Game completed: Anthem demo

After the hellishly cringeworthy E3 announcement video I refused to watch any more Anthem videos. But I was still curious about the game. It's Bioware so I almost have to be. Kind of like when Bethesda releases 'most anything :P

Not watching any videos at all it's no surprise that I didn't know about the demo until a couple of ESO guildies started chatting about it. So I downloaded the demo and started playing.

The demo is more a means to show off the mechanics and the world. There is very little about the story and the characters, which is a shame because those things are usually what Bioware does best. What you get about the story is five quests in a short quest line that don't really do much else but creating more questions.

The first thing I was unsure about was the fact that I needed to be part of a squad to do a quest. I was playing the demo alone, but I decided to go with random matchmaking and go in my own pace. The game made sure to teleport me to the others if I strayed too far behind. I know some players complained about in-game communication not working, but I'm quite happy about that.

After having done the five quests that the demo allowed I realised that I didn't care about the other players. It's like - yes, I have to group up with you but it doesn't seem like I have to bother with you anyway (at least not on the standard  things, maybe harder things will come along with release that actually require a communicative squad), which kind of gives Anthem a MMO feeling. There will be people around, but unless you want to you don't have to bother with them. That's good.

After having done the five quests I played around some with freeplay, which made it seem even more like a MMO. Freeplay allows you to roam the open world, run into other players doing the same and if you want team up with them to do world events - alternatively do the world events yourself. I am going to assume that you can choose to do quests in freeplay too, although I didn't actually try that or see any random fifth person join my random four person squad at any point during my gameplay session.

All in all I'm pretty excited for Anthem. I will definitely buy it and play it. I'm hoping that it will be another one of Bioware's games that I can just drown myself in and completely obsess over, but I'm being cautiously optimistic.