Anthem: Bioware's next Mass Effect-like IP

[szechuan]

It isn't misleading at all. It is simply showing the game off during different parts of development.

It is, it was also showing fake Enemy AI and Animations that don't exist in the final product.

[rhorle]

Yeah because AI Changes and Fake Animations changes effect gameplay more-so then small graphical changes. I have not, read the post clearly.

Don't lie.

I guess completely Misleading Gameplay Animations with completely fake Enemy AI (compared to what we got) is just "Some" Graphical difference now?.

Like I said it is irrational hatred. You are making excuse for when Good games mislead people but hating on a bad game when they mislead people. Which shows that it has nothing to do with misleading people in the first place. It just has everything to do with is the game hated or liked. It doesn't matter if changes are more or less then another games.

Misleading is misleading. Whining about Anthem is still saying a games development can never change from footage that was shown. Because you are specifically attacking Anthem over not adhering to footage shown. So yes you certainly did say it but I'm not surprised you would try to lie about it in order to justify irrational hate.

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It is, it was also showing fake Enemy AI and Animations that don't exist in the final product.

Here you are saying something you just claimed you never said. So every game developed needs can not change from any footage shown. Unless of course you are a game that is considered to be a good game, like the witcher 3, then it is 100% acceptable to mislead people.

That is called being a hypocrite.

[szechuan]

Don't lie.

I'm not.

Like I said it is irrational hatred.

The Game was a huge letdown and a Disappointment, Is that Irrational Hatred to you?

You are making excuse for when Good games mislead people but hating on a bad game when they mislead people. Which shows that it

Not everything is black and white, there are different shades of Advertisements that are more Egregious in misleading people then others, but I guess Nuanced Discussions won't matter for seemingly Staunch Fanboys such as yourself.

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So every game developed needs can not change from any footage shown.

I never said that.

Unless of course you are a game that is considered to be a good game, like the witcher 3, then it is 100% acceptable to mislead people.

Again, I never said that.

That is called being a hypocrite.

That's you putting words in other peoples mouths.

Misleading is misleading.

There's a difference between misleading somebody with a burger that looks better in the picture and misleading someone toward there deaths by telling them about how Cigarettes don't Cause Cancer.

But go ahead, Misleading is Misleading.

[kail]

I was a little confused as to how the tomb quests were 'time gating', as they didn't really slow you down at all. I got the quest to do them, 2 of the 4 I had literally already completed, once I found it, it was like "YOU NEED TO DO THIS. GREAT. YOU DID IT." and the other two simply had a requirement that I didn't understand. I didn't understand how Multi Kills worked at the time, so had to look it up and just.. did it. The other one was finding a few chests. It didn't take any more time than doing a normal quest, outside of the longer time of flying to each one (which did take an extra 10 minutes each)

I literally had zero clue as to how to track the damn quest, took like 10 minutes of UI navigation to see the "challenges" or w/e I had to complete. Were the requirements difficult? Not by any means. Was it tedious just to progress the main campaign...yes by far. The gate quest better fits as some side completion alongside the main campaign that gives you the choice to complete it as you play the game or if you want to speed it through.

It was even further disappointing to see how that quest concludes. Touch a bunch of coffins in a small room (that required loading screens lol) and that's it. Nothing major seemed to have progressed with the shallow story nor I feel any major advancement in my character. Quite possibly the worst "quest" I have ever had to do in a game: 0/10.

[rhorle]

I never said that. Again, I never said that. That's you putting words in other peoples mouths.

It is, it was also showing fake Enemy AI and Animations that don't exist in the final product.

Right there you are saying that game footage will be misleading if it does not reflect in the final product. So you are saying that a game developer can not change the game from footage shown or it is bad for misleading people. Because that is what Anthem did and you are calling them bad for misleading.

But then you throw in your own subjective morality into the equation. Just so you can justify hatred, that yes is irrational. It is irrational because you have you pitchforks out for Bioware over Anthem footage while at the same time saying other developers are fine for misleading in the same manner simply because people find their game to still be good. Which means the problem has nothing to do with misleading footage in the first place. It has everything to do with is the final game good or is it bad. Which again points out how irrational it is to hold only certain developers to misleading footage when it isn't about the footage at all. But about the state of the final product.

Bioware never once said that the E3 2017 trailer was game play footage of the final product. They did not mislead anyone but idiots that think a video released in 2017 is the exact game play footage for a game released in 2019. You are clearly one of those idiots for claiming they mislead you. Look at your metaphor for how much you want to hate on Anthem. You equate Anthem's form of Misleading to saying cigarettes do not cause cancer.

