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[Kotaku] Anthem Players Say The Game Is Crashing Their PS4s UPDATE 05/03/19
- Thread starter LebGuns
- Start date
Again, it's such a funny thing that some of you are acting as if PS4 players now are supposed to be breathing a huge sigh of relief now that they know the game isn't bricking their console.
Oh no, it simply forces the PS4 to shut down improperly. Phew, what a relief!
I mean, really now.
Oh no, it simply forces the PS4 to shut down improperly. Phew, what a relief!
I mean, really now.
To be fair shutting down and downright bricking are two very different situations....
I understand.
Regardless I think its surely not a healthy thing for PS4 to have multiple forced shutdowns like some of the peeps are experiencing when playing Anthem. It's still a really serious issue.
Glad systems aren't being bricked, but smdh at people acting like this is somehow a win for Bioware since it's "only" force-shutting down the console and in extreme cases corrupting the OS/HDD...
The fact that the PS4 has a safe mode that has to be used as often as it does (I.e. ever) is ridiculous.
If you saw crash-rates for an average PC title - this thread would look like a complete non-news in comparison.
It's a strong probability we're below 1% here (which still affect tens of thousands of people for a game like Anthem) and that's WAY below what PC usually get.
It's mainly due to it being Anthem that it gained so much traction.
I was only joking with that post :) Turns out Anthem is NOT bricking consoles... as expected.
Even funnier when you see the same people lose their mind over Anthem crashes by stating Apex Legends isn't having the same problems. People have been reporting crashing with that plenty, but you don't see the same furore just because people actually like that game.
a soft brick, which is basically the same thing accept not remotely close and usually used for android phones and not consoles
Even if they can finally turn it on the damage has already been done to their HDD, might aswell get a refund or start saving for a replacement HDD.
Yikes I just tried playing Anthem and the game crashed. Just a normal crash to the blue error screen CE-34788-0. Not a system failure or anything. Shared the shit out of me.
There is no way I am booting the game up again..... jfc.
There is no way I am booting the game up again..... jfc.
I'm just going to keep trying to get a refund at this point, the game is just incomplete garbage based off of many lies from the devs(ie. no loading!) so this issue makes me hopeful that I have a change to be refunded
Yeah I'm not gonna go for the refund since I actually quite like the game (when it works). I might just uninstall it and check back and see how things are going in a few months.
In regards to the original Kotaku article about "bricking consoles..."
I can't be the only one that acknowledged Kotaku's completely lack of professionalism. I have serious doubts about any kind of journalism at Kotaku. It was so frustrating reading that article. There is probably a deeper topic here on gaming pubs prioritizing hiring the gamer and not the journalists.
The original reddit post from some individual said PS4 is "completely bricked to the point of not even turning on because of Anthem." The one damn reddit post this came from was questionable at best. You either brick the damn thing or your don't, no levels of in between.
What happened to reaching out to this individual? Getting facts? When HardOCP investigated issues with NVidia graphics cards and a particular type of memory they:
I can excuse John from Spawn Wave in this mess to an extent because its really just a vblog. (I also find him adorable.)
Kotaku on the hand has no excuse. Kotaku fucked it up from the bottom all the way up to the editor in chief at the top. To everyone involved at Kotaku; this is on your record. The individuals at Kotaku should prepare to answer for or deny any involvement. Even the cleaning staff.
Note I said individuals and not journalist. (Shade.)
I can't be the only one that acknowledged Kotaku's completely lack of professionalism. I have serious doubts about any kind of journalism at Kotaku. It was so frustrating reading that article. There is probably a deeper topic here on gaming pubs prioritizing hiring the gamer and not the journalists.
The original reddit post from some individual said PS4 is "completely bricked to the point of not even turning on because of Anthem." The one damn reddit post this came from was questionable at best. You either brick the damn thing or your don't, no levels of in between.
What happened to reaching out to this individual? Getting facts? When HardOCP investigated issues with NVidia graphics cards and a particular type of memory they:
- Reached out to individuals.
- Got direct statements.
- Acquired the affected graphics cards . (Extra mile.)
- Had experts research the claims. (Extra mile.)
I can excuse John from Spawn Wave in this mess to an extent because its really just a vblog. (I also find him adorable.)
