Had a quick go on the demo this afternoon, and enjoyed the actual gameplay. I spent longer fiddling around with my TV settings than playing though - ultimately in vain - so that when I was in the pause menu I could see the prompts at the top and bottom of the screen, as there doesn't seem to be any option to do so in game. I wound up junking one of my better weapons because I had no way of knowing what would happen if I pressed a given button. Not the end of the world, especially in the context of a demo, but definitely frustrating.

 

Storm is pretty fun, melting enemies without impunity. Also the charged sniper rifle is ridiculous in this snapshot of a demo with how OP it is, how it holds up in the full game who knows but doing 15k dmg per shot on the dungeon boss is very OP compared to the other weapons I've tried.

 

If I wanted to play Warframe, I'd go play Warframe.

And the funny thing is that Warframe, a FREE TO PLAY game mind you, has a less predatory Microtransaction system than Anthum according to the screenshots we've seen...

Now if you'll excuse me...

I'mma go play Warframe.

 

ICYMI, Jim Sterling made an interesting Jimquisition episode on the predatory nature of preorder culture.

One particular element that resonated with me was the already infamous Anthem spreadsheet that details who can play the game at which point and to what extent. Remember when it would have been ridiculous to even think about delaying the actual general release of your finished product by an extra week so a handful of privileged few with more money than sense would get to play early? And it is even more ridiculous to see that EA/BioWare are still sticking with this scheme despite the unmitigated disaster that was the launch of the last big game under the BioWare banner. That release, because of limited public availability and playing time, tended to highlight only the worst parts of Andromeda and devolved into a cavalcade of shitstorms and trolling quicker than Mac Walters could say “Tempest.” Never mind that I am firmly convinced this initial reaction played no small part in ME:A’s demise and BioWare Montreal being shut down.

It beggars belief, really. Rant over.



(Finally, this is your friendly reminder that we still don’t know what Anthem’s MTX will look like.)

 

Yes we do.

 

We know there's not gonna be lootboxes and the prices are gonna be high enough they felt the need to prime the audience with a "leak" of $20 for a skin. Or in other words, total bullshit.

I don't think the final prices are gonna be $20 for a skin, but I do expect a skin to run somewhere in the $10-15 range, likely $12, and EA making mealy-mouthed "we listened to your feedback" excuses.

 

It’s all BS, of course. And I think Anthem will suffer for EA’s sins of past and present. Remember when we got some outfits and weapons that were actually nice for Shepard and the squad in ME2 for something like $3? We never knew how good we had it.

Frankly, even in the heated market that we have right now, I would consider anything above $5 for a single skin ludicrous and extortionate. Unfortunately, though, I do believe you are correct. If they really want to make All the Money in the World(TM), they ought to do bundles that might give players an actual sense of value at minimal cost to the developer & publisher, however undeserved and fleeting it might be.

 

I'd love to be proven wrong; after all, I adored the shit out of the demo, far more than it objectively deserved, and I would love for EA to not drive off most of the playerbase with their bullshit.

I just... I have no faith that they won't. Every indicator is that the game is gonna come out with predatory microtransactions and a dearth of content, and in six months, Bioware's gonna be sitting there scratching their heads going "where'd everybody go?".

 

I consider anything above 0,00 of any currency to be extortionist if I pay full price for your game upfront. Give me the full game or make it F2P.

Inb4 the rational arguments for continuous support of games after the base price, the industry has shown itself unreceptive to those and that all they understand is the argument of the wallet. Therefore, I think that to combat the unrestrained greed of the developers and publishers, I have to be equally uncompromising. Attempts at compromise from consumers have been met with wholesale exploitation of consumers. The industry is uninterested in reasonable compromise, so I have moved the goalposts on my version of a reasonable compromise, by which I mean forcing the industry to reboot its approach.

 

Yep. This is why I don't really mind having thrown around $300 at Path of Exile over the last eight years - it's completely free if you're stubborn enough to make it work, it's consistently pumping out pretty damned quality content, and they're ridiculously good at interacting with their playerbase without being too accomodating or too asshole-ish.

Pretty much the exact opposite of EA in every way that counts.

 

I took a peek at r/AnthemTheGame on Reddit. I'm surprised they're self-aware enough to notice that they've become the Destiny subreddit.

So, Anthem--after 7 years of development--arrives in a bugged out state, having learned nothing from its two predecessors: Destiny and The Division. BioWare has delivered what everyone was expecting: a buggy, unstable release with a ton of grind, but a dearth of story-based content. Expect two or three story expansions throughout the year with a few more lore-directed missions, but a lack of an actual coherent narraive with a discernible endgame (you know, like what BioWare used to do, where you could play a complete story at release).

