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Angry Joe: Anthem review
- Thread starter Se_7_eN
- Start date
I really wish I had waited to buy Anthem until seeing Joe's review. I feel he makes a lot of really fair points in his videos even if he does it dramatically.
This game should not have been released in this state. Yes there are some people having fun and he even admits there were parts that he really enjoyed, but a lot of these problems will not be tolerated by a large portion of the gaming audience in my opinion. By not tolerated I mean that they will drop the game and not come back.
I feel Destiny was an outlier becoming extremely popular with the sad state of it's game when it came out. I don't know if Anthem has the legs honestly.
I really hope Bioware and many other devs/publishers watch this video. Learn from your peers, their work and player feedback is all over the place for you to see what players are wanting/enjoying and vice versa.
This game should not have been released in this state. Yes there are some people having fun and he even admits there were parts that he really enjoyed, but a lot of these problems will not be tolerated by a large portion of the gaming audience in my opinion. By not tolerated I mean that they will drop the game and not come back.
I feel Destiny was an outlier becoming extremely popular with the sad state of it's game when it came out. I don't know if Anthem has the legs honestly.
I really hope Bioware and many other devs/publishers watch this video. Learn from your peers, their work and player feedback is all over the place for you to see what players are wanting/enjoying and vice versa.
AngryJoe and many others say "6 years for this game!" and they're right to call it out, but I feel that this blowback, atleast this specific complaint, could've been lowered or eliminated entirely if EA/BioWare took a page from Nintendo and provide decent QA in announcing that the game's development was restarted or something (because let's be honest, Anthem as it is wasn't the product of 6 years of consistent game development) like what recently was revealed with Metroid Prime 4.
But of course this is EA we're talking about so probably would never happen. So much schadenfreude I'm experiencing when observing the gaming industry.
But of course this is EA we're talking about so probably would never happen. So much schadenfreude I'm experiencing when observing the gaming industry.
You're right on here. They should have done a separate online mode like DAI and ME3. A fully fleshed out universe with a deep story combined with the flying and combat would have made this much better.
Jason's reporting on Anthem did not report on a project that got rebooted, but simply a project that was in preproduction for a looooooong time, just like Horizon Zero Dawn was.
And sure, a long pre-production phase does mean that the time that the game was spent on full production was shorter than 6 years, but that is the norm for many games.
At the end of the day, the story of a project getting rebooted or having a long pre-production window only serves to explain, but it doesn't somehow wash people's grievances with a product away.
Same here, i played the stronghold over and over and havent noticed this myself
Yeah that would have been great. If they had taken the core minute-to-minute gamplay but put all that development time into making it an open world single player ARPG, this would be such an amazing game.
Sure, but that's why I said "lowered or eliminated". My point with bringing up Nintendo is that they recently did QA stating to their audience that a game announced at last year's E3 was rebooted. While it's not a complete 1-1 comparison, I do think EA (and the rest of the gaming industry in general) can do better in both profits and player retention (which goes hand-in-hand with this ludicrous GaaS model) to poorly-performing titles if competent QA/transparency to the consumer was shown.
That wouldnt address what people are actually upset about though which is asking $60 for a product that is lacking content and polish.
He should've put the downgrade/cut content talk (starting at around 12min) into the review. Insane shit.
Something went very wrong with this game. And if it is indeed the engine that is to blame what is it with these looter-shooters using game engines that are not fit for purpose? I remember hearing Destinys engine was woefully lacking in the development tools department too, that it took a stupid amount of time to make even small changes and would be even worse if you're trying to design an entire level. If it's a choice between a third party engine that lets you iterate quickly and has all the tools you expect from a modern engine and one that creates roadblocks at every corner.. for Christ sake use the third party option.
An engine is one of the earliest decisions you make at the beginning of the project, and even if that decision turns out to not have been the most ideal choice at that time - realistically you have to make choices that serve the limitations that you were forced into? Destiny's engine was a challenge in allowing them to produce the quantity of content that they may have envisioned, but by and large - other than the issue of quantity of worlds/levels, Bungie has managed to deal with the annoyance of whatever engine they were working with to deliver a product that while still flawed, has met a lot of expectations. ( and also not, but not out of engine - but design missteps )
I mean, this Anthem story has me revisiting some God of War related development stories, and early on in that project, they made the decision to not have jumping/swimming/etc in the project because they knew with where they were at with that project, those features were not things that they could deliver in any substantial quality by the time they gotta ship the game. In hindsight a third-person semi-open world action game not having jump or swimming sounded crazy, but it ended up being a rational choice.
Yeah this shit is completely mind blowing. Your game is already content starved and they've cut so much from the release. As far as I'm concerned this is on Bioware. Blaming EA only goes so far especially since so many people at Bioware have gone on record to state that EA had left everything up to them.
It's crazy, they cut a huge amount of stuff that I suppose they want to sell as MTX now, scandalous
They've dealt with them to a degree, but it's still a roadblock that shouldn't really be there. In both instances these are in-house engines. You would have thought something like bungies engine, designed to build Destiny would have the tools necessary to make that content as painless as possible. How they ended up with a toolset that required an entire day to move a node a couple inches just boggles my mind. And that all adds up. Now something that should take seconds is taking over a day. If that's what happened to anthem, if the frostbite engine really is so poor, then it's not hard to see how a game with so little content took so long.
