Review bombs, massive list of bugs, a shitty rollout schedule and much lower than expected sales have all marred Anthem with a lot of negativity and I'll be honest with you, some of it is well deserved. But to be just as honest I also can't stop playing this game. Yeah I may be part of the problem as I did sign up for Origin Access Premier and played the game a week early but hear me out before you start screaming apologist at me. I know Anthem is a flawed game but to say that it's already dead and Bioware along with it is also quite the stretch. The official launch was only last Friday and even the early trial period started only a week before that. If player counts and sales figures are still way down a month from now (the first month of a game's sales is the most critical) then you might have a case for saying the game is dying. But let's not jump the gun and dig the grave just yet because despite all it's flaws Anthem does have a lot going for it.
The biggest flaw right now of course is the sudden reversal of loot drops such that now at any difficulty Master Work items are almost never dropping. While I expect this to be corrected soon Bioware snuck this patch in only claiming after the community started complaining that they were correcting a bug. For a company that has been quite transparent up till now this was quite unexpected and the community for good reason has voiced it's frustration. But while many see a reason to stop playing I don't. After all, Bioware has been very responsive to player feedback up till now and another game dev has chimed in asking Bioware to reconsider. Personally, my hope is that Bioware has one more fix for the loot drops up it's sleeve that will correct the matter in the right direction and considering how frequently they've been patching this game my hope that we'll see that fix this week sometime.
Another "problem" is the main story. I say problem in quotes because really this is subjective. I'm not blown away by the storyline itself but the voice acting is great and the characters as even more so. Besides, there's actually more than one story in Anthem. Much like Mass Effect's loyalty quests there are several smaller plot lines with a pretty rich cast of characters that make for a compelling and very interesting world. If you skip all of these secondary dialogues (you get rewards for talking to characters in Fort Tarsis, something I'm not certain is well known) then you really miss most of what makes Anthem such a great world to be in.
Last but not least is the lack of content and I can't argue with that. While the content in the game is a lot of fun and very challenging even at lower difficulty levels there really isn't a hell of a lot of it. Sadly, this is the consequence of early adopting a games as a service model. The team can't just release a crap load of content because many gamers will never get through all of it. Think of the laundry list of games we all have that we never finished. Why keep rolling out new content when most players never even played what you did create? But at the same time that means you have to give bite sized chunks that leave those same gamers starving for more. It's a double edged sword and if anything brings down this model it'll be that. Destiny suffered the same problem as did the first Division. Why buy a game now when it won't be really good for at least a year? It's a difficult question to answer.
Even I have been advising people to hold off on buying Anthem because I see all the flaws and problems with it right now. The game's rollout was simply too troubled and Bioware still has a fair amount of work left before it can create a truly great core gaming experience. Why do I stick with it? Because I'm totally enthralled with all the lore that I've been finding. I can totally write a story or a fan comic just based on what lore I've found up to this point. And because I'm a story driven gamer that's what matters to me the most. Loot? I could take it or leave it.