Anthem: Balance

I have been struggling with writing my thoughts about games lately. There are a few reasons for this, but a big one is that this blog is supposed to be about finding the meaning in video games, but it’s been far easier to just analyze the games I’m playing. Comparing Anthem to Destiny, for example, brings up all kinds of opportunities for placing the game systems and content side by side and judging what is best, and why. While that kind of analysis can be interesting and useful, it is better suited for finding what works best in a game, not so much for finding the meaning in the comparison or the games themselves. This doesn’t mean I won’t be doing that kind of analysis going forward, but I do want to take things a bit further than that, to dig into things in a way that (hopefully) hasn’t been done dozens of times already. This may mean that posts are a little less regular than was initially planned, but hopefully the quality of content benefits from a more thoughtful approach going forward.

I completed the main campaign for Anthem last night. I had been following my typical BioWare RPG method where I’d play as many of the sidequest missions as possible before playing a main storyline mission, checking in with all of the characters I could between missions in order to advance any tangential storylines or dialog trees. This works out pretty well in the Mass Effect games, for example, as it gives players the opportunity to get feedback from various characters on how missions went before tackling the next one. The last thing most RPG players want, after all, is to miss out on content simply because they were in too much of a hurry and skipped past the opportunity to experience something.

The problem with this approach, specifically in regard to how it works with a Live Service game like Anthem, is that the game is designed in such a way that the developers want to continually draw the player back to the game, having players create a routine of a set of activities. The goal is to keep players in the game and spending money, no doubt, but this means creating repeatable content that draws players back regularly. And unless the more freeform aspect of the game has a creative element that allows players to build things for themselves, a la Minecraft, this means that there has to be missions, quests, whatever you want to call them. And, unless I’m missing something, Anthem doesn’t communicate to the player what is and isn’t part of that ongoing content loop until after the credits have rolled, at which point it’s made clear that certain missions and even the entire storyline can be repeated as much as the player desires.

But without a clear idea from the beginning of what is and isn’t intended to be a repeatable activity, you kind of are left to your own devices when it comes to feeling out whether something is relevant to a questline or if it’s just filler. Fortunately for me I didn’t end up playing too many filler missions, but there were a few. And in a game that was already trying my patience, artificially extending the playtime even further was a bit frustrating.

Anthem’s storyline is a slog. To be perfectly clear, in this context, that means it’s a mostly uninteresting mess that fails to capture the imagination most of the time, filled with characters that feel rather shallow, with stakes that are almost completely lost in the jargon-filled dialog and world-building. The reasons I pushed through to the end are 1) that I kept hoping things would get better, the fog would lift, and everything would begin to gel together, 2) that I really wanted to give the game the best chance to sell me on the ideas it contained, and 3) that I just wanted to check the box that I’d beaten it, if only for my own peace of mind. And, I suppose, 4) the flight mechanics in the game are really satisfying, and I enjoyed that a ton, apart from the overheating mechanic.

Combining this lackluster story with frustration born of poor design, I was reaching the point where I didn’t really want to put much more time into the game to wrap it up. I was actually kind of relieved when I got the notice that returning to the Heart of Rage would prevent me from returning to the fort until I’d completed the mission. I took this notice, accurately, as a warning that this was the final mission and that it was time for me to wrap up any other quests I wanted to do. By this time, I’d already completed all of the sidequests I wanted to do though and went straight for the finale. It wasn’t bad, but it certainly wasn’t anything all that interesting, apart from being the only boss fight with relatively different phases.

I’ve talked about managing expectations before, and how it’s important that the developer and the player both manage them well. My level of frustration towards the end suggests I didn’t do a great job of that here, and I’m not really sure why. The reviews were pretty upfront about the disappointment that was Anthem. The general gamer populous was in agreement. My own early experiences with the game were not anything real special either. All the evidence was there to suggest this wasn’t going to magically turn around at the end, that it wasn’t going to all come together for some fantastic experience by the time the credits started to roll. I shouldn’t really be surprised or disappointed by how it ended, right? The signs were there all along.

We do this with other things too, ignoring the signs that everyone else can see, hoping that somehow our experience will be different or better somehow. We think that the stars might align just right for us when they didn’t for anyone else. We hope that something unique about us will be just the thing that was needed to buck the trend of failure that everyone else has experienced. We think we can be the exception in a bad situation.

Exceptions do occur sometimes. It’s what feeds the fantasy, because if no exceptions ever occurred, then it would be just ludicrous for us to think our experience of something might be the exception. And it’s not even far-fetched to believe that our experience with a video game might be the exception rather than the rule. If you look at the Halo subreddit, for example, you might think that Halo: Infinite was an abject failure of a game, the worst entry in the franchise. I really enjoyed that game though. I think it’s probably one of the best in the series.

So when exceptions exist, but we aren’t guaranteed to be one of them, how do we move forward, not just with video games, but generally? If we assume we’ll never be the exception when faced with something bad, we don’t have a lot of hope. And if we assume we’ll be the exception, then we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment when we’re not.

I don’t really have an answer. My guess is there’s something of a balancing act that has to take place, not living entirely without hope, but also not believing we’ll never face disappointment. What exactly that balance is, though? I don’t know. Being aware of the need for balance though is important, and probably a good first step.