Anthem - BioWare's take on Destiny

I remember someone on Qt3 mentioned that following the companies rather than the individuals is more prevalent when concerning games from the West compared to Japan. Since then, I’ve noticed that the director’s name (e.g. Aonuma, Tabata, Nomura, Kojima, Miyazaki, Taro) tends to be more commonly referenced when people discuss Japanese games than when people discuss Western games.

looks fun with coop and PC

I guess this is one way to make a point.

“Do you want me to say that working with Bioware is fun now?”

Lol.

A few miles from my house, don’t see myself making the drive :)

That was really cute. I loved that they had that in the video.

I feel bad that the lead designer was not able to see his game released. Very sad.

I hope the game ends being good. In more than one way hard working people pours parts of their soul in their work.

Oh right, the game that Mass Effect Andromeda was sacrificed for so that it might live? Yeah it better be good.

I need BioWare to keep giving me open world choise based games for the rest of my life, so PLEASE PLEASE be good Anthem!

This looks awesome, I will buy this. In 1999, I really wanted to make a FPS game that was a combination of an open world like Everquest, a loot system like Diablo, and progression for your character. This seems pretty close.

I expect this to be a lootbox dispenser with a beautiful, 3D UI. I just don’t believe gameplay will trump monetization. We’ll see how the Battlefront 2 thing progresses.

This interview with a disgruntled former Bioware dev does not sound encouraging:

It depends on how it is monetized.

The simple fact of the matter is that whales will be whales. That person spending 15k could just as easily be spending it on some mobile game. That alone is not an indicator of a problem, imo. There are some great f2p games.

I would take anything Manveer Heir says with several grains of salt. He’s the left-wing equivalent of Cleve Blakemoore, so I wouldn’t trust his opinion on Bioware any more than I would Cleve’s on SirTech. His story here of why he quits contradicts what he said a week ago:

At best he’s a disgruntled employee with a grudge against the company.

That may be true. But going from ME3 to ME:A the PvE multiplayer got more grindy. Loot crate becomes much more attractive if you want to kick ass. I know because I played both quite a lot, especially a few weeks after launch. I cbf with ME:A because just when I am getting on top of the RNG and upgrading weapons with sheer effort, they add new weapons and characters to the loot pool to mess me up and slow me down.

So the trend is here: EA increasingly want you to pay for loot crates even after you paid full price for the game, and they are changing their gameplay and design philosophy to cater to that revenue stream. If Battlefront 2 or Anthem bucks that trend, then great news. But I won’t hold my breath.

In the “best” (IMO) f2p games or games with loot boxes, it isn’t a power issue. Look at Destiny. Players that don’t buy silver get plenty of bright engrams and the stuff intros engrams doesn’t significantly impact play.

You’re know it’s kind of funny, but I never played Andromeda’s multiplayer. None of my friends bought the game, and I didn’t feel like playing with random folk. Is it that much worse than ME3? Because that one was big fun.

Nope - its quite fun, and every bit as good as the previous multiplayer part of Mass Effect.

I’ve never played F2P games, so I can’t comment on what is best. I know that in ME:A, you need a high level gold weapon and a top silver character to not die horribly in Gold difficulty. Silver characters are quite easy to level up, but boy a decent gold weapon is a long grind. The drop off in reward between Gold and Silver difficulty is just too much it doesn’t make sense to play in anything less than Gold difficulty.

And they nerfed the hell out of effective and relatively cheap characters/weapons combo. That’s the accountant selling loot crates calling the shots.

If more people play PvE, you probably don’t need to be as powerful because there will be more competent people with decent builds to fight with you. But because ME:A’s popularity is so far off ME3, one person usually has to carry the team. That created a vicious cycle for me: if I waste my time time trying again and again to heroically carry the team and fail (basically losing in game money), why should I persist with it? There are plenty of other games I can enjoy.

I’m not saying the moment to moment gameplay isn’t good. It is. But the long grind behind the miserly reward system turns me off in the long run.

Andromeda MP played like shit on the Xbox one. The controls were sluggish and your character would rubberband around the environment all the time due to poor collision detection.

Maybe it was better on other systems but I found it unplayable.