TL;DR:
Over the past decade, we’ve seen a massive rise in live-service games with huge AAA budgets that close after failing to find an audience. […] Some studios are finally learning that live service is not always a guaranteed cash cow, and in retrospect Anthem feels like an early symptom of the carnage we’re seeing now. […] Too often, as we’ve seen from the staggering number of layoffs already in 2024, it’s the ordinary people, the rank-and-file developers, who are paying the price. Anthem may have been a warning, but unfortunately, it seems to have gone unheeded.
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“How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man?”
The industry should’ve already learned this lesson from the MMO crash, of everyone trying to replicate WoW’s success and then later realizing that a business model of investing a ton of money to try and compete for both consumers’ time and money is a bad idea.
I was in the beta for Anthem and when I first joined in, I was expecting some kind of intro level.
Nope! Thrown to the wolves with other players who apparently had already done this a hundred times.
I’m still figuring out how to change weapons and the mission is 1/2 way over already.
I actually liked the mechanics.
But it crashed constantly and I never went back because I couldn’t play enough to get hooked.
Ha, reminds me of Warframe, where I started out playing a stealth assassin build. The first time I tried co-op I was shocked when the other three players finished the level within like 30 seconds.
Anthem was a warning to actually fucking don’t make yet another generic shooter and instead continue to make RPG games.
I actually liked Anthem, and I wish it would have gotten more support to fix some of the problems. I think it had way more potential than some other GAAS that have come out recently. (cough Suicide Squad cough)
The worst part about it for me was the really bad net code. Enemies would teleport around, shots wouldn’t register or register too late. And their relative damage system didn’t seem to work properly most of the time. It made the combat feel bad, but you could tell that the combat that was there would have felt amazing had the net code been refined a bit.
There were other smaller problems too, but nothing that couldn’t have been addressed in patches. It really is a shame EA gave up on the game.
If you liked anthem, might I suggest the mother of all robot ninja shooter games, Warframe?
Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, I’ve tried Warframe several times and I just can’t get into it. The combat and movement feel too floaty to me, and I’m not a fan of the artificial wait times for getting or crafting gear. Story is also important to me to some degree, and there wasn’t really anything in the way in interesting characters or plot hooks in what I played. I know a lot of people like the game, but I don’t think it’s for me.
I will agree the crafting system is incredibly unintuitive even before you get into the more obscure aspects like helminth or archon shards, but there is some story if you really want to dig for it. Honestly I was pretty firmly a casual player until I got to the chains of harrow and from there I was hooked. It’s not a constant thing for me, but a couple months out of the year I like to check back in and see what’s new. The movement and combat are big sellers for me though. I find myself reverting to/wanting the warframe movement system in pretty much every other game I play after lol
Yeah. The movement is what I’ve seen unanimously praised by people that like the game. I dunno, it’s been several years and several major patches/expansions since I’ve tried the game. Maybe I’ll give it another shot eventually. It’s F2P, so might as well try it every once in a while to see if it clicks.
Those have been my main issues too.
I also just feel no sense of “identity” with such vague constructs of armor at war. Are they human? Are our enemies human? Does anyone have a face?
Granted a lot of the failures with Anthem was thanks to corporate meddling, like EA forcing them to switch to an engine mid development that wasn’t equipped for the game they wanted to make as they insisted on using something in-house, and then forcing them to release it in an unfinished and buggy state. Iirc the devs even cared about the project too, but once again EA ruins something.
I remember thinking it had some neat gameplay concepts from the footage I saw, it just needed more polishing.
I played the Anthem beta and quite a bit at launch. Really enjoyed the game play but stalled out at the final difficulty tier in endgame. A combination of low drop chances and bad itemization made the progression ridiculously punishing at that point. And having only 3 dungeons, and useless open world content made the loop even less enjoyable.
Anthem could have been a great game if it had a little more content, had worried less about player retention and provided borderlands style loot quantities, and had tuned the items better (having 1%-400% ranges was bullshit, and that variability across the 4 different modifiers per item, with some modifiers being useless, like +ammo pickup vs +damage for example, made most drops useless. And most drops being useless made the low drop rates brutally aggravating.)
Also FOMO shops are dumb as hell and I’m convinced they generate less money. If you offer something cool that I’d want to buy, but I was at work so I missed out, now you don’t get my purchase, and I’m resentful. Just sell shit like normal.
