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I must say that Fort Tarsis sounds really underwhelming.
As a competitor to Bungie's Destiny series, BioWare's Anthem offers enough that's new to justify its own existence. The world is pretty. The characters are tolerable. Most importantly, it moves and plays in a way that feels right. This is a competent piece of work.
Although a shared-world shooter is a departure from BioWare's solid action-RPG history, Anthem retains enough of the developer's creative signature to mark it as more than just an attempt to regain ground lost to the genuine innovation that was Destiny.
As in many BioWare games, the dialogue options, decent voice acting, and passable facial animations here reveal characters who display basic personalities, desires, and motivations. Anthem's player character, a mercenary known as a Freelancer, is in a constant state of needing (and wanting) to level up, to improve weapons and stats. The player passes through verdant landscapes, stopping occasionally to engage in battles.
But at its core, Anthem is a solid shared-world shooter that doesn't take too many risks. It feels like a fantasy world designed to be conquered, bit by bit, by small groups of pals.
Wccftech
Anthem arrives in less than a month, and yet, there still seems to be a considerable amount of confusion surrounding BioWare's first new IP in over a decade. People have compared the co-op shooter to Destiny, but BioWare insists the similarities are only skin deep. So, what is Anthem all about? What drives the game? How does it play and flow once you really sit down and delve into its alien world?
Thankfully, I recently got a chance to play around six hours of Anthem at a preview event at EA headquarters. I sampled a few early missions from the full game, tried out the just-released demo, and delved into some end-game content, although we won't be talking about the latter in detail today. I walked away with a better understanding of what BioWare is trying to achieve, what they've done right, and what they really need to work on. Let's blast off into the world of Anthem…
VentureBeat
BioWare fans have waited a long time to get their hands on Anthem, the four-player co-op shooter set in a science fiction world that never ends (think Destiny). Electronic Arts, the parent company of BioWare, has promised that the world and stories of Anthem will keep evolving, as they will keep adding new live content over time.
I played Anthem this week at Electronic Arts in Redwood City, California. It has been a long time coming, this eagerly anticipated online shooter is EA's first new big intellectual property in a decade. I think it has good gameplay and the world is enticing. But with around six hours under my belt, I feel like I have barely scratched the surface. Still, I think it inspires the kind of awe that you feel when you discover a brand-new gaming world for the first time, one built by some of the best game developers in the world.
PCWorld
At E3 2018 we finally got a chance to go hands-on with Anthem and came away underwhelmed. Oh, it played great—the words I used at the time were "smoother than Destiny 2." But as I noted at the time, Anthem ($60 preorder on Origin) is coming from BioWare, a studio known for story-driven singleplayer experiences, and yet there was no story on display at E3. "Tell me why BioWare is making this game," I wrote, "because what I played feels like it could've been made by a dozen different studios."
Well this week EA finally pulled back the curtain on Anthem's story, as it were, giving us a whopping eight hours of hands-on time with the game. A little peek behind the curtain here: That's a lot. Our usual hands-on previews run about an hour or two, and a particularly long demo might last three hours. Eight is unheard of, and indicates EA's either very confident in the game or worried the hype isn't high enough.
And I'm not really sure where I land either. Anthem's still incredible to play, but even with eight hours BioWare's legendary story chops didn't shine through the way I'd hoped.
Gamereactor
Bioware took a lot of people by surprise when it unveiled Anthem. Going from the studio's more linear, story-focused games to something that seemed to be more about fighting strange creatures and getting better weapons and equipment alongside other players probably wasn't a move that many of us expected. Was the studio leaving its roots behind to follow in the footsteps of games like Destiny and The Division? Well, we've had the pleasure of playing the first hours of the game and can reassure you that Bioware is stilling following its own path. They're just exploring the view while they do it.
Everything starts with an impressive cinematic that gives a short summary of who the Freelancers are, why the world isn't filled with the Iron Man-looking suits, and how everything got so bad that most of the population doesn't dare venture outside of the fortress known as Fort Tarsis. It's clear that Bioware has laid the groundwork for a fascinating universe filled with mysteries and potential. The fortress has many interesting characters that you can talk with or overhear talking about their daily problems and pleasures. We really enjoyed how this allows us to digest as much or as little story as we want in classic Bioware style. Ben Irving, the game's lead producer, told us that this allows the studio to keep building upon what he prefers to call narrative instead of story, and we can understand what he means. Obviously we can't say how things will develop after the first few hours, but the opening has definitely caught our interest.
