ANTHEM - failed Destiny clone from BioWare

[Plaguecrafter]

11 month old interview: https://variety.com/2018/gaming/features/biowares-casey-hudson-interview-1202842336/

“Maybe 15 or 20 years from now on devices we can’t imagine, you can play a game and say, ‘Wow. This feels like a BioWare game.’”

Well, this didn't age so well...

 

[fantadomat]

Hudson is quite the ego-maniac isn't he? Being part of burning Bioware to the ground may take some wind out of his sails...

Or anarchist wanting to destroy the ruling order of the game industry!

 

[Clockwork Knight]

https://ogn.theonion.com/ea-announces-new-revenue-model-just-deleting-everyone-s-1834782249

EA Announces New Revenue Model Just Deleting Everyone’s ‘Anthem’ Characters Unless They Send Company $300 In Next Hour
Yesterday 10:26am
SEE MORE:ONION GAMERS NETWORK

Anthem fans, take notice: Electronic Arts just announced they’re rolling out a new revenue model for the game that involves deleting everyone’s characters unless they send the company $300 in the next hour.

Yikes! If you’re attached to your Ranger, Colossus, Interceptor, or Storm, looks like now might be a good time to pony up.


“Look, the idea here is simple: You send us 300 bucks in the next 60 minutes or else we’ll permanently delete your Javelin,” said EA CEO Andrew Wilson in a statement sent out to all of the game’s users. “Think about that. All your gear, gone. The time you’ve clocked into leveling up your Freelancer in Heart Of Rage, gone. Your weapon stash, gone. Forever. Or you can just play along and send us the goddamn money.”

“And no, we’re not fucking around here,” he added.

This will definitely be a huge test for Anthem’s player base, which risks losing all the experience they’ve accumulated if they choose to not pay the fee. Many have already spent dozens of hours grinding strongholds for Legendary loot, which could all be for naught if they don’t provide the money. For those users, paying up seems like a no-brainer.

“We don’t care how many hours you’ve spent building out your fully kitted-out Ranger—all of that’s going straight down the toilet unless we get three-hundo by the end of the hour,” said Wilson. “You could have crafted more Masterworks than anyone else in the game. We don’t care. Without that sweet cash, they’ll be gone.”

“Cough it up, goddamnit,” he added.

Since the announcement, many players have reported the presence of a new countdown clock in the game lobby, counting down the seconds they have left to comply with the company’s request.

“Basically, if you don’t want me to take a sledgehammer to every goddamn server in the Electronic Arts basement, then you will fork over the dough in the next 60 minutes,” said Wilson, adding that he did not care how many paying users he took down in the process. “Don’t think you can worm your way out of this, either. My colleagues over at BioWare are monitoring each payment to make sure every last one of you little shits give us what we deserve.”

“Tick-tock, you poor fucks,” he added.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AnthemTheGame/comments/bp8i53/people_really_taking_this_article_seriously/

Man, Mark really missed an opportunity to respond with "Tick-tock, you poor fucks"

grim reminder that these people are allowed to vote, breed and work public sector jobs.

 

[True Ukrainian]

Those people also bought Anthem.

 

[c2007]

Hudson is quite the ego-maniac isn't he? Being part of burning Bioware to the ground may take some wind out of his sails...

Or anarchist wanting to destroy the ruling order of the game industry!

You're giving that meathead way too much credit.

 

[Norfleet]

I don't know what's more sad, that people would believe an Onion article was real, or that the Onion article sounded so plausible that people would.

 

[fantadomat]

I don't know what's more sad, that people would believe an Onion article was real, or that the Onion article sounded so plausible that people would.

To be honest not everyone knows what the fuck is onion article. And the shit this days is going downhill,it is no wonder that somebody believed it.

 

[Infinitron]

Meanwhile, at BioWare: https://www.pcgamer.com/anthem-cataclysm/

BioWare finally unveils Anthem's endgame Cataclysm event, but it looks pretty meh
Anthem's mysterious endgame event has some cool ideas but the wait isn't worth it.



