ANTHEM

Quote from SWAT_OP-R8R

btw. Console or PC version?

How was the performance for you?

The console version - i rarely play on PC any more (already sitting entire day in front of a PC

The PS sounded like having the vacuum cleaner activated on max power - aside from this there was just the normal game lack, which they described and are working on (rubber banding, NPCs disappearing, etc.)

lowest FPS i had was 65 in fort tarsis

but usually it was around 80-150 (highly fluctuating)

I also miss a FPS lock option on PC which sets the FPS to the monitor refresh rate.

Ive read that consoles the FPS will be locked to 30 (a bit low for my taste)

30 fps is just fine and as it would be fixed for everyone on console there is no advantage for players using higher fps rates

Less cheating^^ Although there are other options to cheat

dunno

i can only say that playing destiny 2 with 30 (I tried it once) was an awful experience. It felt like having heavy input lag.

Ok, Ive started to play the final game this weekend.

My initial experience on Friday was not so good since the cutscenes were stuttering and the overall game performance was bad.

I ended up shutting down the game after just 30 mins.

Later in the evening these problems vanished and I am not 100% sure what fixed these problems.

I did some changes to my Nvidia settings... but at the same time the game received an update. So I cant tell if my changes fixed the problems or if the update delivered a fix. Probably it does not matter... its running fine now.

The game looks better and also is filled with more content than in the demo. So here some improvements were done.

It has been stable for me and since I run it on one of my 3 SSDs the loading times are not a game breaker (~30 secs max).

Unlike I previously assumed there are no loading screens in the open world so thats a big relief. The only loading happens when you enter dungeons or switch from the city to the different game modes.

When you watch review vids you get the impression that especially the loading times are a serious problem but I guess the day one patch helped a bit and putting the game on a SSD completely resolves the problem. Still I am at the point that a game like this should by default have a better performance.

Ive started the story campaign twice... so I am probably not far yet.

My reason for starting all over again while still being early in the game is that my first character was female (I thought that this might be an interesting choice).

l decided not to proceed with the female character for the reason that despite being able to define the look of that character I never see her outside of her Javelin... so the appearance would not matter to me at all. Which in return means that the only thing I am experiencing was the female voice.

Nothing wrong with that actually but after a few missions I came to the conclusion that too many female NPCs I talked to had a very similar sounding voice (at least in the german version) which forced me to read subtitles to figure out who is actually talking to whom. It might be that in other languages this problem does not exist... but ... I dont want to read subtitles in such a game.

So I switched to a male character who has an easily distiguished voice.

Simple reason... simple fix to the problem.

Is the game good?

I can definitely answer this with a confident "dunno".

Over the past 3 days I have played about 20 hours.

I would say that I am in the middle of the honeymoon phase where everything is new and shiny.

I like the gameplay... I like the action driven combat.... I like exploring the game (and there is much to explore)... and I like playing the story eventhough the story won't win an Oscar. What I like most is customizing my Javelin... improving it and making it look badass.

I still play with a Ranger eventhough I have unlocked 2 other Javelins already. I simply decided to get used to one class and get confused with different play styles so early in the game. That also has the benefit that my vault does not get filled with low level class specific items.

I can tell that there are a few things I don't like about the game.

My playstyle is very agressive (as I always try to be the player in the team with the highest score)... this causes me to rush into the battle even if I am outnumbered and outclassed. It really sucks to die in this game because you have to wait for another player to revive you. If nobody of the others care about that or if the team does not notice that other players are down (I simply assume that not every player has such a good overview over the battles) you are doomed to wait. I got killed 6 times so far... and in 4 of these cases I had to wait multiple minutes for my team to revive me. In one case they ignored me completely and I was allowed to respawn after the current part of the mission was over.

What this game really needs is a way to respawn after maybe 30 seconds... or a way to tell the team "hello over here... revive me". Right now dying is a troublesome experience if your team is not experienced enough. Since I play solo this is a gamble with every mission.

Another big problem I have is related to my visits to Fort Tarsis (the city area). I hate moving around there since walking and running feels sooooo slow. You can hear your footsteps... but that does in no way fit to the actually movement speed. 3-4 taps a second but you still feel like being in slowmotion. That needs to change.

