Anthem _ Why I Dare to Hype (and what I still fear...) Part 2

so there's a big world out there but the limits of it aren't clear to us what we've seen so far though it gives us plenty of reason to be excited drawing heavily on an avatar inspiration lush jungle world seems to seamlessly merge the technology of the humans with the primal savagery of the environment we see it in the herd of beasts we fly over and we certainly see it in the giant gorilla like lizard thing we see messing up a few other creatures we decide that he's probably too much for us to handle so we peace out of there indicating that we're either under level for that content or we require a full squad to bring him down safely as we continue to explore the world we see more and more the ruins of a collapsed civilization both above and below the water there are remnants of an old world that we continue to uncover and explore during our adventure and as we begin to service bullets streaked through the water past us and I just wanted to point that out because that's pretty damn cool here we get a first look at combat this is a third-person action game though it's unclear if we get to switch to first-person if we choose to we're rocking a shotgun here and these enemies drop quickly at the hands of it our hot bar beneath indicates that we also have equipped three special abilities though none of them are used here in this encounter our team mate however the Colossus does use one of his abilities a move very reminiscent of the Titan smash in destiny but to be fair destiny isn't the first game to employ ground pounds of some description next we dynamically thrust into a mission a radio call tells us of an impending ambush and the same mech dinosaur thing we saw earlier is now toppled by enemy fire we wait for our teammate to fire the first volley using a mortar he mentioned earlier indicating to us that we can choose what sort of weapons and abilities we can customize with our javelins next it's our turn we use one of our abilities to lock-on and fire over a dozen missiles into the fodder below they quickly fall and we go forward to collect our loot if there was any doubt that answer was going to be eluded shooter its dispelled here the enemies leave an Engram star loot drop on the ground which takes a moment to decrypt revealing a legendary tier weapon

That being said, we can already say that weapons have a name, rarity scale, level, and weapon stats, including many of the staples we expect to be a system very familiar to anyone who's played a looter shooter before has, and as long as it isn't revolutionary it doesn't have to be, this system has worked dozens of times and will continue to work here The leader immediately invites two more teammates, one of which is the assassin-looking javelin I saw earlier in a mentioned screenshot. The assembled group plunges headlong into the storm, narrowly dodging the wild animals fleeing in front of it. The trailer ends with us flying right into the eye of that storm, indicating this will no doubt teleport us to some sort of group-based event, like a dungeon or boss, but it's unlikely to be a raid since that event is dynamic and dynamic Raids tend to take place in fixed locations, and that was the unveiling of the anthem in all its glory. It was so impressive that it immediately became the hot topic at e3 2017. So the real question was, can Bioware live up to the massive amount of hype they've just created or are about to add joins the list of games that were heavily heralded but launched poorly

After the trailer was released, the reaction was almost universally positive, but there were certainly a large number of people who didn't trust what they were seeing, either because it looked too good or because they had lost faith in Bioware to have one Delivering a compelling RPG experience given the disappointing nature of many of its recent releases, the visual downgrade was an issue that the digital foundry's excellent YouTube channel had tackled head-on. A detailed examination of their trailer revealed that this was certainly running on an Xbox One X at a checkerboard-like 4k resolution, one could see some of the compromises made to make this possible, like texture pop-ins and dynamic resolutions. The takeaway from this is that yes, this was real, this was warts-and-all gameplay and while the scripted nature of it was unlikely to be fully realized in-game. The demo on display indicated that there's a very good chance we'll see this level of visual quality when we finally play the game on Xbox One X or on a high-end PC, which is fantastic news no matter what you say about Anthem think. I think the other big and consistent comment that started to flow was that this was just Bioware's attempt at Destiny and let's face it, there's a lot of Destiny in what we've seen here. Mankind is housed safely in a kind of tower protected from the harsh outside world by their wall. The spears give them superpowers Squad-based looter shooter gameplay loop Yes, there's a lot of destiny here, no doubt about that, but there's a lot more. The graphical engine is truly the next generation where Destiny is starting to look decidedly dated as it has decided to stick with its old engine Destiny - The Spears also works in the third-person perspective where Destiny is a first- person game is. The game seems far more skill-driven, where Destiny is primarily dependent on the weapon you're holding and more than just one. Everything else about the world exploration that we see is miles away from destiny, the scale, the flying, the underwater world, the verticality