Kotaku on the hand has no excuse. Kotaku fucked it up from the bottom all the way up to the editor in chief at the top. To everyone involved at Kotaku; this is on your record. The individuals at Kotaku should prepare to answer for or deny any involvement. Even the cleaning staff.
Note I said individuals and not journalist. (Shade.)
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Except that the game has hard or soft crashed many people's PS4's, I had a half dozen crashes and had to do a DB repair at one point. Any of these hard crashes can brick your PS4 as it is the equivalent of yanking the power cord out of the wall.
So it's not like this is made up, the PS4 is uniform hardware so even a single crash is unacceptable and shows that there was minimal QA done and Bioware should be raked across the coals for it to ensure it is actually fixed
Bioware has already publicly acknowledged that there are serious issues regarding the game and Sony is helping them address the issues. Why do you still feel the need to try and defend the game when even the Devs are admitting they fucked up?
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Bricking consoles is not the same thing. Did you read the article (original) and it's reddit source where they reported Anthem bricking consoles?
Bricking consoles.... and where in my post am I defending Anthem? You have to be kidding me.
I don't get it either. Are peoples standards and expectations THAT low? I mean seriously have we gotten to the point where saying "C'mon brehs! All it does is force your game console to shut itself down improperly and make it need to be reset! Small price to pay for having fun right????? RIGHT?!?!?!?!" is a totally normal way to approach a discussion?
A console is bricked when it can no longer boot up due to a corrupt OS..which can happen when you yank out the power cord...which is the equivalent of what happens when Anthem hard crashes your PS4...what are you missing here?
Oh wow, so that's how we define brick now? In the hardware engineering world something that is bricked is dead. Period. It's a brick and barely any good at that. In regards to the original Kotaku article, they made a distinction between a crashed OS and a bricked PS4 system as well.
When was this given a new definition?
Edit: Reworded my replies. Sorry, they came off as combative when that wasn't my intent.
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Bricked is synonymous with broken, soft bricked is used when the hardware is broken but fixable.
It's been used for years in the rooting community, where these things were risks you usually ran into.
The reddit poster said he could not turn on his PS4 after the crash, ergo bricked.
Later he found out he could fix it via Safe boot and rebuild database, so it was a luckily just a soft brick, but a brick regardless.
I think people are confusing data corruption with a hardware corruption. There is a real risk of it corrupting the data to the point the PS4 would need to be reinitialized.
BioWare is in a tough spot (of their own making): If they say don't run the game, massive amounts of refund requests would happen. If they ignore it, they now have a growing myth that the game is bricking PS4s. This is not a new issue. People were complaining about it weeks ago, and BioWare just let it snowball.
Not quite sure why this is turning into some kind of heated debate, but if the OS is corrupted and the PS4 will not longer boot and cannot be recovered for the owner of said PS4 the device is now a brick or paperweight i.e it is useless to them
The PS4 has a recovery partition. If the OS was beyond repair a reinitialization would reinstall the OS.
I have never seen my PS4 crash - not once, and it is a launch unit. Consoles simply aren't supposed to crash, which is one of the reasons to own them instead of a PC. Any game that caused a system of mine to crash, especially one so rampant with bugs and such - not worth the effort
Exactly, it is weaker hardware but for the most part uniform and much easier for a developer to optimize vs the multitude of hardware possibilities on a PC. Latest attempt for a refund was a bust, guess I just shelve this in hopes a good game eventually is born from it like vanilla destiny to taken king lol.
I'm not touching the game until this is fixed and confirmed by other users. My PS4 has already been through HDD failure twice last year due to electrical fault in our house and frequent shutdowns. Yeah its not a brick, but its fucking pain in the ass to go through the initialization process, download and install the big firmware file, then install all your games and get all your saves back (thank God for cloud saves). Not gonna ruin my new HDD again.
I understood what you were getting at, as when i kept seeing headlines say 'Anthem Bricks PS4's' and the only source was one person on reddit, i was a bit skeptical.
But as others have explained, it seems much more common, and i think the more worrying thing is that because of the shutdowns being akin to pulling the plug from a console, the risk of damaging your console is high.
Im used to some console games crashing, but man having to rebuild parts of your PS4's software?
So Bizarre.
It probably also helps that when it does crash you dont have to sit through ten minutes of waiting before your back to shooting a gun.
