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.
I had a great time with ME:A MP. The common characters are fine on gold difficulty; especially since they rank up faster and thus has more skill points early on.
Weapon balance was so-so, but there are plenty of useable commons and uncommons.
Latency could be an issue, but they implemented a system where you could see the quality of your connection to the host.
I didn’t dislike the mp in Andromeda, but the extra grinding pushing you to buying loot boxes definitely put it a step back compared to ME3.
We now know how BioWare will fall.
Goodbye, BioWare.
Oh man, I hope not. That small team working on the recently rebooted Dragon Age, I hope they put out a game as good as Mass Effect: Andromeda, and meanwhile Anthem is a huge success, so that Bioware stays open.
Most recently, sources say, Anthem’s developers have been watching the ongoing anger in the Destiny 2 community over the state of that game.
If only Bungie’s developers were watching. Zing!
I would expect Anthem should have the better story and characters of the two games but, while I have no complaints about the shooting and combat from Andromeda, I have a hard time imagining they’ll top Bungie. I keep going back to Destiny just because they’ve got those mechanics down cold.
Videogame business executive: “Let’s take a stable business unit and dump arbitrary, extreme expectations on them, then put all our eggs in one basket so we have to close them down if they fail. Oh, and our projections were based on milking exhausted gamers with microtransactions, which doesn’t look like it’s going to happen now, so you’ll have to work twice as fast.”
Hey, Tim, how would you like to be CEO? It sounds like you know how to get things done!