Anthem: Bioware's next Mass Effect-like IP

[Leonaras]

Oh shut it. ME2 and ME3 are on a whole different level from Anthem. These games frikkin' redefined the genre, they were the pinnacle of Bioware storytelling and world building. Anthem is a piece of garbage with pretty graphics in comparison.

Don't even try to put Anthem story and non-choices in Anthem to absolutely insane amount of choices and paths in ME series.

As for your cover remark, this depended on your skill and profession choice. Vanguard could zip around completely Interceptor style and live to tell about it, heck Spark Dash is literally a shitty version of Biotic Charge and you could spec it to zip all over the place and recharge your shields plenty enough to eliminate 80% of cover.

The combat in Mass effect 2 was boring enough to stop me playing it, the combat in anthem is interesting enough to keep me playing it.

Biowares stories peaked at Dragon age origins, mass effect (in my opinion) was never better than that.

[Gaidax]

The combat in Mass effect 2 was boring enough to stop me playing it, the combat in anthem is interesting enough to keep me playing it.

Mass Effect 2 has literally started the whole shield/armor/red bars, priming/detonating, critical weakpoints and different element/attack types working better/worse on different types of defenses. Some of these were already in ME1, but ME2 is where it really kicked in and perfected in ME3 and Andromeda.

It’s kind of silly for you to say that when Anthem literally reused ME combat almost 1-to-1. Even claim about cover is debatable, because shiet pal - you are not running around in the middle of all shit in proper difficulties in Anthem.

In this context saying things as if Anthem combat is cardinally different from ME is almost hilarious, because the shit is basically ME combat a bit tweaked. Even bloody flight is not new, you had it in Andromeda, just in more limited fashion.

Heck, Anthem is more simplistic combat-wise really, for example I have yet to see any sort of armor penetration on any weapons that allowed to shoot through thin obstacles or things like physical shields (like these scar enforces have) or heck hit several guys in a line. You had it in ME, heck - you could even mod weapons to add such properties to them if you so desired, can you mod weapons in Anthem? No? Too bad.

[yinyatto]

SWTOR at release barely had any endgame (like Anthem).

SWTOR at release had both Server and Client crash's a lot (like Anthem).

SWTOR at release had a ton of bugs (like Anthem).

Also Anthem hasn't bricked anything, It has only had crash's/bugs.

say that to the many people that have bricked machines right now

[kaelleria]

say that to the many people that have bricked machines right now

This is false.

[Jtbrig7390]

say that to the many people that have bricked machines right now

You mean the ZERO people who's Machines (it was PS4's being reported not PC's) that got bricked and it turned out it was just crashing the system.

There is a difference in bricking and crashing a system.

[stellvia]

You seem to praise Division / Division 2 where the whole concept is staying in cover 90% of the time, what the fck would flight bring to this game ?

Massive's vision for the game has evolved a bit since TD1 release: While cover is still an important mechanic in the game, you aren't as beholden to it as you used to be. There are a lot of times I'm just running and gunning or generally not using the cover while fighting enemies and doing just fine. But I believe he didn't mean the cover system so much as everything else but the cover. (And it would probably be cool to have a bunch of battles clinging to the side of a building or jumping from building to building etc.)

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You mean the ZERO people who's Machines (it was PS4's being reported not PC's) that got bricked and it turned out it was just crashing the system.
There is a difference in bricking and crashing a system.

I'd say that crashing so hard it required them to reformat the system is pretty close to that. Also it was osntensibly "bricked" until he figured out how to reboot the PS4 into safemode which isn't something Sony normally expects customers to have to do.

[Vineri]

All this talk of SWTOR..

I wish EA just put all those millions of $$ back into SWTOR, to take it off life support -- 6 years ago (Ah'hem .. the time when Anthem was budgeted for development), rather than mutilating SW dogma with it's ridiculous cash-shop, to the point where SWTOR isn't even very much of a Star Wars game any more. Oh EA. Oh Disney. RIP Star Wars, RIP George Lucas, RIP hope for decent Star Wars movies. What the hell happened?

Was it bean counters to maximize profit? Loss of future vision? Something bad happened IMO. A shame.

We just can't have nice things anymore...

It's just a glimpse into the future of Anthem, I suppose - SW was a well loved franchise though..

[Temp name]

Probably to try to cut down the amount of hackers that plagued division 1 for a lot of its life time but in this case the fix may be worse than the problem.

Denuvo doesn't stop hackers, it stops pirates

[stellvia]

Probably to try to cut down the amount of hackers that plagued division 1 for a lot of its life time but in this case the fix may be worse than the problem.

