Anthem: Bioware's next Mass Effect-like IP

[SirCowdog]

That said, I found the Heavy Pistols, Scout Rifle and Sniper Rifle to feel a LOT better than the Assault Rifle, meaning the damage they did was very noticeable. Specifically, on the Swarm Tyrant boss for the Stronghold mission when hitting the critical spots, Sniper shots were doing 2k+ damage, Scout rifle was doing ~500. This amount of damage was quite noticeable. I never touched a shotgun because the only ones I got didn't do as much damage as my Scout Rifle and I mained a Storm javelin so wasn't really wanting to get into the thick of the fighting to make effective use of one.

What are people's opinion of the Interceptor and Colossus?

I also thought the assault rifles were kind of meh. But the Marksman's Rifle I found that did a 4-round burst was absolutely mauling enemies.

I only unlocked and played the Colossus, but found it to me kind of lackluster as well. Granted, I only had common weapons to use for it, since I didn't have time to farm any green or blue weapons for it. The grenade launcher was.....odd. The grenades didn't explode on contact, but had to be manually triggered, which made it clumsy to use well. The autocanon sounded fun, but didn't really do much damage.

The shield instead of a dodge was hit or miss. Because enemies often spawn behind or above you, being able to block only a single direction is....not useful. The only thing I really found the shield good for was standing in front of turrets or snipers, which are some of the easiest to avoid enemies anyway.

Overall, maybe the colossus just needs better equipment to be good.

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And I'm not denying that, but then you can't say that a game has 50 hours of play time when 10-20 of it is spent on walking.

Actually, yes you can. The point you seem to be missing is that in an OPEN WORLD game, the walking is PART OF THE GAME'S APPEAL.

Being in the atmosphere and immersing yourself in that openness is part of the gameplay of an open world game. :/ Some games do it better than others, of course. Something like WoW's open world is a joke, and absolutely just a massive waste of time. Something like the Witcher 3 does it much better, with every little thing in the world being relevant to the main story in one way or another.

[Katchii]

Because they totally don't have financial incentive to make the cash shop stuff look better than the non-shop stuff. Or to goad people into buying by making in-game currency earning as long and tedious as possible. There is just no way it won't be abused, especially by a company as unscrupulous as EA. The only answer is to not have MTX at all, because if you give them an inch they will take the whole mile and then some.

I fully expect that to be the case here given who we are dealing with.

After playing the demo though, there is already such a huge amount of customization available for free, and I spent so little time actually looking at my Javelin for it to matter that much I fail to see why this would be such a big problem.

I completely understand why people find customization to be important, but why is selling cosmetic stuff to people who do care about that stuff such a bad thing? I'll have to wait and see how egregiously overpriced the things are before commenting on that specifically, but overall I honestly just don't understand why selling nothing but cosmetics is BAD. I understand why people wouldn't like it or feel negatively about it, I'm not questioning whether people will LIKE it, I don't understand why doing it is BAD for the game/ bad for the business?

[kaelleria]

Honestly the devastator just kind of blew away everything in the demo. Crits were bugged to do 5x damage so they were doing upwards of 24k/shot in certain scenarios. This is obviously going to get fixed, but I expect a lot of the guns are going to be rebalanced a bit.

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New blog post is up -
http://blog.bioware.com/2019/02/04/onward-to-launch/

They had 40M hours played over 2 weekends. 31M last weekend. That's... quite a bit.

[Gorsameth]

Honestly the devastator just kind of blew away everything in the demo. Crits were bugged to do 5x damage so they were doing upwards of 24k/shot in certain scenarios. This is obviously going to get fixed, but I expect a lot of the guns are going to be rebalanced a bit.

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New blog post is up -
http://blog.bioware.com/2019/02/04/onward-to-launch/

They had 40M hours played over 2 weekends. 31M last weekend. That's... quite a bit.

40million hours? Considering the amount of content i'd put the average play time at 5-6 hours?
That's a lot of players.

