It's BioWare making a mashup of Destiny and The Division, but you play as Iron Man; what's not to like?
I played a bit of the alpha, which is under NDA, but I think I can say I liked it?
Anyone who's preordered gets the VIP demo this weekend (and three passes to invite friends), but there's also an open demo coming up the first weekend of February, before the actual release on the 22nd.
I've managed to hold off on this so far, despite being massively tempted, in large part because I think it's going to be like The Division - in that, it's better with a squad and might feel a bit aimless at endgame if you're solo.
That said, BioWare have had one of the most open approaches to community handling I've seen from a AAA developer, with regular updates on social media and a robust presence on Reddit; they're already implementing player suggestions like social spaces that weren't part of the original design.
Is this one anyone else's radar, or is it just me?
I'm considering the demo next weekend, just out of sheer curiosity, but it'll have to be something properly spectacular to get me to buy in..
Well, let me know and we can try grouping up. I'd be interested to check it out in a non-rando situation.
Watched a few streams of this, like wot the kids do.
Looks like a heap of uninspired shite.
It's a modern, triple-A, MMO-inspired, multiplayer, sci-fi shooter.
Of course it looks uninspired.
Remake Phantasy Star Online, you cowards.
Remake Phantasy Star Online, you cowards.
Oh if only. Or, y'know, release PSO2 in the west
Played a bunch of this over the weekend. It's neat and I dig it and cavalcade is old
It's Mass Effect Andromeda's scintillating combat system, blended with Warframe in a fashion that isn't anywhere as good as the game (Destiny) that inspired it.
I'm not sure this is an age thing or a "it's a bit shit" thing.
How much of it have you played? I felt it was more similar to The Division than Destiny, though it's doing more of a Destiny thing narratively (but actually with a narrative).
I was flying around the open world section in my Ranger suit, enjoying the fairly ludicrous sights and I saw three guys getting whaled on by an OW boss monster they'd clearly found themselves outmatched by. It was pushing them around, forcing them back, and I fly by and think 'fuck it, let's see what happens.'
I fly around and realise there's two waterfalls I can fly under to reset flight-heat. I fly down real close to to the ground, buzzing around this bad guy's head. All the while I'm firing micromissiles, throwing grenades and launching a barrage of rockets like I'm goddamn Iron Man. We start to push the bad guy back and I don't touch the ground once as the four of us randoms begin to turn the tide on him.
I hear one of them over VOIP yelling 'CLOSE AIR SUPPORT! DANGER CLOSE! AHH!' as I make another pass. We blow up the boss, I jetboost my way out.
No other game has given me that dynamic 'this thing is happening in a sandbox that's not predictable and you can contribute to this or not' in a good long while. World of Warcraft, probably? It felt good and was fun to play and that was a real standout moment for me.
"I hear one of them over VOIP yelling 'CLOSE AIR SUPPORT! DANGER CLOSE! AHH!' as I make another pass"
Yep, I must be old.
How much of it have you played? I felt it was more similar to The Division than Destiny, though it's doing more of a Destiny thing narratively (but actually with a narrative).
None of it. I watched about 30 minutes of streams and was so underwhelmed I nearly choked on my own tongue.
Ah, and of course, we all know there's no better way to experience a game than watching some shrieking teenager play it on Twitch.
The first time I saw it (at E3?), I thought it looked derivative, too, but I really enjoyed what I played. The world is mysterious and unexplained, but without feeling like there's nothing underneath it (I'm looking at you, Destiny); and no, the gameplay isn't jaw-droppingly new and groundbreaking, but it is solid, and I had fun with it.
How much of it have you played?
None of it. I watched about 30 minutes of streams
Youtubelol is so 2011. We're all about the Twitchlol now.
I watched some muttering adults play it.
And yes, youtubelol, but I doubt actually getting to fly the robots around is going to radically transform my opinion of it. Even if it feels amazing to play (which it likely doesn't as nearly every report of it says it feels like ME: Andromeda) then the rest is so drool inducingly dull I don't really seethe point of it.
Destiny feels good and does this sort of thing. This doesn't need to exist.
Destiny feels good in the moment, sure, but it's horrendously shallow; there's nothing to explore or discover - just follow marker, kill dudes, and get a gun that's worse than the one you have, except you don't find that out until you go through the three loading screens it takes to get home and talk to an NPC.
