> Anthem... man that game had potential but just was not ready to ship. Was a ton of fun to play and I loved the bits of story we got but it really was just a tease of a story sadly.
Anthem came across to me that it had most of its story "filed off" at the last minute. I can't prove it, but Bioware was said to have been working on a Mandalorian game for years and so much of Anthem from the KOTOR-like macguffin that gives the title of the game to the underutilized Cantina in the main hub to the fact that AT-ATs (under a slightly different name) just show up in the middle of plot like you should have already been expecting them feels like Bioware in the very last minute had to pull every Star Wars character and Star Wars reference out of a game that was designed to be a Star Wars Mandalorian simulator.
At least as a player of Anthem, I think it's a tale of weird timing that EA was afraid of losing access to the Star Wars license in the wrong week, and also didn't anticipate that Disney would heavily promote a Mandalorian themed TV show not soon after the expected release date. As an officially licensed Star Wars Mandalorian simulator, just as or just before the first couple of seasons of The Mandalorian were premiering could have been incredible. Anthem hints that it was almost that in such weird ways it's hard not to wonder if EA and Bioware just got Anthem's timing wrong.
(It's also not hard to blame Anthem's weird timing for messing up Andromeda by consequence. Andromeda's team got retasked away from story DLC to help Anthem in whatever its last weird rush was, which in my theory is the "removing Star Wars from it" and I still think Andromeda was only one good story DLC from being among the best of the series.)
If you wanted to relate to the topic in the article you should have said Anthem. It gets most of Rand's ideas on collectivism into digestible form (which is surprising, considering Rand might be one of the most long-winded writers I've read). I made it through that one, Atlas Shrugged, started on The Virtue of Selfishness and decided I'd had enough. While Anthem is easy enough, I couldn't suspend disbelief for Atlas Shrugged, and it just would not end. After reading it, I had no desire to read the Fountainhead...as I wasn't sure what else Rand could write that wasn't both new and contradictory to something she wrote down in Atlas Shrugged. To me, the whole thing felt like a religion than it did a philosophy, where the God was an amalgam of wealth, actualization, satisfaction, indulgence, personal growth, and whatever else Rand said was good. Is the book without any merit? Of course not. Can you get that merit somewhere else? Probably.
My Feelings on Atlas Shrugged in Retrospect:
WARNING SPOILER ALERT. I AM NOT JOHN GALT.
Unbelievably perfect protagonists (your disbelief probably won't be suspended) battle for personal freedom by sticking it to a group of bumbling antagonists bent on taking their toys (read livelihood) away. Insert lots of dialog for the author to repeat what she wrote in her non-fiction pieces where stupid antagonists can't come up with decent comebacks from buddies of protagonists who don't ever seem to shut up. All the while another protagonist is constantly mentioned by everybody in the book, yet nobody knows who he is, but he's chilling underneath some kind of holographic forcefield in the mountains somewhere WHILE HIS BUDDY floats around on a pirate ship (wait, what time period are we in?) blowing up shipments of copper. The main characters are either trying to build a railroad or trying to drive fast trains while wearing simple, yet elegantly fitted clothing. All of this boils down to a speech that lasts a hundred pages and put me to sleep multiple times because anybody can see where the book is going from three miles away (it's a huge book, like 1200 pages or something). The ending flips from some film noir type scene to something out of the Twilight Zone and I could no longer stay interested.
Hacker Cinema
2 comments on Hacker News
> Anthem... man that game had potential but just was not ready to ship. Was a ton of fun to play and I loved the bits of story we got but it really was just a tease of a story sadly.
Anthem came across to me that it had most of its story "filed off" at the last minute. I can't prove it, but Bioware was said to have been working on a Mandalorian game for years and so much of Anthem from the KOTOR-like macguffin that gives the title of the game to the underutilized Cantina in the main hub to the fact that AT-ATs (under a slightly different name) just show up in the middle of plot like you should have already been expecting them feels like Bioware in the very last minute had to pull every Star Wars character and Star Wars reference out of a game that was designed to be a Star Wars Mandalorian simulator.
At least as a player of Anthem, I think it's a tale of weird timing that EA was afraid of losing access to the Star Wars license in the wrong week, and also didn't anticipate that Disney would heavily promote a Mandalorian themed TV show not soon after the expected release date. As an officially licensed Star Wars Mandalorian simulator, just as or just before the first couple of seasons of The Mandalorian were premiering could have been incredible. Anthem hints that it was almost that in such weird ways it's hard not to wonder if EA and Bioware just got Anthem's timing wrong.
(It's also not hard to blame Anthem's weird timing for messing up Andromeda by consequence. Andromeda's team got retasked away from story DLC to help Anthem in whatever its last weird rush was, which in my theory is the "removing Star Wars from it" and I still think Andromeda was only one good story DLC from being among the best of the series.)
If you wanted to relate to the topic in the article you should have said Anthem. It gets most of Rand's ideas on collectivism into digestible form (which is surprising, considering Rand might be one of the most long-winded writers I've read). I made it through that one, Atlas Shrugged, started on The Virtue of Selfishness and decided I'd had enough. While Anthem is easy enough, I couldn't suspend disbelief for Atlas Shrugged, and it just would not end. After reading it, I had no desire to read the Fountainhead...as I wasn't sure what else Rand could write that wasn't both new and contradictory to something she wrote down in Atlas Shrugged. To me, the whole thing felt like a religion than it did a philosophy, where the God was an amalgam of wealth, actualization, satisfaction, indulgence, personal growth, and whatever else Rand said was good. Is the book without any merit? Of course not. Can you get that merit somewhere else? Probably.
My Feelings on Atlas Shrugged in Retrospect:
WARNING SPOILER ALERT. I AM NOT JOHN GALT.
Unbelievably perfect protagonists (your disbelief probably won't be suspended) battle for personal freedom by sticking it to a group of bumbling antagonists bent on taking their toys (read livelihood) away. Insert lots of dialog for the author to repeat what she wrote in her non-fiction pieces where stupid antagonists can't come up with decent comebacks from buddies of protagonists who don't ever seem to shut up. All the while another protagonist is constantly mentioned by everybody in the book, yet nobody knows who he is, but he's chilling underneath some kind of holographic forcefield in the mountains somewhere WHILE HIS BUDDY floats around on a pirate ship (wait, what time period are we in?) blowing up shipments of copper. The main characters are either trying to build a railroad or trying to drive fast trains while wearing simple, yet elegantly fitted clothing. All of this boils down to a speech that lasts a hundred pages and put me to sleep multiple times because anybody can see where the book is going from three miles away (it's a huge book, like 1200 pages or something). The ending flips from some film noir type scene to something out of the Twilight Zone and I could no longer stay interested.