The definition of bricked can and does vary depending on the context. For example, I consider a network device "bricked" when it fails to boot from the primary and backup firmware partitions or is otherwise unable to boot. In some cases it is possible to restore the device via serial connection and setting something up like a TFTP server to manually reflash the firmware, but it doesn't need to be impossible to fix for me to consider something bricked.
For the average consumer with little or no technical know-how, it is unreasonable to expect them to understand the difference between "I can potentially fix this by using a method to enter safe mode and taking specific steps to correct an operating system error" and "this console is dead". Kotaku may not be technically correct but they aren't wrong to highlight the very serious problems that are occurring.
The real issue in my mind is that the bugs in Anthem are capable of causing a kernel panic and, subsequently, OS database corruption. That's on EA for the subpar QA and also on Sony for designing an OS that isn't resilient enough to automatically recover from such a state.
a brick means it isn't salvageable. it is truly worthless
but now we're talking "soft bricks" and lmao I don't even know. but a legit-ass brick is no more useful than an actual brick.
Basically pray that it doesn't happen but most people have accepted it that's why there's no news or coverage on that.
It's also not something Sony can fix. They would need to redo their entire OS and how it runs just to get around this issue.
But it's probably a 30% chance it'll brick the PS4 and would require a wipe.
Bricked systems tend to be that damaged, that you may as well use a brick instead or just throw it away. It's a term that has been used for ages to discribe something utterly dead.
Why would rebuilding the database cause such high corruption chance in the first place though? Whats causing the issue and why cant Sony fix it? I'm far from an expert on this to be honest, but i cant really see why that would happend (also hence my questions). All i really know is that the PS4 OS is based on FreeBSD, a fairly known and used OS that has existed for over 25 years.
I really doubt that the chances for a corrupt harddrive from doing a database rebuilding is that high. I think its difficult to put a number on it, but my guess would be probably be around 0.03% or so. Numbers aside, theres likely a very small chance of it to happen at least. Rebuilding the database is also a tip that Sony themself gives in terms of PS4 troubleshooting. If the chance for a corrupted harddrive was close to 1 in 3 chance, i can pretty much guarantee that there would be a lot more cases about it, and therefor also a lot more talk about it. People in general wouldnt accept to lose everything on their PS4, including all their savegames, from a tip that Sony themself gives :)
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LMAO at the people crying over "bricking!" like shutting down your fucking console and having to repair from safe mode was normal behaviour you shouldn't be worried about. No dummy, that isn't what Apex is doing either (that's just a regular application crash to main menu). I mean, if you want to be anal about how broken this game is all of a sudden to make it look like a positive.
It doesnt mean that that the game crashing and causing this is a positive thing in itself, but there is a huge difference between destroying the console beyond repair and having to rebuilding a database. When i read talks about bricking and that the system wouldnt turn itself on earlier, i thought it was about that the PS4 wouldnt respond at all, basically like not getting power to the system.
A handful of anonymous comments do not justify publishing an article falsely stating the game bricked ps4s in its title. All they did was create a fervor of people lashing out, which could have been avoided with a little bit of due diligence (as evidenced by how quick the truth came out).
So Kotaku really just saw a single post about it possibly bricking the PS4 and just ran with it without vetting the information. And now, as it turns out, it was false and they just said "Hey, we changed the headline to better reflect the reality" when they didn't even try hard enough to reflect said reality in the first place.
Figures.
Figures.
Clearly, it's the reporting that is the irresponsible thing here, unpredictable hard power down crashes is totally normal and has no risk of harming your system. Sony even says it's okay to just pull the plug whenever you want.
/sarcasm
Ya'll ever hear about deflecting?
/sarcasm
Ya'll ever hear about deflecting?
I'm aware there is a difference. The people having their consoles shut down and being unable to turn them back on right away or unaware of the safe boot option had reason to believe it was at least a soft brick. The article was updated to reflect this.
If we can be discerning enough about that, then we also understand that this is not the same case as say Apex crashing, but people are arguing that because consoles didn't actually brick then it's just like any other ol' crash when it is obviously not.
We call that deflecting and being disingenuous. Some people are pretending this is some massive problem with reporting and not, you know, still a massive problem with the game that is not comparable to a regular crash back to OS. Shutting down your console is not something normal, and get unlucky enough it might actually result in a brick.