Release of the day: Anthem — media reaction and sales forecast
On February 22, the MMO shooter Anthem went on sale. The project developed by BioWare is one of the most discussed and controversial games of February. We talk about how he was met by the press, players, and also evaluate possible sales of Anthem.
About the game
Anthem is a session MMO shooter focused on team play. In the English-language media, the game is also often called a loot shooter. It means that the project is focused on constant grinding for the sake of pumping and obtaining higher-level items. The games closest in mechanics to Anthem are Destiny, Warframe and The Division.
From the point of view of gameplay, the game has two interrelated key features that distinguish it from its competitors:
- the game character can fly;
- the game world is focused not only on horizontal, but also on vertical gameplay.
It means that battles and journeys also take place in the air. Players can at any time soar over opponents, hover over an enemy firing point and at the same time continue the fight.
The project has been developed since 2012 in the head studio of BioWare in Edmonton. It was officially stated that work on it started immediately after the completion of work on Mass Effect 3. Since 2015, John Warner, who was previously responsible for games such as Cars 2 and Toy Story 3 at The Walt Disney Company, has been in charge of production.
The launch of the game was accompanied by numerous scandals. The first version of the game, which became available to a limited number of users on January 25, suffered from numerous bugs and performance problems. On January 30, the publisher of the game Electronic Arts published a very complicated schedule of access to the game, which was immediately severely criticized. Two weeks before the full release of the novelty, Electronic Arts launched Apex Legends, a free-to-play team shooter that could potentially compete with Anthem for an audience. Finally, before the launch, it became clear that the game was still not ready for release, and some retail stores hung a substantial discount on the project.
Media ratings
Today, Anthem, judging by Metacritic, is the lowest—rated BioWare game by the press. Her average rating on the site based on a total of 34 reviews is 60 points. Even the scandalous Mass Effect: Andromeda, which is considered a failure, had a much higher score.
Bugs are often scolded.
“Of the four missions that I tried, all four were so full of bugs that it was impossible to pass them. Of these missions, two had portals with endless respawn of opponents, the remaining two did not mark the route or there were no goal markers, that is, it was impossible to advance further on the mission. This is the state of Anthem at the time of release.”— USGamer
However, for most critics, this is not the main problem of the game.
Some publications note things that are unlikely to be repaired with patches.
“The whole Anthem loot system suffers from a lack of clarity. The equipment is boring, and its characteristics are usually incomprehensible.”— PC Gamer
“Anthem’s role—playing mechanics are a disaster.
In the early stages, the rarity of items does not mean anything, since the additional characteristics are distributed randomly and give too little bonus for the item to be useful. In addition, they use annoyingly obscure terminology.”— IGN
At the same time, there are also fundamental mistakes associated with the whole process of the game.
“After each mission, I was dumped back into the hub, even if the first thing I was going to do was turn around and launch the next mission. Quest distributors are cruelly placed far apart from each other, forcing me to move slowly through the unchanging streets hundreds of times just to take the quest, turn around and immediately go back. Overall, the whole settlement seems like a waste of time. Long downloads only exacerbate this impression.” — PC Gamer
“The next problem is the flow of the game.
He is not in Anthem. Usually in a game of this genre, you take three or four missions in the hub, and then complete them one by one in the open world. In the process, you find new tasks that are wrapped up in a tangle of content for you, which leads you around the world of the game. Any activity rewards you with experience and loot, which you can immediately use. This is not possible within the framework of the Anthem mission structure. The flow in the game looks like this: you wander through the hub, take a contract, return to the launch location, watch the loading screen, find yourself in the open world, follow the mission goals, complete the mission, watch the loading screen, watch the mission completion screen, watch the loading screen, return to the Forge, where you put new equipment, watch the loading screen, repeat. This is how it happens every time. There is no way to move from one mission to the next. You can’t just explore the world and stumble into events, because every time you will be teleported to where the mission takes place.”— USGamer
— The Gurdian
User reaction
User ratings are record low. From the players on Metacritic, the project received 4.2 points based on more than 2000 reviews. There are a lot of one-point ratings. Users note that the game was not ready for release at this stage. They complain about: low frame rate, constant errors and long downloads, “dead” hub, boring missions, boring grind, small amount of content, lack of character development, broken game cycle, monotonous weapons, lifeless world, secondary.
Forecast
Electronic Arts, when summarizing the latest quarterly results, mentioned that it plans to sell about 6 million copies of Anthem in the debut month. However, most likely, it was a very optimistic forecast. Today it became known that the initial sales of the game in the UK retail turned out to be 50% less than those of Mass Effect: Andromeda. If we extrapolate this data to the entire market, we can assume that by September Anthem may not sell a million copies.
Another question is how big were the pre-orders from Anthem, and also whether Electronic Arts is going to include those copies of the game that were downloaded as part of the EA Origin subscription. The inclusion of the last two factors in the sales graph can help the company achieve the expected results by the end of the fiscal year, which ends for it in March.
