Anthem Next/2.0 Incoming Soon (TM)

Is this for ALL missions (critical and sidequests), or just the main campaign?

30-40 hours at the absolute minimum.

Heck SWTOR has hundreds of hours of solo/story content for EACH of its eight classes!

"If Bio is smart, we will have a 10-15 hr solo RPG game ( somewhat short, imo) then we jump into the MP world." - Sartoz

10 to 15 hours seems awfully short, tragically so. Even if DA 4 plays like ANTHEM, I would still prefer a longer Solo/Story Campaign in the neighbourhood of 30 to 40 hours. But I guess it would be a pipe dream to say I really want a story campaign the length of KOTOR 1/2. KOTOR took me about 60 hours from start to finish....But man, that was some beautiful story telling and rich exploration, characters and gameplay. And the ME OT.....My favourite games ever.

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For myself, I really enjoyed the game for the most part and have put over 400+ hrs in over the past year. Its flaws are obvious, especially after spending that much time with it, but there are significant enough elements of it that are salvageable that attempting an "Anthem 2.0/Next" relaunch is at least conceptually workable.

Looking at the game from bird's-eye view, you can see a potentially cool CO-OP looter-shooter next to a potentially immersive, single player-focused RPG world but, in attempting to combine the two, they are more smushed together as opposed to elegantly entwined. With flying and combat, you can start to see the potential of the Javelins a unique third-person experience and how fun it is to combine you efforts with three other players with different powers to take different enemies. With the characters, lore, and animations, you get to scratch the service of a new, unexplored world rife with factions vying for control over what feels like a frontier outpost with all sides of opposition challenged by the ever-changing and mutating world they are trying to survive in.

I look at that and see potentially a traditional 40-50hr BioWare single player campaign where Dax, Brin, and Rythe (among others) comprise your party NPCs with whom you can travel in groups of 3 or 4 to take on missions while non-party NPCs like Tassyn, Matthius, Yarrow, and Vule can advocate for the different factions, fight off outlaws, Dominion and Scars, and investigate intrigue in Fort Tarsis.

From there, you can switch over to the multiplayer/CO-OP mode to complete daily, weekly and monthly challenges, complete seasonal objectives, build out your Javelin's loadout with loot-based weapons, gear and support materials while earning coin you can exchange for cool armor sets, vinyls, decals, etc.

Unfortunately, by trying to have them both feed into and influence each other neither is a satisfactory experience. If I had "dream" redesign, I'd lean into the "BioWare-esque RPG" side and make traversing Fort Tarsis third person perspective, make the conversations also third-person perspective with more conversation options, have the Javelins have an overt story behind them and their design and purpose as opposed to being triggered by leveling and it's story a simple codex entry, explain why you, personally, chose to be a Freelancer as opposed to a Sentinal or part of Corvis, give further back-history into the origins of the scars, give clearer objectives to the outlaws and give more faces to the Dominion (further agency beyond "enemy"), let us flirt with Tassyn or Maxine, the bar owner, or Brin...

Maybe it defeats the purpose of what they were attempting...maybe they were unsure what they were attempting...but maybe it would align closer to an audiences expectations.

Casey started this ball rolling in 2012 shortly after ME3's release and was part of it's initial conceptual phase before leaving 2 years later in 8/2014. I wonder if him coming back to "Anthem" three years later was reminiscent of that Donald Glover gif of him to returning with pizzas and everything is on fire. Obviously, getting the game out was priority one and getting BioWare vets like Mark Darrah and Mike Gamble on board in late 2017/early 2018 was likely in aid of that. Now? Casey is the face of "Anthem" once again...I'm genuinely curious where he takes it from here.

I feel like something else is needed to get more people to want to spend hundreds of hours in that game...

though I admit I've never quite understood why so many people keep wanting to get more loot to make it easier to get even more loot, if there's no other goals to aspire to.

That was my point, but I guess I didn't make it that well.  The story for me was great, but after it was over and I had done the strongholds and explored for hours on end, what was left?  I guess chasing a piece of gear here or there, but the gear itself was was so underwhelming, for me anyway, that I had no incentive to farm.  There just wasn't/isn't enough engaging activities to keep most people playing much beyond completing the campaign.  I did come back for the cataclysm but you all have heard my issues with that.  My hope is that once 2.0 is released it'll bring with it an infusion of players, old and new, and there won't be so much of the end-game elitist type attitudes toward it.

I don't wanna sound like a complete asshole... but WTF are you doing in the Anthem forums then? This obviously is not the right game for you and it probably never will be. There are so many good singleplayer and story-driven games out there, why waste time discussing a game that is clearly not your cup of tea? For other people singleplayer games are pointless - I know some people, good friends actually, that basically skip everything in almost every game. They are not interested in stories at all, they just want good gameplay. Personally I like both, leaning more towards the multiplayer and gameplay side of things though. Competitive in the past, perfectionist in games like Anthem nowadays. But I won't pass up a good game like Deus Ex or hopefully Cyberpunk either. But I usually know what to expect from these games before I start them and if I get bored I might even stop playing.

Obviously, it is not. It's the first Bioware game since the original Baldur's Gate that I didn't purchase. And normally I do steer clear of the Anthem threads (except for the skepticism thread) not because I feel I shouldn't be allowed to (until the mods get even more tyrannical, I guess) but out of politeness on my part.

But with news of some kind of revamp of Anthem, I think I am justified in posting on threads about it, and voice my own hopes and expectations. Since even if I am not a fan of Anthem, I am something of a connoisseur of Bioware games.

If that's all right with YOU, that is.

I didn't want to say "you should go" as much as "why are you (possibly) wasting your time here discussing Anthem while you could instead enjoy something else". No justification needed or anything obviously, I'm just wondering why somebody would spend time talking about a game he/she will most likely never play instead of discussing or playing the games they really enjoy.