Different animations and different AI is the same as saying cigarettes don't cause cancer. Let that sink in before you try to say that you are not being irrational in this specific case.

[szechuan]

So you are saying that a game developer can not change the game from footage shown or it is bad for misleading people.

I Never said that, and clearly you're either misinterpreting my posts or ignoring them



Ignored.

[rhorle]

I Never said that, and clearly you're either misinterpreting my posts or ignoring them

So then how is Bioware bad for misleading people about Anthem if early footage can be different from the final product? That have released multiple videos since that 2017 E3 trailer with different AI and animations. Pre-release of the final product showed it to be different. The demo showed it to be different.

Again you are saying that Anthem, a developer, can not change the game from a in-development slice of the game because to do so is a bad form of misleading. You are whining that it is misleading because you were not informed that a 2017 E3 footage was not the final product. Despite various review sites, demos, and more recent footage showing differences.

[Charge me Doctor]

Misleading is misleading. Whining about Anthem is still saying a games development can never change from footage that was shown. Because you are specifically attacking Anthem over not adhering to footage shown. So yes you certainly did say it but I'm not surprised you would try to lie about it in order to justify irrational hate.

You get it backwards, isn't not a case of developers changing their product after showing it to public, it's the case of making heavily redacted trailer to make the game look better than it really is.

Anthem in trailer on E3 looks way better than what we've get, which is, sadly, became a norm for most AAA games - they put extra effort into making trailer all beautiful, then it turnes out that the game either was downgraded, or never actually playable with such graphical fidelity outside of trailer sequence

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And this is exactly why it is irrational hate on Anthem. You accept misleading footage shown about another game because the game was still good. Yet you don't accept it in another game because the game also happens to be bad in other ways. Make up your mind. Either misleading footage shown about a game is bad or it is fine. You can't have it both ways.

It definitely can. In the end, publisher wants us to buy games, we want to enjoy games. If you bought a game and didn't enjoy it - you are angry, it may happen from misleading trailer which made you all hyped up about that game, but in reality it was missing stuff from trailer and you didn't enjoy it. In case of Witcher 3 - you still enjoyed the game even after noticing features missing in from trailer (i have no clue what this whole E3 witcher 3 talk about, i haven't even seen trailer) then you are fine with it.
That's how misleading footage can be both fine and bad.

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You must be new to gaming if you have never seen that done before. It isn't misleading at all. It is simply showing the game off during different parts of development.

It is in fact misleading. And harmful for consumer, because they take your money via preorders. You watch trailer, get hyped up, preorder, game gets changed and there is no "new in-development footage" (like it usually worked with indie titles like Starbound), game ends up released, it's bad, and your ingame sequence that you've seen in trailer looks different (worse) from trailer.

It shouldn't be tolerable behaviour. Ever. And yes, i would take points off witcher 3 if that would be the case and i actually watched trailer. Just like watchdogs being different from E3 presentation made me make my decision on either i'm buying it or not.

[RobertoCarlos]

that article is pretty funny.

Love how one of the leads at EA let his Ironman fetish run wild with what sounded like a geninuely interesting idea from the intial concept ideas from bioware.

Welcome to search through my post history in this thread but I said earlier this game was a Ironman rip off. In fact I'll find it myself.

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Yeah can tell the game looks soul less even just from gameplay vids

pretending to be Iron man loses its charm after a few hours

Im not a hater, I just call it how I see it.

[stellvia]

@rhorle I think you are misinformed, and that is part of the problem in this discussion. The E3 2017 video was "rendered in-engine in real-time" which is Marketing Speak for "this is still a PR video running on a steroids PC, it's just not pre-rendered to an MP4 first". There are a lot of tricks you can do with rendering models in an engine that hide flaws and misrepresent a scene.

The biggest thing you need to remember is: That was not an "in-development slice" of the game. It was quite literally just a PR demo scene they whipped up. The game hadn't even left pre-production yet at that point. You can pre-bake textures, normals, lighting, and even animations (like the Strider collapsing and exploding) to dramatically lower their strain on a system, or it could even just be a situation where the framerates would be unacceptable on average hardware. It allows you to fake a fantastic looking scene that you will never be able to deliver on in the actual game. You're basically just making a mini movie. Also, the whole part where they loot and come up with the exotic Jarra's Wrath or whatever: That was entirely faked and not making any online call to generate an item. Apparently because even by release they weren't able to generate loot on the fly...