Enjoy your Destiny clone, folks.

 

Yup. I got exactly what I expected, and honestly, the story campaign sounds made the purchase worth it. I enjoyed it, and it took me a solid 20 hours to get through between that and the sidequests, and I enjoyed every one of those hours. In a dollar per hour sense, it's beaten ME3 and DAI in value already, so I'm happy with it. Any more time I put into it is just gravy.

Not sure how much more time I'll put into it, grinding for perfect loot can only keep me entertained for so long, but I enjoyed what we've got, warts and all.

 

Man, what a letdown from Bioware. Reviews are unanimous that the game is very average at best.

I played the pre-alpha and the demo and was bored out of my mind both times, but I still hoped that the story would be up to Bioware's usual standard. And erveryone seem to agree that's it's a disapointment on that front too. This really sucks because I wanted to give them a chance even if I was part of the "Mass Effect died for this" crowd.

 

Full disclosure, I haven't and won't play this game, but I am watching some videos/reading some reviews and trawling reddit/Twitter because I'm feeling schadenfreude.

Main points of criticism seem to be:

technical issues (load times, bad UI, loot drops)

copy pasted content aka DA2 2.0 (apparently the endgame is a copypasted earlier encounter, little variation in enemy types)

gameplay & game design (the hub area is lifeless--comparisons to the Citadel from ME--the world is huge but one-note, party mechanics don't work well unless you specifically invite your own party, poor selection of skills, increased enemy health pool & one-hit-kill approach to difficulty, poor enemy AI, lacking QOL features like FOV slider, screen shake, visual noise, the fact that the flying system, a core element of the game's marketing and appeal, becomes unusable on higher difficulties because you just get ohk'd out of cover)

ME:A got 6 months before the end of support announcement. I give Anthem half that time--somewhere around the GoT series finale.

 

People keep blaming EA, but EA isn't the problem.

Bioware is.

All the talented and smart people left this studio ages ago before Dragon Age 2 was released. Yet people still actually think this Tumblerina infested company can still deliver quality content the likes of Baldur's gate and Dragon age Origins.

I mean people are actually defending this game. No wonder triple-A games keep releasing with shittier quality every year and more horrible anti-consumer practices.

It's these rabid white knights who deny any and all flaws and will bend over backwards to be fucked in the asshole and have all their money takes away from them just so they can make themself believe they were justified in forking over 60$ for a piece of shit.

And I actually wanted to pre-order this garbage because I was starving for something else than Warframe.

 

@Agayek, can spoil the plot for me? Is it Andromeda 2.0 or is there some meat on the bones?

 

It's a pretty standard Bioware narrative. Basically, it goes as follows:

Spoiler: On the off chance anyone in here actually cares

You start as a newbie Freelancer, joining a major expedition, employing most of the Freelancers, to silence a Cataclysm (read: magical quasi-omnipotent maguffin running haywire) that wiped out one of the handful human cities. It ends poorly, with the whole expedition except for you and your squad leader dead, half of the Cyphers (psychic mission-control specialists) that were participating remotely driven insane, and absolutely nothing done about the on-going storm of fuckery that has become known as the Heart of Rage.

Thus ends the tutorial.

The plot picks up again two years later, where the utter disaster that was the Heart of Rage expedition has rather tarnished the reputation of the Freelancers, so you and your new Cypher, Owen, are working odd jobs, just trying to make a living in a nowhere outpost called Fort Tarsis. At this point, you're approached by Tassyn, a spy working for Corvus (the local CIA equivalent), because she has information that the Dominion, a human polity that sprouted out of the northernmost city and that is both highly expansionistic and directly responsible for creating the Heart of Rage in the first place, is moving toward Fort Tarsis and, more specifically, the relatively nearby Heart of Rage, for reasons unknown. Tassyn hires you to investigate, find out what they want with the Heart of Rage, and, if possible, stop them.

So off you go, messing about with Dominion activities and trying to figure out what's so special about the Heart of Rage. Your investigation ends running headlong into the leader of the Dominion forces, a man known only as The Monitor, who seeks to use the Heart of Rage to harness the Anthem of Creation and become a god. You object most strenuously to this, but the Monitor eludes you and escapes to continue his plans.

