ANTHEM - failed Destiny clone from BioWare

[Belegarsson]

I know this is a "demo" but with only less than a month until full release, I fail to see how this game won't struggle hard at launch with this sheer amount of issues:

- horrid performance, i5 8400 + 16GB RAM + 1060 struggles to run this game even at medium setting 1080p, too many stuttering. My home PC with RX 570 has a weak CPU (i3 4170) so I don't expect it to perform better, the open world section is okay, Fort Tarsis is a pain to walk through, but honestly the graphics quality isn't that impressive for the game to be this demanding.

- the control: mouse acceleration everywhere, the worst is when your javelin swims in an underwater cave, that shit gave me cancer.

- too many loading screens: finished a match and proceed to go to victory screen? Loading screen. You're about to start an expedition and wanna go to the forge to customize javelin? Loading screen (thankfully this one is fast). In battle if you happen to stray out the combat area accidentally, no matter how close you are, you will still get teleported back to warzone, and it's another loading screen.

- a lot of missing sound effects when you unlock new vanity items, new javelin or when you salvage an item. Sometimes audio ingame is completely cutoff mid session.

- the menu: so, when I go to option menu, I hover my mouse to advanced graphics setting and see the options in it, but I have to click it one more time to go into that section? It makes sense for controller but not for mouse. Also why do I have to hold Esc to exit the forge menu again, why not just give me a yes/no confirmation?

- can't use scrollwheel to rotate javelin in the forge, rotating speed is too damn slow.

- the game told me to press D pad down to drop a mission item while I use mouse. Some buttons aren't rebindable.

- no FOV slider, no resolution scale, and I don't see any seperate shadow quality setting.

- alt tab in fullscreen mode can make the game go haywire, in one instance I got complete black screen, had to restart the whole PC because I couldn't access the taskbar or CTRL + ALT + DEL to open task manager.

- and the biggest issue: the loading screen appears when I start a new expedition in Fort Tarsis always stuck at 95%. I have to manually kill the game through task manager, reopen it so the game can pop up a prompt that let me continue the expedition. Truly the most annoying shit so far.

 

[Lone Wolf]

I'm actually reasonably pleased that the big issues people are reporting are largely technical, rather than gameplay-loop based.

The FOV/mouse controls/sound bugs can all be ironed out pretty quickly, whereas shitty design is a death knell. The jury is still out.

 

[J1M]

moon knight Here's your source. I guess you cared if the statement was true, but not enough to type "CVAA anthem" into a search engine.
https://www.hardocp.com/news/2019/0...ecting_multiplayer_chat_just_went_into_effect

 

[J1M]

Human ghosts.
Force is experimented with by priests, but scientists have no interest.
Good and evil are treated as if they are characters.
Prophecies are reliable and taken seriously by powerful institutions.

Or some form of ascendance? I mean, it's never explained as either magic or science. Sounds like an assumption.

Good and evil are treated as forces, not characters (who?), which is subjective.

There is no definitive treatment of the force as a non-scientific phenomenon. Who says scientists have no interest in the Force, in the SW universe?

Prophecies are treated seriously by religious institutions, which is... explicable?

You disagree because a bunch of things could potentially be explained off-camera by science. I think you can see how thin that logic is. We don't need to go into detail to dispute it.

 

[RapineDel]

A few people saying the game won't bomb, that's rubbish. There's been too many half assed GaaS titles now that people get scared as soon as issues are surrounding it, no one wants to put time into a dead game or one that's going to be second best to a punch of others, if they're going to put the time in it has to be in one that's at the top of it's genre. Why was World of Warcraft so popular for a long time? It was THE game to play for a lot of online gamers simply because of popularity and anyone who's not a die hard will only float towards those sort of ones. People have a fear of investing time in an online game and having it all be for naught pretty quickly these days.

This game will be a mainstream flop and I think EA already knows it. It's a loot based shooter that looked like a good idea 4 years ago but the mainstream industry has moved on and EA just want this out the door so they an move on. Bioware will always have their obsessed fans remembering the "glory days" of Mass Effect so this will be pay to win pretty quickly to ensure they salvage as much from them as possible. Aside from that it'll be a pretty low key release that may spell the end for Bioware.

To release a demo in this state seems baffling, but EA knew the writing was on the wall so obviously decided to try and get as many pre-orders as possible, knowing enough people wouldn't cancel out of laziness for it to be worth it given once word gets out around release anyway no one is going to buy it. The failure of Fallout 76 must have really angered them as well as it indirectly put pressure on this game to be something better.

