1824

First digital price drop tomorrow or next week?

1825

Travis Day, one of the (former) lead devs on Diablo 3, has been playing Anthem. He doesn’t like the loot system. He explained why in great detail, along with suggestions on how to improve it. He started a thread
in the subreddit, which includes a Bioware response:

I hope they do listen. D3’s current loot system is top-notch. Also, I think it’s cool that devs play other games. I’m always surprised when games repeat mistakes their competitors have long solved, and Bioware definitely should have learned some lessons elsewhere.

1826

Also, the Scar are a literal garbage foe/faction. Insects? WTF. No effort bargain basement ripoff of Gears of War’s locust.

1827

That was a nice read.

@rei yes, because gears invented insects …

1828

I’m not complaining about the Scar’s lack of originality or whether or not they owe anything to GoW but that their faction has even less reason to exist than the Dominion and are uncreatively “human/tank-shaped insects” …

1829

Yeah! They also use humans as enemies. That’s so overdone! ;)

1830

¯_(ツ)_/¯

1831

Finished the story tonight on my Xbox One X. I’m lvl 27 now, and here are my thoughts:

Pros:

  • Combat is great and FEELS great.
  • Traversal feels natural and awesome.
  • Some of the characters are good (love Haluk).
  • The game is beautiful.
  • The setting is interesting.

Cons:

  • Main story is pretty forgettable, and features at least one plot twist that annoyed the shit out of me due to how completely arbitrary it is. The main antagonist is completely perfunctory, and doesn’t really even feature in the game for at least 85% of it.
  • Too many loading points. There are missions where you load into an interior area, activate a thing with no combat, and then leave… requiring another load. The structure of this game, and when it needs to load assets, is just mind boggling - with the Forge being the most glaring example, and the expedition rewards screen being a close second.
  • Bugs galore. I’ve had the audio in the game just die on me in the middle of a mission twice, which required a full restart of the game to fix. It’s clear this game came in extremely hot on release day.
  • Big framerate issues. You can feel it bogging down constantly, and when the combat gets hairy it can outright buckle. Any time you fly from the air, into deep water, the framerate will chug. The game looks great, but it doesn’t really count for shit when you can’t get a smooth experience from it.
  • Fort Tarsis sucks. It LOOKS beautiful, but you quickly realize it’s just a single-player hub where everyone stands in one place waiting to be talked to. Every character has about three lines of canned dialogue they will repeat any time you go within five feet of them. The entire zone just feels devoid of life, even if it can look the opposite in screenshots. And I ask again: why is there so little ambient noise in a busy marketplace or a bar?
  • Not even close to enough cosmetic options for the javelins at launch. Virtually everyone is either in Legion of Dawn armor, or the default armor. It’s baffling that they included such granular control over materials and colours, but then included almost no actual model options for the armor pieces. I know more will come later (almost certainly purchasable with real money), but it’s a pretty pathetic baseline.

There are additional rantings that I’m forgetting or leaving out. Characters you talk to at the Fort will say things like “I’m going to go talk to the bartender now” in ending a conversation with you, and then just… remain standing in place, frozen in time. I had a conversation with one character in the bar who isn’t normally found there, and when I left and walked over to where he normally is found, he had magically warped back there.

C’mon Bioware - Skyrim had quest NPCs that walked around doing a daily routine EIGHT years ago.

Anthem is a game that feels like it probably needed an extra full 12 months of development, before it was ready for release. The game’s problems go beyond technical polish, even though it definitely has those problems.

The “workflow” of the game - getting into missions, swapping out gear, setting up expeditions, talking to vendors - all feel clunky and unfinished. Whether it’s simple things like walking way too slow in Tarsis, or the unintuitive menus for expeditions, or not letting people equip or even preview gear drops in the field in a LOOT SHOOTER. It all feels messy and frayed - like an overstuffed piece of luggage, just barely managing to maintain it’s shape.

I’ve actually enjoyed my time with it for the most part, but I have real questions about how long I’ll keep playing now that the story is done. The loading times really weigh down the experience, because it makes getting in and out of the fun stuff a pain.

