Anthem Review: 4 Ups & 9 Downs
3. Tombs Of The Legionnaires = Worst. Fetch Quest. Ever.
No spoilers here, but roughly one-third of the way through Anthem's campaign, you'll be tasked with a mandatory Freeplay mission called Tombs of the Legionnaires, which requires the player to open four tombs by basically carrying out a gigantic slog of a collectathon.
You'll need to fill 15 fetch quest bars in order to proceed, farming world events, performing tricky multi-kills, repairing javelins and countless other activities, and while some of them are simple enough, some are certainly not.
Easily the most egregious requirement is to open 15 treasure chests scattered around the world, but for some mind-boggling reason, if you're playing in a team the chest will only be credited to the player who first opens it rather than the entire team.
During world events - which drop a chest upon completion - this often results in players desperately running for the chest in the hope of unlocking it first. It is the precise antithesis of what a squad-based multiplayer game should be encouraging.
And if that's not idiotic enough, you're only able to track objectives in the game's Cortex menu, while there's no way to pin them to the screen during gameplay to make things a bit less painful. As a result you'd be forgiven for just writing all the requirements down on a piece of paper.
According to BioWare support, the quest is actually supposed to retroactively include the player's accomplishments from earlier in the game, but for many players - this one included - they've been required to carry out the entire mess from scratch.
The result is an exhausting 3-hour fetch quest which murders the game's pacing and enjoyment. If it wasn't supposedly a mistake, it'd be easy to assume it was an attempt by EA to stop those playing the 10-hour EA Access trial from beating the game.
After all, if you remove this quest from the game entirely, you're actually looking at less than 10 hours of critical path gameplay. Yikes. Regardless, this needs to be patched ASAP.