Another point of critic for me is that freeplay feels so empty. No, not empty because of not enough NPCs... but the map is so incredible big and only 4 players are on it.

I once encountered a Titan when I was lvl6 and after half an hour shooting at it and using all my abilities I had caused maybe 20% damage to this Titan. No other player on the map was close to help me... no way to call for help... nothing.

The freeplay mode need more players... and the game needs a chat or a ping system or something else where you can call for help.

It is stupid to limit such a big map to only 4 players.

4 players work if you are on a mission where these players know what the objective is... but it does not work in freeplay.

I am still too early in the game to clearly give a review.

There are aspects that I like... there are some that I dont like.

The game lacks a bit content in its early state but that currently does not bother me at all. I think that I will spent more time in the game this week and then continue to work on CF after that... I am not putting too much expectation on all that stuff right now. I am not mad that the game doesnt force me into a 24/7 grind yet.

The metacritic reviews put Anthem at a pretty low 60% score... which is worse than Mass Effect Andromeda.

I think this is based on multiple factors.

Both Demos were not running smooth which caused some anger. The players expected more content at release, the players expected a better story telling from Bioware (but lets face it, its not a singleplayer RPG), the players were confused about the strange release schedule, the players were insecure about the microtransactions... and the players hate EA. The hate is really strong up to the point where players are not even considering to give this game a chance.

I just hope that the sales numbers are still high enough for EA to give Bioware the time to deliver the needed content.

This looks so much like a badass Predator:

As you can see in the mission review screen below, the balancing between the different player levels works pretty well in Anthem.

I like that I can keep up with a player that is 12 levels above me and even achieve better scores if I play just good enough.

Interesting also is that you have a personal score, which in the match I played here was 2400 (which was 200 better than the 2nd best) but on top you get an alliance score which is a teamscore which can even out large gaps between players. This way even new players that dont perform that good yet can catch up with more experienced players. (and when I talk about score I of course mean XP... but in the end thats pretty much the same)

This guns nails it:

There is an ongoing debate on guns and their actually use in Anthem.

You probably can find hundreds of comments stating that guns are useless and underperforming.

At this point I have to completely disagree eventhough I mainly use my other Javelin abilities. I use them much more often than guns.

When you start a new game and play the intro mission... and also the first few story missions you will notice that your guns are actually very effective.

But after a few missions somehow dont feel effective anymore. Abilities (especially when you do combo damage) turn into the true damage dealers.

I believe this is totally intentional to force players to learn how to use abilities over stupid gunplay.

As a matter of fact... you can get item drops which increase your combo ability damage by up to 50% while the perks you get on the low level guns maybe have 3-5% bonus damage IF you have luck.

Many guns in the story campaign feel like pea shooters. But not all.

e.g. There is a sniper rifle with explosion damage. It only has 1 bullet before you have to release but that one bullet hits harder than any of your abilities. Especially against bosses or larger enemies this weapon (or other very specific weapons) will save your ass in some situations.

e.g. Some enemies (like Titans) dont take combo damage. Many other big enemies are hard to combo since you often have to get very close to them which might get you killed.

There are some mid-tier weapons that are really worth using over your abilities.

In endgame you get much better weapon rolls. Some which deal 200% bonus damage and have further bonuses that stack and improve your DPS.

Especially in endgame turn into the real damage dealers and the argument that these weapons suck in Anthem is total bullshit.

There is a phase in the game where weapons (with a few exceptions) are underperforming... but that phase does not last too long.

Regarding my concerns about the game economy:

An epic armor pack from the ingame store costs about $8,50. You can also buy it with ingame currently... at 61.000 coins.

I started the game with 40.000 coins (you get that for free) and played 3 days. Now I am sitting at 91.300 coins. So in 3 days I earned a bit more than 50.000 coins.

That does not sound that bad but is totally irrelevant actually.

Why?

Because most of these coins are rewards from challenges/achievements.

If get 2000 coins for killing your first Titan in the game... how often can you kill your first Titan? Correct, you can do that only once.

These challenges/achievements are a one time thing... once achieved you can not repeat that stuff and eventually you run out of opportunities to earn coins.

That is why I completely would ignore them. Its nice that they exist and you can get a few coins as "bonus" but in my eyes they are not worth to be considered a regular income.

