@Agayek we're gonna have to agree to disagree about previous BW game plots.

Btw I've found a 3 hour video that compiles all the relevant story stuff and I'm watching it. I'll say that cutscenes are slick (although there were a few where Faye was leaning against a wall and waving her hand, it looked weird) but compared to the hilarious disaster that was Andromeda, I gotta give props for execution there. Voice acting is also top tier work, particularly banter between Owen and the Freelancer.

But at the heart of it, it's a story with an underdeveloped bad guy who wants to harness ancient power to become a god. Now that I write this, that was also Cory in DAI, except DAI had another layer beneath that.

DAO was, at the very core, also a classic good vs evil story, but I think that the chapters of the journey were much better than they look in Anthem, especially the treaties (and Paragon of Her Kind in particular among them). Each one was a complete story on its own. DA2 tried something different. Instead of a typical huge scale tale, they went for something more personal, centered around one person at the heart of a brewing conflict. Execution was average, but at least it was something new and creative.

ME2 was less of a grand narrative than an anthology of shorter stories, but what an anthology it was.

Anthem meanwhile is another story with a weak villain and a McGuffin. Kind of like the Phase 1 & 2 MCU movies (GOTG 1 for example).

I acknowledge that my default position of negativity makes me hypercritical and I'm sure that actually playing through the full 20 hour experience is different from a 3 hour compilation video, but what I've seen does nothing to endear Anthem to me. The story was the last shot BW had at convincing me that there was a shred of soul left in the studio and now I know for sure that there isn't.
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Watch this video. It's long (30 minutes) and old (Nov 24th 2017) but just as relevant today.

If you watch this video and keep buying EA games knowing the information in the video, then I have nothing else to say to you.

 

Anthem has apparently only sold around half the amount Mass Effect Andromeda did and only 10% of Destiny's initial sales. Believe that's just in the UK, but still not looking pretty.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/insert...term-or-ditch-it-like-andromeda/#71508e561ac1

Highest score I've seen is a 7/10. It's sitting at about 61 on Metacritic. but a 4.3/10 from general users.

 

I keep on seeing this thread come up under New Posts. Can someone please explain to me what this game is. People seem pretty hyped up about it.

 

A Destiny Clone by Bioware.

(My post is definitely biased against EA)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_(video_game)

 

At this point we can say a worse Destiny clone. Destiny 1 was 2014, Division was 2016, Destiny 2 was 2017. Anthem entered the genre with a broken release worthy of Bethesda and a feature selection worse than its predecessors in the genre, having learned nothing from them during its 6/7 year dev cycle.

It rides on 3 three things: BioWare's reputation from a decade ago, graphics, and the flying mechanics. That's not enough to sustain a live service for a decade, might not even be enough to sustain it for a year.

 

TLDR is that it's an Iron Man simulator with Destiny/The Division style loot mechanics. It's got a pretty damn good core gameplay loop with some innovative mechanics and it's simply a ton of fun to just play.

However, it launched in a frankly embarrassing state, with bugs out the ass, terrible decisions made in most layers of the game's design (made all the worse by how the competition made the exact same mistakes years ago and very publicly figured out the solutions) and a dearth of meaningful content. It feels like the game is Bioware cashing in the last vestiges of their good reputation left after Andromeda and the ever-worsening dumpster fire that is Dragon Age and trying to make something of it.

And yet, it's also a game I find bizarrely compelling and haven't been able to put down for very long in the week and a half since it's release. I'm hoping they get their shit together and fix the game's many glaring issues, because it's got the potential to be one of my favorite games of all time, but it's gonna take a lot of TLC to get there, and it's nowhere near worth the asking price as things currently stand.

 

So it’s basically Guilty Pleasure Shitfic: Gaming Edition?

 

But imagine if Joe suddenly showed up and wrote that shitty fic and just expected you to like it because he wrote Wastelands.

 

Essentially, yeah. I'm playing it cuz it's a lot of fun, but it's got a lot of problems they need to solve. The good news is that early indicators are that the devs are listening and responding correctly to feedback, so if they carry that over to actually delivering, odds are excellent that the game will be pretty good circa May/June, but it remains to be seen if they'll continue to respond correctly and/or EA will continue to fund their efforts.

Edit:
@Arthellion It's more like some random wearing a paper mask with Joe's face on it wrote it and expected you to like it, to be clear. Theseus' Ship and all that.

 

I know that AngryJoe is not everyone's cup of tea, but I just want to point to an interesting bit in the video at 23:50. If you're not inclined to watch, I'll paraphrase.

Delrith talks about possible evidence that the project went through the gamedev equivalent of reshoots or that EA stepped in with a cleaver to cut off portions of the base game to later sell as DLC or whatever.

