Hello, everyone!

As the title says, I'm curious to know what everyone thinks of Anthem, and how it might impact Warframe. It seems like DE is definitely keeping an eye on it (as evidenced by the appearance of "Javelines" on the recent devstream). I just watched the Unfinished on it, and boy, does it not look great. Compared to WF, it seems like the combat is just clunky and boring--lots of just normal-looking and feeling weapons, a clunky transition between walking and flying, and just a generally old-fashioned looking system. The hubs and other areas also look weirdly lifeless. This really bums me out as a longtime Mass Effect fan, but I also wouldn't want to see Warframe impacted by it, as well. I'm going to check out the beta this weekend, and see what it's all about.

I played it, and enjoyed it in the same way I enjoy Destiny and Warframe.

It's clunky and definitely not optimized at the moment, but the combat is fun (if bullet-spongy), and the flying mechanic is pretty fun. It definitely got more enjoyable once you open up the other Javelin suits, particularly the Storm ("mage") Javelin, which throws out fire, lightning, and cold attacks.

I quite enjoyed the early Anthem demo and plan to be playing it at release. IMO it is quite a bit of fun once you get your hands on it. Also no offense but I would not judge Anthem based on how GB playing made it look, one glance at how you actually use Storm in the game all the time (ie almost always floating above the battle while air dashing, constantly using abilities,) should be a good indication of that. The pace and mobility of it also depends a lot on how proficient and familiar you become with the different javelins; jumping in and out of the fray and weaving in between enemies, setting off combos and synergising with teammates. You can transition between flying, hovering and walking/running, quite fluidly once you get the hang of it and will be doing a lot of it regardless, depending on the javelin. Stuff like air to ground melee and maneuvering around the combat arena becomes very useful as well. The difference between seeing the pace of a team that knows what their classes/weapons do and how to effectively use them both in terms of solo piloting and abilities as well as how to best support each other, versus people still fumbling and still feeling their way around, is night and day. You join into that demo Stronghold mission and can see players still struggling left and right dying a lot, not knowing how to chew through hordes or through tough elites, all the while that mission can be handled so painlessly if at least a couple people are on their ball.

There are a lot of significant smart positives about the game already that is lacking in it's competition, like the visual customization system, and the Diablo 3 like gear and difficulty scaling system for example. But also a few issues that need to be ironed out (aside from obvious network ones) like K&M flying/swimming controls, an fps limiter, lots of slow loading screens, town optimization, town movement, mission menu UI, the fact that your gear loadout even requires a short load, no party chat.

But it also won't really affect Warframe in the short term. It's quite a different game by it's nature. Much closer to a cross between Destiny and ME3 multiplayer, with several Diablo elements. Combat has a very different focus then Warframe, more on smaller number of enemies that take time to handle, requiring you working with combos to handle them efficiently. Warframe's pace is the way it is and can be the way it is because in Warframe you can blaze past everything and kill dozens of enemies in a couple seconds, it's a fundamentally different style of a horde shooter in the end because of the ways it's designed at a core level. And it would be a crime for Anthem to be as fast paced as Warframe, with that breakneck pace at which Warframe is played it has a lot of it's own problems in terms of enemy, encounter and boss design. It's good that they are such different games, while technically occupying a similar games market space.

In the long term I can only hope that some positive things from Anthem will rub off on Warfame like maybe their custom materials system per body part used in customization. Or the challenge scaling via types of difficulty and reward levels. Tho to be honest there is not a huge chance for either anytime soon as both are not easy undertakings to implement at this stage in WF by any means.

So here is a repost of my Anthem thoughts from the latest GB podcast:

I got into the Demo (lets be real it was a beta) for free somehow and the Demo was really bad in a lot of aspects (technical, poor explanations, how huge items are isn't clear if you just play a bit, etc), but the game has a ton of complexity and promise. Currently I plan to get Premium for a month, to save money, and play the game as I doubt there is more then a month of content for a fairly hardcore gamer based on what I have seen.

Something thats hard to understand without playing a decent amount (they start you with literally nothing) is the sheer quantity of loot, builds, and combat depth via primer and detonators with different power setups (essentially weapons with cooldowns). For instance primers and detonators were not explained at all and are a large focus for the game. Something like the Rangers melee is meant to be a primer, which then allows you to get a massive damage boost via a detonator you shoot from another weapon. Overall the gunplay was definitely worse then destiny and is fairly gun dependent (heavy pistol and rocket launcher felt great), but wasn't significantly far behind and some of the weapons are really unique (the explosive sniper rifle was nutz) or require some thought to use (the colossus heavy weapons etc).

