Anthem (Gaming)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Monday, June 12, 2017, 13:59 (2722 days ago) @ MacAddictXIV

Looked like a really cool game. The one thing that completely destroyed it for me was two lines that blew my immersion out of the water.

After seeing an unexplored cavern
1. "We should do that later with Kim"
"Yeah, he could use the XP" (not abbreviating, direct quote)

When the ranger picks up loot and it is being opened
2. "ahhh come on, be something good! ahh yes, Jarra's Wrath!"

Both cases gave me a "WTF" moment of wondering if it was the characters talking or the players. After the trailer all I could think of was that these characters were pulling a deadpool and knew they were in a game. It completely destroyed the rest of the potential story line and atmosphere of the game.

It was exactly like the Division and Wildlands reveals, where the in-game characters are essentially role-playing players (intended to represent how people will communicate while playing the game, even though Nobody Talks Like That Ever). It's doubly weird in this case, because the player character seems to be the character's voice actor, so the line is blurred further (they did state that she was joining another player in that instance, not that he was a character in the game).

It's that kind of smoke and mirrors (and especially given how good both of the aforementioned games looked compared to how mediocre they turned out) that makes me super skeptical about the whole thing. Still, it looks like a full game that evolved from Mass Effect 3's multiplayer, so it's definitely on my radar.

Yeah, I never saw either of those trailers, so this is my first round of weirdness. I can confidently say that I really did not like it. I liked everything else about the game from that impression. But if they plan on doing stuff like that and I, as a potential player of their game, thinks that audio done by voice actors in a live playing of the game is supposed to think that it's not going to be part of the game... then apparently they are risking my money for no good reason other than to simulate what the average gamer is going to say to a buddy. That seems really stupid on the marketing side in my opinion. However, I am also pretty confident that I'm not an average gamer, so maybe this stuff actually works.

I can confirm that pretty much everyone thinks this is stupid (and some folks do a great job of pointing out how dumb and unrealistic this is), but for some reason, they keep doing it. That's why I enjoyed the "Become Legend" trailer series, since it turns this practice a bit on its side.

Nowadays I take the whole thing as a red flag. No game that does it has lived up to the hype.