It sold well and made them tons of money.DAI continued the trend. The old CRPG genre just had fewer fans and was less likely to make money. So they went populist with ARPG leanings.
More content coming tomorrow:
Yay! More RNG for a shallow loot pool with aimless lack of endgame post-Cataclysm!
Interesting that you can like part of DA2, but only focus on hating one part of anthem.
Don’t give me too much credit. I hate all of Anthem–the setting, lore and characters are all wasted on this anti-consumer wreck. The looter shooter components–namely the loot and progression are non-existent. It’s holistically a disappointment. The unused or squandered flight mechanic is the only “good” apart from very well-produced and HQ sound and art assets that went were ultimately utilized in a shitty end product.
The “gameplay loop” most cited as “fun” lifted from Mass Effect Andromeda exists in a vacuum.
They also had waves of enemies that would appear during combat encounters, materializing out of nowhere. So you could never actually strategize beforehand for a battle, because more guys would just drop out of the rafters or whatever.
And the entire ending gauntlet of DA2 is the worst thing I’ve ever done in a Dragon Age game. You spend the entire game talking Anders through his issues, only for the game to go “nope” and completely backtrack on that. Then the mage professor guy who was keeping the peace turns himself into a monster. Then you fight the boss lady and her… magical, living statues. DONE.
It was when I realized this was really how it was all ending, that I realized I really didn’t like DA2.
I’d forgotten and blocked out the shite ending with Anders in DA2. Thanks for reminding me.
Anthem is still utter crap though. 6 months for this and it’s going away in 1 week? A score attack mode with a segregated, instanced map with 5 or so short bullshit breadcrumb quests? A tiny new room at Fort Tarsis behind more useless loading screens. The perfunctory setup for the new Vara Boss villain is schlocky and continues the bad BioWare Proper Noun Villain trend. After that
I played past the breadcrumb missions into the 15min min score attack and the area still has puzzles…that are impossible to do with random people since there is no text chat and no way to communicate except a couple of fixed emotes. Game is still fundamentally shit, since now they just expect you to grind it over and over for RNG drops from the “seasonal” vendor. I got five chests with nothing for the javelin I was playing. Awesome!
Obviously, I can’t/won’t prevent anyone else from enjoying it but the setting, characters are squandered on this inept live service where nothing is “live” nor is there any “service.”
I’ve run about 60 full Cataclysms, 40 of which were in random groups. I’ve had one instance where someone accidentally screwed up a puzzle (Britaheim). One. We got it eventually. The other 39 or so times, there were no real problems.
At least on PC in GM2, most of the players know the basics. People still fail to optimize the scores (typically by doing puzzles before all the arenas are done), but every group I’m in makes it all the way through.
Dude… you’re so sour on this game, you’re viewing everything through crap-colored glasses. Anthem still has big problems and a long way to go, but it’s a heck of a lot better than it was a few months ago.
This is the thing that has concerned me with the Cataclysm plans since it was first announced in February or March or whenever it was. The game suffers from a serious lack of content, I think it’s a massive strategic mistake to spent their time developing content that is temporary in nature. Especially if that content takes them half a year to develop!
I have a wealth of games right now and am not in the mood for Anthem. If I feel like firing it up again in a month or two, I’ll have no new content to experience or reason to come back to the game?
I don’t loathe Anthem, in fact I find playing it really fun, it just lacks content and a good loot chase. I’ve been holding off while I wait for those things to arrive, but it doesn’t sound like it’s happening.
Shit is coloured shit objectively without needing shit-coloured glasses. We will agree to disagree.
“A lot” better is subjective. It’s barely better–the loot pool+system have not changed. There have been no new NPC interactions/voices outside of a handful for this narrow scope of this event. The NPCs in Fort Tarsis still stand mute except for the ones that have the icon bug since launch–one of many unresolved fixes that persist.
