Anthem: Bioware's next Mass Effect-like IP

[apelsinjuice]

Beta February 1th for pre-orders or EA access, will probably just be a short demo but at least something. Not sure if I want to go with this or division 2 as my next looter shooter grind game

[Lahis]

Beta February 1th for pre-orders or EA access, will probably just be a short demo but at least something. Not sure if I want to go with this or division 2 as my next looter shooter grind game

Why won't they call that what it is: a demo. No actual testing can happen that close to launch.

[CrossNgen]

Why won't they call that what it is: a demo. No actual testing can happen that close to launch.

Because it is called a demo, not a beta.

[kaelleria]

Why won't they call that what it is: a demo. No actual testing can happen that close to launch.

Because they are calling it a demo...
You start at level 10 and can go up to 15. You'll have access to 1 strong hold, some missions and free play.

[apelsinjuice]

Ooh spicy, looks like division 2 will have their demo on February 1th as well, some competition for the looter shooters

[xxcloud417xx]

Beta February 1th for pre-orders or EA access, will probably just be a short demo but at least something. Not sure if I want to go with this or division 2 as my next looter shooter grind game

Yeah same, looking to maybe jump ship from Destiny 2. I'm still not completely sold on Division 2 though. I played The Division on launch and it was good until endgame. Not particularly sold on Ubisoft being able to handle their shit for a MMO-ish game.

The fact that the guys behind SWTOR are handling some of the multiplayer elements does actually make me hopeful for Anthem. Say what you will about that game, I thought the content itself was fun. They had an actual endgame to it, hell they even did what WoW couldn't accomplish and make Battlegrounds fun. I can't stand PvPing in WoW, but Huttball all day, man.

I have to say that them doing a pre-release Demo is a great idea too. I'm on the fence about Anthem and that demo is going to be what determines it for me. Was in the closed alpha for it as well and without breaking NDA; there's a few things I'm waiting to see in the Demo before I make the decision too. If I see what I want, then I'm sold.

[I Push Buttons]

Yeah same, looking to maybe jump ship from Destiny 2. I'm still not completely sold on Division 2 though. I played The Division on launch and it was good until endgame. Not particularly sold on Ubisoft being able to handle their shit for a MMO-ish game.

The fact that the guys behind SWTOR are handling some of the multiplayer elements does actually make me hopeful for Anthem. Say what you will about that game, I thought the content itself was fun. They had an actual endgame to it, hell they even did what WoW couldn't accomplish and make Battlegrounds fun. I can't stand PvPing in WoW, but Huttball all day, man.

I have to say that them doing a pre-release Demo is a great idea too. I'm on the fence about Anthem and that demo is going to be what determines it for me. Was in the closed alpha for it as well and without breaking NDA; there's a few things I'm waiting to see in the Demo before I make the decision too. If I see what I want, then I'm sold.

Have you played it since then?

By most accounts The Division endgame is pretty decent now.

[jstnw89]

Dafuq.. Andromeda was actually a terrible game and IDGAF about animations or w/e.. The story was shit along with the side characters, which are the only things I care about during a Bioware game (not the combat which was great)

[EyelessCrow]

Dafuq.. Andromeda was actually a terrible game and IDGAF about animations or w/e.. The story was shit along with the side characters, which are the only things I care about during a Bioware game (not the combat which was great)

Lol you're way too emotional, it wasn't great but it wasn't terrible or shit. Go have yourself a nice cry and come back.

[Onikaroshi]

I feel bad for people who preorder this game, really wish I could say more

[apelsinjuice]

I hope for nice fun gameplay with some form of customisation and different gearing/skill choices and nice end game grinding

[jstnw89]

Lol you're way too emotional, it wasn't great but it wasn't terrible or shit. Go have yourself a nice cry and come back.

It was definitely terrible though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Onikaroshi]

Fixed it for you, although I don't really feel bad for them.