The world of Anthem has enough mystery to be intriguing, but it's not all obscured behind wanky half-written descriptions on weapons. In Destiny, it feels like everyone but you knows everything about the universe, and they're deliberately not telling you ("I don't have time to explain etc why I don't etc.") - which in reality is because Bungie haven't decided what to retcon anything into yet. Anthem feels consistent and designed, and I feel like there's actually stuff there to find out in the world, not just be told about by a diary entry tacked onto the back of an assault rifle.
"follow marker, kill dudes, and get a gun" - a succinct summary of 85% of all videogames to be fair.
So the one argument in Anthem's favour is that it's robot shootymans universe is slightly more coherent than Destiny's shootymans universe? Hmm.
So the one argument in Anthem's favour is that it's robot shootymans universe is slightly more coherent than Destiny's shootymans universe? Hmm.
He's a writer; the writing is the most important thing.
The demo is up on the PSN store now, if anyone else is planning to jump in over the weekend.
I look forward to cav's thorough savaging.
Already had it downloaded on PC, but PS4 is more tempting.
As an interpretative dance choreographer I will be closely looking for coherence in its ability to convey universal themes through fluid hand gestures.
Spent about 2 hours with the demo this evening, and I'm less enamored with the content selection this time round; the free play area I think is the same as the alpha, but the first mission in this demo ends with a terrible, immensely frustrating "puzzle" to unlock an object you need.
There's more Fort Tarsis stuff, too, which feels sluggish to move through, distressingly empty and overly labyrinthine. There are a bunch of NPCs, but most of them aren't implemented properly, and they're scattered widely enough that it mostly feels like I'm crawling around a Destiny map.
It still feels fun enough to play, and I found a few interesting events and stuff in the world, but the narrative stuff here just doesn't do much for me, because there's no foundation for it; I don't know who people are or why I should care yet.
Overall, I don't think these two demo weekends are necessarily going to have the positive impact EA and BioWare are hoping for.
Another half-hour on this again this morning, and I'm back on an upswing.
There were more NPCs in Tarsis, for a start, which was nice to see (maybe related to the server restart that ended my session last night?), but I wasn't half-distracted by podcasts. I'd got some gear upgrades, and had fun just blitzing about in free roam, taking out a couple of enemy camps in the world.
I think the lack of tutorial for this session hurts it, if only in a minor way - a lot of game/mechanical stuff feels unexplained, and at one point I was getting encouraging, "just one more!" radio chatter from my handler regarding a quest/event thing I'd started without realising.
The UI as a whole is a bit of a mess, though, with a lot of nested sub-menu nonsense - especially when it comes to picking a mission. I think even something as simple as rewording some of the button prompts might help with that.
Gave this the briefest of shots earlier and… I don't think it's for me. The whole experience felt sluggish and overcomplicated. How can so much UI communicate so little?
I spent the entire time thinking about how I was wasting the evening playing a demo for a game I grew increasingly unlikely to buy, instead of Hitman.
I'm starting to get used to it, but I'm convinced that this was the wrong selection of content to give for the first major public showing.
I get they wanted to have some missions, some free play, and a "dungeon", but it's devoid of context - there's no introduction to anything or anyone, no tutorial; just, "here's a bunch of stuff, off you go." It's unfriendly.
Re: the UI specifically, there are still too many sub-menus, but the most frustrating one is the Forge - in particular, the javelin appearance "system". Everything just requires too many damn button presses - when changing the material of a piece, you have to go back up a level to then change the colour; and changing the material also resets to the default colour, instead of letting me see what it would look like in the current colour.
Like I say, I'm getting used to it, but it seems poorly thought out.
when changing the material of a piece, you have to go back up a level to then change the colour; and changing the material also resets to the default colour
Doesn't help that there are also like a dozen different things to change the colour and material of.
Don't know what kind of rep Polygon has in these parts, but they've got a fairly interesting article looking at how much of an impact Apex Legends might have on Anthem.
I'm still looking longingly at the preorder button, for no reason I can fathom; as much as I want it, I'm not going to be in a position to play it for the first week it's out, and none of the preorder bonuses are remotely interesting.
Fuck it. Happy Birthday to me.
Reviews on this seem to be pretty middle-of-the-road, though mostly coming from a place of disappointment rather than Anthem being outright bad. (It's a similar situation to Crackdown 3, where reviewers seem to be struggling to see what new things this game brings to the table to justify its existence.)
Of course, the thing with games-as-a-service is that Anthem Now will bear little resemblance to Anthem Later- so long as BioWare are able to pivot quickly enough to address player feedback and keep people on board long enough to justify that continued effort.