[Edge-]

40million hours? Considering the amount of content i'd put the average play time at 5-6 hours?
That's a lot of players.

The fact that they didn't give player numbers makes me think it's a less impressive number than the hours played implies, generally publishers love to talk about whatever their big sexy numbers are. Still a respectable numbers, but the exclusion of player counts has me wondering if the average session was very long (8+ hours per person) but that the player numbers aren't boast-worthy.

[Krille]

The fact that they didn't give player numbers makes me think it's a less impressive number than the hours played implies, generally publishers love to talk about whatever their big sexy numbers are. Still a respectable numbers, but the exclusion of player counts has me wondering if the average session was very long (8+ hours per person) but that the player numbers aren't boast-worthy.

Seriously doubt the average was 8 hours per player. I loved the demo and played a bunch but probably didnt end up at more than 10 hours in total. I have seen many people complain and say they didnt even get past the ranger.

Would explain the constant disconnecting i had.

[kaelleria]

The fact that they didn't give player numbers makes me think it's a less impressive number than the hours played implies, generally publishers love to talk about whatever their big sexy numbers are. Still a respectable numbers, but the exclusion of player counts has me wondering if the average session was very long (8+ hours per person) but that the player numbers aren't boast-worthy.

What constitutes as impressive though? If the average was 20 hours you'd have 2m players. I don't think it's quite that high so they probably still had a few million people check out the game over the last two weekends.

[Gorsameth]

The fact that they didn't give player numbers makes me think it's a less impressive number than the hours played implies, generally publishers love to talk about whatever their big sexy numbers are. Still a respectable numbers, but the exclusion of player counts has me wondering if the average session was very long (8+ hours per person) but that the player numbers aren't boast-worthy.

Origin says I played 5 hours and I did the missions, dungeon and the 4? caves in freeplay.
I'm sure there will be long sessions but it all evens out by the people that don't even get past the 3 story missions.

[Baconeggcheese]

Well, I'm an idiot. Until earlier this evening I thought the demo was console only, then I found out it wasn't. I had the demo ready to go a few hours ago then decided to watch Netflix and eat before trying it, now the demo's unavailable.

oof,

Well if nothing you could buy the 1 month of the base origin sub iono if its still 1$ and you get the 10 hour trial to use starting on the 15th.

I actually enjoyed my time with it, my son loved it. Might but this day one...but I really really hate EA.

Only real EA thing that stands out for the game thus far seems to be the release date. The demo being in the state its in kind of speaks that to me, where we're going to have to accept that there's gonna be the typical issues from the game being forced out before its ready. Which honestly I had so much fun playing the demo that I'm willing to deal with it.

The fact that the devs are just all over reddit / twitter / discord directly communicating with the player base literally all day every day makes me super optimistic for the game on top of it just being fun to play.

"Cosmetics don't matter!"

Meanwhile Transmog is huge in WoW and Warframe endgame is literally nicknamed Fashionframe.

Yes, cosmetics matter. People want to look cool, even in video games. Which makes skins easily exploitable money milking machine.

Yeah I never understand the people who say that. Clearly everyone knows that it matters, otherwise they couldn't get the money they do for it.

In my opinion the biggest issue for this game will be lack of end game activity variance. After single player campaign is done, what is there left? 3 strongholds, Contracts and Freeplay? That’s not even nearly enough.

Well looking at destiny 2, I couldn't even tell you how many dungeons there were because they were completely irrelevant and we had almost no reason to do them so we didn't. You spent most of your time just doing the free roam style content doing events n things, and then it had 1 raid which took like 90 minutes with competent people. And frankly I had a good time with the game and felt like I got my moneys worth, and I don't think the pve in it is anywhere near as fun as what I experienced with anthem.

Warframe is literally just the same game from start till you get tired of 1 shotting mobs that do nothing at all, still a popular game that people who aren't me enjoy.

