BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Anthem’s Heartbreakingly Good ‘Mass Effect’ Armor Sets Are Live For N7 Week

Following
This article is more than 4 years old.

Anthem, a game that still exists, has just unveiled something that got leaked a few weeks ago, a series of Mass Effect-inspired armor sets for its four javelin classes. They’re now live in the store to celebrate N7 day, which is Thursday, along with the “Shepard Shuffle” emote and an “Andromeda Initiative” wrap.

If there has one thing Anthem has done right, it’s making killer armor sets, and these Mass Effect ones are no exception, and like I said last time, make me sad for what could have been with this game.

The sets are fantastic, and they are:

The Asari Storm

The Turian Ranger

The Quarian Interceptor

The Krogan Colossus

Each are available in the microtransaction store for the usual cost of 61,000 coins or the equivalent of about $10 or so in real life money. Lord knows I have not been regularly playing Anthem as of late, so I can only afford one of them with my limited funds that remain there, and I think I have to go with the Quarian Interceptor as an homage to my lost love Tali.

The deeper with get into Anthem’s lifespan (it’s still hard to believe this game came out this year), the more murky the future of the game becomes. Anthem has lost pretty much every BioWare person in charge of it since launch. Mark Darrah and Mike Gamble have moved onto Dragon Age. Ben Irving and Chad Robertson have left BioWare completely. I’ve asked them who over there is running Anthem right now, but I haven’t heard back.

Right now, the game exists in a sort of limbo. It has a “holiday” Halloween event which has a new twist on the Cataclysm, but future “Acts” of content have been dismantled and it’s unclear what, if anything, is the plan for the series going forward. Many fans wonder when the servers might just be flat-out turned off, a wild question about a game this high profile that launched just nine months ago. We don’t know what Anthem’s current playercount is, but it’s often in the single digits for streams on Twitch, another kind of insane stat for a game like this.

These Mass Effect armor sets make me sad because A) I really miss Mass Effect and wish we got more Mass Effect instead of Anthem and B) I really do think Anthem could have been the next big sci-fi thing for BioWare if so many mistakes hadn’t been made, but obviously it was all mishandled and here we are, mourning a zombie game.

We are supposed to hear something about Dragon Age next month, but fans are already skeptical, given Anthem and Andromeda as BioWare’s last two titles, and everyone is holding out hope for the glorious return of Mass Effect someday. It seems exceedingly unlikely that Anthem 2 will ever exist, but if you want to support the current version for some reason, you could do worse than buying these killer Mass Effect skins.

Follow me on TwitterFacebook and Instagram. Pre-order my new sci-fi novel Herokiller, and read my first series, The Earthborn Trilogy, which is also on audiobook.