Since before Anthem launched, BioWare has been teasing its mysterious Cataclysm endgame experience. It was hyped up as a world-changing feature that would challenge the mettle of Anthem's hardcore players. Cataclysm was supposed to launch in May, but Anthem's turbulent launch and myriad of core problems, like highly repetitive missions and boring loot, got in the way. And after missing most of its April update deadlines, BioWare announced it was delaying their entire post-launch roadmap—Cataclysm included. But today Anthem lead producer Ben Irving and community manager Jesse Anderson hosted a livestream on Twitch to finally show off what the hell Cataclysm actually is.

The wait has not been worth it.

Don't get me wrong, Cataclysm is cool. But after waiting for so long to be revealed—and set against the backdrop of Anthem's fundamental flaws—Cataclysm is hardly a reason to reinstall Anthem if you're already frustrated with the disjointed mess of BioWare's loot shooter. Not to mention it still doesn't have a set release date, though players can test it out on Anthem's upcoming test server in the next few weeks.

While Cataclysm was often compared to Destiny 2's raids, it is a very different kind of experience. As Irving explains, Cataclysm is a timed event that will take place over eight weeks, with new loot and activities rolling out each week. The first two weeks of the Cataclysm event don't really count however, as all they'll offer is new in-game challenges that reward new vanity items for missions and Strongholds you already have unlocked. After those two weeks pass, the Cataclysm itself will be available. Here's how it works.

Into the storm
Once the six-week Cataclysm event kicks off, players will have access to three new story missions with "high-quality cinematic scenes" and a brand new area called The Cataclysm. The new story missions will help bridge the events of Anthem's original story campaign with this new event, but the meat of this update is found in The Cataclysm area itself.

This new area is an open-world zone ravaged by a supernatural storm. The goal behind Cataclysm is to team up in a squad of four to complete various objectives, earn points, and defeat a final boss before a time limit expires. Those points are then turned into a currency you can spend on new gear that will be rolled out on a weekly basis once the Cataclysm update is actually live.

Unlike a Stronghold or a traditional dungeon, however, the Cataclysm is a nonlinear area that players are free to explore at their leisure. You won't have much time to take in the sights though, because your time in The Cataclysm is dictated by a timer and extreme weather effects that constantly chip away at your suits' "Stability Meter." If that meter runs out, the storm will quickly deplete your health and kill you.

Scattered across the map are various arenas with specific objectives that, when completed, reward your team with points. These arenas look pretty similar to the repetitive free-play events that players are familiar with, but Irving did say that the objectives will involve some puzzle solving. That doesn't inspire much hope, since Anthem's attempts at puzzles has so far been more frustrating than fun. These arenas will also have safe spots that can be triggered, giving you a temporary reprieve from the Cataclysm's harmful effects. Solving the objectives of each arena will increase your score and your time limit.

To maximize your score, Irving says there are plenty of secrets and puzzles that players can complete that add bonus multipliers. One of the more obvious ones, for example, is killing enemies while suffering from the harmful effects of the storm, which doubles the points you get.

The ultimate objective is to defeat a boss called Vara, which Irving did not go into much detail about. Once she's defeated, your score will be doubled and the Cataclysm will end. So the overall idea is to quickly clear objectives and kill enemies, earning bonus multipliers to get the highest score you can while still leaving enough time to defeat Vara. Even if you don't defeat her in time (or you die trying), you'll still finish the Cataclysm—just without her massive double bonus.

The Cataclysm will change each week that the event is live, too. New arenas will be made available while others will be locked off and "Inversions" will add modifiers like upping the damage of shotguns or reducing the effectiveness of elemental effects to encourage players to try different strategies to maximize their runs. A leaderboard system will give bragging rights to those who can clear The Cataclysm fastest with the most points earned.

But what about the loot?

One of the biggest frustrations Anthem players have had is with its boring and stingy loot system. But beyond Cataclysm adding more powerful loot, the frustrations of Anthem's gear system will largely remain in place. Each time you finish a run in the Cataclysm, your points will be converted to a currency that you can spend at a vendor in Fort Tarsis on "battle chests"—which sound like they'll only contain randomized rewards.

The contents of these loot boxes will change week after week, starting with some new melee augments before finally offering some brand new types of weapons that haven't been unveiled yet.

While this new loot will be more powerful than anything currently in the game by a small margin, Catacylsm will also add higher rarity tiers for support items, some new masterwork gear, and a new slot that changes the behavior of your javelin's melee weapon. These will be added to the regular sources for loot, too.

