Anthem - PC Experience

[Chett_Manly]

Last night I beat Anthem. It took 18 hours. I thought I'd share some thoughts, and if anyone has any questions I'd be glad to answer them.

 

I went into it hoping that Bioware would manage to put in a compelling story. They managed this in Star Wars The Old Republic, an MMO, and actually managed to do it multiple times, one for each class! I played through all of them! Anthem has nothing approaching the stories Bioware made for an MMO. There are no decision consequences that I could see, there are no love interests, there are no companions that you really play alongside. The story is effective big bad villain going to get super weapon, stop him. It's about as generic as you can get. Then they add on a lot about how "Freelancers" used to be respected, but aren't respected now. This doesn't really make any sense to me as they are just mercenaries, who failed and cause massive destruction, but apparently mercenaries in this world have some sort of Fraternity. You do contracts for money, you are private military contractors, not Chivalrous Knights!

 

And yes the game just calls you "Freelancer". Even the characters who you are close to. It's just like Pathfinder, Inquisitor. That Bioware hasn't improved this in years is really sad. It took me all of 90s to think up a better solution. Call Signs, pick one, all are pre-recorded and voiced. 

 

What else, that Neill Blomkamp directed Trailer for Anthem, that was pretty good. The story in that trailer is that there is this woman wandering alone in the jungle and surviving somehow and you find her, and she has this connection with the Anthem, a magical energy force. There is a mystery around her, and her ability, and what that means. And none of that is in the game. Maybe they will add it later. Probably not because the villain in the trailer is in this game, and well you win. So yeah. Guess Neill got a different revision of the game script. 

 

The story also does nothing to explain what this world is, why humans are on it, why the architecture is a blend of super advanced Sci-Fi engineering and middle ages North African. They really seemed to want to make this place look it was North Africa. Maybe it is. Maybe its the future and the Anthem was some device used to offset global warming. Who knows. Nothing makes sense. Especially how they do not have planes, yet can make Iron Man armor that flies. I don't get it.

 

Almost every conversation you have will present you with two options to reply with, but there is really no point in it. I found myself just trying to get past the dialog as fast as possible. Which very annoyingly is the Escape key, which means you spam it to get through the pointless conversation with a pointless NPC, and then end up in the Menu. On the positive front the story cut scenes, the conversations are almost all in engine, and look fantastic. Character detail is top notch, Animation is great, this is no Mass Effect Andromeda screw up! I played on a Ultrawide, and except for the few pre-baked cut scenes, they all rendered in 21:9. 

 

Performance wise the game runs okay. I am playing 3440x1440 on a GTX1080 with a 8 Core i7 @ 4ghz. Settings on High, Motion Blur, DoF turned off. I get about 45-65 FPS in the game world, about 55-70 in the Fort. It's very playable though. I didn't really notice it that much. GSync does wonders. The game looks great, detail is great, effects are great, and some of the landscapes are rather awesome. It's a Frostbite game, and like every other one I have played it looks top notch.

 

A lot of the User Interface and game design around it is terrible. For instance you have the Fort that you are in between missions, and in the Fort to go on a mission you have to walk over to the area where the armor is, and load into it. But after you load into it, it takes you to a menu where you then can go to another menu to load the map to select the mission, and then you go back to the first menu to launch the mission... and its a lot of pointless tedium for what should be simply opening the map in the Fort, click a destination, and clicking launch. Why am I walking across the game world to go load into the suit, just to load a screen to pick where I am going? It makes no sense. Maybe its to hide loading times on the consoles. Loading times on PC on a nvme SSD are not great, its take a bit. 

 

Then you have the loot system which doesn't let you change your gear in the world, and doesn't show you what you looted when you are in the world. You get loot, but it just says Rare Item or Uncommon Item, whatever grade item you got, not what the actual item is, let alone actually being able to equip it and have fun with it! It is so so very stupid and frustrating! There is also no loot that changes how your suit looks. There are no armor drops, or any cosmetics. At least I never got anything from starting to beating the story that changed how my armor looked. I only got guns, and support gear, which gave minor stat increases and sometimes different types of attacks (Frost Grenade vs Regular, Laser Beam vs Rocket...). But for all the guns, its just getting higher level versions of the previous gun you had. And most of them suck. Do yourself a favor, get the 100 round LMG, it hits about as hard as the 40-50 round Rifles and LMGs, but you know has 100 rounds! 