Gamespot
The best way to sum up Anthem, BioWare's online third-person shooter, is to call it a cross between Mass Effect 3 and The Division. On one hand, it's a lot like other, similar shooters: you'll team up with other players as you blast away at various creatures, causing numbers to fly off their bodies as you work to take them down, hoping to get newer, better guns for your powered Javelin mech suits. On the other hand, Anthem is definitely a BioWare game, even if it's a pared-back version of the more complex and story-heavy RPGs the developer is known for. Anthem hits a middle ground that, on the whole, makes it feel unique among the shooters like it.
BioWare recently gave GameSpot a chance to play the first few hours of Anthem at its studio in Austin, Texas, starting from the game's opening missions, as well as some late-game content. That gave us a pretty solid cross-section of what Anthem offers--from its team-based gameplay that feels a lot like the multiplayer of Mass Effect 3, to the way the game delivers story through conversations with its various characters, much like in BioWare RPGs of the past. We got the best sense we've had yet of what it'll be like to play Anthem, at least through the main story campaign.
Variety
"Anthem" is unlikely to scratch the itch BioWare fans still have after 2017's disappointing "Mass Effect: Andromeda."
The high-flying action game is a diversion for the studio that delivered the critically-acclaimed "Dragon Age: Inquisition." It's the latest entry in the shared-world shooter genre that includes Ubisoft's "The Division" and Bungie's "Destiny." The specter of the latter has followed BioWare, as critics and consumers alike have drawn parallels between the two games and left publisher EA in a challenging spot.
"Anthem" looks like it's cut from the same cloth as "Destiny." On the surface, the simple act of being able to fly doesn't look like it would have a significant impact on gameplay. But the feel of maneuvering the robotic Javelin exosuits in three dimensions for traversal and to gain an advantage in combat drives home just what makes 'Anthem' stand apart.
PCGamer
Anthem makes a poor first impression. You'll sit through cutscenes that feel longer than they are, tiring dumps of story that depict dark, sneering legions of bad guys going to battle with you, the good guys, over ancient alien technology. You'll shoot hordes of alien bugs, the rats of sci-fi RPGs, and traverse a vast rocky terrain a little too reminiscent of Andromeda's opening minutes before meeting the funny British guy, the stern militant leader, the nervous tech expert, or the mysterious tattooed space wizard. If it sounds familiar, it's because Mass Effect exists.
And yet, somehow, I'm a sucker for it all. I have the javelin controls to thank. Flying is a dream, Anthem's answer to Destiny's headshots: the thing that will make its questionable bits easier to endure. Watch the video above to see what I mean.
Verge
Toward the end of October 2012, Hurricane Sandy was just beginning its life as a tropical storm, one that would grow into something much more devastating as time went on. From its early days in the Caribbean Sea, it moved across the globe, steadily gaining strength. By the time it reached Kingston, Jamaica, it was classified as a hurricane, and it ravaged Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic before finally reaching the United States, where the storm impacted 24 different states. It was felt particularly hard in New York and New Jersey, with flooded streets and subway tunnels.
At the same time in Edmonton, about 2,000 miles northwest of New York City, the developers at BioWare were figuring out what their next big project would be. The studio was primarily known for its epic single-player role-playing games, like Mass Effect and Dragon Age, but the team wanted to go in a slightly different direction for its new game, which at the time was codenamed "Dylan." The idea was to create a persistent online world, one where players could share experiences together. They developed an ethos they described as "massively shared, but not massively multiplayer."
Casey Hudson, a longtime employee who now serves as BioWare's general manager, was part of this brainstorming process for "Dylan." During that period he also found himself fascinated with the destructive path of Hurricane Sandy. He remembers getting text alerts on his phone, and following the storm's movements online. One morning when he went to the office, he immediately turned on CNN, transfixed by a live stream of the storm reaching New York. A drip-feed of news and reports had built up this dramatic moment, and it gave Hudson an idea. "I was thinking, that's what I wanted people to be able to talk about in the game," he recalls.
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I must say that Fort Tarsis sounds really underwhelming.
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