However, there are daily, weekly and monthly challenges in this game and there is the alliance system.

The alliance system calculates a score based on your earned XP and the XP of other players you have played with. Players which you randomly meet and players on your friends list. With other words you get rewarded for playing with other people. Thats nice.

I believe only the reward is based on the 5 players with the highest XP gains.

I cant tell what a usually reward might look like over a week since I did not play a full week yet. However for roughly 3 days played I got 555 coins. Not much actually but I am also just low level and dont have access to high difficulty content yet. So... maybe its a bit more.

What I can tell for sure is how much I could earn using the daily, weekly and monthly challenges.

I can earn exactly 0 coins from the monthly challenges. Simply because the reward are masterwork crafting materials. So yeah... Id take them.

The daily rewards (I only consider the ones with coins here) are not hard to accomplish... play a few world events (easy)... finish a stronghold (easy). Not a big deal.

Per day you can earn 1250 coins. With other words 37.500 per month. It is not a big deal to really go for that.

And then there are 4 weekly challenges. This is a bit more tricky. Today was the reset and in the 3 days I played I managed to finish 2 of the weekly challenges.

One of the weekly challenges could not be completed by me because I have not unlocked endgame content yet (I assume its not a big deal once unlocked). And the 4th challenge was simply not possible for me as I would have needed a bit more time (a day more would have been sufficient). I simply didnt have a full week to finish that challenge. I dont see a problem getting it finished in the next week.

Each weekly challenge as a 2000 coin reward, so you can earn 8000 coins per week... or 32.000 coins per month.

Combined with the rewards from the daily challenges and the alliance system you can regulary earn ~70.000 coins.

Thats enough to buy one Armor Pack per month.

It somehow was my expectation that about to be one free armor per month. And the final numbers prove me right.

But on top there are the one time achievements which also might help to get some cosmetics from the shop.

Bioware also announced that there will be a way to earn cosmetics from completing strongholds on a regular basis. So its not all that bad actually.

I think the ingame economy is perfectly fine.

I dont want items to be way too expensive but I also dont want items to be meaningless cheap. Afterall earning something is part of the fun.

Quote from SWAT_OP-R8R

As you can see in the mission review screen below, the balancing between the different player levels works pretty well in Anthem.

I like that I can keep up with a player that is 12 levels above me and even achieve better scores if I play just good enough.

Interesting also is that you have a personal score, which in the match I played here was 2400 (which was 200 better than the 2nd best) but on top you get an alliance score which is a teamscore which can even out large gaps between players. This way even new players that dont perform that good yet can catch up with more experienced players. (and when I talk about score I of course mean XP... but in the end thats pretty much the same)

Yeah, you get more or the same points and actually the group is very often good balanced. But actually the better levelled players deal a lot more damage to enemies due to their better performed Javelins.

Actually I did not have one game yet where a higher level player did perform better than I did. Maybe by 50 XP... but not to a significant amount.

Either these players dont use their javelin well or ... I dont know.

Its not even that I go into combat with the highest level gear that I have. I often use items which are multiple levels below my highest lvl items simply because their specific effect fits my play style.

hmm

there are moments where the story turns interesting

Story review:

After after one week or more precisely 38 hours gameplay I finished the story campaign and reached endgame (lvl30).

That actually isnt that bad. In my eyes that is a good amount of story content for a full price game.

Of course I played the side quests that were offered along this story road because they somehow belong into this equation and often contributed to the experience.

The balance between story content and reaching endgame in my eyes is very good.

Other games unfortunatly run out of story long before endgame can be reached and you then have to start grinding low level missions to make progress.

I did not experience this in Anthem at all.

It surprised me a bit that it took a full week for me to get through the story part. I finished the storyline of vanilla Destiny 2 in just 2 days.

So yeah... I cant complain about the amount of story content and its balancing.

I watched multiple vids on youtube from early access players trying to render a negative view on the story telling.

Well, I have to admit that we are not talking about Shakespear here. But we are also not talking about story content on the level of a bad soap opera.

Anthem probably is at the same level of a Hollywood action movie in which the hero has stop the evil guy that wants godlike powers.

I am pretty sure you all know these types of movies.

Anthem won't win an Oscar... but it actually is an entertaining ride.

