BioWare’s dance with ‘Destiny’ has a rough start

It’s all just a little bit of history repeating. Or so Anthem publisher Electronic Arts presumably hopes.

Destiny had a rocky launch too, you see. Its moving and shooting felt great from moment one, but the RPG bits that were meant to keep people playing for triple-digit hours were overwhelming and undercooked. In those early days, people liked to play Destiny, but few actually understood it.

Then, lightning struck. 

Two weeks after launch, the Vault of Glass raid was released. This pinnacle activity promised the best loot, but at some cost: it took six players to beat, and actually finishing the thing meant solving a series of cooperative puzzles while taking on the game’s toughest and most imaginatively designed foes at the time.

It didn’t fix every single problem, but Vault of Glass gave Destiny players something to reach for. And honestly? That was enough. The heaviest layers of rules and systems would get fine-tuned down over time (after tons of player feedback), but raiding gave Destiny exactly the thing it had been missing: purpose.

Now, five years later, Anthem, from acclaimed Dragon Age and Mass Effect creator BioWare, is struggling to find the same footing even as its new game’s strengths are right up at the front, screaming in your face. Nothing in modern video games right now beats the unbridled joy of soaring through the sky in your Iron Man-esque Javelin and raining hellfire on mobs of alien foes as they struggle to shoot back.

Welcome to Anthem

The first 10-odd hours in Anthem are defined by those thrills. The controls click quickly, even in a more complicated mouse-and-keyboard setup, and an extended tutorial punts the early game exposition into hour two. As for all those unclear systems I mentioned? Not even a concern until much later.

The only meaningful choice you have to make early on is your Javelin, though it definitely sets the tone for what’s to come. There are four different Javelins that each offer different styles of play, from the heavily-armored Colossus with its oversized guns to the speedy and agile Interceptor, which excels at hit-and-run tactics. (There’s also the Storm, which dishes out elemental space magic from afar, and the Ranger, a sort of well-rounded bruiser.)

You pick your Javelin right after a Ranger-only tutorial, and you’re told right then and there that it’s something you’re going to be stuck with for some amount of time. (Subsequent Javelins unlock at levels 8, 16, and 24, though such specifics aren’t made clear until later.) 

Without touching any of the other suits, having to make a split-second decision before you can play any further feels paralyzing. For many, it will mean a jump over to a web browser, maybe even YouTube, so an informed choice can be made. But the whole exercise speaks to one of Anthem‘s core issues: it doesn’t explain itself very well.

Your Javelin is just the start. Every one of the suits can level up. Your pilot, the person inside the suit who can walk around and uncover story between missions in a place called Fort Tarsis, also levels up. There are factions that level up. There’s something called Alliance tiers that levels up. To what end? It’s not immediately clear.

Nothing in modern video games right now beats the joy of soaring around in your Javelin.

Even for your pilot, the conduit to Anthem‘s most basic unlocks (more Javelins, more weapon/gear slots, etc.), BioWare took a non-standard approach. Most video games people understand that leveling up in an RPG involves earning experience, or XP, as you take on foes, complete missions, and advance through the story. That’s not quite the case in Anthem, however.

There’s still XP, but you only get it by completing specific challenges. These challenges vary from activity to activity, and — as far as I can tell — you can only see those challenges in your in-game Journal once you start an activity. Even then, it’s not necessarily clear which challenges you need to chase — there are submenus upon submenus in the Journal — or how XP you get for each one.

The challenges themselves are simple enough that you’ll often get them by accident just through the normal course of play. But the lack of clarity is the real problem. You could advance faster, but there’s nothing that really tells you where to look or how to understand what you’re looking at. I only figured out leveling after a friend ran through it for me.

This is just an example, albeit an egregious one. Anthem is littered with rules that go completely unexplained, but there’s something especially jarring about an RPG that doesn’t clearly tell you how to level up. Not that it matters at first. You’re so busy tooling around with Anthem‘s mechanical joys to notice. But then you hit hour 10 (or so), and a few realities start to set in.

An uneven grind

By hour 10, you start to realize that Anthem‘s quests all feel kind of same-y. It’s not an illusion. The narrative context is always changing, but the actual tasks placed in front of you are pulled from an astonishingly limited pool.

Sometimes you’ll stand in a circle and defend while a meter fills. Other times you’ll follow an on-screen tracking device to collect parts, or gather floating “echo” keys that you deliver to a centrally located locking mechanism. There are also “kill all the things” objectives and straight-up boss fights.

The problem is, when you’re facing the same five or six basic puzzles and solutions again and again across 30-plus hours of story missions, everything starts to melt together. Does it really matter why you’re collecting echoes for the Nth time? Can you even remember?

(There’s also one more open-ended midgame quest that’s tied to four separate Journal challenges. It’s poorly explained and has already been ripped to shreds as a major stumbling block for all players.)

By hour 10, you start to realize that Anthem‘s quests all feel kind of same-y.

It’s a bewildering approach for BioWare, a studio that has such a rich history of marrying story and gameplay. Anthem divorces the two instead. All of the big character moments are relegated to Fort Tarsis, where your perspective switches to first-person and action gives way to interpersonal chatter.