Live stream footage of rei playing Anthem:
Surprise, surprise, the loot is still 99% garbage after an expedition if you don’t crash out of it. All purples out of a chest on GM3. You also spend 2+ minutes sharding them manually one-by-one. Legendaries and masterworks are the same shit you saw 6 months ago with the exception of support items and melee which are likely to have shit inscriptions on them.
“Guilds” are not implemented as shared housing, vendor, text chat channels or anything in-game…just a separate mobile chat app. Way to go. This game is trash.
At least the Doctor Harken voice actor has a decent soundalike for Peter Lorre.
The only way this could be improved is if the guild smartphone app came out for Blackberry and Anthem itself used Games For Windows Live.
Damn.
Anthem isn’t going to make it. There’s no comeback path here, no redemption story. It’s over, and it needs to be put down. Again, this took me just a few sessions over one week to figure out – I’m hoping that, somewhere inside BioWare, they’re coming to the same realisation.
He’s not wrong. The game’s foundation is completely broken. The gameplay is fun, but everything else needs to be completely rebuilt. It’s the equivalent of smashing your car into a brick wall at 50 mph and being hellbent on repairing it when everyone else is screaming at you that it’s easier and cheaper to just buy a new car.
I tend to agree. This game could have been salvaged, but obviously not by this team or with these tools or with EA being in charge. They needed rapid response monthly updates to address the worst of the player complaints. Easing up on the loot throttling would have helped. Sure, people would have kitted themselves out with the best the game had to offer eventually, but they would have taken a break with positive memories as opposed to bitter and angry. That would have bought them more time to do the real overhauls they needed.
I don’t know if it’s just more terrible (mis)management, whether the tools and engine are too difficult to use, a lack of resources from EA, or all of the above, but it’s hard to not feel like the window has has basically closed. I’ve been waiting since Feb for some important system overhauls, but they have done nothing. I’m busy with other games at the moment so won’t even see the Cataclysm stuff, so there’s not even any new content for me to come back to.
It’s the end of August for a game that launched with major issues in February and there is basically 0 improvement in that time. It’s a colossal missed opportunity on EA’s part. Big shocker, I know.
No argument from me. I did not like the game at launch, but I hoped EA/BioWare would jump on updating and course-correcting. But here we are in August and the game still fundamentally sucks. The core issues haven’t been addressed at all. The loot blows. The encounter design is mediocre. They’ve added Cataclysm endgame stuff, but by all accounts it’s pedestrian at best.
It doesn’t seem like a No Man’s Sky style revitalization is coming.
So let’s see, we’ve got another article of random internet person saying “I don’t like thing”, this one with the added spice of “… and therefore it must die.” Oh wait, some people might like and enjoy playing? I can’t see how that’s any concern of mine. And then we get the wonderful chorus of Qt3 players jumping in with their plus ones. Well you’ve definitely convinced me of one thing - this thread is no longer worth my time.
Because while some people enjoy playing, it’s not a lot. It becomes a concern of yours when EA pulls the plug on the live service.
I get where you’re coming from, though, and I’m sorry if I contribute to stinking up the thread for the game. It’s really not my intention. Any fuss I raise is because I really want to see this game succeed but EA and BioWare seem to be dropping the ball. For my part there’s no gloating or relishing the game’s struggles, I’m mourning it.
I think this thread would have more action and more constructive things to talk about if there was much action being done on BioWare’s part, if that makes any sense. If we had 4-5 monthly content or QoL updates to discuss, the thread would have talk about that going on. Maybe negativity abhors a vacuum and it fills the space instead.
Again, I sincerely am sorry if I’m contributing to stinking up the thread. I keep following it because I keep hoping for good news. If I hated the game or didn’t give a shit about it, I’d be ignoring it.
It’s an incomplete, broken “live service” game based on multiplayer servers without communication tools where the basics of connectivity are still broken 6 months in.
There needs to be more uproar against this shitty consumer practice of GAAS so that it can be made an example of. No, it can’t be allowed to slink away.