In addition to that, there are some positive if minor fixes that will affect the whole of Anthem's gear system. The biggest is that the Luck stat, which helped influence rare loot drops, is going away entirely and drop chances will be boosted as if you had your Luck maxed. That means more loot more often. Items that once offered extra Luck will now add armor instead.

When will Cataclysm be released?

We still don't know, but the good news is you can play a beta version starting sometime in the next week or so. We'll have more information on that as it's made available, but you'll have to download an entirely separate beta client for Anthem—if you can spare another 60GB of drive space that is.

The beta servers won't be live 24/7, but Anderson says players will be able to jump in for a few days at a time and test out new Cataclysm features as they're being developed and provide feedback. That feedback will help BioWare determine how powerful new Cataclysm loot should be as well how it should tweak the overall experience.

After such a long wait, though, I'm not all that excited by what BioWare has been cooking up. I like that Cataclysms are a dynamic race against time where you have to find that perfect balance between staying safe but also pushing your score ever higher. But this feels remarkably like Anthem's boring free-play mode with a timer slapped on it. One of the worst parts about Anthem was how repetitive and simple its mission objectives were, and though this stream didn't go in-depth on what it takes to complete an arena in the Cataclysm, they sure seemed similar. I'm worried that after a few runs, the Cataclysm will end up being the same repetitive grind. And rewards stuffed inside of randomized loot boxes doesn't exactly whet my appetite for Anthem's mundane loot. At this point, I'm not sure what would.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

I thought Anthem's endgame cataclysm happened on release.

 

[Gerrard]

Have they fixed all the core issues yet?

 

[Steamboat Willie]

Have they fixed all the core issues yet?

The game hasn't been scrapped entirely so no, not yet.

 

[Turbo normie]

Bioware acts like Cersei Lannister.
Bioware's children are fucking incest breeding annoying the whole world. We all know how retarded they are but Bioware loves them and pretends their are normal and legit. Only Bioware will cry at their funeral.

 

[True Ukrainian]

Dragon Age Inquisition says that you are wrong. It might look like a bloody abortion, but plenty of people loved it.

 

[Myobi]

Dragon Age Inquisition says that you are wrong. It might look like a bloody abortion, but plenty of people loved it.

Yeah, especially the part where the real ending to it came in a form of a DLC.

 

[Infinitron]

Oof: https://www.pcgamer.com/anthem-feels-hopeless/

Anthem feels hopeless
EA's loot shooter is in a tail-spin that seems impossible to pull out of.

PC gamers are no strangers to an epic comeback story. In the past few years, publishers like Ubisoft and Square Enix have pulled games back from the brink of doom several times. Rainbow Six Siege, Final Fantasy 14—hell, people forget that even Steam was once reviled as useless software that relied on DRM and game exclusives to get people to download it, and now people are mad when a game isn't on Steam. The world of PC gaming is full of stories like these, of developers righting a wayward ship to find resounding, unlikely success. But I don't think Anthem is going to be one of them.

When Anthem launched players quickly realized that, underneath all that hype about an ever-evolving story and world, it was a disjointed, unimaginative loot shooter full of needless padding and repetitive missions. But there was also a glimmer of hope. Anthem wasn't the first live-service game to launch in a bad state, and though things were grim, other games like Diablo 3 and Battlefield 4 had skirted similar launch disasters. But nothing in the past four months since Anthem's release—including its long-awaited and over-promised Cataclysm endgame—has given me any confidence in BioWare's ability to turn things around.

No momentum
Though Anthem's problems at launch were significant, they also didn't feel impossible to rectify. The main campaign was a total bust, but Destiny proved that players are quick to forgive a bad campaign or patch when what follows is actually enjoyable. But aside from fixes to problems that should never have existed in the first place, like unbearably long load times or a game flow that forced you to spend so much wasted time walking the streets of the purgatory that is Fort Tarsis, BioWare hasn't delivered a single compelling reason to keep playing Anthem.

A new Stronghold and some tweaks to loot haven't come close to fixing Anthem's foundational issues. For months, players begged BioWare to throw open the dam of its drip-fed gear grind—just to give them something to be excited about—and BioWare hasn't, presumably so as not to undermine and trivialize Anthem's gear progression. All the while, notable BioWare developers have been pulling back, engaging with the community less, leaving players in the dark about what was happening and why.

