Worse than ever, honestly. Not that I expected that BioWare was somehow going to take a genre they know nothing about, pair that with technology they aren't particularly good with, and somehow deliver something great, but isn't it surprising just how many lessons remain unlearned from Destiny?
Say what you will, I fucking loathe Destiny 2, but Bungie's work is the absolute best out there right now -- if you're going to do any of these types of games, it is required fucking reading, both Destiny 1 and Destiny 2. What went wrong is just as important as what went right with those games. Anthem shows an ignorance to those entries in the genre that, to me, is surprisingly staggering.
You know what is funny is, Division 2 is now the best looking game in the genre because it promises to be basically the same thing as Division 1, plus a raid. Destiny 2 actually failed to be "more of the same" -- there was too much removed from the formula that Bungie had to go back and re-discover over time, and by the end it was far too late in mine and most peoples' estimations, I would think. People want iteration in this genre; we want devs to cheat off of other peoples work; take what works, and roll again on the stuff that doesn't in the hopes that it brings us closer to a more complete vision for the genre.
It's an incomplete genre, in my opinion. It isn't well-formed. Bungie has struggled with this, and they're basically the best at it, or were. Everyone has a fundamental content problem, but bring your technology problems (poor engine / scalability, in Bungie's case, non-seamless design in Anthem's, among other issues), or your poor social features (no text chat, no ping, lack of cohesive features that allow people to easily play together), and you're just proving over and over why people are both simultaneously thirsty for more games in this genre and at the same time loathe an entry of it.
Meanwhile, Division is the most boring of all of these games, and yet, it has sound technology, it is an iterative step, which is what most people want, and it sounds like they actually listened to the criticisms of the previous game. It's ridiculous when you have such fucking monolithic presences like Bungie and BioWare failing in their forte, and goddamn UbiSoft is swinging in to steal that thunder. At this point, all Ubi's team has to do is fucking show up, and they'll have the best entry in the genre available.
So, yeah, the looter shooter genre is disappointing at best for me. Going back to Destiny 1 and thinking ahead about how this entire thing could evolve, I'd never expect that things could actually get worse, but the worst vanilla Destiny had to offer is miles better than Anthem's best, and that's a bad sign for the genre.