Supposedly the time frame for the first major content patch is supposed to line up with when they expect (average) people to be reaching the end of the launch content. So iono we'll see, games fun enough that repeating the same small handful of stuff while getting consistent upgrades will keep people occupied for at least a while. And it looks like the gear grind is going to be more substantial, so that could last a while.

And if not, its not like they're asking me for a monthly sub or anything. I don't need a game to give me infinite content and to consume all of my free time indefinitely for it to be worth 60 smacks. Its ok for a game to entertain me for however many hours and then for me to move onto the next thing.

[Valkari]

I almost feel like its the opposite of destiny gameplay wise, where destiny has phenomenal gunplay and this incredibly strong focus on guns with the classes taking a backseat and generally feeling more or less the same, anthem's classes feel and play tremendously different and have a really strong focus on abilities and mechanics with the guns taking a backseat.

This is true, especially felt that when I tried the storm. Was basically just using abilities for everything and had the gun if I wanted to switch it up, lol. Now if I could just have the game stop crashing constantly... Hopefully the full release will be better that way.

[Edge-]

Now if I could just have the game stop crashing constantly... Hopefully the full release will be better that way.

Crash, or freeze computer? Because I tried to get into the free play to check out the storms near the end but the damn game froze my computer and forced me to do hard restarts. Very frustrating, because I really wanted to check it out but didn't want to risk more freezing : /

[Baconeggcheese]

This is true, especially felt that when I tried the storm. Was basically just using abilities for everything and had the gun if I wanted to switch it up, lol. Now if I could just have the game stop crashing constantly... Hopefully the full release will be better that way.

Supposedly all kinds of stuff was already addressed in the release candidate, along with day 1 patching fixes. We'll see though, gotta remember this build was 6 weeks old when they snapshot it and you're looking at 11 weeks worth of work from the time this build was frozen to launch.

Lord knows there'll be new issues popping up though so, we'll see.

[kaelleria]

One of the issues that was causing system instability with the demo was the loading screens not being capped fps wise...
This basically pegged CPU and GPU temps during loading screens.

Vsync took care of this and it has been fixed for the live release.

[Edge-]

One of the issues that was causing system instability with the demo was the loading screens not being capped fps wise...
This basically pegged CPU and GPU temps during loading screens.

Vsync took care of this and it has been fixed for the live release.

I was getting that super high framerate even with vsync enabled, IIRC. Was wondering about that, seemed odd to me that they wouldn't automatically cap framerate during loading screens, especially given how long they are on a HDD -_-

[Baconeggcheese]

especially given how long they are on a HDD -_-

That's one thing that really got me, these were pretty long load screens on an SSD. I can only imagine how long they were on an HDD, hopefully they are able to do something to help with that.

[kaelleria]

I was getting that super high framerate even with vsync enabled, IIRC. Was wondering about that, seemed odd to me that they wouldn't automatically cap framerate during loading screens, especially given how long they are on a HDD -_-

It'll be capped at 240 fps for release.

[Edge-]

It'll be capped at 240 fps for release.

...but why? Why does it need to go that high? IIRC most console ports I've played recently with 30fps caps on console cap their loading screens similarly (as with their cutscenes too, sadly), there's no need at all for high framerates during loading.

[kaelleria]

...but why? Why does it need to go that high? IIRC most console ports I've played recently with 30fps caps on console cap their loading screens similarly (as with their cutscenes too, sadly), there's no need at all for high framerates during loading.

They literally just forgot to do it apparently... Yeah I know.

The PC version had 0 caps on anything.

[Edge-]

They literally just forgot to do it apparently... Yeah I know.

The PC version had 0 caps on anything.

I was meaning why cap it so high, it seems arbitrary as hell.

[kaelleria]

I was meaning why cap it so high, it seems arbitrary as hell.

:shrug: Maybe trying to support the people with 144hz monitors so they picked something totally arbitrary that's higher.