Anthem. By now you’ve probably heard a lot about Anthem Bioware’s newest IP. It is a new game delving into the Looter Shooter RPG genre alongside the likes of the Destiny franchise and The Division franchise. Anthem takes place on the world of Bastion where humanity has had the difficult existence of surviving on a world left unfinished. The Shapers, mystical gods who formed the planet and the life on it, mysteriously disappeared and left their tools behind on the planet. The tools, known as Shaper Relics, harness the Anthem of Creation to warp, manipulate and create reality itself on Bastion. You play as a Freelancer, a mercenary of sorts, for hire. Freelancers pilot Javelins, heavy metal exosuits with a litany of abilities and skills, and they go out into Bastion to help silence, control and manage the Shaper Relics that go haywire. Your story as a Freelancer begins after a catastrophic event destroys the city of Freemark and you are sent to silence the Cenotaph, a Shaper Relic at the center of a Cataclysm.

Alright now that we have that out-of-the-way, Anthem is fun. The world of Anthem is massive and gorgeous. I have not played a game as beautiful as it in quite a while. The gameplay is addictive and fun. Stomping around as a hulking Colossus shield bashing enemies and raining heavy mortar fire on enemies ignites the fire I have when I play my Titan in Destiny 2. For some lighter yet equally as heavy fun I pull my Storm out to rain elemental destruction down on my foes. There are 4 current javelins, the Ranger, the Colossus, the Storm and the Interceptor. The Ranger is your jack of all trades soldier type. Able to zip around and deal the various types of damage. The Colossus is the heavy tank-like javelin specializing in heavy damage and explosions. The Storm is your mage-like javelin capable of floating around raining elemental fury from above whether it’s a fireball or lightning strike. The Interceptor is a ninja-like javelin specializing in quick attacks and debuffs enemies to deal quick powerful attacks.

Anthem’s story is decent and actually pretty good in my opinion. There’s some down moments when the story slows down or the pacing becomes disjointed. Despite those moments I enjoyed what I was given. There are plenty of little ambient conversations, dialogues that you actually participate in that add some depth and character to overarching world. Now this isn’t an award-winning masterpiece and it definitely won’t win you over if you’re going to compare it to the likes of the Mass Effect Trilogy, but it’s actually good if you take your time and explore the world and Fort Tarsis every opportunity you get. Outside of the story or Critical Path as Bioware calls it, there are Agent missions that you get from specific characters to flesh out side stories, contracts which become repeatable post story as well as legendary variants once side stories are completed and strongholds. Strongholds are similar to destiny nightfall strikes but probably a bit longer. There is also Freeplay, which is how to explore the greater world of Anthem where you can harvest materials, participate in world events (public events from Destiny), and fight world bosses.

Now I said Anthem is fun…when it works. Presently Anthem is much more stable than it was when it initially launched. Yet there are still plenty of bugs, glitches, and all manner of technological instability present in the game. By now I would assume you’ve heard of the infinite loading bug where the loading screen gets stuck at 95% forever and you have to exit the game to fix it. There’s also the mysterious disappearing loot bug where your loot just doesn’t exist even if you pick it up and it doesn’t show up in your vault when you clear the mission or Freeplay. The Quickplay playlist is a grab bag of issues where you might load into a mission or contract and it will be softlocked. Softlocked for those unaware is when the mission is still playable, joinable, and everything works except the objective doesn’t update triggering the next events. Prime example of this happening is when you are doing a mission involving the legendary Helena Tarsis and you must escape by defeating Dominion forces. Only you are stuck fighting infinitely as the mission objective doesn’t update. Matchmaking in Anthem is 50/50 as sometimes it happens instantly and you find a group or you load into a broken mission and no one can join and you can’t do anything. Then there is the notorious console/PC corruption bug or more famously known as the console bricking bug. This one made famous due to misinformation is bad but not as bad as people and other media outlets made it out to be. This bug actually more persistent in consoles, but also happens to PCs, corrupts the hard drive and makes it unusable until you boot the console in safe mode and restore it.

