Good Writing Can Be A Saving Grace: Writing and story could have been Anthem’s unique hook in the looter shooter arena Oruç Dim Follow Feb 26, 2019 · 3 min read

Anthem released four days ago to a pretty mediocre critical reception: Currently its Metacritic score sits at 60. It is not doing so well sales-wise either, as it only managed to sell 10% of Destiny’s sales in the same sales window (which is the first week). Most prominent criticisms Anthem has received are long loading times, same-y looking environments, dull gameplay and poor characterization and story.

Assume for a second that Anthem had an exceptional story and characters, but all other flaws were also present. Wouldn’t that be a great redeeming quality if that was the case? Since, if that was true, Anthem would have something that cannot be found in other games: A unique, fleshed out setting with believable characters. You can find nearly all of the other things Anthem has to offer in other titles, but one thing that cannot be found in other games is the setting and story of a game. Sure, there are bound to be similar settings and stories, but if a game has good characterization and writing, its setting and story is going to be unique enough to set itself apart from other similar settings and stories. This could be the one redeeming quality of a game that has long loading times, dull gameplay and very similar looking environments, and it would even lead to it having a niche following among the gamer circles that value well written games (much like Alpha Protocol, for example, which managed to sell 700.000 copies through word of mouth in a couple of months and believe me when I say that everything else besides the well written story is quite terrible in that game, and if the story was also terrible, the sales wouldn’t even come close to that number).

As of right now, after four days of launch, we do not know if the players that like and play the game in this moment will be playing it in the months to come. But a well written story is a much better hook than just ‘fun, okay’ gameplay: You care about what will happen to your favorite characters, or, in other words, have an emotional investment in the story, so you come back for the later parts of the it. It is not just some weapon, or a skin you are after; what you are after is the continuation of the story that you want to see the rest of; something you cannot find anywhere else. You can find much more entertaining gameplay in Destiny 2, for example, but its story is nothing to write home about. This very well could be Anthem’s unique hook, but, as we all know, they blew it. They thought that more than two dialogue options would be confusing for the audience this game is targeted towards, well, it turns out they targeted the wrong audience from the beginning (or they should have tried to get that audience accustomed to these kind of conversations).

With Anthem, EA and Bioware are trying to penetrate a market that has the Division, Destiny and most importantly, free to play Warframe in it, and these are all better than Anthem in many respects. If they targeted their original audience, the fans of titles like Baldur’s Gate, Dragon Age and Mass Effect, and develop a much better story and characters with the rest staying exactly the same, Anthem would have a much bigger chance of survival in this climate. Right now, it fights for survival, and I simply don’t think its chances are that great with the much bigger fish in the sea when it comes to gameplay systems and technical stability.