Anthem shuts down next month

[Truthfulpietro]

In a month, on January 12th, the servers for Anthem, a game from BioWare, released in 2019, will shut down. This doesn’t just mean that multiplayer gameplay will stop functioning; the whole game itself will stop working. You will not be able to play the game, period.

I’ve been playing the game myself since the announcement was made. The game itself is a beautifully crafted world, but its geography is small compared to other modern games. Heck, if GTA III were to be placed in the same league, GTA III would actually be larger than Athem. That gives some perspective.

The story has a good premise: the player is called a Freelancer, piloting a jetpack-and-metal-suit called a Javilin. After your first mission in what's known as The Heart of Rage goes south and you lose your fellow Freelancers and you rescue your leader, against his wishes, you fall on hard times, taking contracts and assignments where you will silence dangerous relics, deal with vicious fauna and fight various factions such an authoritarian faction called the Dominion, a malevolent race of anthro insects called Scars and a criminal syndicate called Outlaws. Ultimately, stopping the Dominion’s leader, The Monitor, from triggering a cataclysm at the Heart of Rage, where it all began. That’s pretty much the story in a nutshell.

Whilst I did enjoy the primary story, it feels like it was incomplete or underdeveloped, as there are a couple of characters that only show up in one scene, and we don’t explore the world of anything other than your hub at the Fort. During which you also have to deal with various chats with a wide range of characters, which are ultimately forgettable and don’t offer anything deep to the world. All they do is talk, rather vaguely, I might add, about their experiences. During which you are asked something and you have two choices of dialogue, whichever is selected will either award you points for loyalty, or not. There are no real long-term rewards, no unlocking of special equipment, no special implications, and no means to retry the side plots if you choose the wrong dialogue. Which is sad because a couple were decent, such as helping a woman give up drinking in favour of opening a bakery, or finding a woman married to a man who was actually a distinctive spy for the Dominion, who was secretly experiencing a split personality due to his memory being programmed in such a way that specific code words expose his true nature.

As for the contracts themselves, they basically boil down to, go to area A, kill the bad guys stationed there, interact with a specific item, stay in the area long enough for the next objective to trigger the next step in the mission or some other variant. You do get to silence relics by collecting their components, one at a time, and return them to the relic, whilst dealing with whatever threats you have to overcome. The missions can be accomplished with up to three players in a co-op mission. As you level up, you unlock more javelins and equipment that ranges from “Common” to “Legendary”. As the servers are shutting down, the weapons and equipment are more likely to be “Epic”, then “Masterwork”, then “Legendary”.

All the while you have to contend with the achievements asking you to finish the story, find all the landmarks, collectables and complete every weapon and gear challenge. All of which was said to take 60 hours.

Keep in mind one of the most frustrating things I had to deal with is when the servers would expire and I’ll have to quit the game and reload it to get another server, that’s my experience at least.

Overall I would give it a C-.

But I wanted to ask for your opinion on the fact that once the servers close on January 12th, the game will no longer function, even if you have a physical copy.

[Stalvern]

Insane news. Not that it was shut down, but that it was still going. I thought they killed it years ago.

[Voor]

I think 6 years of enjoyment is fantastic, so I wouldn’t be bitter if it went away.

[VideoGameCritic]

Why are they shutting it down? Does it really cost so much to maintain the servers, or are they just trying to herd existing gamers over to some other new game?

[GStratos]

I think 6 years of enjoyment is fantastic, so I wouldn’t be bitter if it went away.

I would. There are games I have been enjoying for 30 years and counting, including online ones. No games have to die or go away when there are solutions in the forms of patches, SDKs, server emulators and whatnot.

[VideoGameCritic]

GStratos makes a good point. If I'm talking to my nephew about some old game like Ninja Gaiden (NES), he can pop in the cart or at the very least play it on an emulator. With Anthem, it'll be like the game never existed. I guess there will be YouTube footage of it...

[DaHeckIzDat]

That's an inherent risk that comes with playing online games. I mean, how many MMOs that were popular in the early 2000's has World of Warcraft eaten by now? When you buy/subscribe to an online game, it comes with the unspoken understanding that it's eventually going to get shut down, whether it's because the studio behind it went out of business, or if there just weren't enough players left online to justify keeping the servers running.

[GStratos]

But it doesn't have to be that way. There are MMOs that have survived thanks to fan servers, including Toon Town, Age of Empires Online, Need for Speed World, and several others. I believe even certain versions of Runescape.

I think we have just been culturally primed to accept the death of video games as inevitable when it is anything but.

[DaHeckIzDat]

I don't see the disconnect here. Those games are still up and running because the fans worked to make that happen. If they want, they can do the same with Anthem.

[crimefighter]

And game companies wonder why newer live service games are having a very difficult game catching on with no offline single player campaign.