Another real nail in the coffin is the current loot crisis. Briefly, for two different windows of time loot was dropping at an excellent pace. Yet all good things must end in the gaming world. The first time Bioware came out and said the increased loot drops was a bug in the system and they hotfixed the issue and players were bummed because previously loot wasn’t dropping like it should according to players. Then again on Friday night when a hotfix was pushed out and loot seemed to increase and the playerbase was ecstatic. That all changed when the newest patch was released fixing the issue of getting common and uncommon gear at eldergame level (post level 30). Players have taken to social media to vent their frustrations over the loot situation that it is currently unfair and disrespectful of players’ time and investment. For clarification, prior to the recent patch, you could gain all colors of the loot rainbow (in order of least value: white, green, blue, purple, orange, lime green), but now you mostly see purple, a few blues, maybe an orange and if you’re lucky a lime green. Once you hit level 30, you mostly want Masterwork (orange) and Legendary (lime green) items as those are the most powerful. Anthem’s loot system reminds me of Diablo style acquisition. You gain the legendary and its good for a bit, but after you start grinding to get that legendary piece of gear with the right stat roles, called inscriptions, attached to it. Many in the gaming world refer to these as God Rolls as they are the apex of gear drops. Masterwork gear can drop and once mastered through use unlocks the blueprint for crafting. Here’s where another issue comes up, you need a material called Embers to craft the right level of gear. Embers come in Uncommon (green), Rare (blue), Epic (purple), and Masterwork (orange). You need Masterwork Embers to craft Masterwork gear. Seemingly, according to players, there was a stealth nerf (reduction) in the drop rate of Masterwork Embers from Harvest nodes while out in Freeplay. This put an unfavorable slash to the way of maxing out for Masterwork gear to prepare for the higher difficulty content which had, key word here, a higher chance for legendary gear.

Loot is what drives games like these. Players want to be able to find loot, get loot, and then get more and better loot. The way I see it, Bioware is strangling their game to death with the loot issue. It’s currently all the subreddit r/anthemthegame can talk about at the time of my writing this. Players can tolerate the bugs and glitches and whatnot if they are having fun and getting that psychological high of getting loot. It doesn’t always have to be good if you take a page out of Diablo 3’s book. Ironically, a developer from Diablo 3 even posted to the Anthem developers noting that Bioware’s game is suffering from the same problems Diablo 3 had prior to their Reaper of Souls expansion. Yet Bioware’s developers are fine with “incremental updates in the next few months”. I’m sorry but this is an issue that needs to be solved soon. Not in a few months as it seems like Anthem is bleeding players like Destiny 2 was in its’ first few months. Unfortunately the loot in general is bland and boring in design. Nearly every gun looks exactly the same and at first glance you mistake some weapons for each other. Masterwork and legendary weapons look exactly the same except for they have paint jobs on them. Take Destiny for example, when you get into legendary (purple gear) they start to look visibly different from the rare (blue) gear. Exotics in Destiny, which are akin to legendaries in Anthem, look nothing like any other weapons in Destiny. They are unique super powerful weapons and armor that give special bonuses when used. Legendaries in Anthem are just different in color and a slight bump in base strength over Masterworks. Sadly you can get completely useless legendary gear, as in sub par to masterwork gear. This is a travesty to loot centric games. Legendary gear should always be better than masterwork, but should never be a god roll all the time in a loot system that Anthem has.

I will say this about Anthem, it is a good game with great elements and given time it will shine. The issue is that there isn’t enough currently to keep players engaged for long. The game came out on the heels of Destiny 2: Forsaken and its Black Armory content and just barely ahead of The Division 2. Currently many compare Anthem to both Destiny 2 and what has been shown off via betas of The Division 2 but I find that an unfair comparison. I compare Anthem to Destiny and The Division, the predecessors as the sequels have had time to build upon foundations already formed. Both Destiny and The Division were dumpster fires upon their launch and took nearly a year before they were halfway decent. Granted Anthem has had time to learn from the mistakes of both games and comparisons should be on equal footing. Gamers I feel are simply tired of getting 50-75% finished games and told basically “wait it’ll get better.” Time is money nowadays and players want to see that their purchase is going to be worth what they pay for. Players don’t want to spend $60 for a game and it’s nothing but a glorified beta or alpha in some cases.

All in all Anthem has a lot of work ahead for itself. There’s another major patch expected on the March 12^th to fix more issues but I’m not sure if it will be worth it. I’ll be sticking with Anthem as much as I can because I do have fun and I love my THICC boy Colossus, but sometimes the issues hamper my enjoyment. Would I recommend Anthem? No, not currently (unless you’re a glutton for punishment or one of my close friends because co-op is fun and nonexistent in games). I would honestly say wait about 6 months. Hopefully things are much better by then or sooner. Expect more stuff from me as I’m able, life gets in the way, but that’s just part of the ride.