Hello there! After the recent stream during which Ben Irving said that the constructive criticism is welcomed I decided to write this post about my feelings on the outside world. I chose a simple formula for this kind of post which consists of a problem description, few proposed solutions and overall summary, so let's jump right on it!

1. THE PROBLEM

So, basically what do we have outside? Lush, colorful world which is filled with ancient mysteries, remnants of probably dead civilization, ruins of our own culture and many dangers. Here is the thing where it gets tricky though. Dangers are basically.. basic? I mean, we have the trio of baddies in form of Scars, Outlaws and Dominion but that's about it. They are a decent basis, but in the end only a basis. The problem which I see here is basically that the world is simply empty. We fly through this world but we meet:

a) Threats that are intertwined with global events, which is a must.

b) Mobs that are standing somewhere in the map and basically doing nothing.

And basically, that's about it. Where is the wildlife? Where are all the predators? Where is the goal of all these random enemies just standing there? I am sorry, but sometimes it feels like "you like the RPGs, heard about Dungeons and Dragons and decided to become a DM. You become excited, you create the world of your own and you fill it with a bandits on every corner, plus generic bullet sponges and you call this a living world." In my humble opinion, the game suffers from the same problem as Mass Effect: Andromeda did, and to a lesser extent - Dragon Age: Inquisition, where in ME you had mostly Kett around every corner and in Inquisition it was a Templar or Mage.

BUT!

Those two games had some good ideas that were created during the development process. For Inquisition it was the dragon hunting, that for me personally added much to each zone. The sight of dragon flying above your head basically screamed "THIS IS MY LAWN PUNKS", and it was great. I felt really excited and engaged into each of those fights, which I definitely CAN'T say about titan fights in Anthem. They are bland, boring and always the same with only difference being the amount of elementals that spawns, which is bad. In Andromeda, we had vaults which allowed us to terraform planet, change it. We entered the vault, we eliminated the enemies and then we had to run as fast as we could because evil death ray wanted to kill us. Honestly? The idea was really, really great, but implementation of this was lackluster.

Overall, I think that Anthem's problem is the blandness of open world, without interesting things to catch you on a hook or make you feel something more than "yay, outlaw #8299 eliminated, time to move onto bland titan fight #69".

1. A SOLUTION:

So, we had the problem explained, now it is time for some ideas on how to fix the issue. Let's start with popular word in today's era - "diversity". This game needs this! Diversity in terms of enemies, diversity in terms of events and diversity in terms of equipment (which is a topic for another time). Moreover, as I said earlier - we have a decent basis in terms of enemies, but this needs to be expanded upon. The current roster of enemies presents something like that:

Dominion - Grunt, Valkyrie, Frost Wolf, Frost Medium Monster and Fury.

Scars - Grunt, Annoying Guy (sniper rifle / light machine gun), (much more) Annoying Guy (shield), and the Luminari.

Outlaw - Grunt, Storm, Ranger.

Scorpids - Basic Scorp, Exploding Scorp.

My proposition is as follows, each of these rosters needs something entertaining, like a big badass something unique. The best one here is of course Scar roster, which in my opinion is really fleshed out with Luminari as my favourite. I freaking love fighting those guys. They feel massive, they have a few skills, few nice weak points and hit hard, but not overly hard.

The Dominion one is second, but they need to tune the Fury, because she is just really infuriating (pun intended) to fight against. She hits like a truck and she can be really hard to take down which is antifun.

The Outlaw one is just boring really. They need something brutal, something outlawish, which fits their bandit scheme. Maybe some kind of a mech which is constructed from used parts, the heavy hitter.

And here we have the Scorpid one. I think that there is a great potential up here, and the whole roster should open up for some more weird options. Imagine something like Tyranids or Zerg. Plus, I think that the flying venom spitter would be an awesome enemy.

Now, the titans. They are just really painful to fight. The window during which you can deal some damage is too small and hitting the brick for zero damage is no fun. My proposition for Ash Titans is as follows:

• Make him more like Hive Tyrant, where you can deal a normal damage to him.
• Massively buff the damage to weakspots.
• Fix the few bugs he has, while adding some fresh air like two phase fight. For example, during the first you're attacking the titan directly and during the second you need to attack with a horde defending him, while he is rejuvenating or something.

About the diversity, where are my bad bois elemental titans? Fight with the Monitor has showed us some excellent ideas about elemental abilities and damn, I want some ele titans! Lightning Titan which is smaller, bur airborne and much faster, while raining thunderbolts from the sky? Gimme now! Minion based Acidic Titan, which is four legged foul beast? Awesome. Majestic Fire Titan which is heavily melee oriented with some big ass flaming weapon, while throwing armageddon around? I take two. Perfectly shaped Frost Titan which is heavily ranged, while having rough crowd control abilities forcing the players to intentionally overheat engines to stay in air? Noice.

But let's finish the topic of diversity and let us move onto some other ideas. We have something called dungeons, right? Right?! Let's use them! First of all, allow us to matchmake while entering them. Make them soft-instances in opposition to hard-instances like strongholds. Add one more room / level / whatever you can call it and throw some juicy boss at the end. Give him a cool name, some unique skill and higher masterwork legendary chance and just enjoy. Second of all, add a few more of them, give us small quests which are connected to those places, let those quests explain the story behind dungeons.

Now, if you are still reading this and you didn't threw out your PC through the window I am really glad to hear it! The first last thing I want to speak of are... MONSTERS AND BEASTS. Bastion is a dangerous place, right? Introduce more predators, more flying beasts, more agressive wildlife! There is this cool wall painting which Yarrow creates that showcases some of the beasts I guess. We want those, we really do!

The second thing I want to talk about are the overall global events and - let us call it - a global scenery. I think that they are really a good way to make the world alive, but the quests need more (again) diversity and DEFINITELY they need to be global or have some greater notification range (hello, World of Warcraft). Moreover, let us join the global quests with dungeons more. I saw during the demo one quest which happened in a dungeon, but I feel like there should be much more of them.

1. SUMMARY / TL-DR:

BioWare has got a great sculpting ground, but they need to put a lot of work into it. Diversity in terms of global quests, different enemies and dungeons is essential in my opinion to make the open world really great. Thank you for your time and please, be polite to each other! Rakuzan out.