There could be a bit more variety in the tasks you have to do during the story missions but actually this is not something which would be a deciding factor for me.

The missions are fun... even ... if the layout is a bit repetive.

Story wise the game offers a some plot twists to spice things up a bit. The shows conflicts between the characters that need to be dealt with and renders some emotional, sometimes damaged personalities.

I dont want to spoil the story too much here because I actually think its worth experiencing it.

Anthem however, has a few problems... or at least some aspects which I did not like.

There is the problem of the character animations.

More than often enough I thought... the way the animations are done does not fit to the story told.

The problem here is that the developers often have used idle animations or standard animation sets during conversations. It simply feels strange.

In my eyes Bioware should redesign these conversations and motion capture the animations individually. That would significantly improve the quality of the game.

As a matter of fact there are a bunch of scenes in the game where motion capturing was used to create more complex animations and these scenes are just great.

There is a difference if you encounter this:

OR something like that:

Next to that I have a few problems with my own character... the player... the Freelancer.

My problem starts with the fact that I have no idea what my character is called. I am always called "hey freelancer"..."so you are the Freelancer"... a name would be nice.

I of course understand that in a shared online world this "title" is used in order to create the impression that not all players have the same name.... but actually thats... bullshit. Its the same crap like in Mass Effect Andromeda... where everone was calling you "Pathfinder".

I miss the days where Characters had a name. "look there is Commander Shepard".

I think you get my point. I want to identify myself with the character I play.

The next and probably most important point is that I think the main character is too much of a nice guy.

Helping everyone, being nice to everyone, always having a friendly word... always being right, always being the hero that saves the day.

The main character does not have any character flaws. He/She does not have any negative traits.

During the story you have conversation options which always will lead to a 100% nice and shiny resolution to the discussed problems.

I wish that such conversation options would lead to "complications" or even consequences that have an impact on the game.

But when your only answer options to the question "Are we friends now?" is 1. "Yes" and 2. "Of course" you start to doubt the purpose of such options.

On top of that does it make the main character a bit unrelatable.

Conclusion:

I am not disappointed by the story content of the game. No, I am actually surprised. There is more than I actually expected to see and at no point I felt bored.

There are in my eyes issues in the way some of the story is presented.

But I think if Bioware at least starts to recapture some animations in the cut scenes the Anthem storyline could get really impressive.

Lore:

The Anthem backstory (Lore) also is based on solid grounds.

Its a story about what the world of Anthem was based one... how the world was created and how it evolved.

The rise of mankind... the fall of others... and a constant threat of coming from the creation itself.

The world of Anthem is an artificial one... the world was created by something or someone. Everybody in that world knows it but nobody understands it.

Generally it reminds me a bit on Mass Effect Andromeda where an old race started to artificially terraform worlds. Nobody knows who these people are but their terraforming machines are still in on the planets.

In Anthem this pretty much is also the case... the machines are the backbones of the world and they keep creating new stuff.

It wouldnt surprise me if Anthem and Mass Effect share the same universe.

Advice:

Make use of the Alliance system in the game.

For the first weekend after the release I played without people on my friends list with the result that I was able to earn 555 coins.

I have just yesterday started to really make use of the alliance system by adding other players to my Origins friendslist.

Yeah... I simply wrote down the names of the people I played missions with and then did a friends request.

The alliance system today shows a reward of nearly 7000 coins. That is a huge bonus just for having other Anthem players on your friends list.

3 weeks in the game and the honeymoon is over.

Shit hit the fan.

The Anthem reddit is on flames.

Reason, Bioware released a patch this weekend which introduced many many fixes but also for a very short moment allowed players to earn endgame items at an inflated rate. Bioware noticed it... paniced and reverted that change.

The drop rates of endgame items was very low prior this patch... but meanwhile endgame loot is almost impossible to get.

People have spent 150 hours in the game and still have not been able to get a single Legendary item.

I have spent a good amount of my weekend in the game unlike the weeks before got nearly no loot anymore.

On top of that does the freeplay mode all of a sudden (since the patch) contain significantly less crafting materials.

That results in a terrible situation where players are no longer able to find endgame items in the game and also no longer are able to craft such items.

The developers responded in a not so clever way stating that they are also not happy with the current situation but will provide a new system in a couple of months.