 

There is no pay to win, and in fact there wasn't much to even buy. I am not worried at all about micro transactions here. I was able to make my armor look awesome with just the free stuff (Matte Black Everything!). Maybe that is just because I played it on Origin Access Premier early access week (which is really dumb that this is a thing). But the only things I could see to buy were two paint jobs for your armor, and then two materials. I bought the diamond steel one with the in game credit. It wasn't that great. The in game credit is only good for cosmetics and crafting gear from what I saw. I didn't find any weapon vendor. You just buy the materials and craft a new gun suited to your level. I ended up doing that multiple times just to keep having the 100 round Light Machine Gun.

 

Combat itself feels pretty good. A lot of avoidance, a lot of movement, enemy variation is pretty decent, you get a few that are troublesome, you get a ton that fall before you like a scythe through a field. I found it quite entertaining once I figured out which weapons weren't dog poop. There is also this laser beam weapon on the Ranger, you hold it down and laser things in the face. It feels pretty good. It reminded me a lot of Mass Effect 3's multiplayer. Where you had the power abilities on the character classes and then guns. The dumbest thing about combat is reloading. You need to keep moving, but you cannot reload while running. Except if you run over an ammo drop it automatically refills your weapon. So apparently my character cannot change a magazine while running, because they would be game breaking, but refilling the ammo on both weapons for running over an ammo drop is not game breaking. I don't get their design choice.

 

Traversal is great. Flying is great, the animations for it are superb. There is this dumb overheating system so you cannot fly continuously, but otherwise its really fun. I wish they'd take out the overheating. You cannot attack while flying, only hovering, and you cannot fly too high already as it knocks you back down, so I didn't see the point in limiting how long you can be in the air. The controls on PC are much improved since the Demo. I did increase the flight sensitivity to about 50%. Jump with space, hit shift to turn on the rocket boots, and off you go. 

 

Multiplayer is a mixed bag. You can play it single player. You have to set the option in the launch menu to private, and then they tell you off for it, and keep telling you off for wanting to play private. Yet stupidly the story is told as if there is only one person doing it. None of the cut scenes pay any attention to the 3 people that are behind your character. They are shown, but don't exist for the story. There is even a point where the main character talks about being the only person to have come this far in a cut scene that shows the 3 other people in your group. It's really silly. I guess they were too lazy to put in NPCs for the private mode to act as your back up and give a story reason to have back up there. So instead in all modes the game acts as if you are alone.

 

Multiplayer on PC is also a bit of a disappointment. THERE IS NO CHAT! These console barbarians expect me to use a microphone and talk to people! I want to simply type, "Its this way!", instead of having to yell it at them. Also the first person who talked on a mic called everyone a bunch of F@%%%ots, because we went the wrong way. The game world is often confusing, and communication is somewhat necessary. I could also find no in game menu for contextual communication, like an option to say "over here" or "on me", like what Battlefield has.

 

As for bugs, its not that bad. I did have to quit out of a Stronghold (Dungeon in World of Warcraft parlance) because the path to the next area wouldn't load. And in one cut scene the camera was in my characters head and I could see the teeth model. That's pretty good for a game that hasn't even fully launched. 

 

I guess if I were to grade Anthem, I'd give it a 5/10. I definitely would not buy it for $60. Yet as part of Origin Access Premiere, I don't feel cheated or anything. If you do a one month sub for it, that's a good deal. This game is well worth playing for $15. If they added some player vs player content, especially a 64 player Conquest like Battlefield, I'd come back and play it endlessly. Or if they added in a good narrative story, I'd come back to it. Yet having beat the story, I don't find any appeal in grinding for loot, I don't care if my character has a lower average item level point score in a game where I cannot fight other players. 

 

 

 

[Acid Panda]

bare in minds the game does not come to the rest of the world for a few more days.

Its seems to  be going along the lines of a service so more content coming.

also did you rush the game or have a pretty complete experience

[Chett_Manly]

1 hour ago, Acid Panda said:

bare in minds the game does not come to the rest of the world for a few more days.

Its seems to  be going along the lines of a service so more content coming.

also did you rush the game or have a pretty complete experience

I don't feel like I rushed it. I did all the missions as they came up, and there is even time in the middle where they make you go accomplish a bunch of objectives in their free play mode to advance the story. So I spent a good deal of time in free play, doing the Stronghold, and then completed the story. So I don't think I missed anything leading up to the story ending.

 

So the only thing I haven't done so far is the strongholds that open up after you finish the story, there are 2 right now, and some achievement/reputation grinding stuff.

[xreaperx22]

yeah im still playing this on origin,i was using the storm suit forever,then finally unlocked the ranger thinking this will be much better,only to switch back to the storm model,that thing just melts everything,whole groups incinerated instantly lol....i doubt any of the other suits will be as good as that,but heres to hoping....right now im doing the tombs or something like that,i tend to do all the side missions before the critical ones.but all in all im having a blast playing it so far.