For a brief moment this weekend, Anthem players were happy.Just before a patch aimed at fixing numerous bugs landed on March 9, BioWare’s online mech shooter—which has had a rocky launch, including an issue that caused PlayStation 4 consoles to crash—began to spew rare and powerful loot at a rate that players loved.Anthem is all about acquiring masterwork and legendary weapons and upgrades, which requires hours of grinding. Just before Friday’s patch, Anthem started dropping good loot at a high rate. It turned out the generous loot was a bug, and developer Bioware quickly patched it out.
Living up to BioWare’s RPG pedigree, Anthem’s world is inviting, mysterious, and filled with fascinating backstory and characters. We see humanity struggling to find its place in an alien land, hunkered down and on the brink of extinction in an old walled-up fort. The story setup succeeds in delivering the tone of desperation, but is muddied when you see the tools you get to use to help keep humanity alive. You don’t get a sword, or a banged up gun. You basically get to be Iron Man. You are given a powered exosuit called a javelin that is designed to be a one-person army-killer. Come to mmocs.com now, you can buy Anthem Power Leveling with fast delivery and 100% safety.
There’s something else here that piqued my interest though. As you may or may not know, Casey Hudson left BioWare in 2014 – as Anthem was in its earliest stages of development – only to return in 2017, as Anthem would enter a period of accelerated production in an effort to hit its release date. Upon his return, he would find that Anthem had drastically changed shape from the one he had helped initially incubate. This is all recounted in Kotaku’s account of Anthem’s tumultuous development.
The world itself is perhaps an even greater failure. It just doesn’t feel real. You’ve got your home base, Fort Tarsis, that’s mostly empty of attractions despite the high level of technology present. Fort Tarsis is full of NPCs that have nothing at all to offer you — not even a basic fetch quest to color their lives. Out in the world, there are essentially four enemy factions: the wildlife, Scars, Outlaws and Dominion. Just like Mass Effect or Destiny, these factions each have a distinct visual look and fight just a little bit differently, though there’s not much going on in the story to tell you about their motivations and desires. You’ll encounter them in scripted missions and occasionally while exploring, but otherwise the world feels as empty and soulless as Fort Tarsis despite its apparent beauty.
There is still a journey ahead for Anthem, there’s no question of that, and even at my lower rate of playing I’ve found a few small annoyances such as having no direction of any kind when in the freeplay mode, but if you’re not planning on spending every available moment in the game then I can definitely recommend it.