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Angry Joe: Anthem review
- Thread starter Se_7_eN
- Start date
I vote for Loot'em'up.
And then the camera pans down and reveals a shoddy handmade sign "gief coin 4 medz plx diagnosd w/ biowaer syndrom" and an old hat with a few coins and a half eaten apple in it.
Ouch. Everything Joe says that could have made the game better and perhaps good just doesn't exist or never happens. Like when opening the tombs on that horrible story quest, why not have that skeleton corpse be reborn and have a cool fight inside the tomb? Something. The cut scene where the story is being explained but you don't play any of it looks far better than everything else Joe showed in his review. And even that live action trailer or whatever the hell that was is even better and more exciting.
Such a shame because the world looks absolutely gorgeous, the gameplay is solid when it works and the flying seems to be as good as swinging around NYC in Spider Man was. Oh man. What a disaster. SMH.
Such a shame because the world looks absolutely gorgeous, the gameplay is solid when it works and the flying seems to be as good as swinging around NYC in Spider Man was. Oh man. What a disaster. SMH.
there's only two paths into the future
one path leads to emoji's being the only way to communicate
one path leads to shlooter
Joe really does seem like he wanted to love it, and you do see there are times he is having one hell of a good time. The good of the game just can't manage to carry all the weight of the bad.
Fantastic review that articulates well what the problems are. Also find it personally gratifying that he pointed out that Andromeda is a better game than Anthem (which is what I've been saying).
Incidentally, Andromeda ain't even that bad. It's just okay. Which isn't good enough when Mass Effect is in the title, sure, but it's still okay.
I think this is effectively what happened. I think this game had a development crisis and dramatic restructuring late in the process. Nothing else can explain why so many basic and obvious features are wrong or missing. It's very likely that a lot of what the game is at release was hastily slapped together over a year or so.
Incidentally, Andromeda ain't even that bad. It's just okay. Which isn't good enough when Mass Effect is in the title, sure, but it's still okay.
I think this is effectively what happened. I think this game had a development crisis and dramatic restructuring late in the process. Nothing else can explain why so many basic and obvious features are wrong or missing. It's very likely that a lot of what the game is at release was hastily slapped together over a year or so.
I don't think so. I think this is a problem with the GaaS model and shared world concept for looters. That being said BioWare has had a ton of failures to learn from.
You're a dev, right? Why do you think this is an engine problem over an inherent problem with shared world games in general?
Probably because they want the continued revenue of a F2P game without actually being free.
I just catched up Joe's review and O M G.
How the fuck did they manage to make ALL THE LOOT the SAME? In a looter shooter? I thought you could unlock stuff later in the story, fancy and shiny and flashy stuff, but there's NOTHING to look out for. What?
Who the hell greenlighted THAT?
Not enough. He received 40,000 credits for buying the Legendary edition. So literally playing the game like a full-time job for 2 weeks will not allow you to craft a Masterwork item. That's insane.
Because literally every game Bioware has made with Frostbite has had massive development problems, as documented by Jason Schrier in his MEA coverage and his book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels.
Someone needs to do the science...what is longer, Sonic 06 loading screen per mission or Anthem's multiple loading screens per mission?
User Banned (5 Days): Antagonizing other users + History of similar infractions.
Triggered by use of the word "triggered".
I feel frostbite may be a problem with the loading and other technical stuff, but it seems the biggest problem is that Bioware does not have experience making this type of games.
but many of the bad decisions don't seem to with technical issues at face value.
The view is like 100% on point, I say this as someone whose put at least 30 hours in at this point. I really want to know what BioWare was doing for 6 years. You CANNOT blame EA for "pushing this out the door." They had SIX YEARS and the full resources of BioWare with the backing of EA. How could this be the end result? Honestly, what this tells me is that they either really had no clue what Anthem actually was until far late into development or they had major technical issues for most of development.
The lack of any variety in armors at launch is the most telling part. It's a supposed looter shooter that has no actual loot. You cannot unlock any new armor pieces through the game right now, what you get at launch is it with the ability to purchase either one or two additional pieces (depending on your class). How was this deemed acceptable? Even if you want to take the cynical, greedy EA approach. Why isn't there just a ton of armor pieces to purchase right out the gate? It's shocking how little there is in the actual game on all fronts.