it just feels fresh and different, in a way their Fates revealed if I don't love Fate more than most other games, but I wrote on Twitter when I first saw Anthem that this is the kind of innovation was what I was really hoping for from Destiny up until the time it was revealed I didn't want flying sentinels but I did want to see the Destiny Formula had evolved rather than just more Destiny Anthem to me at least seems to be the place where the ludus shooter takes its next big innovative steps, but of course we've been here before and more specifically I've been here before to date the game I've been looking forward to the most more than any other is Star Wars The Old Republic, the Bioware MMORPG announced and released in 2008 Three years later, as a hopelessly addicted whale gamer, I saw the future of the MMO genre in the Old Republic by merging my favorite license with my favorite play style and to this day no game has disappointed me when I think of this game It just makes me sad to know how wrong Bioware was they wrote a phenomenal Star Wars game but delivered a very, very boring MMO, and the game utterly broke as a result, even though it didn't recoup the huge investment in its development. In a recent interview, EA's head of product development said that something very familiar was the start of a ten-year journey for Bioware and EA is. It's the exact time frame we heard when we first saw Destiny reveal that Bungie and Activision had signed a 10-year agreement on multiple sequels and DLC people don't like hearing stuff like that because it implies that Stuff being held back and released slowly over a ten year period, whether that's true or not, the fate association alone is enough to get a lot of people going. If this is going to be a 10 year journey for Bioware and EA, it has to be on exceptional genre-defining gameplay, and I've been playing Bioware games since I was a kid d I think both their gameplay design and storytelling skills have taken an evolution that you can follow old-school closely by checking out yourself are aware when masters are both story and gameplay systems and narrative form

but with Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic, Bioware began investing more in narrative than gameplay. Do not get me wrong. The Kotas gameplay was still great, but it was designed for consoles, so the complexity of the gameplay had to be toned down to be more accessible on a controller and for an audience not used to complex PC RPGs is a trend that continued with Jade Empire and Mass Effect with phenomenal stories but just okay gameplay again, they weren't bad by any means but they weren't spectacular either Bioware started making some bad games here. Dragon Age 2 was both poorly written and poorly executed from a gameplay design perspective. All the depth of the first game completely eroded the attempt to make Star Wars The Old Republic console-friendly was worth it for the storytelling of Drew Cap-Haitien alone, but the gameplay left a lot to be desired. Dragon Age Inquisition was a huge improvement over Dragon Age 2 in terms of storytelling, but it's gameplay continued to be hollow and uninteresting and Mass Effect Andromeda was objectively Bioware's worst game ever, meaning Andromeda led to Bioware Montreal has effectively been downsized and there are rumors that the planned single player DLCs have been shelved, there have been plans for a sequel to Andromeda but apparently those plans have now been shelved. The common thread in all of this for me is double number one. Drakkar's passion is the heart and soul of Bioware's storytelling, and the fact that he's back gives me enormous hope for the future of Anthem, but as an MMO and Anthem's success is not determined by how good its story is is, but how good its gaming systems are. Kotor and Mass Effect were great for their stories, not the gameplay, but Anthem won't have the luxury of that path, it has to compete with Destiny's exceptional gameplay loop if only it can be surpassed, and for that reason I hold all mine untold hype in check Thinking and speaking about this for myself, although I dare to believe I know preaching is popular, don't get upset, but to be honest I really don't care

hyped for anthem extremely hyped in fact I think there are just so many reasons to be excited for this game so I'm willing to sign on for that ride come what may for me personally the reveal was sort of an epiphany I spent the last few months figuring out where to take my channel in the future and while watching the anthem trailer I realized that this is what skill up was really about it was a channel for games like this ludo shoote  RPGs games like the division like destiny like anthem and it was then that I decided to recommit myself to the original identity of this channel I'm going to be doing other things on other channels but the majority of the content you're going to see here on skill up is going to be based on the division and on destiny and on anthem these are the games that I love and I know you guys love them too so I want to work hard to bring that focus back to my channel over the coming months you'll notice that the anthem logo now adorns my youtube channel banner right up there with destiny and division that's a statement of intent about where I want to take things I'm very excited for the future and I hope you guys will be along for the ride with me thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

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