They broke it in a day and now want players to wait a couple months for improvements (whatever they look like).

By then in my eyes the thousands of players which have already complained will have moved on to other games.

I am not sure if this is a bug or malicious intend. But the situation in Anthem over this weekend went from sub-optimal to a nightmare.

The patch released earlier (on 9th). Originally the patch was supposed to be released on 12th (tomorrow). In my eyes it was a very bad mistake releasing a patch on a weekend without having the developers in place to react on possible problems. Patchday always should be when your team is at work and deal with unexpected situations. I also think they probably should have used the days from 9th to 12th to actually test the patch instead of blindly releasing stuff.

Meanwhile more than ten thousand players (and we are talking about the loyal fans which want this game to be a success) have stated to protest and boycott the game over the next week.

The community managers have meanwhile opened a feedback thread for the loot issue. It will be interesting to see official statements now that the developers are back at work.

Right now Anthem is a looter shooter without loot.

My opinion after +140 hours in the game.

You might spend ~40 hours to play throught the story and level up your character.

This is a very satisfying experience since the gameplay is fun, everything is new and the story also is relative ok.

After that point you will be facing the endgame content of Anthem and I personally did not have a big problem with it. I tried the different Javelins, tried to create builds that allow me to switch to higher difficulties and deal more damage.

I would say that until I reached ~100 gameplay hours everything was fine.

However, the last ~40 hours reveiled to me in which areas Anthem has its problems.

Loot is a big problem. The loot drop rates are way too low. The game does not feel rewarding in endgame. When you finish your play session at the end of the day you want to look back and be able to say I got this nice shiny item that did improve my Javelin.

But that is almost never going to happen.

Anthem is a looter game which only drops low level engame loot at very low rates. High lvl endgame loot (Legendary) almost never drops. Playing 140 hours and only having 5 Legendaries (while 3 of them are duplicates) is not a satisfying experience.

Low drop rates are not a problem by default for a looter game. But it is a problem for a looter game that makes use of random perks. Why. Because your chances to get an item that has perks which fit your build is incredible low. You might need thousands of loot drops of that specific item to finally get the perk roll that you want/need. But if you can barely get any loot your chances to get an item that fits your build is pretty much inexistent.

That is something Bioware does not seem to understand.

On Friday they increased the loot drop chance on higher difficulties but only by a very small margin. They dont seem to understand how a looter game has to work in order to motivate players to spend time in it.

The result has been a very upset playerbase. Many players did move on to play The Division 2 instead.

Bioware for some reason does not understand how to balance the game. They had no working balance at hand when the game released and even today they have no working balance.

The game was in development for 6 years and you would assume that in that time the fundamental aspects of the game are working. That unfortunatly is not the case.

The more you play the more you notice how much the game is unfinished, unbalanced and at times broken.

Here a few examples:

The game has a perk called luck. That perk is supposed to increase the drop chance for endgame items. Sounds good right?

The problem is that players have very inconsistent experiences with this perk... sometimes it appears to be working, sometimes it doesnt.

The developers reveiled that this perk as diminishing returns... but players recently came up with the conclusion that the calculation for the luck perk is broken. Once you more than 90% luck in total your chance to get an item with high rarity might even turn negative. With other words, if you have too much luck you get no good item drops anymore.

Another example of how broken fundamental aspects of the game are is the level 1 weapon that every player got at the start of the game. The damage of this specific weapon scales with the player level... unlike other weapons in the game which drop at fixed levels. So it happened that this LVL1 weapon was by far more powerful than any other weapon in the game. Bioware meanwhile fixed that after the players reported about this mess.

But of course, once something is fixed something else breaks.

Now players noticed that when they only equip one single legendary item and remove all other items they can max out their damage because the damage formula is broken. Instead of dividing by the available item slots it only divided by the used item slots. Its a huge difference if you divide a lvl75 item by 11 (6,81 DMG) or if you divide 75 by 1 (75 DMG).

We are talking here about very stupid mistakes a game developer like Bioware should not make. Bioware acts like a bunch of idiots that cant get their shit right.

The mistakes they make are really stupid.