They were talking about Anthem, not Division. When you launch TD2 the splash screen shows they do use something called "Easy Anticheat" though.

[Onikaroshi]

They were talking about Anthem, not Division. When you launch TD2 the splash screen shows they do use something called "Easy Anticheat" though.

EAC is a pretty nasty anticheat for hackers to deal with, usually means it's kept down. There won't be many, if any, public hacks at least.

[WoWGoneBad]

Soo out of boredom I went into GM3 for some Contracts and Strongholds. Well that did not go so well lol. The first parts of the GM3 contracts I was the only player for the first 2 parts and I think the others joined in via Quickplay. The Stronghold was Scar Nest and while I did do a decent job holding my own in the first part, yea too much HP for me ot get it solo lol.

Sooo I guess I will just need to stick with GM2 sadly. I liked that GM3 could kill you in 4-7 shots if you did not pay attention.

[Edge-]

Man, I don't get all the "Frostbite is bad" complaints.

Frostbite seems to work just fine. Sure, it was designed initially for FPS titles but it's proven highly versatile.

EA Tiburon and Bucharest have figured out how to get it working with Madden/FIFA.
Ghost Games/Critereon managed to figure out how to get it working for Need for Speed.
Hell, PopCap even managed to get it working for a third person shooter like PvZ: Garden Warfare.

I really don't get why it seems to be only BW that continues to have ongoing issues working with the engine. I'm strongly inclined to believe that BW simply doesn't prioritize engineers or invest in a strong engineering team and that's the cause of their problems. I've seen nothing to indicate the engine can't work well with this style of game or that the engine has hard-limitations in terms of tech/features they can get working with it.

Seeing a lot of criticism about Frostbite, but none of it points to the engine proper being a significant problem. It all points to BW's not being able to work with the engine well.

And EA doesn't even force developers to use it - https://www.vg247.com/2018/04/09/bio...stbite-engine/

BW chose to use it for DA:I. Then again for ME:A. Then a third time for Anthem. If they couldn't get it working how they wanted the first two times (and yes, I know development overlapped with these games), why keep banging your head against a wall and giving yourself a concussion?

[yasiru]

Heck, Anthem is more simplistic combat-wise really, for example I have yet to see any sort of armor penetration on any weapons that allowed to shoot through thin obstacles or things like physical shields (like these scar enforces have) or heck hit several guys in a line. You had it in ME, heck - you could even mod weapons to add such properties to them if you so desired, can you mod weapons in Anthem? No? Too bad.

Well, there is the Ranger pulse blast that goes through armor/shields. I am not very familiar with ME so excuse my ignorance but did it have a bunch of different weapons that did different things, like cause explosions, freeze targets, etc? At least we do have things like that in Anthem. That is not a cut back at you, I am actually curious to know.

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I'd say that crashing so hard it required them to reformat the system is pretty close to that. Also it was osntensibly "bricked" until he figured out how to reboot the PS4 into safemode which isn't something Sony normally expects customers to have to do.

You're comparing appearance with facts here. Just because my daughter doesn't know how to start my car doesn't mean it is actually broken.

[Faldric]

Man, I don't get all the "Frostbite is bad" complaints.

Frostbite seems to work just fine. Sure, it was designed initially for FPS titles but it's proven highly versatile.

The common complaint is that frostbite is terrible for open world games. Which makes sense as it was designed for shooters where you walk down narrow corridors. It seems to have problems with big open areas, usually interrupting them with loading screens. I read an interview with an ex-lead developer at Visceral where she describes how hard it was to add an inventory and other RPG systems to the Frostbite engine. The games you listed all played to the engines strengths (despite maybe NfS) but all open world games on frostbite (DAI, MEA, Anthem) had their fair share of problems.

Edit: The interview https://www.kotaku.com.au/2019/02/am...stbite-engine/

[Onikaroshi]

The common complaint is that frostbite is terrible for open world games. Which makes sense as it was designed for shooters where you walk down narrow corridors. It seems to have problems with big open areas, usually interrupting them with loading screens. I read an interview with an ex-lead developer at Visceral where she describes how hard it was to add an inventory and other RPG systems to the Frostbite engine. The games you listed all played to the engines strengths (despite maybe NfS) but all open world games on frostbite (DAI, MEA, Anthem) had their fair share of problems.

Edit: The interview https://www.kotaku.com.au/2019/02/am...stbite-engine/

Man, that engine just seems to be too rigid.... there's so many better engines then Frostbite for open world, but of course it would cost EA more so... here use this engine that just doesn't work for open world/rpg games.