 

[Life of the Party]

 

[rusty_shackleford]

t's a loot based shooter that looked like a good idea 4 years ago but the mainstream industry has moved on

disagree, there's still a completely open market for an online looter-shooter-RPG
destiny 2 is shit, divison is meh but yet both are still very popular
closest to anything good in the genre(and it's a bit of a stretch) is warframe

 

[Arnust]

- can't use scrollwheel to rotate javelin in the forge, rotating speed is too damn slow.

Use the left and right movement keys for that. Also tried to use the scroll wheel until I saw that worked, lol

 

[Spockrock]

played the demo. and yes, it's Destiny with flying. not a bad thing per se, I kind of enjoyed playing through Destiny with a friend. but when Warframe is constantly in the top 10 most played games on Steam, why they'd pick to clone Destiny is beyond me.

the demo has very limited content, but so far it plays nice, especially as Storm, where you can take advantage of slow reacting enemies and bombard them from the skies (with the exception of mobile AAA-batteries, that can take you out regardless of how fast you're flying).

difficulty is all over the place. I played through all missions on Normal difficulty, and most bosses have abilities that one-shot me. all the while getting to those bosses is extremely easy, because you can one-shot most enemies you encounter.

mission-specific levels are linear and a chore to go through. this is one part where they should've taken cues from Warframe. same goes for loot drops. what you get as reward is completely random, so you can't farm some boss until it drops what you need, instead you're left hoping you get a low-quality version of what you need, break it down to get its blueprint and then craft a rarer version. they keep saying the demo's economy is not representative of the final game, but I have a feeling it will mostly stay this way - with an emphasis on crafting (which kinda defeats the purpose of shooting monsters, since you get loot by searching for rare crafting materials, which you get from chests/resource nodes)

overall, it's better than I expected, won't be buying it at full price, but I'm cautiously optimistic. in a year's time it can be a good game. if Bioware survives for that long.

 

[Arnust]

I think bar none the sniper enemies are even more dangerous than the turrets. If you can't dodge them in time the fuckers are gonna two shot a Storm and force you to fall off the air.

 

[typical user]

I just have played it for maybe 3 hours. My impressions so far:
-Game feels like a console piss-port. Long loadings, retarded submenus, fancy icons which don't tell you anything and poor performance in your base. In the freeroam I had 60 fps on high preset on 1080p, in the base... 28 fps.
-Movement and shooting feels good but generic enemies with abilities that don't make sense make gameplay really boring.
-Small bits of dialogue gave me an impression this is going to be another nu-Bioware game full of gibberish, fancy names, enigmatic stuff happening which won't make sense again. Dark Souls has more comprehensive lore and it was obfuscated in item descriptions FFS.
-Graphics and sounds are good but c'mon there are other good looking games which I do not get bored after 3 hours.
-The mech frame (or Javelin if we go with fancy names) has some good customization options but those are probably here so EA can put in their ridiculous loot boxes. There is already a premium currency (or maybe world events currency but it's EA c'mon).
-You can't see your stats, how much health you have or how long are cooldowns. It's all streamlined so console plebs won't hurt themselves from additional math and creating efficient builds.
-No PVP means the game will die in 3 months.


When I played The Division beta I was sucked in and didn't want to leave the computer because for it's unique PvP mode and the fact the game ran pretty smooth and it had bearable UI. This game is a mess and I don't feel like buying it not just for technical reasons but the fact there is nothing unique. I have free Destiny 2 on Battlenet just waiting to be checked out already and I can also download Warframe for free or wait for The Division 2 demo. Anthem is pretty lame competitor even with jetpacks.

 

[Vibalist]

 

[thesheeep]

How to fuck up flying controls on a PC game shoddy console port: Make the user emulate an analog stick with their mouse

 

[J_C]

Just saw this thread
https://www.reddit.com/r/AnthemTheG...o_spoilers_the_pc_version_is_an_afterthought/
Apparently nothing about the mouse controls is fixed from the """alpha""", surprising no one with a brain.

"Lack of text chat:"

when you decide to copy destiny 2 so hard and you copy the single worst feature of the entire game

Lack of text chat is due to the stupid new CVAA laws. In order to add something like that to the game they need to have the ability for blind people to use the chat successfully. (Text-to-speech, documented testing with disabled people, etc.)

LOL, we can congratulate for those who created this stupid law. :D Now developers will rather not put chat into their games, because it is much more of a hassle to create a chat which complies with this retarded law.

 

[BlackAdderBG]

Yeah they don't have chat because of some obscure law that passed this week. 4 years in development btw.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Yeah they don't have chat because of some obscure law that passed this week. 4 years in development btw.

it passed 9 years ago

 

[AwesomeButton]

What else do they have for release? Anthem? Does anyone expect this not to be a flop too?