As schezuan mentioned, the concept of nuance and degrees of fault seems lost on people in here atm, so I too will end here.

[Kasierith]

The most telling thing for me from the article was that they basically built the game around a short sit down with the CEO to play the game and have fun for a single session. Anthem is an extremely fun game... If you look at single snippets of gameplay. Flying around is fun, but flying around for 20 minutes in Freeplay gm3 trying to find randos to group with is not. The combat is fun .. until the 500th time you've done it. It's like everything that is a positive in the game is what can be sampled in a single half hour session, but the things that lead to it's longitivity was left by the wayside. The loot crawl is horrible since all youre really doing is rolling the dice again and again sifting through worthless muck hoping for a specific few items. There's no real sense of exploration since the world is so small compared to how quickly you can transverse it and the minimal benefits of doing so. Players are sectioned neatly into zones so there's no organic interaction with others.

All in all, this game was built from the ground up to satisfy the combat system, it's direct up front playability. I don't regret the 45 hours I spent on it because I had a hell of a lot of fun. But there's literally nothing that is compelling me to log back in.

[Yunru]

https://www.kotaku.com.au/2015/05/th...roversy-sucks/

People were angry and attacking the devs over the difference. The devs had to make several comments about it. The difference was due to optimizing the game versus showing an unoptimized early look at the game. It doesn't matter if The Witcher 3 still looked amazing. How it looked changed from footage shown versus what was released. You also prove a very good point. You defend the Wither 3 because it was a good game. Yet the same sort of things in Anthem you are irrational hating on because the game was bad. That is the problem with modern gaming. People are to interested in dumb stuff instead of the games as a whole. Then they latch on to anything they can in order to hate. Show us on the javelin where Anthem touched you?


Remember you were whining about misleading animations and fake AI when referencing the trailer. That is all stuff that is constantly changing in games. It misleading implies the current animations are close but not what was shown. Hence it is misleading rather then wrong or fake or non-existent.

If the video comes with:
This is not the final game footage.
Its fine then. But if it comes without this is more or less false advertising.

[Dhrizzle]

I was a little confused as to how the tomb quests were 'time gating', as they didn't really slow you down at all. I got the quest to do them, 2 of the 4 I had literally already completed, once I found it, it was like "YOU NEED TO DO THIS. GREAT. YOU DID IT." and the other two simply had a requirement that I didn't understand. I didn't understand how Multi Kills worked at the time, so had to look it up and just.. did it. The other one was finding a few chests. It didn't take any more time than doing a normal quest, outside of the longer time of flying to each one (which did take an extra 10 minutes each)

As a random bit of grinding they really stood out from the rest of the campaign, I assumed they were to give an introduction to free play but they certainly worked to pad the runtime. In the Kotaku article one of the sources said there was talk of making a solid timegate where you would have to complete them challenges over a matter of days.

[Baconeggcheese]

@chazus At launch the tomb quest didn't count things you did before getting the quest. Then after much player uproar they patched it to include anything you did since starting the game. The article made it clear the original version was even worse... Timegating between each tomb instead of being able to work on them concurrently.

This is incorrect, it was always retroactive. They just didnt show you the challenge until you reached that point in the story. Now afaik it shows up right away or much earlier.

[rhorle]

@rhorle I think you are misinformed, and that is part of the problem in this discussion. The E3 2017 video was "rendered in-engine in real-time" which is Marketing Speak for "this is still a PR video running on a steroids PC, it's just not pre-rendered to an MP4 first". There are a lot of tricks you can do with rendering models in an engine that hide flaws and misrepresent a scene.

It is still a video from a product that is in-development. A product that has had many videos since released to show changes made. The fact still remains that Bioware did not mislead anyone. The only ones that were mislead are those that choose to believe that a video from E3 2017 will be exactly the same as the final product from 2019.

Because people lie to themselves once they get hyped up does not mean Bioware mislead. Changes from that video were clear pre-release from other footage.

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If the video comes with:
This is not the final game footage.
Its fine then. But if it comes without this is more or less false advertising.

Another fool? Why do you think that a video shown two years before release is required to be final game footage? Are you that you that incapable of free thought and common sense that you have to be told? Do you also have to be told to breathe?

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It is in fact misleading. And harmful for consumer, because they take your money via preorders. You watch trailer, get hyped up, preorder, game gets changed and there is no "new in-development footage" (like it usually worked with indie titles like Starbound), game ends up released, it's bad, and your ingame sequence that you've seen in trailer looks different (worse) from trailer.