Naturally, Tassyn does not appreciate this and, with the stakes being so dire, ultimately leads you to Haluk and Faye, your squad leader and Cypher respectively from when you first ventured into the Heart of Rage, who have been obsessively pursuing any lead they could on how to safely get into the Heart and stop it. They, reluctantly (as they viewed your leaving them to move on from the disaster to be a betrayal), decide to help you, because that's the only way they'd ever get closure on the matter.

The information their obession had turned up over the last two years, combined with Tassyn's intel, leads you to the locations of the lost tombs of the leaders of the Legion of Dawn, the original group of heroes that, lead by General Helena Tarsis, rose up eons ago, when humans were enslaved by aliens, and successfully won freedom for humanity. The theory being that, according to legend, General Tarsis was able to control the Cenotaph, the relic at the heart of the Heart of Rage, and that that should, theoretically, allow you safe passage in to silence it.

Turns out, that legend was correct, and you and your band of misfits gather information from the tombs of the Legionairre's that leads you to the tomb of General Tarsis. Her tomb provides you with the key to the Fortress of Dawn, the ancient, nigh-impregnable stronghold of the Legion, and within awaited General Tarsis' Javelin, the legend itself.

Unfortunately, at this point, Owen betrays you, having cut a deal with the Monitor to hand over the Javelin in exchange for sparing Fort Tarsis, and through the use of sabotage, disables your Javelin and steals General Tarsis' to hand over. Unfortunately for him, the Javelin was missing a key component that you still had, having picked it up from Tarsis' tomb. So Owen lead a group of Dominion forces in, and they all got wrecked by the Heart of Rage, buying you and your team just enough time to use the data from within the Fortress of Dawn to build your own version of the control mechanism in Tarsis' Javelin.

You then proceed to dive right back in to the Heart of Rage, tear through the Dominion forces, only to find that you were a hair too late, arriving moments after the Monitor had subsumed himself into the Anthem. He manifests himself as a quasi-energy being, and a big boss fight ensues (honestly, the most interesting boss fight in the game, by a fair margin). You beat him, and then Faye, your Cypher, manages to finally silence the Cenotaph and put a stop to the Heart of Rage, and you all go home heroes.

Only for Tassyn to stop you and lead you to a dark back room, where she pulls a tarp off a dead alien, the very same aliens General Tarsis rebelled against, and said "We found this last week. We don't know what it was after, but this could be really bad. Keep an eye out, okay?".

Cut to black.

That's the full plot. The TL;DR version: Crazy dude blew up a city trying and failing to become a god, you and your friends need to stop him before he can try a second time and actually succeed. Then some sequel/future patch bait sprinkled in at the end for good measure.

Honestly, I like it on the whole. It's far from perfect, being a quintessential Bioware story, where the core narrative is entirely predictable, but the characters are engaging and likeable enough that the story is still quite entertaining anyway.

 

I guess that's what should be expected from BW at this point. Honestly, it sounds exactly like Andromeda.

Spoiler

Freelancer=Pathfinder

Monitor=Archon

Dominion=Kett

Shapers=Remnant

Cenotaph=Meridian

Plus, from what I've seen, a grind in the middle of the game that mirrors Andromeda's planet viability and sequel bait straight out of a Hollywood action B-movie.

We're never getting another DAO or even DA2 from BioWare again.

Is there a Morrigan or Varric in there?

 

man, you'd think that being better than destiny 2 was a pretty fucking low bar to beat. I mean, the game was right there for them to study and just not make any of those same mistakes. But somehow they've made more. The ineptitude is kinda amazing.

 

Not really. I liked the whole cast, don't get me wrong, they were decently fleshed out, but none of them were as charismatic as Varric or as nuanced as Morrigan.

The best character is probably Matthias Sumner, the main Arcanist (read : action scholar) largely because shortly into his chain of sidequests, he screws with something he shouldn't have and is split it into three separate people, each inheriting part of the original's personality (his scholarly leanings, his 'inner rage' for lack of a better word, and his curiosity respectively), and the rest of the sidequest chain is them figuring out who they are as individual people.

Edit: though I will say that you're being a little unfair to Anthem's story. You could do the same breakdown you did except replace references to Andromeda with Me 1 and it would fit just as well. Probably DAO too, now that I'm thinking about it.

Bioware has never written terribly involved or even particularly good stories. The plots have always been predictable and genetic, it's been the characters that make it seem more than that. And while Anthem isn't exceptional in that regard, it's also not particularly bad. It's just sorta average, character wise, and I think that's why people are so chuffed about it.