 

[thesheeep]

Yeah they don't have chat because of some obscure law that passed this week. 4 years in development btw.

it passed 9 years ago

You can't be serious.
There is an actual law that prevents multiplayer games from having a text chat if that text chat doesn't also feature text-to-speech?

I mean, sure, tts is extremely easy to implement, but still... I have trouble believing this is for real.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Yeah they don't have chat because of some obscure law that passed this week. 4 years in development btw.

it passed 9 years ago

You can't be serious.
There is an actual law that prevents multiplayer games from having a text chat if that text chat doesn't also feature text-to-speech?

I mean, sure, tts is extremely easy to implement, but still... I have trouble believing this is for real.

https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...lation-on-videogames-is-now-in-effect.125888/

 

[fantadomat]

Yeah they don't have chat because of some obscure law that passed this week. 4 years in development btw.

it passed 9 years ago

You can't be serious.
There is an actual law that prevents multiplayer games from having a text chat if that text chat doesn't also feature text-to-speech?

I mean, sure, tts is extremely easy to implement, but still... I have trouble believing this is for real.

Blind people and progressive murica.

 

[Angthoron]

Are there more mute people, or more blind people that play action games, what do you guys think?

 

[fantadomat]

Are there more mute people, or more blind people that play action games, what do you guys think?

You don't need a voice to kill shit!

 

[Infinitron]

Virgin Chad: http://blog.bioware.com/2019/01/26/anthem-vip-demo-update/

Anthem VIP Demo: an update from BioWare’s Head of Live Service
by Author -Chad Robertson

Yesterday was rocky. The first day of our VIP demo weekend did not go exactly as we planned, and I want to share what happened.

We’ve been testing the entire game and platform for several months, but there were a few things we missed; real-world play frequently leads to unexpected issues. Before I share details on this and what we’re still facing, I want to dispel one comment we’ve seen: that we under-planned for server capacity. To ensure stability, we intended to manage our servers to match the player population as it grew. Overall, we had excess capacity prepared for population increases, and continue to do so. That said, what’s important is that all parts of the game work as designed to meet players’ needs, and that did not happen in the opening hours.

While there are a number of issues we dealt with yesterday, the three primary areas were:

1. Platform connections – this was caused by the spike in players entering the game when we opened up. Unfortunately, these issues did not present themselves during our internal testing. Investigations are ongoing, and we will continue to apply fixes throughout the weekend.
2. Entitlements – these are account flags that grant players things like their pre-order incentives and demo access. During the demo weekend, we identified a bug where VIP players with a specific combination of entitlements were being blocked from accessing the demo. We believe we’ve resolved most of these, but have additional cases we are addressing.
3. “Infinite loads” – this is occurring for some players, particularly when they transition from Fort Tarsis to an expedition. We saw this only in isolated cases during internal testing and believed it was resolved. Unfortunately, the problem is exacerbated in the real-world where differences with player’s ISPs and home networks introduce new behavior.

Today, our top priorities are:

1. Continue to resolve any reports of issues with login and entitlement problems.
2. Implement fixes to address “infinite loads”. I want to be upfront that this is a difficult one, and something we may not resolve during this weekend — many players are not seeing this issue and the last thing we want to do is destabilize the experience for everyone.
3. Improve server performance. We’ve heard reports of rubber-banding and other signs of server latency. We believe we can address this and will be conducting some small-scale experiments to confirm that. We may roll some fixes out this weekend or may wait for the open demo next weekend, depending on the level of risk to the overall service.

While we have had problems, we have also had many players enjoying the game. It’s been incredibly humbling to see so many people watching along with us on Twitch (over 300K concurrent viewers yesterday & over 100M minutes watched — those are Fortnite-type numbers!). Thank you for your support! Our goal is to get everyone into the demo having fun together.

We appreciate everyone’s patience and sincerely apologize for those who have had issues getting into the game. As a token of appreciation for your enthusiasm and any issues you encountered, we’re giving everyone who participated in the VIP demo weekend an additional new vinyl at launch.

We believe we’ve created an amazing game and we’re doing everything we can to ensure our entire community can enjoy it. We’re committed to keeping an open conversation with our community as part of our Live Service well into the future. (We’ll also have some cool news to share soon on our plans for the game after we launch — stay tuned!)

If you’re still having problems, please reach out to Answer HQ. Dedicated members of our community and customer support teams are here to assist you. Anything they can’t handle gets reported to BioWare’s development team.

Stronger Together!

Chad

 

[thesheeep]

Are there more mute people, or more blind people that play action games, what do you guys think?

I definitely become mute when I play. Last thing I want is to talk to other shitheads...

 

[Space Satan]

(((coin)))