True, specially from bioware/EA

[kaelleria]

I hope for nice fun gameplay with some form of customisation and different gearing/skill choices and nice end game grinding

TLDR - Tons of customization both visually and gameplay wise. End game is going to end up being Strongholds, Contracts(repeatable missions) and Freeplay at different difficulty levels.




Going to try to explain this in a few different parts -

Javelin Types
These are basically classes. Currently there are 4 different Javelins we'll be able to play at launch. You get Ranger at level 1 and unlock the other javelins as you progress throughout the story.

Ranger
All-arounder.

Storm
The mage/support javelin. They can fly and hover for extended periods of time. Their ult drops giant elemental meteors on stuff.

Collosus
Tank type. Has a taunt and uses the heaviest weapons.

Interceptor
Rogue type. Most agile of the javelins. You can buff up their melee like crazy. The interceptor's ult basically gives you a ton of defensive stats and buffs your melee. You can chain combos with the interceptor ult up.

Each of these has a ton of different abilities that I'm not going to list out. You can read about them here.
https://vulkk.com/2018/09/02/all-ant...ies-and-roles/

Big thing to note, you can swap abilities out based on different gear and you have access too all 4 javelins.

Cosmetics
Cosmetics are completely separate from power. You will only be able to buy cosmetics as they've stated they don't want any power coming from real money.

Build customization -

Gameplay customization is based on your gearslots as you'll be able to build load outs that completely change how you play.


Gear Rarity
Gear has different rarity levels, Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, Masterwork, Legendary

Common has 0 inscriptions (random rolls), Uncommon 1, Rare 2.
Masterworks and Legendary all have unique main affixes and 4 inscriptions.

Inscriptions
Inscriptions can be things like ultimate cdr, ability damage buffs, increased flight or hover time, increased ammo for a certain slot, etc... Apparently there are 100+ different inscriptions.

Legendaries and Masterworks
Legendary/Masterwork unique affixes are things like "Defeating an enemy with your homing missile increases the base damage of your grenades by 50% for 3 seconds" or "Hovering increases the recharge rate of all you abilities by 50%" or "Killing multiple enemies with your grenades increases your hover time".

All of those particular unique affixes are on different pieces of gear so its easy to see how you could put together a build based around hovering for extended periods of time and clearing lots of different enemies with grenades.

Your abilities/weapons can also apply status effects (Fire, frozen, lightning, etc..) and those can be used to combo with yourself or others. For example if an Interceptor kills a frozen enemy, they gain an aura that will apply the frozen status effect.

At launch there should be 70+ different Masterwork/Legendary weapons.

There are between 10 and 11 different gear slots depending on what javelin you're playing.

You can also do things like gear out a specific javelin to fulfill a different role completely. An example the devs gave was being able to do a Grandmaster 3 stronghold with nothing but Rangers. It would be difficult, but you could gear yourself use and buff the Bulwark Point ability to give your group more protection while others take Muster point to increase the group's damage.

Since everyone has access to all Javelins, there's 0 point in creating another character as you can just build out the your gear set.

End game and the grind
There are a few different types of gameplay at endgame that we know of so far, Freeplay, Strongholds, Contracts and eventually "Raids".

There are a ton of difficulties - Lancer -> Free Lancer -> Master -> Grandmaster 1,2,3. Grandmaster 1 unlocks at 30. G2 and G3 unlock at different gear levels. (Not entirely sure if I've forgotten a difficulty level)

Gear can drop from anywhere. There are no set loot tables. In harder content, better gear has a chance to drop. This will scale to your gear level to a point. Once you've unlocked Grandmaster you always have a chance at getting max level Masterworks and Legendaries.

Freeplay
Completely open world. Considered the easiest content. There are various world events in Freeplay and sometimes bosses.

Strongholds
Strongholds are basically dungeons and they have the best chance at dropping Masterwork/Legendaries.
There are a few streams they've done to show you gameplay.

Raids
There will also eventually be "raids". There's not a whole lot known about them at this point. They will probably be called shaper storms. It isn't immediately clear if these will be still be for 4 players or more.