How's it actually hold up, @Ninchilla ? Worth the preorder, or still too early to tell? Just realised it's not out for another four days, so it probably is too early to tell.
I wouldn't know - early access is only for PC-based EA Access subscribers, or whatever the hell the service is called; plebs like me don't get it until the 22nd, along with the day one patch that allegedly addresses half the problems people are reporting. For example, lots of preview coverage mentions slowness of movementin Fort Tarsis, which is being addressed in the day one patch. As it is, anyone currently playing is basically getting a release candidate, not the actual launch version.
There's a healthy number of official responses to criticism on the subreddit, too - from designers, as well as community folks - so if the transparency and communication continues as it has so far, I'd expect the most glaring issues to be solved relatively quickly.
I guess we'll see.
Slight tangent, but is Andromeda any good? All I saw was the rabid Internet ravings and gifs of a woman with a weird smile.
Is it on par with the old Mass Effect games?
Short version? No. It's clearly rushed, the story doesn't do much new (for the series, or scifi in general), and the more open-world-esque design just doesn't really work when you're trying to do a dramatic, ticking-clock narrative.
Having said that, I did enjoy it quite a lot. The companions are all good (except Liam, who is a fucking idiot that should have been airlocked about eight minutes after waking up), the combat is decent, and it's not as buggy or weird-looking now as it was when it launched.
I keep meaning to go back and play it again. I think the thing I actually struggled with most was lack of familiarity - I'd spent three games and the gods only know how many hours with Liara, Tali, and Garrus, so being dropped in a familiar-ish setting but with a bunch of strangers was a bit jarring.
If it's cheap in a sale, I'd say go for it.
Right, then: Anthem.
I've only spent a couple of hours with it yet; I've basically competed the tutorial, painted my javelin (Ranger, because I'm boring), and run a couple of missions/freeplay sessions besides.
I'm enjoying it! It's very Division-y, in terms of how it plays; the story is… fine, I guess, but I do really like a couple of the characters I've met so far; flying around is very cool.
Can't comment on the much-derided "lack of content" that's been the focus of so many people (most of whom took
the week off to put 60+ hours into an early-access, late-beta version of the game all in one go - I've already seen reddit threads decrying "the death of the endgame"), as I'm still very early in proceedings, but some of the criticisms I've seen are valid - mainly UI/QoL stuff, which can probably mostly be patched.
Anyway, it's basically the game I expected it to be, and I'm having a good time so far. Hopefully it'll continue.
Finished the story, got to level 30, ran legendary contracts and my first reward item was this:
Look my +0% damage boost.
Anthem is a poorly designed, roughly implemented game which rattles and strains against itself as best it can. There are some good elements in here but the core systems, the core tech and the narrative are inexcusable.
I can not recommend anyone pays money for this.
Anecdotally it seems to be doing quite well though. There are far more people on my friends list playing this than I expected, given its poor reception. Maybe I just need better friends.
I've been bouncing around in it most of today, and having a decent time of it. I mean, I'm not at endgame, so I'm not counting percentage points of anything yet. I dunno, maybe things will turn sour, but as someone who's not going for the "race to the endgame so I can be teh h4rdc0r3" experience, it's doing what I expected.
Also, a quick Google of that specific item shows that there was allegedly a problem with the perk stacking, so they've turned it off while fixing it.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Darokaz/status/1099850288742178816
Not saying there aren't problems with item rolls - there definitely have been, resulting in a number of changes in the last few days that really should have been there from day one (who doesn't sort stats by relevant weapon type?) - but that's not exactly one of them.
Finished the story. It was shorter than I expected; still only level 33. It's okay - helped by some great characters and hindered by a couple of really bad and lightweight "twists" that kind of just don't make sense.
Still, I'm having fun blasting about and killing things, and numbers are still going up on the (semi) regular. I'm not at the point of the grind that everyone on the subreddit is complaining about, and to be honest at the pace I'm creeping towards endgame, I wouldn't be surprised if it's mostly sorted by the time I get there.
Interesting article from Kotaku about what went wrong. It's very candid, considering how recent the game is.
https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964
The BioWare response was one of the blandest, most corporate things I think I've ever read.
The games industry seems to be broken.
The BioWare response was one of the blandest, most corporate things I think I've ever read.
"We don't think that articles that point out how certain people are shit at their jobs and actively damage staff with their approach are fair."
I bet you fucking don't, sunshine.