Unlike destiny guns seem to take a slight backdrop to power usage and how powers interact with one another, weapons, and ultimates is significant. For instance the Storm ultimate resets the heat bar so you can jump up, hover for like 40s, then ultimate, then hover again for 40s without any gear. Then you can get gear that improves your heat times and all of the sudden that 40s becomes 75s, ultimate in air, then another 75s, and you are hovering for the majority of any fight, its just really item / build dependent and you start with basically 0 items and only get terrible items during the demo so its both hard to convey and was poorly done in the demo.
As for the constant Mass Effect comparisons, it literally never crossed my mind and I outside of Brad and Jeff I don't think i've seen it mentioned by anyone in the forums / reddit. I expected this game to be a mix of Destiny, Warframe, and Diablo and thats exactly what it seems. I never expected an excellent story, just something better then Destiny or at worst case equivalent to Destiny 2's story.

@silversaint: There's a lot of Mass Effect in Anthem; the armor design, the powers, the combo system, the shooting, some of the movement is like jetpacks in MEA. Overall it feels like ME3 multiplayer mixed with a little bit of Warframe and MEA. This game could easily be in the Mass Effect universe if they wanted to do that. I don't see that much Destiny here. A lot of the similarities it has with Destiny were also in Borderlands, Division, and other games.

As a Warframe player i can tell that Anthem is different enough and that i enjoyed the gameplay of Anthem really liked the Colossus (tank dude), Like Jeff said in the podcast the guns lack some umpf they could use more DAKKA DAKKA, But i really liked the abilities, like teslacoils coming out of my exosuit was pretty cool. And the game could only improve over the years if they support this GAAS for long. As someone who played Warframe the day it was released, i can tell that game changed a lot over the years.

And as for it affecting Warframes playerbase just think of it as people who jumped from MMO to MMO to end up in Azeroth again :D the times i heard "This is gonna destroy WoW" Warhammer online, TERA, Age of Conan. Most of those games are death. But Wow still shines.

As someone who played both Destiny and Warframe extensively (and is still playing WF regularly), Anthem is much and I do mean much closer in it's design principles to Destiny then it is to Warframe.

Core gameplay design things like: multi step mission structure, how long missions take, narrative delivery, launch hub design, time to kill, movement responsiveness and speed, pace of missions, bespoke levels, the way gear works, leveling works, gearscore, the melee system, how ability use is governed (cooldowns), resources, dismantling, in game communication, etc... All are from a similar mold of design Destiny has and yes some of that design is shared among looter games and looter shooter games, like Borderlands and others, which is kind of the point, Warframe took a very different approach to how the gear system, leveling and pacing work to those games; all of that stuff I mentioned above works very differently in Warframe from both Destiny and Anthem, to the point where it leaves people super confused when they try to jump in. (I could write a separate paragraph or three about each of those touch points). WF has almost no shared DNA with Anthem at all, about the only things Anthem does that are hints that devs looked at WF as well are: A. the separation of the gear and fashion (also present in many looter games now) B. a bit more reliance on abilities, and even that one is more of a middle ground between something like Destiny and Warframe; which is it's ME multiplayer DNA rather then anything.

Keep in mind I'm not trying to say it's ripping off Destiny or anything, Anthem has a lot of it's own things going for it (and there are already things I see Anthem doing much better(like gear, fashion and difficulties)). But mixing in Warfame and ME it's hella not; pretty much every persistent WF player is gonna tell you that.

@tennmuerti: All I said was that "there was a little bit of Warframe" lol. I've played all 3 of these games too. The closest games to having movement like Anthem are MEA and Warframe. In WF you're running super fast, gliding, flying (depending on the mission/area), and you can dive underwater all these things you can do in Anthem too. In Destiny you just walk, run, or ride the hover bike thing. Also, WF is more power/ability focused. Destiny is mainly about shooting and all the character types feel the same, while in Anthem and WF it depends on who you are. They're also PVE focused, Destiny trying to be PVP and PVE is probably why the powers are so tame and boring. Feel free to disagree, but that's why I said it feels like ME3 MP and a tiny bit of Warframe to me.