At some point in a story mission you come across a character who greets the Freelancer as if they'd met before, even though they haven't. Then, once you unlock a stronghold after beating the story, the same NPC is introduced to the Freelancer, hinting that the game got chopped up and missions were out of order and that this happened late enough in development that there was no time to get the voice actors to rerecord their lines. Also, Faye talks to you in freeplay before you meet her in the story.

I do recommend the whole video, and AJ's recent Anthem review.

If there are fans of the game itt, if you have positive reviews you'd recommend watching, I'm open.

 

Honestly, I haven't seen any positive reviews. The least negative ones are all "yeah, the game sucks now, but it'll probably be pretty good in a few months, assuming EA doesn't kill it".

 

Apparently Anthem's sales data is not looking good. Physical sales at 25% of what Destiny 2 got, and half of what Andromeda got. Also already starting to get heavily discounted outside the US market.

 

To be fair, digital sales are the overwhelming majority of game sales these days, where as it was still a minority (albeit barely) when both of those games came out.

The game's sales are definitely tanking, and there's no way in hell Anthem is meeting the expectations laid out in the last earnings call (5-6 mil by end of March), but it's not quite as bad as those numbers would suggest.

Edit: @ScottPress yeah, the game pretty clearly had a troubled development. I'm betting that the game was a total shitshow of half finished ideas and technical messes that was about to be thrown out when Hudson was brought back on board a couple of years ago, and the released game was the Frankenstein's monster he managed to get them to cobble together out of those parts.

 

I think Jason Schreier from Kotaku may have teased as much a couple of days ago.

Here’s the tweet:

https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1100157373774286848?s=21

 

I don't take Schreier seriously, admittedly because I'm allergic to "game journalists" in general, particularly those associated with Kotaku or Polygon.

Regarding sales, it'll be best to wait for EA's fiscal year report. That'll be the best source of info on game sales. I'm very interested to see their projections vs results on BFV.

I agree that there's likely zero chance of pushing 6 mln units by end of March, but I still think that (unfortunately) the pure momentum of BioWare and the fact that people who obsess over the industry like I do are the vocal minority will account for at least 2/3 of EA's projection.

A funny tidbit I saw in a YT comment: EA now stands for Early Access.

Another thing, I'm seeing a lot of people sending out signals like "I don't care, I'm enjoying the game, fuck the haters" and "Negative reviews make me feel guilty about enjoying Anthem". Like, fuck off. No one says you can't enjoy your time with Anthem, it's not on people who gave bad reviews to make you feel good about it, and pointing out that EA shat out an unfinished game to make teh moneyz is not an attack on you, you fucking vagina.

 

True, but the fiscal year report is a long way off. Right now we have to make do with the data we have. (BTW, apparently BF V was one million units below expectations).

Odds are Anthem will still make plenty of money for EA, but EA's never been content with just making plenty of money. Anything less than all the money in the world will be a disappointment.

 

Remember that FO76 guy who got permabanned for having too much loot (using in-game mechanics)?

A Twitch streamer/YouTuber Gladd was apparently banned from Anthem for exploiting the game economy (having too much loot).

This is just what this game needs. Thank you, BW/EA, for the continuing lolz. I look forward to the death of Anthem. Schadenfreude is strong.

Edit: to be clear, it looks like the guy found an exploit and was abusing it in a manner not planned by devs, but it's a PvE game, him having more loot doesn't impact other players, and there's no loot trade between players or even trading in with the MTX store for extra coins. So instead of doing what even fucking Bungie realized (fix the exploit, but why ban the players) BW banned him.

It's like they want this game to fail.

 

Confirmed to be a bug, but hilarious anyway.

 

Yes.

From looking at it, it seems like a level-scaling-gone-wrong scenario, where they tried to set up a system like World of Warcraft's semi-recent scaling mobs, where mob effective health is determined by your gear/level instead of an objective value, and failed to account for folks deliberately downgrading their weapons to take advantage of that.

Fortunately, this should be a pretty easy fix, as they should just need to factor in the rest of the player's gear as part of the scaling (which would itself be a good idea regardless, as it would provide a incentive to have more than one piece of gear at highest-ilevel and remove the existing incentive for stacking low-tier gear you can craft functionally infinitely for maximum stats), but there's no ETA on a fix for it yet.

I'm hoping they roll it out soon, preferably fitting it into the patch next Tuesday, but who even knows.

Really though, this game has been nothing but a long string of events that each, individually, said that the game needed another 6 months in development. I love it to bits, but god damn is its current state embarrassing for Bioware. They really should have just delayed it another few months and ironed out these kinks.