It’s got a 61 on OpenCritic, and Brad Shoemaker of NextLander said he thought long and hard about giving it 1/5 stars at the time (ultimately giving it a 2/5) because the game didn’t even really work when it launched. That wouldn’t really indicate it was just something the internet wanted to hate that week.
moakley@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
I played it at launch. It worked fine for me.
But yeah, some players had technical issues that were quickly patched. That’s how launches work nowadays. The reaction seems justified in a vacuum, but if you compare it to how glitches affect the scores of other games, it’s weird.
Cyberpunk 2077 still got good scores despite major technical issues that took a lot longer than a week or two to fix.
I can go buy the re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-release of Skyrim and still encounter the same game-breaking bugs that I encountered fifteen years ago.
So I still feel like Anthem got treated unfairly here. If it was some bland, unimaginative game that didn’t do anything else well, sure, I get why they wouldn’t pull their punches. But again, the gameplay was immaculate. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better game treated worse.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
A big site redesign just happened at Giant Bomb, so I can’t view the review, but there’s typically a difference between an always-online game not working and some of the things you listed. Cyberpunk was reviewed on PC, and it mostly worked fine for a lot of people on PC, which is what the early review codes were sent out for. Skyrim crashed a lot but kept plenty of auto saves so you rarely lost progress. In an always online game, the functionality just isn’t there if the problems are related to server infrastructure. In fact, this is rarely punished in review scores, and the likes of the latest Flight Simulator are the exception rather than the rule for it.
But even when there weren’t infrastructure problems, people still weren’t thrilled with the game that was there when it worked.
moakley@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Some were, some weren’t. I was thrilled.
And then the hate grew to the point where it was a meme, where everyone “knew” that Anthem was bad, even people who hadn’t played it. Then it was over.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
I’m glad you enjoyed it, but that reputation spread because reviewers had a bad time with it. It wasn’t, like you said, because the internet just needed something to hate that week. And since it never got a No Man’s Sky esque update, I doubt the consensus on it would have changed much even if more people had given it a try after the fact. They certainly had the opportunity with steep discounts over the past few years. In that time, Destiny got plenty more attention and two or three other Borderlands games came out.