sold as a place where your story changed. A dynamic story instance of choice and dialogue. I don't think it was crazy of me to think of the Citadel. Instead it's a shittier tower from Destiny. So once you realize that 90% of the NPCs here are actually lifeless, Disney, Hall of Presidents, animatronic props you will go looking for those people to talk to. And you know what you'll get? Nothing. Garbage, pointless banter, utterly divorced from the story. Nothing you do here matters. Nobody's story is interesting. Nothing leads anywhere. Nothing changes. Ever. It becomes quickly clear that the player can totally and safely ignore everything to do with this system because A, it barely exists and doesn't matter. And B, the developers clearly didn't put any effort at all into it. Conversations are delivered in horrendous static shots. Not only is there no actual direction, there aren't even reverse shots. Because if there were, you'd realize that you aren't the freelancer. He'd be somebody and remember he's nobody, he's the suit. You look at the strange lifeless twitching marionettes before you and wait as they slowly and laboriously say nothing. Then at the point where a normal game or movie would cut back to your character, the camera lingers on the twitching puppet in front of you as your character says nothing back. Then the puppet, then you, then the puppet and once every five or ten lines you have the strange opportunity to choose between two dialogue options. These options invariably also say nothing. They aren't interesting and have no impact. Ever. Almost always the choice between something like, yeah, it's dangerous, but that's my job. And hey, I like my job. It's not that dangerous. Why does this system exist? What's the purpose of this system? Was it to tell an interesting story with choices? No. It obviously and clearly is not because there are no interesting stories or choices in Fort Harsis. It is a disaster of pacing. Getting to another mission often takes two minutes, three minutes of walking and listening and then two to five loading screens. If Bioware was going to put so little effort into making Fort Harsis a place anyone would want to be, they should not have required players to come back here every single fucking mission. You spend a lot of time in Fort Harsis, man. Far too much time. I gave up on the dialogue system probably maybe 30 hours in and that improved the game. But it still demanded that I walk across the hub area to get to the next mission, then walk back to my javelin over and over and over. Every time the game picks up some steam, it slams the fucking brakes on and transports you back to Fort Harsis. And missions are short. Imagine if in Mass Effect, every 14 minutes you were sent through three loading screens to have to return to the Citadel. Think that might kind of fuck up the pacing? Anthem is two games awkwardly sewn together. One is a reasonably fun, if somewhat lackluster action game. The other is a catastrophe. Absolutely awful. Sadly, you cannot play one without the other. What could have been? It's probably easy to watch this and write it off as, oh well, this game's just not for him. But that is totally false. This game is for me. I am a tremendous fan of Bioware. I am one of 11 people on earth who likes Andromeda. I played 1500 hours of Destiny. And hundreds and hundreds of hours of Destiny 2. I like Warframe. I played the Division. The idea of Mass Effect mixed with Destiny is probably the recipe for my favorite game of all time. I am left wondering how it took six years to develop this game. This very small, very shallow, very limited game. And make no mistake, Anthem is small. Far, far, far smaller than Destiny. The map is obviously pretty, but it is one small, empty map. Totally empty. Destiny's maps are more accurately described as several large open halo levels stitched together with hidden loading screens. Anthem is one big, empty map. It's difficult to know where you are because it all looks exactly the same. The variety and offer in Andromeda levels is light years ahead of Anthem. Light years. Hope you like jungles and waterfalls and caves because that is the entirety of the level diversity you get in Anthem. There are caves with old ruins, jungles with old ruins and waterfalls. And that's it. There's simply nothing like the difference between Earth and Titan and Nessus in Destiny 2. It would be like all of Destiny 2 taking place on Io. One large, empty map of scenery. It is impossible to distinguish one area from another. The story is absolutely terrible. Mindless, pointless, dreck. So bad it's hard to believe it took more than a few hours to write. There's lore, but who cares? The world doesn't have enough to make me give a shit. I'm left wondering how six years can be used at a story and a dialogue system and a hub this small and lifeless is what was produced. Mechanics themselves are so simple it's hard to believe that basic systems weren't designed fairly early on. Why does this game feel like it was developed in the last year and a half? Everything is smaller, shallower, same year than is needed. I am sure it can improve, but even the things it does well are only good, not great. Destiny has a great combat system. Anthems is good. Now imagine taking this game's combat and traversal mechanics and setting it in a world with several different planets. Or at least a much larger map with actual different zones. Imagine Fort Tarsus, four or five times as large. Imagine a dialogue system like Mass Effect and characters and choices and dynamic webs of outcomes layered on top. That's the game Bioware seemed to be making, but that's not what's here. What's here is not ambitious at all. It is depressingly safe and standard. Before we go, there's one small thing I wanted to point out. The first moment I got nervous about Anthem. I was excited to play Anthem and I had high hopes man. Everything I'd seen looked really interesting, but the first red flag was when I read this. Now, it's not that romance options in Mass Effect and Dragon Age were hugely important to the gameplay. Often they were quite silly and the actual sex scenes were kind of uncanny valley levels of gross. It's not that I desperately wanted romance options. It's what that said about the game Anthem was making. When Bioware announced there wouldn't be romance options, the audience for Anthem was made clear. This is a game for everyone, for kids, for dumb people, for everyone. If romance options didn't fit the vision, it seems likely that moral ambiguity and ethical issues also wouldn't be involved. And if those things weren't in there, then a dialogue system wouldn't need to be as robust. Anthem is a Bioware game stripped of everything that made Bioware games interesting. It's a game that is almost purely mechanical. There's nothing here beyond the 30 second visceral power fantasy of mobility in combat. But there's one big problem. Destiny is much, much better at that 30 second combat loop than Anthem is. Because Bungie has spent over 20 years laser focused on perfecting that 30 seconds. Their culture, expertise, and skills are built on that 30 seconds. Pushing that 30 seconds outward for 100 hours is what Bungie does. It's what they've always done. Maybe a few years from now Bioware will have perfected that too. But they have in an Anthem and if they wanted to drag me along buying javelin skins while they learned, they would have needed to give me at least a crumb of what Bioware has spent the last 20 years doing. The thing, their culture, expertise, and skills have perfected. They didn't. They gave me one map, two dialogue options, and a dead hub city of dead animatronic puppets. It sucks man. Alright, see you next time in Metro Exodus. A game that does what its developers are good at. Thanks for coming. Bye.