Contracts
These are repeatable missions that award something. It can be in-game currency, real money currency, gear, crafting materials or blueprints
If you end up truly getting screwed by RNG you'll be able to do legendary contracts to get a specific piece or blueprint. These seem to be repeatable. These can take place in Freeplay or Strongholds.

Factions and Alliances
There are also different factions and alliances. Your guild is your alliance. The other factions seem to be close to what Destiny's factions are. Killing different things on a mission and getting different medals seems to award reputation for various factions and your alliance.

There's probably things I'm forgetting as well, but the point is it's probably already deeper than most other looters that came out in the last 4-5 years.

Wall of text crits you for 9999999

[EyelessCrow]

It was definitely terrible though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Lol no it wasn't. Maybe by past Bioware standards it wasn't all that great, still wouldn't call it terrible. I think what happened to it WAS terrible.

[xxcloud417xx]

Have you played it since then?

By most accounts The Division endgame is pretty decent now.

I keep hearing that, I got into it again during the first expac since I grabbed the season pass. Didn't particularly find anything that great about it and never touched it again really. Season pass was a total waste, played only 1 of the 3 DLCs.

[apelsinjuice]

game info..

Sounds pretty good, looked at a few new gameplay videos with strongholds, reminds me a bit of warframe with pretty fast-paced gameplay. Will definitely try the demo.

[I Push Buttons]

I keep hearing that, I got into it again during the first expac since I grabbed the season pass. Didn't particularly find anything that great about it and never touched it again really. Season pass was a total waste, played only 1 of the 3 DLCs.

Indeed, I too was disappointed in the DLC since I only really played the Underground.

As to the rest of the game though, they reworked the way gear/scaling/etc., works at the end of 2017 in patch 1.8 (which was like a year and a half after that first expansion dropped). Its entirely different to how it was early on and there is actual progression, its also much easier to play solo since everything but incursions scales to group size now.

They added something called world tiers, which increase the difficulty of enemies (for all content in the game) as they go up. So right when you get to level cap you are on tier one, you will see mostly normal level 30 enemies, but then up at tier five (the highest) all enemies will be level 34 and you will often find elites. The gear score of gear drops goes up with world tier as well, at five gear around ~260-280 drops. You can then upgrade gear for Division Tech up to a cap of like 286 for normal gear and 292 for classified gear. And speaking of classified gear, I don't remember if they existed when the Underground came out, but they gave all the gear sets extra five and six set bonuses, making them extremely strong.

There is also way more to do now and the loot has been normalized across all activities, so you don't have to do one thing or the other to get specific gear. Almost all of the missions have challenging difficulty now (unlike launch where only like 3 or 4 did), seven missions have legendary difficulty (which is very hard, you need min/maxed tier five gear to do them), they added a thing called Resistance which is basically a horde mode with missions on it and three different versions of it to choose from, as well as two new zones where resistance is located with harder enemies and rotating missions to do, the Underground was polished and re-balanced so it actually scales properly for solo play (you can solo on the hardest difficulty all directives active now), etc. Oh and then these events occur I think twice a month now until The Division 2 comes out called Global Events where positive and negative modifiers are added to missions that make them sometimes easier/sometimes harder, and also award currency for the event that you can spend on caches that have a very high chance (or even guaranteed if you buy the expensive caches) of giving you exotics and classified gear.

But yeah its entirely different now than the first few months after launch...

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On topic: The Division is sort of tangentially related to Anthem since they are both looter-shooters and Anthem is about to go toe-to-toe with The Division 2. So my post isn't exactly off topic mods.
:^)

[Lahis]

Lol no it wasn't. Maybe by past Bioware standards it wasn't all that great, still wouldn't call it terrible. I think what happened to it WAS terrible.

Only the combat was good. Everything else is pretty bad.

Terrible game for once great studio.

[Karrotlord]

Only the combat was good. Everything else is pretty bad.

Terrible game for once great studio.

Andromeda wasn't made by Bioware Edmonton. It was made by Bioware Montreal, a side studio that had only done DLC before starting Andromeda and is now closed.