By now, players will be familiar with the notion that Anthem is a middling game that has some extraordinary qualities in it. Those elements never really get a chance to shine, and the game is worse for it. Whether it be the tantalizing hint of flight being more relevant than it is, or a well-designed fight with a Titan, there’s just enough present within Anthem that it leaves fans wishing it had more.
How much of that feeling stems from the game’s original reveal trailer? The E3 2017 Anthem trailer was one of the most talked about at the show. At the time, it seemed to promise a natural evolution of Destiny’s core gameplay values. There are also a lot of things present within that trailer that, for better or worse, define Anthem now - its open world freeplay, the Javelins themselves, the city of Tarsis as a hub, and dizzying flight.
Yet for all of the promise of the game’s E3 2017 trailer, Anthem’s 2019 launch has been a much different experience. There’s a lot of differences between that trailer and what we got at launch, and very little of it is a favorable addition through subtraction. Here’s our take on the biggest, most noticeable differences between what we saw in 2017 versus what we got in reality under two years later - but first, here’s the E3 2017 gameplay reveal trailer:
Weapon Equipping on the Fly
One of the major changes BioWare made to Anthem comes in the way the game approaches equipment. Anthem loves the idea of loot, and that’s been a selling point for the genre it occupies for most of its existence. Later in the trailer, the player finds a new legendary rifle called Jarra’s Wrath and equips it immediately upon picking it up, upgrading their weapons loadout. It’s a simple thing and, for those who haven’t played Anthem yet, doesn’t seem out of the ordinary at all.
Anthem doesn’t let players equip weapons while they’re still in the instance they joined. The launch version doesn’t even identify which weapons have been found until the mission is over. That’s reserved for a visit to the mission end screen, which will then inform players of what loot they’ve acquired. Even then, they can’t equip it - players have to navigate one screen further, to the Forge, to do so.
It’s a weird discrepancy, and it’s one that illustrates the system that’s in place after launch wasn’t always there. It seems like there may be technical limitations fans are unaware of that made the loot equipping system currently in place a better choice. It’s also clear to basically anyone even passing familiar with looter shooters that being able to swap their stale guns for new, shiny ones as soon as they’re picked up is a big part of the appeal of loot in the first place.
Fort Tarsis, the Living, Breathing Hub
The first difference in the trailer is even more obvious than the rest that follow. The trailer opens up onto Fort Tarsis, the hub that Anthem uses to centralize its quest givers, dailies, and story beats. In 2017, Tarsis was alive, with ambient noise in the background, bustling streets, and even characters with missions to give approaching the Freelancer instead of the other way around. Tarsis looks incredible in the trailer, like some of BioWare’s finest creations in games past.
At launch, though, Fort Tarsis is little more than a shell of what the trailer suggested it could look like. There isn’t really a lot of movement, and when there is, it is NPCs walking awkwardly past, without any real purpose. Nobody really comes up to the Freelancer and checks in or gives them missions. Everything is much more mechanical and plain in the Fort Tarsis we got from Anthem once it released. That isn’t to say that the environment itself isn’t interesting. Fort Tarsis has a lot going from it from a design standpoint. Unfortunately, there was a lot of promise in the trailer that went unrealized when it comes to the Fort.
Dynamic Open World
Speaking of environments feeling alive, the trailer also shows what happens when players leave Fort Tarsis, and it looks spectacular. There’s a level of flexibility in the movement - not to mention no restrictions on flight - that makes the world pop. There’s also life happening in the background as the Freelancer seeks out the location of their mission, as an Ursix gets into a fight with a pack of Howlers unprompted by the player. The environment is a little more closed off, allowing the decision to put things like tree roots or rock faces to impact combat. Finally, the player is able to dive into water just in front of a group of enemies and emerge to catch them by surprise a little later.
In Anthem’s release version, the open world freeplay is much more wooden. We’ve yet to see creatures attack each other in a visually appealing way, and there just isn’t as much happening on Anthem as there seemed like there would be. The trailer made world events look much more common than they would be, when in reality they are pretty distant from each other in both spacing and timing.
Perhaps the most crucial point of difference here, though, is the notion that a world event could contribute to a mission a Freelancer has already received. The way Anthem works now, players need to choose between Freeplay, Strongholds, or Missions prior to loading into the game world. Once there, players are locked in to whatever they chose. That means missions can’t inform Freeplay games, and there’s no ability to pick up a new quest while completing one the player has underway already.
Page 2 of 2: Seamless Transitions & Drop-In/Drop-Out Gameplay
Seamless Transitions
A small touch in the reveal trailer is that, when the player steps into their Javelin, they seamlessly transition into the open world by watching their character leave Fort Tarsis. It’s not a core gameplay mechanic, but it certainly adds polish to a presentation that wasn’t lacking in it already, and it made Anthem’s load times look good. The aesthetic is part of Anthem’s appeal, and playing into it with pseudo-cutscene loading screens seemed like a deft touch on the part of BioWare.
In practice, though, Anthem is plagued by actual loading screens, and there hasn’t even been a fix that works to reduce their times to a reasonable amount yet. While the animation to get into a Javelin remained the same, it was then followed by Mission Select and loading instead of what the trailer demonstrated. It’s not a big deal, but it’s yet another element missing from a game that really seems to have promised more than it could deliver with its E3 2017 trailer.
Calling In Party Members On The Fly
Perhaps the biggest omission in the game comes right towards the end. The trailer closes with a Cataclysm storm, which is content that isn’t quite available in Anthem yet but will be soon. It’s what happens once Cataclysm storm starts, as the Freelancer in the trailer calls in two more friends on the fly to add them to the group and complete the task.
The ability to drop into other people’s games is pretty much impossible in Anthem. In Freeplay, players are automatically put into matchmaking until they find however many people they need to have a 4 person squad. Once in, that squad is locked. It also makes it impossible to invite two friends to complete a mission objective in Freeplay with, because maximum squad size is 4 and the game auto-assigns it to every Freeplay session. Match-making with friends is required to be done before arriving in Freeplay. Perhaps Freeplay looked a lot different a few years ago, but the suggestion that calling in friends was possible is a strange one to make if there’s not much intent to follow through, as it would represent a major feature for online play.
Overall, the differences between the E3 2017 trailer and Anthem at launch are noteworthy, but not necessarily evidence that BioWare ever misled anyone regarding the game. It feels much more like things were cut from Anthem to hit a reasonable launch window, and that, unfortunately for the developer, a lot of the cut content ended up being things that had been showcased previously. The trailer was also made to play up the elements of the game that were considered a strong selling point, so the dynamic open world and the most detailed, closed-in elements of the map were probably never going to make it into the final product. Still, these are some big differences, and if even a couple of these features had made it into Anthem’s finished product, perhaps critics would be singing a different tune.
