Imagine if EA shut down someone's Origin account for exploiting an in-game economy bug. Christ.
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Anthem Review Thread
- Thread starter Earvin Infinity
- Start date
As I said a page back -
It's sad that I was only 3/4th's joking. This game really feels developed in a pre-Diablo 3 vacuum. I honestly don't know how it happens, it has to either be complete incompetence or having literally no extra time to do more than build a Minimum Viable Product
You really have to try hard to be this incompetent tho. We know they looked at Diablo 3. They've namedropped it several times and the whole difficulty tiers feels modeled on the torment system. It's almost inconveivable. If you don't have time to develop and test on your own shit, the least you can do is copy the homework of the kid in class who went through this already, then add your spin later. They couldn't even do that.
One of the ex Diablo 3 leads was on reddit earlier outlining exactly how to fix the loot and endgame. Will they finally listen when basically the Diablo 3 team is reaching out to you, telling you how to fix the things that you shouldn't have done in the first place...?
I got it all on sale a year or two ago I think. Citadel DLC alone made it worth it IMO. Fanservicey as FUCK but so good!
I really do think it's style choice. I think they want your loadout choice to be consequential. A "choose wisely and deliberately" approach. We see it in other games too.
Travis Day is a treasure, I posted his GDC talk much earlier in the thread, it's well worth a watch if you've never seen it before, discusses both WoW and D3.
Luke Stephens also made a video discussing Anthem and BioWare from a more business perspective.
Yep, farming act 1 inferno for gear ilevel below your level and always crappy was so demoralizing with the untested Act2+ of inferno destroying you. Act 2 with it's annoying enemies and bullet hell was such a hard wall, and the thing was that there was rumors of act 3 giving loot good enough for act 2+. Act 1 seemed good enough since it was usually zombies, but remember those impossible champion pack affixes? Ice, mortar, arcane? Man the hax affixes combos annoyed me so much.
And for visuals on further explanation on what was so wrong with D3 vanilla loot itemization.
I don't know if it was posted here already but a Blizzard developer, Travis Day, who worked on D3 and the D3 rework actually gave feedback to EA/Bioware after playing a lot of Anthem.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AnthemTheGame/comments/ato54p/reward_structure_issues_and_ideas/
Long and insightful post. Short slice of the beginning.
"Reward structure issues and ideas
I've been playing Anthem for the last week and really enjoying myself. However the game seems to fall into a number of reward system related traps that I wanted to take a moment to point out and offer some possible solutions to in an effort to help make this game, which I'm enjoying, more compelling.
"Dead" inscriptions -
By now I suspect many people have seen items roll with stats that they don't understand. TLDR Man icon means it effects everything you do, Cog icon means it only effects the item that it rolled on. Currently the game allows for items to roll inscriptions that literally can not effect the item they are on. Example, Venmous Blaze with item specific Physical damage, +% Weapon damage, or +% Cold damage.
Having items roll affixes that are sub-optimal is standard practice for this kind of game but I think there should be a hard distinction made between "bad" and "literally doesn't work". Currently this causes a considerable amount of confusion for players learning the game as their initial assumption is to think anything an item rolled will work on the item it rolled on. Since that isn't true I assume the design intent was to create a larger spectrum of item power based on the rolls, I would argue it comes with too many drawbacks. Keeping the spectrum of item power large could easily be accomplished by simply changing the relative weighting of affixes while restricting them to things that actual work on the item. Alternatively items could have an affix range, MW could roll 2-4 or 3-4 properties on creation so that there is still the same amount of item variance but the affixes that show up continue to still "work" on whatever they rolled on."
That's possible, the one thing I wish is that you didn't have to go back to the fort to start a new mission. The load out doesn't bother me, but maybe it would if I was able to do missions one after another since it meant going back anyways. As far as I'm concerned the biggest thing that makes all these things issues is all the loading screens.
The Warframe found this out when they made their first open zone. For Fortuna, their second open zone they made it so you can easily get new missions in the world without having to go back to base. Now it seems like they are going to overhaul that first open zone graphically, design wise, and with updated lessons learned and implemented with Fortuna.
That and loading a whole other scene to dish out end-of-exhibition rewards. If they just let me load into simple menus for that kind of thing, it would feel so much more streamlined.