This separation makes a certain level of sense for the game that Anthem seemingly wants to be, of course. The Destiny-style grind for ever-better loot is meant to carry you well past the bounds of the plot. Fort Tarsis is there for all your story needs, so you can let go and just play once you suit up.

It’s also completely unnecessary. Anthem‘s ham-fisted plot is littered with questionably motivated characters and unearned twists. When an ally betrays you late in the game, their reasoning is on par with a five-year-old’s temper tantrum. And when that character shows up again a few hours later, ready to help for some reason, your own Freelancer is somehow just cool with it.

Don’t even get me started on the final boss and subsequent cutscene, which resolves the story with all the subtlety of a power cord being yanked out. (This comparison is more apt than you realize, trust me.)

If you manage to persevere through all of the story’s headaches and all of the pointless obstacles to progression — probably a 30-hour commitment, at minimum — you’re rewarded with Anthem‘s endgame. There are new contracts to chase, plus the highest-level Masterwork and Legendary loot that you’ll mostly get from the newly unlocked Grandmaster difficulty settings. 

This is where everything really falls apart.

A grand(master) mess

Anthem‘s idea of higher difficulty challenges boils down to enemies that have more health and do more damage. That’s not a sin in and of itself, but all of the toughest encounters — most of which are relegated to high-level Stronghold missions — effectively nullify Anthem‘s greatest strengths.

Stronghold set pieces and boss fights regularly feature enemies that make flight virtually impossible, even for a few seconds. Anthem combat is quite literally built around mobility. All the Javelins behave differently, and some even work best on the ground. But having the ability to hit the jets and fly clear at a moment’s notice or attack from above is a huge piece of the tactical play in Anthem.

That ability disappears in every one of the endgame’s knockdown brawls. It’s not just the damage you take when you’re completely exposed in midair, though that’s painful too. It’s also the fact that enemies never seem to miss, and that many of their attacks can overheat your Javelin’s jets, killing your ability to fly.

When you pair that with a boss that has a seemingly bottomless health pool, the only reasonable strategy is to find a piece of cover, hide behind it, and chip away at the boss until it falls. The biggest of those bosses aren’t even susceptible to combos, one of the more advanced features of Anthem‘s combat.

Players have already started working out how to game the system.

One such boss fight took me 40 minutes to clear. My squad didn’t get a game over screen even once; we spent our entire 40 minutes in the boss chamber doing that pop-and-shoot maneuver. There was no strategy to it, no real thought required. Also no fun. We were all overleveled for that Stronghold, too. So the fight was seemingly working as intended.

Players have already started working out how to game the system. If you matchmake into one particular Stronghold, you’ll quickly find that squads play through the first two loot drops and then quit before the final stretch into the boss. It’s not an accident; players have figured out how to “farm” the Stronghold for loot because actually playing the game as intended is a chore. That’s a rough start.

There are plenty bugs as well. Loading bugs, graphics bugs, performance bugs — you name it. I don’t want to spend too much time pulling out the individual issues I ran into, because these are the sort of things BioWare will probably work to fix quickly. 

That’s an important thing to remember, too: Anthem is a big game with (the studio presumably hopes) a long life ahead of it. It was a whole year before the first Destiny really found its footing. I think it’s important to go in knowing the troubles Anthem is facing, but a lot of its current issue — even the endgame’s garbage approach to difficulty — can be fixed over time.

This is also where we get back to my original point, though. Destiny didn’t survive because players gave an uneven game the benefit of the doubt. It survived because there was a fulfilling experience to be found in spite of other issues. I’m not sure Anthem has that.

Where’s the endgame?

The core mechanics, by which I mean the basic acts of flying and shooting, feel great. The arsenal is smaller than it could be and doesn’t evolve a whole lot as you dig deeper into the game, but each gun you pick up feels uniquely powerful. Even the leveling and the rules of combat, unclear as they are at first, become sticky as you get the hang of them.

All of that is the stuff of Anthem‘s undeniably strong foundation. But it lacks purpose. There’s no Vault of Glass moment on the horizon as far as anyone can see. BioWare released a development roadmap running through what to expect in the coming months, but it’s frustratingly light on the details.

That may be intentional. Games like Anthem and Destiny live and die by their communities. BioWare needs people to play Anthem before it can understand what’s wrong with the game and how to fix it. But I’d also argue that some of what’s wrong here should have been anticipated. It’s not 2014 anymore. Destiny was first out of the gate in popularizing a new sub-genre, but now, five years later, players approach these types of games with built-in expectations.

That’s where Anthem fails. It looks and plays like a game that invites you to spend hundreds of hours on a loot grind, but it doesn’t reward that grind effectively enough. Having all the best gear doesn’t change the fact that Anthem‘s toughest challenges are “bullet sponge” bosses that depend on patience rather than tactics.

You’re going to see a lot of chatter in the coming weeks about Anthem‘s long load times and buggy performance. It’s all true. But it’s also a temporary situation, and not necessarily the reason to stay away. Even in its current state, there’s a good 30 hours here that’s worthwhile, provided you can get past the dull mission design and absurd story twists — which I happily did.

The real issue is the lack of purpose. Why does this game exist? What kind of experience is it trying to deliver? It may not be Destiny, but Anthem is a similar breed of online game and it needs fans to hop on board. BioWare’s never going to build up any kind of deeply invested community if it can’t give that community something to reach for.