Interesting "it's not a Destiny killer" trend in Reddit

Maybe I'm reading too much into the name Freelancer, but that sure sounds like picking up contracts at the Fort/hub is going to be a big part of the experience. And I did plenty of undirected exploration in Destiny, particularly while waiting for a World Event to drop, but I'll grant that the true grind is mission based in Destiny.

I would be f'ing awesome if I could play Anthem 90% in exploration mode!

Having never played Destiny, I'm a little unaware - 1st player shooters don't interest me.
3rd person with some background story, that's another matter - these things sound different to me.

The devs are emphasizing that it's better to consider Anthem a coop game rather than an MMO, which makes me think that there won't be a persistent, shared world in the traditional MMO sense where you can run into other random players at any time.

However,  the same dev that called Anthem a coop game also said something about there being features that allow for a shared world beyond what a traditional coop game would have. This makes me think that either you can share a world state with your coop buddies or it will be something like the original guild wars, where you can meet up with people in hubs but the persistent world is actually instanced.

I did pick up a copy of the Division, but playing as a staggeringly limited customised character, mute in its interaction with the limited story, spoiled the otherwise enjoyable combat and mission structure (excluding PvP).

Without that story hook, however, it became ultimately pointless.

Now if the game had an interesting protagonist and interesting backstory, that might be another matter.

Yes, a saw a lot of people saying that Anthem, it´s not like Destiny. Maybe the 3rd person action, maybe the Javelin armor. To me both have a lot of similarities.

I am a Destiny player and I 'll try be as unbiased as I can.I'll take it point by point:

-Destiny is broadly Sci-fi but it is more of a blend with Fantasy. It has wayyyyy more "space magic" involved.It has a lot of vagueness in the lore,no scientific explanations,tends towards myths,legends and brave warriors of the past (eg The Iron Lords) , Golden Ages etc. The events Also , we don't know if there are any alien races in Anthem. We are on what seems like an alien planet that we've colonized and we only saw the dangerous wildlife. Destiny's Post-Apoc is not like Fallout 4. Boom Nuclear War.We're done. As I said, the fall of humanity aka The Collapse is veeery vague ,happened a looong time ago and even The Darkness as the cause of it is never explained.For the time being we know nothing about Anthem and to whether the story is more similar. Or dissimilar that we think .
-Social Hubs are a feature of MMOs.It's very general to be a similarity.
-Destiny isn't really open world. There are several locations.Not very big maps where some missions take place or the player can patrol the area .But as I said,they are not very big.They said Anthem will be open world.As in one huge as map.At least that is what I got from this.My mind goes to maps like in Far Cry games.
-Classes exist in many games.Very general point of comparison.
-Jumping,again...Very general point.Destiny has only jumps which slightly differ from class to class.No flying.Also,Andromeda had the jet packs.
-The loot, yeah I admit that thing looked like an engram.But again, loot system is very similar in all these types of games.Also the palette distinctio where green is always for uncommons,blue for rare,purple for ultra rare and yellow for exotics.Division had that too , I even sae the same colors in Horizon Zero Dawn which is a single player game.
-Portals? We don't know yet. Vex portals are present in Destiny but the main way to travel from place to play is your space ship.
-Drop in co-op .Destiny does that in Strikes. Assuming you are playing alonr,it drops you in Matchmaking but only on the Strike.
-interactivity between players ,yes. A general feature of online games.
-Dungeons,temples and ruins? Depends on what you mean.If u mean it in the RPG sense,then no.

Has any game ever actually killed another game? I mean, it's a difficult thing to quantify, but has any game that was successful been dethroned by an upstart? I struggle to think of any.

Everything I've seen leads me to believe that player interaction in the open world will be limited to your 3 coop mates. I honestly would prefer it be that way.

If you had a MMO-style shared open world, you'd be extremely limited in how you present narrative. You'd have to account for the possibility that not everyone would arrive at the event at the beginning; people join in the middle on the fly, etc - it gets even worse for multi-event chains. Not to mention there will be people who have played through it before and maybe don't want to sit through a 5 min cutscene - you have to respect their time too or they might not want to participate. And the list goes on. This usually ends up with any story tied to those events being simplified and diluted, or relegated to things like codex entries.

It's also really hard to balance gameplay for stuff like that, too. When I played guild wars 2, the big world events were either impossible to finish if you had less than a certain number of people there or ridiculously trivial if you had a giant mob (there were times when the bosses would drop within SECONDS just from the sheer number of people attacking them). It was rarely anything in the middle.

Limiting everything to 4-player coop only solves a lot (but not all) of those problems.

Thanks for taking the time to reply. Let me just drill down on a couple of items to explain why I think it's more than "all games do that" sort of similarities.

Given the range of genres we were guessing that Secret IP might be prior to the announcement (olde-timey pirates and steampunk topping my list), there is much less dissimilarity between Anthem SciFi and Destiny SciFi-Fantasy than there is in, say, Fallout (post-apocalypse, another popular guess) and Destiny. In other words, from a broad perspective, they're close enough to call them both SciFi, and clearly not Western (Red Dead) or High Fantasy. And given that Bioware could have picked any genre, why SciFi?

Classes do exist in many games, but Anthem seems to have classes that are recognizable as Hunter, Titan and Warlock, the classes of Destiny. I doubt that's a coincidence.

I see that you've read /u/tomato-andrew's post, where he describes the rationale for why EA intentionally made the trailer (though, not necessarily the full game) very familiar to Destiny players. That's another reason why the pushback surprises me. It would be much more surprising if there was nothing familiar about Anthem, don't you agree?

Rogue, Warrior, Mage (DA released in 2009)
Engineer, Soldier, Biotic (ME released in 2007, the other classes are hybrid of these 3 classes)
Sentinel, Guardian, Consular (KoTOR released in 2003)

BioWare has been doing that trifecta of classes for basically 15 years now...

I think its clearly meant to compete with Destiny (or Destiny 2)

what I don't get is why its so blatant. Surely they could have put in some more original thought for the setting and design