[Edge-]

The common complaint is that frostbite is terrible for open world games. Which makes sense as it was designed for shooters where you walk down narrow corridors. It seems to have problems with big open areas, usually interrupting them with loading screens. I read an interview with an ex-lead developer at Visceral where she describes how hard it was to add an inventory and other RPG systems to the Frostbite engine. The games you listed all played to the engines strengths (despite maybe NfS) but all open world games on frostbite (DAI, MEA, Anthem) had their fair share of problems.

Edit: The interview https://www.kotaku.com.au/2019/02/am...stbite-engine/

Again though, I have issues with that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_for_Speed_Payback

This was designed as an open world game and they managed to get it working without extensive loading screens.

I remember the Hennig comments on the engine but again, I'm still confused about it because we see so many other studios capable of getting the engine to work how they want or why BW simply didn't just move to another engine. If the technical challenges were as severe as they said, they should have realized this back with DA:I and transitioned to other engines for ME:A and Anthem, especially if Visceral was encountering similar issues.

Again, it speaks to the questionable decision-making process at BW nowadays.

[kaelleria]

I mean I don't disagree with you...

If flying was added truly late (2017 or thereabouts), that probably required a significant amount of redesigning and reengineering.

I know they made the choice to make the game look as good as possible, especially in Fort Tarsis, probably as a response to Andromeda.

If the game is positioned to be a cross gen title, they may have made some bad decisions with that in mind.

[Faldric]

Again, it speaks to the questionable decision-making process at BW nowadays.

That one is for sure. But its always hard to judge from the outside how big the internal pressure to comply with certain company rulings is. Also technology decisions have many deciding factors. I am a software engineer myself and I often chose to reuse a library I hated simply because I know: Yes, it's painful to use but I have experience with it and maybe I can do some things differently with it this time. Sometimes the suboptimal choice where you at least got the know how is the right one. Especially when nobody is paying you for the time to learn a better suited technology. It's kinda hard to go to the suits and explain to them: We want to switch engines to one we have to license that we think is better suited, although we don't really know for sure because we have never used it before. Also, we need more new people that know how to work with it.

Bioware will probably have thought that after DAI and MEA the groundwork for RPG systems is finally done, so it will be easier this time.

[Edge-]

If flying was added truly late (2017 or thereabouts), that probably required a significant amount of redesigning and reengineering.

If that's the case, that's quite possible. But I wonder if it was the smart move or not, and I'm sadly inclined to say no. As awesome as flying is, if it's the cause of a lot of these technical issues, especially heavy leading screens (which I'd be surprised if that alone caused it) then it absolutely isn't worth the tradeoff. I would have taken far more limited vertical mobility and a better quality game over flying, even if flying is rad.

I know they made the choice to make the game look as good as possible, especially in Fort Tarsis.

That's not reliant on Frostbite though. UE4 come with a great toolkit for graphical goodies and post effects right out of the box, for example. They could have absolutely met similar levels of visual fidelity with it, and based on their comments they would have likely had a far easier time working with it.

If the game is positioned to be a cross gen title, they may have made some bad decisions with that in mind.

I don't see how this factors into things. There's no indication that Frostbite will support next-gen tech without extensive work now, nor is there any indication that UE4 won't support next-gen tech. Quite the contrary, it's very likely both will be updated to support cross-generation games.

So again, I'm left scratching my head because so many of these decisions simply don't make a lick of sense.

[kaelleria]

If that's the case, that's quite possible. But I wonder if it was the smart move or not, and I'm sadly inclined to say no. As awesome as flying is, if it's the cause of a lot of these technical issues, especially heavy leading screens (which I'd be surprised if that alone caused it) then it absolutely isn't worth the tradeoff. I would have taken far more limited vertical mobility and a better quality game over flying, even if flying is rad.



That's not reliant on Frostbite though. UE4 come with a great toolkit for graphical goodies and post effects right out of the box, for example. They could have absolutely met similar levels of visual fidelity with it, and based on their comments they would have likely had a far easier time working with it.



I don't see how this factors into things. There's no indication that Frostbite will support next-gen tech without extensive work now, nor is there any indication that UE4 won't support next-gen tech. Quite the contrary, it's very likely both will be updated to support cross-generation games.

So again, I'm left scratching my head because so many of these decisions simply don't make a lick of sense.

I don't think it's related to Frostbite at this point. Unfamiliarity with it might have caused some issues, but I think its probably them just adding features way too late in development.

The loading screens could and should have been hidden, pretty easily in fact, but time probably had other plans.