Anthem: Challenges, Events and Activities

At least in my opinion is that these challenges shouldn't be seen a mandatory by the average player. Things like the bonuses in MEA where you earn hundreds of thousands of points can be a turnoff making people think they need to spend all that time to be on par with others. It might not have been accurate to the game, but perception of all players is important.

ME3MP defo had some good challenges, would be good to see something like that in Anthem, something to keep the player engaged while rewarding aver gameplay.

This is very hard to talk about without having more details of the basic gameplay for Anthem, but lacking that and given that I never played ME3MP, let me use Destiny and Battlefield as my basis for conjecture. Destiny is not a very good basis, since Destiny's "have fun with strangers" design goal is at odds with Anthem's apparent "have fun with friends" design goal. But it's all I got.

In Destiny, there are spots on the map where, every hour or so, a set piece battle would occur. The area would tell you when the next event would occur, so as you are cruising by towards some other goal, you can remember to go back to spot to catch the event. Or you could just camp out the spot until the event happened. Strangers would do the same. Once the event started, it was a pick-up coop experience. You could heal fallen Guardians, or snipe if most of the rest were tanking, or tank if the rest were sniping, coordinate your ultra attacks, etc. Low bar to entry, but also low value in terms of coop. Something like that might have place in Anthem, but it wouldn't be enough to really make a difference.

On the other hand, squad based FPS games, like Battlefield, really make the most of playing with friends. Some of the best battles are when your friends coordinate smoothly, each doing their part. When everyone has basically the same weapons and knowledge about the map, the differentiator is how well your squad works as a unit. But squad based MP needs a competent squad leader. That's what always made the difference between a good fight and a bad one. So Anthem will need gameplay features that give incentives for good squad leadership. What those are, I couldn't say.

As a negative vote, I think scheduled challenges whose rewards are strictly grinding oriented -- more XP, more loot boxes, more costumers, etc. -- seem pretty pointless to me. I'd rather see challenges that reward good squad play and good squad leadership.

Finally, there needs to be room for emergent challenges. Some of the most fun we had with Battlefield was making up our own challenges. Like there's a glitch you can exploit that, more-or-less, enables you to be shot out of a tank cannon. We used to ROFL trying to see who could be shot the farthest. Other challenges included jumping out of a chopper onto the wing of a jet plane while both are in flight, bailing from a jet with a rocket launcher, one-shotting another aircraft, and then diving back into your stalled jet before it crashed, and parachuting onto the roofs of otherwise inaccessible tall buildings. Anthem ought to track what emergent nonsense play people come up with on YouTube or whatever and turn them into organized challenges.

Nothing can make Anthem as good as me3 with the current developers in charge. The good old days of good (Bioware) multiplayer games are gone imo, that was clear with MEA and now what they’ve shown us with anthem. Don’t think anything can or will save that game.