Friday they increased the drop rate of endgame items (masterwork and legendary) for certain types of enemies. That would be cool if they did not forget to increase the drop rate for Stronghold bosses awell. But thats what happened they forgot to increase the drop rates for bosses and now players have started to exploit the game by playing only 2/3 of the stronghold and then leave the match after opening the 2nd stronghold chest. This in result harms other players because they get put into the strongholds at the point where the exploiters have left the match. The people which do not exploit the game right now can only do a lengthy boss fight with literally no rewards for killing the boss while the exploiters get all the loot.

Bioware is too stupid to think about consequences. When you increase loot then you have to do it in a way so players play the full content and not just a small amount of it.

And then Bioware puts up tweets requesting players to beta test stuff... 3-4 weeks AFTER the game was released.

I believe it was about the quickplay mode.

The game was released with one quickplay mode in which players could select this mode to support other players which struggle to get missions done because other players dropped out of the match for whatever reason. I like that idea. You support players in need and get additional rewards (double loyalty points). The thing is... the matchmaking in that quickplay mode was broken from the beginning. So what did Bioware do? They introduced a 2nd quickplay mode for strongholds instead for normal missions. So instead of having one broken quickplay mode we now have two broken quickplay modes.

I really dont get it what Bioware is going.... i dont get it. They do the worst beginner mistakes.

You dont get the impression that this game is developed by one of the best game developers... it feels more like an indie developer trying to get stuff fixed with duck tape.

Bioware was such a good developer once. My most favorite games launched with a fancy Bioware logo.

Knights of the old Republic

Mass Effect 1-3

Dragon Age

Baldurs Gate

Neverwinter Nights

But Bioware today is just a shadow of what it once used to be. They make idiotic mistakes that you never would expect from such a large developer.

And the problem is that they do that on a game that actually has potential.

Anthem can be a fun game. It is beautiful, it is dynamic... everytime you launch into freeplay you have a fresh and new experience. The gameplay is oddly satisfying and addicting.

They just cant get the balancing right.

Maybe in a few months... maybe in a year Anthem is where it belongs... either a good working, well balanced game or dead.

Right now it is in a state that is hard to define.

I believe this image here is representative of the state of the game:

Explanation: You can not earn shards in the game. It is not possible... not by completing Challenges, not by the weekly path to glory. The developers show a deep lack of knowledge about their own game.

This article is one of the most depressing I have ever read but it explains a lot.

https://kotaku.com/how-bioware…aku_copy&utm_campaign=top

Bioware meanwhile rushed to release a fuck you response.

Anthem Game Development – BioWare Blog

Im not sure what is worse.

The content of the Kotaku article about Bioware and the development of Anthem or the fact that just minutes after this article was released Bioware had a prewritten PR Blog article published to counter the Kotaku report.

They didnt even took the time to read the original Kotaku article before they came up with their denial bullshit.

That is like shouting "I didnt steal that Iphone" when the police stops you for a routine control.

I am a bit shocked by the level of incompetence of the bioware management and the impact this had on the emloyees. I really advice you to read the full article. You might get an eye opening glimpse at what it means to create games and software in general.

Reddit, youtube and twitter are on fire... well the Anthem reddit is on fire every week since the release of the game since every week more bs happens.

I guess the latest news about Anthem is that the promised Acts (new game and story content) are not going to happen at all.

Quote

So what’s next for Anthem?

We hear your concerns on core issues in Anthem and are acting on it. Those systems require a more thorough review and re-working versus quick fixes. We’ve got a team working on that now, and early results are promising.

In order to address these long-range plans, we are moving away from the Acts structure for updates. Instead, we have additional seasonal updates planned for this year that we think players will enjoy. These events will deliver challenges and chases similar to what you’ve seen, and are built around some fun themes we’re bringing to the game.

As I’ve said previously, we want to be transparent with you that we know more work needs to be done to make Anthem better. We also want to ensure we’re backing up our words with a great game you can play. So I don’t have any news today to share about the long-term changes we are bringing to Anthem. What I can say is that we will continue to engage with you, our community, through PTS when we can show you what is coming.

Stronger together!

So Acts got replaced by seasonal updates.... which... lets be honest here could mean anything. Even a ingame Xmas hat or a flower texture for your Javelin

On top of that the Cateclysm content that was introduced a few weeks ago also will vanish in just a few weeks, leaving players with nothing to do.

Damn another promising game been messed up by greedy producers ?