Yeah i didn't play any of the ME3 dlc so it'll probably be worth it, plus i can do a femshep run this time around :)
This would be like BL2 banning people for "save and quit" farming lmaooooo
Bungie actually did not fix that, they literally directly turned that into a feature. It existed for over 7 months.
They understand the difference between an actual exploit (infinite super glitch) vs efficient loot farming vs cheese (riven).
Exploits like pulling lan cable on crota, infinite tethers, slova bomb in mayhem etc take away from the experience of all players affected and get addressed or patched within a reasonable time. Worse case some stuff get temp disabled till a fix can be deployed.
Efficient loot farms, like sharing/resetting checkpoints - are not technically exploits, just players figuring out ways to minimize the time taken for loot drop.
Some, like the baron heroic story farm, get patched eventually. Others like EP boss farm get turned into a feature because they realize that it's a better way to reward players and keep them invested where loot is RNG.
Cheese (atheon solar nades, riven clusters) are harder to fix and can take weeks before they can be addressed without breaking encounters.
Bioware really has learned absolutely nothing in the past 6 years.
Same with Warframe devs, people figured out how to move fast with momentum and tricks, and Digital Extremes helped them out by making it a feature while controlling it a bit.
Timestamped 13:14 - 15:43
Timestamped 13:14 - 15:43
Hey, who knows, a lot of other people seem to be enjoying it. Hell if you look at a lot of Reddit posts us "haters" are a significant minority. But yeah, the game has it's fun and enjoyable moments but I would never recommend anyone biting at $60. MAYBE at $40 if you're really into this type of "game as a hobby" thing, but realistically $20-25 would be about my sweetspot. There is $20-25 worth of enjoyment here, if only to fly around and look at the gorgeous locations in the map they've built.
If you wait a bit you can jump in much cheaper and see if it's your thing. Hell, by then it might be a much better game.
Please tell me there's a clip of what he was doing or the moment he was banned.
I can't believe someone got banned for this, even Bungie who has done really stupid shit knew that banning someone for this kind of this would have been stupid.
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Finally listened to some podcasts where they talk about the game and I was surprised about the tomb thing. For me, since I played it on the actual "release day" I only had to raise 3 people, which a friend and I did. Other than that I had 100% of all the challenges complete, so it was just a lot of flying around really.
Hearing about what it was and even how it got "fixed" actually surprised me, because I wouldn't have known otherwise.
Hearing about what it was and even how it got "fixed" actually surprised me, because I wouldn't have known otherwise.
How is ANY looter shooter better? This is what happens when you have years to observe other games mistakes and not learning from them.
I'm just surprised that they released a sequel to Fallout 76 so quickly!
Holy shit. In other words, our twitch viewership took a nosedive, so all is forgiven. Banning him in the first place was pathetic, but this is just...
I'd argue both Destiny 2 in its present state and The Division are miles better than Borderlands 2.
Can't speak for Warframe as I haven't played that to any significant degree.
Warframe is better than all of them.
But I never even liked BL that much.
Looking at my post I probably should've worded it better. I meant how is it possible that every looter shooter since BL2 is better than Anthem since Anthem had all those years to learn from their mistakes. And somehow they didn't do their homework. My bad :p
The most mystifying thing about this is they said they had a number of avid Destiny, The Division and Diablo 3 players in the development team. How is possible to play those games and not take any lessons in GaaS design from them, I'll never know.
For all we know these people could have raised concerns and upper management would have nothing to do with it. It could also be the classic case of being too in love with your design/in the weeds to be able to take a step back and realize the issues. Finally it could simply be that just because you're a big fan of something doesn't mean you have any idea of how to do it but better.
Agree on the Javelins being much better to look at than the Guardians. I LOVE the characters in Destiny. Anthem is a better looking game in terms of technical bits like lighting, foliage, water, etc - it feels more alive for sure (but not as much as the E3 demo reel, eh?). I just can't get over the look of Nessus, Mercury, and Io in Destiny 2 though. I think I just have a thing for the Vex, maybe....
Lmao Amazon are pushing Anthem in the UK. Just had an email saying I can get £5 off Anthem due to being a customer who buys videogames....
