Anthem: A Bad Game That Deserved a Chance to Get Better

Anthem was one of my first big “beats” outside of Destiny when I started working at Polygon. I was still about eight months away from making the part-time to full-time jump when Anthem came out. For weeks in 2018 and early 2019, a huge majority of my hours went to researching and writing about Anthem. It was gonna be big, and as the looter shooter guy, it was not hard to justify spending almost all of my time on pre-writing guides, writing explainers and “everything we know” articles, compiling social media from devs, and writing up any and all official news with a ton of urgency.

And then Anthem came out. And it was not a good video game.

I don’t really want to take the time to go through all of the individual things Anthem did poorly, because I don’t really want to do that to you and it was a long time ago. I have probably forgotten more frustrations than I can remember. But: The story being nothing comes to mind (although it came with Bioware expectations, which was part of the problem). And the buildcrafting wasn’t where it needed to be. The endgame was nonexistent, with nothing but a promise of something greater in the future. And, if I recall, there was a lot of balance disparity between the classes in some of the pre-endgame activities. And that’s all if you made it through the leveling process, which had one particular busy-work section in it that I remember so vividly that it’s still the first thing I think of when I experience obnoxious padding in story campaigns.

But you could fly, man.

I know that’s always what people go with when describing Anthem, that “the flight was incredible,” but it really was. It was the thing that captured people for that game. Even when it was revealed that it was a looter game (which just made it all the more exciting for me, but turned off a bunch of others), people still wanted to try it for the flight alone. I would argue that, to this day, no game has really captured flight the way Anthem did. [Jeff note: It was the only thing that made me play it and the only thing I remember about it.]