The lack of any variety in armors at launch is the most telling part. It's a supposed looter shooter that has no actual loot. You cannot unlock any new armor pieces through the game right now, what you get at launch is it with the ability to purchase either one or two additional pieces (depending on your class). How was this deemed acceptable? Even if you want to take the cynical, greedy EA approach. Why isn't there just a ton of armor pieces to purchase right out the gate? It's shocking how little there is in the actual game on all fronts.
A lot of the jank/lameness in MEA came from the fact that Frostbite is utter shit at a lot of things - there's tons of concept art for super alien aliens, and it seems like the only reason they weren't implemented was that it was impossible to get them to work in whatever jerry-rigged systems they had. Then there was the whole thing with procedural planet creation not working (aside from a small team who got it working, then didn't share that info with anyone else), forcing them to go with fewer and fewer handcrafted planets as time pressures kicked in.
I bet you there's a lot of scrapped stuff that got cut because they couldn't make it work, especially not in whatever time frame they had for actual development (which I suspect was closer to MEA's 18 months of real development than the full 6 years).
He does say its slightly blow average, so maybe he uses the full scale from 1 to 10?
The problems weren't necessarily just tech related (though it could certainly be the case when we look at the poor optimization and long/frequent load times) but I suspect that they reshuffled the entire organization of the game and its design late in the process. We saw something similar happen with Destiny 1 when it came out with most of its story missing.
That's just my speculation though, because I can think of no other reason so much is missing. Basic shit like no stats page, no waypoints, etc, not just the content in general being minimal. Just common sense stuff being completely ignored/wrong. Like why do so many guns have useless perks? We may never know the full story of what happened, but, again, my own hunch is that there was a development crisis.
The people working at Bioware are very talented, and there's a lot of potential that can be seen in individual aspects of Anthem. But as a whole it's a fucking clusterfuck. Something bad happened. If they work hard and keep developing it and really knock it out of the park over the next year the game may become great. I certainly hope so -- But it's going to take a LOT of work
Agreed as much as we love to rag on the corporate leadership at EA and rightfully so most of time, this instance however it seems Bioware was given a lot of time by EA and a lot of resources.
These last couple of years quite a few folks have left Bioware including long time veterans and it seems like Andromeda all over again were internal problems at the studio created a lot of problems.
Andromeda was made by a team that was new to working with Frostbite and they'd never made a full AAA game. There were also the lowest on the totem pole in terms of priority for resources, so infighting played a part in that team not only dithering on prototypes for far too long, but also shipping Andromeda the way it came out. Remember that it is EA that ultimately decided to ship the game and it's no coincidence that both Andromeda and Anthem - clearly unfinished games - are dumped at the end of the fiscal year.
Anthem is supposed to be an all-in game for Bioware, one that got plenty of resources and time. They even paused DA development for this thing and it doesn't show. The game that shipped is like a year and a half cobbled together effort. Something went really wrong during the development and I'd love to know what it is. Bioware already dealt with Frostbite multiple times before Anthem so that's not an excuse.
I choose to believe Bioware is still comprised of professionals that take pride in their work. What we got is probably a function of bad management both at the studio level and from EA.
I really don't understand how the mission variety in these large profile games is so bad. Destiny and Anthem have the same main issue in my eyes. The only thing you do (outside of Destiny Raids) is run to an objective while listening to dialog, maybe a cutscene will pop up, and maybe you'll have to defend the objective. That's it. There's absolutely zero creativity on display. There's zero attention directed towards pacing, one of the most important aspects in a game. Mission variety is a HUGE part of good pacing in a game like this.
In regards to the loot complaints, what Joe and Delrith displayed there is so depressingly barebones, I think the Trials Rising beta has more cosmetic options. A Trials game, in a beta which I assume is purposefully limited in character progression, has more cosmetic options.
In regards to the loot complaints, what Joe and Delrith displayed there is so depressingly barebones, I think the Trials Rising beta has more cosmetic options. A Trials game, in a beta which I assume is purposefully limited in character progression, has more cosmetic options.
Sounds like they use the same RNG that Fire Emblem did for leveling up stats prior to Awakening.
Watching that review its hard to see how the game is only slightly below average.
Yeah, that stood out to me as well. He was insanely negative and angry and then characterized the score as "slightly below average".