I can't pretend to know how EA manage the frostbite engine? Whether Dice make their first person shooters and then other internal EA Devs just have to deal with what they're given regardless of what game they're making? But it sounds like they need to have a dedicated team making the engine robust for all types of games, so that when a studio like bioware gets their hands on it, they're not having to build entire inventory systems that were never originally supported etc.
If you think about it, Dragon Age / Mass Effect were just as repetitive to play if you look at the combat, which is why breaking up missions with actual story segments (not just radio dialogue the you can't hear in the midst of gun fights) is so important.
Anthem is an improvement to Mass effect when it comes to gameplay, but it removed literally everything that made the repetitive gameplay loop bearable and replaced it with poor online and boring loot.
You keep talking about content I'm talking about the game world. I've played D2 far more than a few hours lol.
I think if Bioware / EA didn't include microtransasctions for skins and the like, there would possibly be a little less blow back. But once you release a full price unfinished game that's underwhelming, and look to get a little extra from players is when gamers / critics throw their hands in the air and start to destroy the game with negative buzz. Had Bioware released the game as it is now, but no microtransactions and had a real road map to improve the game over the next 6-12 months, I think more than a few gamers would look the other way and support the devs. But it's an unfinished mess of an EA product with microtransactions, I fully expected this game being destroyed, and deservedly so. And quite frankly I don't understand why more companies dont follow what the devs of Dirt Rally did, release the game as early access at a lower price, as more content gets added the game price increases, and when it's complete, it's sold for $60. I got in early for that, and had no issue waiting for the game to improve. As the game got a bit more content, my buddies jumped in at a slightly higher price than I paid, but they were ok with it.
I watched the entire first review and the entire extended review and they are right about every single point they talk about. It's such a shame to because you can tell they really wanted this game to be good. BW doesn't even seem to know what kind of looting game they want. They have a Min/Max system where your rolls are more important than the rarity of the gear, but that doesn't exactly work when the rolls are a total fucking crapshoot where you can get inscriptions that don't even apply to that specific piece of gear. Not to mention in a system like that you need more drops because your build is more dependent on your rolls. You're not getting a semi-decent build with +20% harvesting on most of your gear and since they nerfed the loot drops recently it's even harder to get a decent build. Not only is Anthem a poorly designed game, but it's a poorly designed one that completely wastes your time.
I haven't been this disappointed with a game in a long time.
I haven't been this disappointed with a game in a long time.
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Wait, is that true about the weapon stat mods they aren't universal? I.e. the physical damage boost on the flamethrower only boosts the physical damage of the flame thrower instead physical damage for every skill?
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Surprisingly, yes. You can also get elemental damage boost on something that doesn't even do elemental damage or physical damage boost on something that doesn't do physical damage. You can really tell that BW had absolutely no clue how to make a looting game.
That's just... I have no words.
I can't currently login to the game to test, but I'm assuming then this is also true for the other buffs? For example an LMG that says it boosts sniper rifle ammo capacity +10%. It doesn't actually increase the sniper ammo count?
Edit: Searched reddit and found
sigh
It can potentially roll for everything, but it has the chance to roll for just that piece as well. The difference is a gear icon compared to a suit icon. If it's the gear icon then it just applies to that specific piece while if it's the suit icon then it applies for everything. Basically, it's a total crapshoot. Anything can roll anything whether it actually works for that piece of gear or not.
I think this was supposed to be a single player game which got repurposed into a co-op based mmo lite game...
Yep, Bioware should stick to what they are good at, which clearly isn't GaaS.
Imagine if Anthem was a full on cinematic Action RPG, with a rich story, multiple choice dialogue options that actually alter the story and interesting characters / companions, something more like Mass Effect........ It has a lot of potential to be a fantastic RPG and would be far better than a GaaS.
I've been playing the game for dozens of hours and I didn't know this, LOL.
Just starting this...
So the "free play events" are just (very) random spawns of a particular enemy type? No setup, new objectives or even enemy bases?
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This is the way to go in the future IMHO. It worked in the past. Just make finished games with one or two big DLCs and sequels every 2-3 years. There is no need for all those fake-MMO elements. Or make a fully fledged MMO instead. Those hybrids rarely work out.
Check the second review discussion video. They talk about it there.
So basically they talked about certain inconsistencies in how the story is presented, how certain NPCs are mentioned and seen out of time, I don't remember the exact NPCs or how it worked but basically whatever they had, Angry Joe and Co. guess that they chopped it up and put it where they could to finish the game. Basically they suggest the game was rushed out after a development hell and in their haste, whatever they had was put in. Specifically they note that the beginning and the end are the best parts with the middle being shit.
I could have sworn I read or heard in an older video that there was originally some kind of a system where you, while might not have been necessarily able to bang characters, were able to form deeper relationships and learn more about certain NPC characters. I guess that was removed?
Wait...the perk pools aren't related to the weapon archetype!? Like, in this world's lore the people who make the weapons are so fucking dumb they just put big sniper ammo mags on SMGs and call it a bonus?
So after all of this and after Joe pointing out how misleading trailers and even dev casts were... Class action for misleading advertisement? This feels way worse than Fallout 76, similar to No Man's Sky
Love how they just keep bringing up how Borderlands did everything better, lol.
Yup. Snipers can roll machine pistol dmg, LMGs can roll sniper ammo, etc. Everything is randomized
