Anthem: Familiarity Matters

I fired up Anthem and decided I was so far removed from what I had played before that I needed to start over entirely. It wasn’t long before I was lost again though.

The first couple of missions acquaint the player with the controls and some of the lore of the world. Controls are easy enough, though I’m not sure I really understand the difference between a grenade and a shoulder mounted micro-missile. They get into the vocabulary of the world pretty directly, and I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’m lost about five minutes in. They’re talking about Shapers and the Heart of Rage and the Anthem of Creation as if it’s all just matter of fact stuff that everyone already understands. They talk, at least initially, about Javelin suits piloted by Freelancers (the player character’s role) being some kind of folk heroes but also somehow mercenaries at the same time, who then lose their hero status as a result of being defeated in a battle, but they’re still mercenaries, and they’re still doing good-guy-things, but not afforded the same respect as before. They provide some names for the big walking mobile launch platforms and some enemies, but I’m already in such a word soup that I can’t recall the names, barely holding on to what I’m doing in the moment, let alone why. And then I go meet Owen, who’s my cypher that is…my backup? My “guy in the chair”? But he also wants to be a Freelancer, so maybe he’s like a Padawan eager to become a Jedi?

Contrast this with playing through the final story mission of the current season of Destiny. After weeks of preparing for it, Queen Mara is ready to perform the exorcism that Savathun has requested, removing her worm and freeing her from the grip of the Darkness. We Guardians head to the Dreaming City to perform the ritual and combat ensues as Savathun’s sister Xivu Arath throws her forces at the player in an attempt to stop us. Mara and her Techeuns perform the ritual while Saint-14 protects them with a void bubble, and after some minutes the task is completed, with Savathun disappearing into a kind of mist, but also relinquishing the body of Osiris, who she had possessed. This ultimately fulfills her bargain with the Vanguard, raising questions about whether or not she is truly an enemy after all or if she will end up assisting us against the Darkness. It’s a pretty satisfying conclusion to the plot that’s been weaved for a while now, and leads us directly into the narrative of the upcoming Witch Queen expansion.

To be perfectly fair, there’s a lot of word salad here in both games. A lot of background that exists, and a lot going on that I think is going to be really easy to cause eyes to glaze over. And yet, one is very confusing and feels like it’s dense to the point of trying to keep players from understanding things, while the other is logical and feels like it makes sense – is even pretty decent storytelling. The difference? Familiarity.

The Anthem missions I played through, the ones that serve to confuse more than enlighten, are right at the beginning of the game. There’s no context or familiarity for players hopping into things for the first time to understand half of what’s being explained – even with some faint familiarity from my time playing the game at launch, I’m still largely lost. It’s an in media res beginning that doesn’t serve the player or the story in any meaningful way, really only creating confusion for the player since the character they are playing is supposed to be familiar with this world and its terms already, so things aren’t exactly explained except in lore drops which are entirely optional.

Again, to be fair, Destiny had a bit of this problem early on. Background information and deeper lore on the alien races and history of the world(s) was limited to lore drops – initially not even accessible in the game! But from the very beginning, the player’s Ghost (companion NPC) is explaining things to the player because the context is the player-character has no memory of what’s going on and is unfamiliar with their surroundings. The Ghost literally says – within the first minute of gameplay – “I’m a Ghost. Actually, now I’m your Ghost. And you…Well, you’ve been dead a long time. So you’re going to see a lot of things you won’t understand.” It’s some pretty clear lampshading, but it’s also extremely effective at saying to the player “you won’t understand everything right now, you don’t have to, we’ll explain what you need to know”. There is no such accommodation in Anthem’s opening missions.

I’ll also note that the mission I played in Destiny with the massive wall of vocabulary that wouldn’t make sense to newcomers is the culmination of several missions. There’s been lots of lore and story developments since Destiny released, and it’s been literal years of building towards this mission. Players are expected to understand what’s going on because they’ve been given the opportunity to become familiar with everything that’s going on. 

I fully expect a brand new player who hasn’t touched Destiny to be completely lost if they jumped into this mission, but that player would be sidestepping tremendous amounts of content in order to get there. The brand new Anthem player? They don’t have any way to get up to speed before playing these missions. The only way one might be familiar enough to understand it all is if they’ve gone and looked at the resources that sprouted up in the wake of the game being released – at launch there would have been no hope at all.

How does this happen? The two key ways, I believe, are editing, and a writing team that doesn’t get outside perspective early enough. First, it’s easy to start in the middle of the story where things are already understood if you’ve written the entire story and then just edited things in such a way that the middle is towards the beginning. Sometimes this works and provides a vehicle for mystery and intrigue – see Christopher Nolan’s Memento for an excellent example of this. Here, starting in the middle only creates a state of regular confusion that has me wondering if I missed something and should understand more but I can't exactly go back and check. The second way, when the writing team doesn’t get outside perspective, happens as a result of being too familiar with the material. If I’m writing a story, developing concepts and worldbuilding are a natural part of that process. And so as I work things out, I integrate them into the story. I understand why things are the way they are, even if I haven’t explained them to the audience. It’s only when I bring that story to people who can provide a fresh perspective – people outside of the writing process – that I can see where I’ve created confusion by not spelling things out. In terms of game development, getting this feedback early on is key, because everything is being built around a certain experience, and if I understand too late that I’ve made things confusing, I can’t always go back and change things to make it better without also forcing changes to a host of other things.

We know that Anthem’s development was a struggle, that things came together far later than they really should have. We don’t have specifics on how the story came together, as far as I’m aware, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn it was a combination of things that ultimately contribute to the confusing initial experience.

I’m hoping that, like Destiny, Anthem’s writing clears things up the deeper I get into the game. Some things, though, I’m afraid are just going to be lost on the cutting room floor, with no hope of recovery because EA won’t invest in salvaging things. I can see how that could be a significant investment though, given how much work just the opening needs.