I’ll be interested to hear some internal post-mortems on this game, because for such a storied studio - not just Bioware, but THE Bioware studio in Edmonton - it’s a bit shocking that this was the best they could do, despite being able to incorporate and learn from the hard lessons of Destiny 1 & 2.

1832

Whoa, 256 posts over the weekend. I guess I’m missing out on some discussion.

Hopefully I will have time to jump into this sometime this week. The reports I’ve gotten from my friends so far is that a lot of the technical issues from the demo seems to have been fixed.

1833

Gothic had them 18 years ago. And better than in Skyrim.

I appreciate your post though, very informative.

1834

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_VII:_The_Black_Gate - 27 years ago (damn I’m old).

Although I consider stuff like that like a very minor blip in a game like Anthem. It doesn’t try to be a immersive RPG at all in the first place.

1835

I know about Ultima, I mentioned Gothic because it was the first in 3D environment to have that (to my knowledge, maybe I am wrong on that also).

1836

Crossed the 40 hour mark, finished the story, and I’m still having a good time.

Loot gets better.

Masterworks seem to be where the loot game gets interesting. I didn’t care about any of my guns (Devastator Sniper the lone exception) until I got a masterwork. I’ve found 4 so far (playing on hard), and two in particular are game changers.

Thunderbolt of Yvenia is an upgraded “Scout” marksman rifle that has a 33% change to proc electric damage. A bolt of lightning comes down from the sky. It makes an awesome sound. It absolutely shreds.

Avenging Herald is an upgraded “Blastback” heavy pistol that increases weapon damage by 200% when hovering. Weakspot and headshots land in the 6-12k mark. It’s insane. I started playing storm just to hover over the battlefield one shotting badguys.

Fun thing about the Herald, that 200% damage buff applies to your other weapon as well. As long as you have that sucker equipped you can pull out your devastator sniper and whamo, no more scar hunters. No more turrets. Etc. You have to be hovering to pull it off, but that adds a fun gameplay variable.

As someone who likes to tinker with builds, there are a lot of things to play around and experiment with. Just stacking a few components that increase crit damage or overall weapon damage yield substantial returns.

1837

Weapon challenges are also pretty cool. I know a lot of people hate the crafting and think it’s too resource heavy, but I don’t have a problem with the cost. Eventually (if you keep playing) you’ll be swimming in ember.

I unlocked the blueprint for the Yvenia and crafted a much better version.

1838

Also… the locusts in Gears of War aren’t even really bugs?

1839

Does anyone actually think that it’s too resource heavy? It’s kind of trivial to produce stuff, at least at lower levels. I’m guessing maybe it gets harder when you get to masterwork or something? Although you can also just buy more embers if you wanted.

1840

One of the review videos showed somebody who had played the game for 76 hours, half of which was optimized grinding on GM1, could barely afford the mats for crafting one Masterwork item (need 25 embers, they cost 5k each, they’d made less than 100k while playing the game).

Was that an unrealistic case? I.e. are the actual costs lower, or are players supposed to make money a lot faster than that?

1841

I had about 120k banked by the end of the game, but that included the free 40k you get for the special edition stuff.

1842

I’ve played substantially less than 76 hours, and have not done any GM1 runs, and I was able to craft a masterwork. The embers drop from a lot of things, and you obv get them as well from dismantling things.

It’s probably not tuned properly (not much is in this game). Like with early Destiny1, I’m sure there is some tweaking that needs to be done.

1843

Maybe his “optimized grinding” isn’t really that optimized?

I mean, I see some of these folks who seemingly distill any actual fun out of the game, and end up turning it into some weird case where it doesn’t work.

But in normal play, I’ve found tons of embers as I play through. Maybe masterwork embers are super less common, but it seems like commonality of stuff follows your progress.

On some level, these guys turn the game into work, which it’s not designed to be, and then complain that it’s not fun.

The question I have is, why would someone just grind the hell out of the game like that? What’s the point of that kind of race? There’s no PvP… you can’t get some kind of competitive advantage over people. It’s like these people have forgotten how to just play a game.