PSA: Don't be alarmed by "I finished the story in 5 hours" claims

This is a pre-emptive PSA based on speculation, so take with appropriate skepticism.

TL;DR

I predict that a lot of people are going to skip through cutscenes and rush the story part of the cripath in order to get to the elder game as quickly as possible. That is both normal for loot shooters and valid for that style of play. So if you see a claim of some shockingly low number of hours to finish the story, like 5 hours, that doesn't mean that there are only 5 hours of story content in the game. It just means they rushed it to get to the part of the game they prefer to play, the elder game.

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For loot shooters like Destiny and Warframe, a conventional and valid style of play is to get to max level as quickly as possible so that you can get into the real grind for best gear as quickly as possible.

Some quotes from the Anthem sub on Reddit to support this:





So for people who want to play in this style, a long story-centric critpath is actually a problem. Which does somewhat beg the question, how optional will the story content be in Anthem? Presumably, very optional and skippable.

The other alternative, that Bioware will only actually put 5 hours of story content in the game, seems extremely unlikely to me at this point, given what they've been saying consistently about how they are differentiating Anthem from other loot shooters. The whole My Story/Our schtick.

In the end, how long the story content is, versus how much time people choose to spend on it, are two different things. Which may be why Ben Ivro tweeted this:

Ben Irving @benirvo
It’s a really hard thing to compare so we aren’t really commenting on the crit path length for Anthem. Depends how you play, etc


Note: I'm using "5 hours" as a placeholder. The exact number isn't as important as the fact that it's a small number, relative to what we are used to from Bioware for story content length.