Post Script

What hope is there for a loot game that doesn’t understand the thrill of the chase?

There is a widely held suspicion that Anthem was not the game BioWare wanted to make. That it was toiling away on another of its signature singleplayer RPGs when EA, green-eyed at the engagement numbers Activision was touting for Destiny, enforced a genre switch on the studio. Certainly this is a game of contradictions, that often gives the impression it either used to be, or would prefer to be, a more traditional BioWare game. Yet that alone does not explain away all the game’s problems.

Nor does the Frostbite engine EA has spent this console generation pushing its internal studios to use, though it offers a plausible explanation for some of Anthem’s issues. It is easy to see why a game engine designed for Battlefield’s sprawling deathmatches would struggle to carry a fully open world, hence those loading screens. Perhaps it also explains why loot cannot be inspected and equipped the moment you pick it up – something promised by the original announcement trailer – and why we cannot fiddle around with our loadouts during loading screens (a Destiny feature we never truly appreciated until it was taken away).

Anthem’s real problems lie much deeper. This is a game that borrows liberally, and often brazenly, from the most popular looters around – among them Destiny, Diablo III and Warframe – without seeming to understand what makes those games work. Anthem is a loot game that gets loot wrong, and that is a far greater concern than any loading screen or crash bug. This is an established genre, with fundamental principles, and any developer seeking a slice of this potentially very lucrative pie ignores them at its peril.

First, loot should be exciting from reasonably early on, since it is what keeps people playing, and coming back for more. Developers can reasonably assume that the large part of the playerbase will simply play through the campaign and then quit; that a smaller portion will carry on, mopping up sidequests until they either run out of things to do or hit the level cap; and that a smaller number still will push on into the endgame, replaying missions and quests in the endless hunt for the most powerful gear. All need an incentive to keep playing. A good loot system turns the campaign player into a level-cap one, and potentially an endgame one too.

For that, new gear must be able to be viewed and equipped the second it drops – with some exceptions. Diablo III’s Legendaries, like Destiny 2’ s Prime Engrams, must be taken back to town and decrypted, and there is a tantric sort of thrill in waiting to learn the precise nature of a drop you know to be powerful. Arguably Anthem could do the same with its higher tiers of gear, Masterwork and Legendary. But not with the commongrade items that are still dropping regularly for us over

50 hours into the game.

Next, loot should be about empowering playstyles, not just making numbers go up. While Anthem’s combo system inherently invites a degree of experimentation, it is not enough by itself to keep players on the hook for hundreds of hours. Too much of its loot game is about gear pieces that offer minor percentage boosts to other slots; a 13 per cent increase to an ability’s cooldown is nice to have, sure, but it should not be the focus of the loot grind until the very end of the game, when committed min-maxers are seeking to optimise specific builds. The more successful games in this genre give players a peek behind the late-game curtain, by making high-tier gear available much earlier on in small quantities. In Diablo III, Legendaries can drop in your first hour; in Destiny 2, you are given one Exotic weapon and armour piece for progressing through the campaign. In doing so you not only give players fun new ways to play, but also hint at what could be theirs if they stay the course. The closest Anthem comes to this is a Legendary scout rifle, exclusive to the game’s special edition, that appears to shoot frozen peas and whose principal benefit is a boost to your Luck stat, increasing drop rates of the game’s miserable low-tier loot.

Optional higher difficulty levels can provide a meaningful incentive for committed players to stick around – something Diablo does wonderfully well with its dozens of Greater Rift tiers, and which Anthem seeks to ape with the three Grandmaster settings which unlock once you hit its level cap. But difficulty only works if your action game is rock-solid; being oneshot-killed is one thing, but having it done by something you couldn’t see coming is another thing entirely. And the rewards must be commensurate with the effort involved – something Anthem’s GM difficulties failed to offer even before a seemingly severe nerf to drop rates was hidden in the day-one patch. Rates should never be used as a way to paper over an absence of meaningful things to do. If, a week after launch, players are running out of things to do, it’s not because your drop rates are too generous. It’s because you didn’t give them enough to chase in the first place.

Games of this kind are often presented as being about numbers, but in fact they are about feelings. The dopamine rush of a powerful drop; the fire of synapses as you inspect it, consider its implications and build around it; and then the thrill of testing it out, knowing that you’re making the hunt for the next new toy both easier and more fun. Given all the bugs in the game at launch, BioWare perhaps has more pressing matters on its to-do list. But if it does not solve its loot problem, the next few months of patches will be for naught.

Loot should be about empowering playstyles, not just making numbers go up