Now there’s a scorching hot take!
No surprise. Anthem showed us that Bioware’s studio- and project-management are their root problem. There’s probably an excellent peter principle story in there. It appears that the same key players are in the same jobs, so we should expect more of the same “Bioware Magic.”
You don’t change a company’s culture without changing out some of the management.
The only semi official tweet was from the personal Twitter account of one of the CMs volunteering at a horse rescue so the rumour about ignoring the low morale crunch problem by team building exercises also confirms that rumour.
A BioWare writer responded to some Anthem lore post about something coming soon. Meh.
This guy is alleging that Anthem has less than 13k players left playing.
That seems really low, seeing as they sold almost 4 million copies .
Makes sense. It released what… 3 months ago? They’ve added basically no new content to get people to keep signing back in. They also haven’t resolved their loot situation which seemed to frustrate and ultimately turn off a large portion of their playerbase (always hard to gauge online).
It’s not very useful anecdata, but I knew probably 7 or 8 people between friends and people at my office that purchased it. I don’t know anyone that’s playing anymore, myself included.
I had fun with it, but it was clearly time to stop playing when I did. If interesting content comes out, I’ll fire it back up.
Anthem is a game you finish. People usually stick around if there’s some form of endgame progression – alternate levels, good loot, achievements, cosmetics. Bioware didn’t get to any of that by their launch date. So, it ends.
I’m stunned that anyone is still playing.
Was that 4 million units sold through, 4 million sold to retail, or 4 million accounts (Origin subs)?
Actually, it kind of isn’t. I mean sure, you can defeat the Heart of Rage and declare victory. But in the final moments you’ve still got the secret agent woman showing you a corpse of an enemy thought long defeated, and then you’ve got old freelancer guy saying, well, still contracts to do, let’s get to work!
As far as why people keep playing, I’d say in my case it’s because the actual gameplay is pretty fun. I dig flying around throwing grenades and lightning at bad dudes on the ground. The strongholds were pretty fun too, if you had a decent group. But as I mentioned a little while back, I’m stepping away from Anthem for mainly optimistic reasons - I’m hoping new content is coming along at some point, and when that time comes I don’t want to be too burned out to enjoy it.
Yes, the storyline is unfinished. But I meant “You run out of things to do.” There’s no way to meaningfully advance your character.
Wow, this couldn’t be more off base (assuming it’s true). The lack of talk from Bioware about Anthem is only reinforcing the idea that the game’s future is in question, and that they don’t have any plans for it to discuss. That’s causing people to move on, and when people move on they don’t comment…at all because they don’t care anymore.
I think I mentioned way upthread that live games can’t afford to release patches at a slow pace like this. Smaller, more frequent patches give the impression that the devs are involved, and that things are constantly changing. Larger, content-driven patches are more symbolic of single-player/offline games. Not only that, they’re much more likely to introduce bugs, and QA is already struggling on the few small patches they did release.
nice list :) Upvoted, I posted a little reply with my thoughts.
That depends upon which level you finish the Heart of Rage at. If you are sub-level 26, you still have the final Javelin to unlock (which is definitely worth it, given how differently each Javelin plays) and level it up.
There are also the GrandMaster (and consumable) unlocks at level 30, if you want to go for the Masterwork/Legendary items (some shared among javelins, some specific).
I have three javelins fully kitted out in mostly legendary gear. I understand where the endpoint of the game is. I’m at it. So I stopped playing, because there is nothing meaningful left to do.
That’s the point I have been making all along.
I don’t think he literally meant there’s nothing to do - more that there’s nothing COMPELLING to do. Grinding out gear for another javelin just because, didn’t strike me as compelling when I still played Anthem.
“Anthem is a game you finish” pretty much summed it up for me. I finished the (terrible!) story, then grinded out the strongholds for a week or two, then got bored and quit.
The game’s movement and abilities feel good to use, but I found the actual combat encounters dull quickly, as the AI isn’t terribly smart, so playing it for the sake of playing it also wasn’t a tantalizing long-term prospect.
After this long, with the shape the game is in, 13k active users at any time is actually higher than I expected.
Another mark of stupidity on the part of BioWare is they haven’t removed the 10 (or was it 15?) minute lockout timer that prevents partial groups from being filled with new bodies when that much time has elapsed. This was implemented when the active player numbers were still high and people were consistently bailing before the end boss fight in Heart of Rage. This caused people who queued up for HoR to get deposited at the boss fight continually for weeks. Now with the waning player count and removal of Elysian chests at end of strongholds, well…
Nevermind the chests worsened odds of good loot by adding in useless crafting materials (embers) for a non-existent crafting system.
This is all tied into bad loot because HoR was calculated to be the most chance of MW/Legendary drops bang for buck. Problem is at the time end bosses had zero chance (vs 1% now) of dropping Legendaries but there were 3 shots in the preceding encounters. So people bailed consistently. This pissed off players for weeks while this happened and prevented challenges involving completing a full HoR as well as hampering gaining Freelancer faction rep.
Stopped by a Redbox while grocery shopping and checked the games they had for sale. Redbox was selling Anthem discs for $24.
Surplus physical stock of Anthem is destined (no pun intended) for the landfill and thrift stores. There were many, many sightings of unsold piles of Mass Effect Andromeda in that aftermath.
What causes the discs to go on sale? If they don’t get rented often enough or if it’s a fixed period of time has elapsed?