Been skimming through a bunch of reviews/let's-plays and, yeah, the currently anaemic endgame is a problem. Freeplay wandering, limited story mission replays plus a total of 3 strongholds (equivalent to Destiny strikes), 2 of which you'll have already run through the campaign...not nearly enough for the kind of long-term engagement a looter shooter needs. They can/will add more stuff, of course, but to launch with so little was a mistake.
Other observations:
- Needs better loot. There's a generous drop ratio but what you're given isn't exciting. Example: there's currently 3 named varieties of assault rifle with (I assume) differing base stats. Instead of each progressive level of rarity dropping a different gun, you just get a slightly better version of the one below. Sure, it's an improvement, but there's no feeling of pleasant surprise or shock of the new. What makes it even worse, though, is that all 3 rifle types LOOK THE SAME.
Defender,
Hammerhead,
Warden. Supposedly 3 different guns. But if they look the same and sound the same, are they different enough to make you care? Meanwhile, there's practically no option to alter your Javelin's looks outside of decals, with the main extra parts locked behind microtransactions.
- Shooting overall lacks true 'punch' regardless of what gun you're using. How much that detracts from the experience depends on how often you can rely on your Javelin's innate abilities instead, most of which are way more exciting...though that does beg the question why they even bothered with guns in the first place. Just make the fireball hands cool down faster.
- The 'tether' keeping a squad together - that forces stragglers to sit through another loading screen until they get teleported to wherever the one asshole that flew on ahead wound up - is WAY too restrictive. And I'd have far less of a problem with that if...
- The campaign should be playable solo. Like Destiny or Borderlands or, hell, even non-shooter equivalents like Diablo,
Anthem's story treats you like a one-of-a-kind hero, conveniently leaving out how there's thousands if not millions of people in the same boat as you. That's...dumb when you think about it for too long, but it's how these things have worked for years so what the hell. Point
is, if the game's not gonna acknowledge your having help as part of its core narrative, why force you into matchmaking for every mission? Rebalancing difficulty for a single player would be easy (difficulty here generally effects nothing except damage scaling w/r/t enemies) and you'd be able to both enjoy the story AND get comfortable with the expanding mechanics if you weren't being yanked around by teammates you didn't ask for. Keep the co-op optional throughout for people who wanna play with friends or think they'll have trouble, sure, and it's important for the higher-difficulty endgame stuff like Strongholds, but having it mandatory throughout hurts more than it helps.
- It's pretty obvious that the enemy AI was not programmed to deal with airborne opposition, which is baffling since any-time flight is the key thing separating
Anthem from its peers and is easy to implement within combat encounters. I don't know how tough that'd be to fix - I guess 'very' - but I think it matters.
Just so I'm not coming off like a 'hater' or whatever, I think the game looks utterly breathtaking, the story (what parts of it I've seen) is interesting enough and buoyed by good character writing, the flying seems awesome and playing as a Storm looks like how I wish playing Warlock in Destiny worked. Just hovering imperiously around vomiting magic at people. There's potential here but it'll take a lot of work to translate that into something worthy of the time it asks.