Anthem is the anti-looter shooter I need right now

Genre is everything, it seems. Genres establish gameplay expectations for players. If you’re a role-playing game, you typically need individual character stats and abilities, preferably broken down by conventions established in the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop RPG. If you’re in the newly emerging looter-shooter genre, you’ll want to keep a tight gameplay loop of “shoot enemy, get better thing” going at a fairly decent clip.

Now, if you’re Anthem, then you’ve chosen to straddle the fence of these two genres. It would take a major developer with experience in both of those—RPGs and looter-shooters—in order to make that work. Otherwise, your gameplay will lean too far in one direction or the other, or perhaps be compromised in both. Anthem’s developer, BioWare, is a company known for making some of the most iconic RPGs, ever. Baldur’s Gate. Mass Effect. Dragon Age. Those are three names etched in stone along the grandiose halls of Best RPGs of All Time. Those games not only give you the requisite RPG skills and RPG abilities, they give you strong character and world building, as well as emotive story arcs.

When it comes to looter-shooters, BioWare’s name doesn’t come up in conversation. Which, I think, is okay. Despite describing “looter-shooter” as a genre, it’s really just a broad description of what 90 percent of all video games do: point-and-click on an enemy to kill, have numbers/resources/guns/ammo/money pop out of it. It’s not so much a genre as a core gameplay loop. It’s just what you do, not what a game is. What seems to categorize one shooter as a looter-shooter more than a vanilla shooter is that the loot, the rewards, pop out at a seemingly faster rate, for always-improving loot. It would be considered bad if either 1) your loot drops at too slow of a rate, or 2) your loot fails to “make the numbers go up” at a perceptibly quick pace. There’s probably some kind of Time-divided-by-Loot math involved.

Anthem is being heavily criticized for getting that Time-divided-by-Loot math wrong. Here’s the problem, though: I don’t get a dopamine drip from just “making the numbers go up.” 

Props to people who do. But that’s not often why I come to video games. I’m not approaching Anthem from the looter-shooter side, though it’s undoubtedly a looter-shooter. I’m approaching Anthem from the RPG side, even if those stats and abilities are baked into your suit as opposed to your protagonist. Sure, your Javelin (as your exosuit is called in the game) is just another place to “make the numbers go up,” rather than seeing the numbers go up on your strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma. Apples to apples. I’d just rather watch my abilities as a player improve by making smarter tactical decisions and reading the room better by improving my situational awareness during a firefight. That’s where I appreciate seeing my internal numbers go up as a player, not necessarily as a character on the screen.

Which means I’m enjoying the exploration and aerial combat just fine. Most critics tend to agree that BioWare handled that part well. Shooting: pretty good. Flying: very good. Yet Anthem appears to have scaled their loot drops “incorrectly” for the looter part of the looter-shooter formula. I understand where those players are coming from. It’s a valid gameplay expectation when you’re billed as a looter-shooter, which is exactly what BioWare and publisher EA did with Anthem—promoted it as a live-game looter-shooter akin to titles like Destiny and The Division.

The part that does give me that dopamine drip is that RPG side that BioWare comes from. The side where non-player characters reveal their doubts as well as their aspirations. The side where the world is littered with history and social studies, not just cover from gunfire and ammo +1. The side where the far-future Byzantine art and architecture build out the world more than any explosion radius and damage-per-second calculation. Coming from that side, the map’s hub, Fort Tarsis, does quite well.

You have Owen, the Robin to your Batman, of sorts, who is dying to be a Javelin pilot while also admitting that he’s emotionally and sensually hypersensitive and broken. There’s Tassyn, one of your mission givers, whose Mean Girls attitude can sometimes sneak out of her usual military bearing. And there’s the shop owner sincerely rooting for the sense of pride and importance you and your Javelin bring back to a place like Fort Tarsis, even if he waxes just a little too poetic, even for a video game. And as far as time and place is concerned, I would love to see a video series of someone simply reading through the incredibly deep glossary as they beat the bounds around the insane verticality of the map. Yes, you just picked off yet another three fire-breathing pterodactyl thingies out of the sky with your sniper rifle, but you did it from a natural rock bridge that helped earlier generations funnel down and dissuade migrating predators. Okay, you can add another dozen or two bugs to your killboard, but you’re adding them from the site where Fort Tarsis was originally intended to be built before the immense sinkholes started tearing apart the landscape.

Heck, as far as world building goes, even on a smaller scale that’s unseen and only implied, there are Frisbee golfers that meet outside of the walls. There’s the fort’s custodian leaving desperate notes posted up on walls around the city to get people to clean up all the pots, pans, and OSHA-disapproved cords and cables strung about the entire place. I’ve even run across a couple cassette recorders that have old-timey radio plays in their cassette decks that must’ve been rewound a hundred times already.

All of this adds up to why I’m confused by Anthem’s 60 Metacritic rating. Okay, so the miniboss you just fought dropped a common item instead of the uncommon or rare item you were hoping for. Scrap it for parts, craft something better, and get back out there. Amidst all this world and character building, amidst all this brilliant architecture and these lived-in spaces, amidst all this language and social interaction with you and among non-player characters—how is the end game (or purported lack thereof) suddenly sending this incredibly robust world down into the D- range of video game scores? On what scholastic scale does a 6 out of 10 make sense for a game with universally praised good looks, good flying, and good shooting?

Thankfully for both of us, dear reader, I’m not writing the official review for Anthem. Not that I’d buff my score to a 10 in order to impossibly counterbalance itself against 45 other negatively critical reviews. But honestly now. I’ve played some 6-out-of-10 games before. Anthem is no 6 out of 10. Not to boil down my argument down to a 10-point grading scale, but that’s just embarrassing, and I’m not talking about for BioWare. I’d just love to see what other games these critics are playing in order to put Anthem on par with a Soldier of Fortune or a Dust 514. Or even looking back on BioWare’s own library, how is Anthem 10 points below Mass Effect: Andromeda, or 20 points below Dragon Age II?

So far, I’m okay with being in the minority for this one. I largely like everything I’ve run across in Anthem so far. I haven’t even reached level 10, though, so that’s where I have to prescribe you a grain of salt with everything you’ve heard me say up to this point. Perhaps that end game is just so inconceivably bad that it’s BioWare’s absolute worst new property ever launched. But tweaking the loot drop rate won’t resurrect that damning Metacritic score. I’ll read more reviews. But the loudest complaints so far have come from the loot drops, so I have to assume that’s what’s buried Anthem.

But hey. Even if that is what’s shoved this game down into being one of the lowest-rated games of the past 12 months, I think I’ll be just fine. You can find me hovering over the water-cooling battlefields, clearing out hives of enemies with primer-detonator combos, then timing out of the server as I comb through the Cortex glossary, noting where all the Strider paths used to run in and out of Fort Tarsis, and giving my Cyper, Owen, a little punch in the shoulder back at base, that little knucklehead. So, we’ll see how my playtime turns out. I’m never going to be a Twitch streamer with 250 hours of gameplay time within the first two weeks of launch. Perhaps when I hit that 250-hour mark, I’ll have seen all Anthem has to show me. But I have to imagine that I’ll have gotten my 60 dollars’ worth by then. Besides, if Anthem turns out to be something of an anti-looter-shooter, then I’m good with that. Anthem is exactly the anti-looter-shooter I need right now.