I'm playing a lot of Anthem these days. Firstly because I'm employed to work on a Game-as-a-Service (GaaS) game, and secondly because Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is already kind of a mess. So I picked up the failed live service game Anthem again, five years after I last played it, to see if I missed anything the first time.
The last time I played the game was around March 2019, a month and change after it launched. I recall not being impressed by any of it. You fly around and shoot at things, but it feels shallow and meaningless. Worse still, some random other players were always in the way. I originally played for around ten hours before I gave up. And either I've mellowed over the years, or those randos really did make for a worse experience. Playing Anthem now means endlessly waiting for matchmaking that never comes, but zipping around in your armored space suit feels great, and the gunplay is much more solid than I gave it credit for originally. I still encountered a handful of other players in Free Play, but they just minded their business. They're at max level anyway.
The story of Anthem is hard to wrap your head around. You're piloting an exosuit called a Javelin, but you're not aligned with any of the game's factions. That makes you a Freelancer, a sword for hire. You're doing all this flying and shooting business on an alien planet called Coda. At the start of the game, you're recruited to take your fancy exosuit into a storm called the Heart of Rage, and destroy the Cenotaph at its center. To put it mildly, this doesn't go as planned, and you are forced to retreat and lick your wounds in the city of Bastion. So far, so good, but there isn't really a driving force in the narrative beyond that. After this epic opening act, you are forced to take small-time contracts for the city folk to rebuild your reputation, but all urgency has dissipated. This is especially jarring when picking the game up after a five-year hiatus because I literally could not figure out how to continue the main story!
The main problem with Anthem's story is that the publisher desperately wanted to chase that sweet Destiny clout and felt the best way to get there was by aping its naming scheme. This means everything is named generically as fuck. You are the aforementioned Freelancer, allying with the Sentinels and Arcanists and fighting the Dominion, Scars, and Outcasts. These names wash over you like water over river rocks, making emotional investment in the story difficult. Who are these people? What do they believe in? What does their banner look like? It's all very strange when you consider this is coming from BioWare, the studio responsible for some of the most celebrated narrative-driven RPGs in gaming history!
That said, interacting with the characters in Anthem is fantastic. Every character has a deep and engaging backstory that threads itself through the narrative to teach you more about the world you inhabit and its history. Of course, they all have a contrived reason for not joining you on missions outside the safety of the city walls, but it's fantastic character-driven writing overall. It's just a shame that this writing is in service of a Game-as-a-Service in which the stakes can't matter because we have Battle Passes to sell.
The monetization in Anthem is par for the course, which is to say, not great. There's a premium currency for skins and such, but you can't pay for better gear. That's probably why the game struggled to make its money back. However, I did manage to get some epic loot that was 40+ levels above my current gear by spending the premium-ish currency I had lying around. These items are so good that it will take me literally dozens of hours to find something better, and yet I didn't have to drop any money on it. Very strange!
The wildest thing about Anthem's monetization is that it's not free-to-play! It's still like 20 bucks on the EA store, or whatever they call it. Going free-to-play could generate some buzz around the game and pull some players back in. Anthem will never be able to compete with something like Genshin Impact, but it should be able to peel some players off of the disastrous Suicide Squad game if the entry price is free compared to seventy buckaroos.
Anthem was a huge flop, but it may have been ahead of the curve. Even the general public is getting sick and tired of the current superhero slop, and historically that means we're due for a resurgence in stories about knights slaying dragons and saving princesses. Anthem is clearly inspired by tales like Knights of the Round Table, and I think it has a lot going for it with that framing. It's just a shame that EA/BioWare tried to copy Destiny instead of letting it stand on its own two thrusters.
Should you play Anthem in 2024 CE? Probably not. But you won't be able to experience it at all once the servers go offline, and that's extremely sad, no matter where you stand on whether it's a good game or not.