Subject of email: "Attention - Important Information About Your Amazon.co.uk Order of Anthem"
I didnt' order Anthem at all....
lol
Subject of email: "Attention - Important Information About Your Amazon.co.uk Order of Anthem"
I didnt' order Anthem at all....
lol
So my review is online now: http://joypad.dk/index.php/anmeldelser/485-anmeldelse-anthem
We chose to postpone it to play the game after the day one patch.
To sum it up I think the game has a huge potential. I really liked the storytelling and the characters, apart from the main villain. I even somewhat liked Geeson.
The after credit scene actually hyped me up for future content, and the core combat is fantastic and in my opinion the most fun in the genre.
All that having been said the game simply has way to many issues right now. The loot is fundamentally broken, the story is too short and the endgame has zero variance. On top of all that we encountered numerous bugs even after day one and several more patches.
We chose to postpone it to play the game after the day one patch.
To sum it up I think the game has a huge potential. I really liked the storytelling and the characters, apart from the main villain. I even somewhat liked Geeson.
The after credit scene actually hyped me up for future content, and the core combat is fantastic and in my opinion the most fun in the genre.
All that having been said the game simply has way to many issues right now. The loot is fundamentally broken, the story is too short and the endgame has zero variance. On top of all that we encountered numerous bugs even after day one and several more patches.
My Danish is very rough but Google Translate thankfully does a pretty good job with Danish. Good review, whilst I don't personally agree with everything I think it was incredibly fair and well reasoned. Also, I haven't seen enough reviews praise Sarah Schachner's amazing work in Anthem, I've been following her since I heard Infinite Warfares underrated OST.
Yeah the soundtrack is fantastic. She is very talented, and like you said very underrated.
Giant Bomb - 2/5
Also included is a video podcast discussion about the game that's about an hour long. Brad really liked the flying and customization and was iffy about or disliked pretty much everything else.
Also included is a video podcast discussion about the game that's about an hour long. Brad really liked the flying and customization and was iffy about or disliked pretty much everything else.
Frequently, it was the meter for my ultimate ability appearing to be ready to go even though the ability was actually unusable. Once, the game loaded me into a mission with one of my two guns unequipped (note that the game doesn't actually let you unequip a gun manually). And twice on PS4, the game crashed so hard that it literally powered down my console, forcing me to repair all my storage devices before I could boot it back up. A game making you worry about damaging your hardware is just inexcusable. I don't remember seeing this many big and small technical issues in a major release since, well, Mass Effect: Andromeda. How that reflects on BioWare's recent track record doesn't really need to be said.
Yup. Hopefully stability gets better soon. As others have said, it's really cool to know they are able to make quick adjustments to various loot mechanics. It means the backend for making tweaks is solid and easy to update. But these bugs are simply unacceptable. No if's and's or but's.
Cools I'll watch later, I'm loving the flying, combat(especial with mw gear, adds a new layer with all the extra buffs), and painting my javelin. Game needs work, prob should have been held back another few months. The broken missions in quick play, lack of armor drops and few other things need to be fixed ASAP. That's said nothing beats flying into a bullet hell, freezing some trash mobs, get a head shot with a sniper then unload a massive lighting strike on a shielded dude that cascades that freeze effect to everyone around it. It's good enough for me to put up with the bugs for now but if it was killing my Xbox like it was doing his ps4 yeah that's a hard pill to swallow.
It's not certification's job to do QA. If your game is a buggy mess but still passes the standard tests, it's good to release.
If it's hard crashing my console and forcing me to restore my saves, someone needs to do proper tests to avoid consumer backlash.
Cert can't find every crash. What you want isn't feasible. Crashes like this are shit, but this is the reality.
The same way Andromeda passed last year. EA made a call and begged.
I'm just astounded at how dead and lifeless Fort Tarsis is. I know the city is meant to be in a rebuilding phase but still. I think having some audio track lightly play in the background and light chatter from NPC's as you walk around could have went a long way. It's just so dead silent it's creepy with the only interactions you get are awful conversations between idle NPC's that just stand there like morons the entire time.
It certainly looks great, but like the rest of the game the area is so unfinished it's nuts.
It certainly looks great, but like the rest of the game the area is so unfinished it's nuts.
I mean to be fair, how many games have you played that have a known history of shutting down consoles and forcing repairs?
There are glitches and there are GLITCHES, knaamean? Some things should never happen. Especially when some of the worst ones are detected and reported by the community more than a month ago now.