Datto's video is great. His concerns about endgame difficulty deserve to be listened to.
When I played the demo, I was getting hit by unknown enemies way too often. And the "no single attack can take you below red health" thing seems like an awful crutch that I relied on way too much. There are way too many enemy spawn points that are either behind you or generally outside your FoV, so the first you know of the enemy is when your health bar goes red.
It also fucks class balance. If you're constantly getting hit for insane damage and only live because of the "red health" lifesaver, then what's the point of small increases to shield/health? How do you even play a melee class if a red-bar can kill you quickly? What's the point of Colossus if tanking damage doesn't work?
It seems like few people are asking about end-game weapon/class/ability balance because of the bugs and annoyances. Gameplay is good, but this seems like a relative judgement compared to the Tarsis walking-simulator and loadscreen desktop-wallpaper simulator. Anything would seem good next to that. The bad quest design, poor enemy variety/design/AI and balance issues are more worrying to me.
I know that GM difficulty is getting a day 1 patch, but I'm very suspicious of developers making radical balance changes and making it up as they go along. This isn't like just a few weapons being overpowered and needing a nerf.
Anthem seems to me like a project without effective top-level management. I can only assume that everyone was locked into a silo mentality, making sure that their section worked but never considering how the whole game would work. It's the only reason I can think of for the load screens and stuff like Tarsis looking great but being horrible to experience as a player. The animation team did a great job. The art team did a great job. But no project lead was there to say, "That's nice, but we can't handle texture streaming at that quality without making everyone walk really slowly and spending ages loading. Function is much more important than form in a main hub area".