It's understandable that BioWare employees don't want to subject themselves to the toxicity and vitriol often thrown their way. It also puts Anthem in vicious cycle it can't escape from: The longer BioWare gives players the silent treatment, the more disgruntled and upset they become.

Without something to push back against this overwhelming tide of negativity, I can't see Anthem ever making a comeback. Even if such a fabled update existed—that perfect game mode or progression grind that could suddenly make Anthem fun—I don't even have faith that BioWare is capable of making it.

In the tumultuous months that followed its release, one beacon of hope was Anthem's Cataclysm event. Since E3 2018, BioWare teased this as the cornerstone of Anthem's endgame experience: Apocalyptic, supernatural storms that players would have to brave in order to save the world and, of course, grab some good loot in the process. If BioWare could do something fun and interesting with Cataclysm, it might have been able to finally get its footing. But, like everything else about Anthem, Cataclysm is a baffling disappointment.

When Cataclysm was first shown, hurricane-strength winds ravaged the land, uprooting trees and rocks while wildlife fled in terror before earth-shaking peels of lightning. It looked scary and exciting. The version of Catacylsm now available on Anthem's test servers couldn't be more different.

In lieu of an announcement at E3, BioWare revealed their plans for Catacylsm during a livestream a few weeks ago. After weeks of waiting and hoping BioWare would have something to show, we got some nails and a coffin. Instead of that supernatural storm we were promised, players fly around in a map that looks exactly like the main open world only it's colored really blue for some reason. There are no hurricane winds, no bolts of lightning, nothing to indicate that you're navigating a fatal storm to fight some unknowable threat.

Nope. Cataclysm is just Anthem's Free-Play mode with a timer slapped on. You're still flying around to different objective markers on the map, solving some arbitrary puzzle or fighting some meaningless boss—only now there's a scoreboard. I took some time to play Cataclysm on Anthem's test servers in hopes I was maybe missing something, but it's really as boring as it sounds.

Though Catacylsm is subject to change (and hopefully improve), it echoes the same problems plaguing the rest of Anthem: It's unimaginative and underwhelming, making me believe that BioWare just doesn't have what it takes to make Anthem fun.

In four months BioWare has only managed to address some of Anthem's most broken designs, but we're still left with a shooter that is woefully boring and sparse. Cataclysm isn't going to change that. If BioWare really wants to save Anthem, it needs to give up on its half-assed post-launch roadmap, start over from scratch, and build something actually worth saving. Instead of drip-feeding updates to its rapidly evaporating community, BioWare should go dark like Hello Games did after No Man's Sky and resurface when it has something of interest. But if BioWare continues chasing milestones on a road map that few people even care about anymore, Anthem is truly doomed.

 

[BlackAdderBG]

So they will give it the SWTOR treatment-put 2 people to maintain the game f2p mode running and 20 people to work on the in-game shop.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

best part of Anthem failing means that we get a new mass effect before bioware is shitcanned

 

[Rahdulan]

https://www.gamesradar.com/no-mans-...t-76s-developers-to-stay-silent-after-launch/

TLDR
Antem will turn around 2yrs after launch but BW has to stay silent according to Murray.
Silence is golden.

Because EA is known as charitable bunch.

 

[Cyberarmy]

best part of Anthem failing means that we get a new mass effect before bioware is shitcanned

We need a much more bigger rainbow

 

[typical user]

The worst part about Anthem is that combat looks great, it feels great but the enemy design, the balance and the rest of the game are crap. If you release complete dogshit crap then people will move on. Anthem, Fo76 and the rest have great skeleton, a great starting point with great potential and huge mess attached to it.

 

[Makabb]

Wow the music is a rip off from Xcom

 

[BlackAdderBG]

I'm probably tone deaf, but don't hear any similarities.

 

[Volourn]

Wait. a game that is all women with no men yet there is still war? But, I thought the anti male brigade was all about the 'men are to blame for everything' shtick? LMAO

 

[fantadomat]

LoL this is pretty much dead. In this video there are some pretty good numbers,even if the guy is super obnoxious.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Anthem currently has less people watching it on Twitch than Mass Effect.

Spoiler