Amending the Anthem

 I can fix it: I have the imagination!

Live Service games: The final frontier. Aside from the mastermind of the genre, Destiny itself, it seems that the 'Live Service' style of game is one forever circling the drain ready to swallow up the unwary. A missing link between single player focused personally driven narrative and massively multiplayer bigger-picture gradually unveiling narrative; it never seems able to grasp onto that core audience of people who'll love it for what it is. Probably because so many of these games try to be exactly what Destiny is, not realising that Destiny was a success case of funding, development and novelty that even then had a plethora of growing pains in the beginning. Still, there has to be a way to do one of these games right. Destiny, and I guess the Division, can't live as sole arbiters on what it is to be a healthy live Service.

No, in fact I'm convinced that there is some missing substance that all these games have lost and I'm going to discover what it is as I unravel the method through which we might theoretically reboot some of the saddest failures. Avengers recently shut off all updates, and though I wish I could fix that one up first- I'll be honest it's a difficult conundrum to solve. Superhero's as a genre just doesn't seem to work from a fundamental level with what a Live Service functions on, as we've seen twice already with Avengers and Gotham Knights, (I know Knights was an offline Live Service, but the principal was the same) and we're about to see it a third time when 'Suicide Squad: Kills the Justice League' commits Seppuku. So I want to take look at an easier game to work with, Bioware's supposed opus: Anthem.

Now Anthem was one of those games doomed from the start, with no one quite knowing what the game they were making even was until the E3 trailer team informed them and the audience in the same moment. But what was there appealed at least conceptually. A high fantasy sci-fi world with mech suits and a mysterious power called 'the Anthem' left behind by the old gods. It had this 'Sci Fi channel' vibe to it with a lush and diverse city of people's kept within a massive fortress surrounded by untameable wilds full of wild monsters, bandits and eye-pleasing visual delights. It had all the looks to be a hit, and even it's world seemed functional enough to support this style of modular progression, expedition based gameplay snippets and slow unfurl narrative progression. It could have worked! But it didn't.

Largely I'd say this was because of the 'lack of vision' problem. This game was thrown together at the last minute, the team had no way of creating enough content to keep a new player base happy and had to stretch out what they could make until it was stringy and ugly- but in the world of imagination we can restart development with intention from day one and propose what the game could have focused on instead. And to start with, I think that Anthem should have shifted pace from creating a WOW shrunk down experience (like what Destiny shoots for) and try for a more Runescape style of game with a unique Bioware flavouring sprinkled on top for good measure. Don't understand what I mean by that? Don't worry, I've been brainstorming this for at least a year at this point.

Now from the getgo I think that most Live Service titles, Anthem included, would be vastly improved by going the route of providing 'vertical progression paths' rather than the genre-standard 'Horizontal progression'. Essentially what I mean by this is giving players an incentive to progress down the skills and activities they come to like rather than down some vague universal 'core level' like most RPGs already do. If, instead of focusing on purely getting stronger, the game provided a range of activities that players could level up their proficiency at doing, such as what Runescape offers, you'd have yourselves a fertile field for player constructed storytelling to thrive. For example, let's say that one such activity was being an Escort Javelin for the various merchants travelling the land. Completing basic escort jobs unlock more dangerous routes against complicated land- travelling across sea or in the sky- facing different threats along the way. The endgame version of these escort missions could have you safeguarding a merchant through an active 'Anthem' whilst it rages about, teraforming giant chunks out of the ground, dealing mind-bending effects of one of god's tools gone haywire.

The effect that specifications like this would have is in providing some sense of roleplay without making the entire product a 'hard RP' dystopia like you'll find in some of those 'Sandbox MMO's which never seem to catch on too well. Players will naturally gravitate towards activities that they enjoy and assume those roles within the ecosystem of the world, giving them an intrinsic reason to grow attached to the world of Anthem. Now they won't just be logging on to hit the next level cap, they're checking in to fulfil their duty hunting down the overbearing wildlife, or collecting rare materials from dangerous areas of the map. Of course they'll be players who want to be good at everything, and they'll be welcome to try. All that the developers would need to do from here would be to ensure that each play archetype is catered to as development progresses to tell the larger narrative.

But perhaps the biggest change in my vision of Anthem would be how it handles it's narrative. Bioware famously stepped away from their traditional storytelling methods by reasoning they wouldn't be possible within a live service space. Which meant no meaningful choices, no fleshing out your character with personally driven shifts in perspective, no relationship building or breaking with people around you- everyone had to follow the same static narrative because otherwise there would be narrative inconsistency. Well I've figured out the solution and it's a real special one. Get this: Instancing! But seriously, instanced main story objectives is how RPG MMO's like TOR handles their stories and it allows for everything that Bioware said was impossible. TOR has it's choice based storylines, (although I do critique the worth of those choices in the main narratives of The Old Republic. A more narrowly themed game like Anthem could definitely improve upon that part of the formula) companion relationship building and grouping up with friends whilst playing separate story objectives. This simple approach would have let Bioware play to their strengths whilst trying something new.

And finally, in a sort of wrap up of everything I've said: the world of Anthem needed to be more interactive to make it feel liveable. Even simple things like the ability to sit and have a drink at the bar adds wonders to the immersion factor. Read some in-universe newspaper, wake up in the infirmary after getting KO'd and choosing not to respawn at checkpoint in a mission, spotting key narrative members out and about and sharing a few lines of dialogue: this is the heart of a proper liveable world that Anthem, and games of it's kind, are so often missing. Sure, Anthem's problems ran a lot deeper than the game which was in the planning sheets, but in a perfect world with perfect development and a perfect launch: this was the Anthem I wanted to see. And maybe with a bit of luck it will be the framework of a Live Service we'll see someday in the future.