So a two year old trailer, when pre-orders were not even around, is misleading? There has been footage of anthem since that 2017 trailer. A lot can change in two years. The E3 2017 video was not to be a final game play trailer. Treating it as such is downright stupid. No wonder people now a days think they are mislead at every turn. The believe anything will be the final product instead of "in-development".

Don't watch things from in-development games if you are that prone.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Anth...2F2019&tbm=vid

There are plenty of videos of Anthem, including actual gameplay footage, since the 2017 E3 video. All of you are claiming that all of those videos since showed the exact same things as E3 2017? And that nothing changed? And that Bioware mislead you into think nothing changed? I totally understand wanting a game to stick to all trailers made for it. I totally understand being disappointed when a game does not live up to expectations. But it isn't acceptable to say a game mislead you when it was infact yourself who mislead you by not seeing the signs present in videos closer to the final product.

[Adam Jensen]

They were really AIMING to be Destiny, but weren't good enough to even make it that far...

How did so many people think this was going to work out? Are they really that out of touch?

BioWare trying to make Anthem like Destiny is like reaching for the stars only to trip face first on your shoelace . . . and then claim you made it.

Destiny isn't without flaws, but it's a far more polished product with an amazing background lore and an endgame filled with content. Anthem was over as fast as it began and gave me no reason to stick around other than to bitch about the money I spent on it.

Anthem feels more like a demo than an actual completed game. Even the story is half-assed. Who the hell is the Monitor and why should I care? Why are the Dominion the bad guys? Why should I automatically agree that the fall of Freemarch is a bad thing?

Also, who the hell is the bald dude at the beginning? The bald Elon Musk dude?

[Baconeggcheese]

BioWare trying to make Anthem like Destiny is like reaching for the stars only to trip face first on your shoelace . . . and then claim you made it.

Destiny isn't without flaws, but it's a far more polished product with an amazing background lore and an endgame filled with content. Anthem was over as fast as it began and gave me no reason to stick around other than to bitch about the money I spent on it.

This is a joke yeah?

[Dhrizzle]

BioWare trying to make Anthem like Destiny is like reaching for the stars only to trip face first on your shoelace . . . and then claim you made it.

Destiny isn't without flaws, but it's a far more polished product with an amazing background lore and an endgame filled with content. Anthem was over as fast as it began and gave me no reason to stick around other than to bitch about the money I spent on it.

Admittedly I only started playing at Destiny 2 (as Destiny was not released on PC) but Bungie did a bloody awful job letting us know what was going on. There's people and blue people and robot people, no idea what or why they are, and some sort of big ball hovering above a city that gives them super powers. Little floaty robots try to provide exposition but not very well. Then some Chaos Space Marines invade because they want to worship out big ball but then we beat them.

Anthem feels more like a demo than an actual completed game. Even the story is half-assed. Who the hell is the Monitor and why should I care? Why are the Dominion the bad guys? Why should I automatically agree that the fall of Freemarch is a bad thing?

Also, who the hell is the bald dude at the beginning? The bald Elon Musk dude?

The Monitor is one of the leaders of the Dominion, you should care because they are callous invaders who never hesitate to use force to get what they want. That is also what makes them the bad guys. The Dominion, Freelancers and Sentinels formed when the Legion of Dawn splintered.

The fall of Freemark was considered a bad thing because it was one of the largest forts, housed a dangerous shaper relic and gave rise to the massive Cataclysm known as the Heart of Rage.

Which bald guy do you mean, Mathias? He's an arcanist who is one of the key supporting characters in Fort Tarsis.

[Lindon]

Admittedly I only started playing at Destiny 2 (as Destiny was not released on PC) but Bungie did a bloody awful job letting us know what was going on. There's people and blue people and robot people, no idea what or why they are, and some sort of big ball hovering above a city that gives them super powers. Little floaty robots try to provide exposition but not very well. Then some Chaos Space Marines invade because they want to worship out big ball but then we beat them.

Destiny has a metric fuckton of lore explaining the backstory of the world and the entities in it. Considering you didn't play D1, you've missed out of quite a large amount of lore. No game company invests time and effort in explaining everything that was explained in previous games. D2 had a very condensed summary to the backstory of the game and provided enough to hopefully make you understand why you are doing what you are doing.

Another part that people usually forget is that Destiny has short text based lore entries. Anthem seemingly also took this route where they explain and build on the world in the form of these short texts.

Whether this is a good or bad way to tell a grander story is hard to gauge since it's completely subjective.

Which bald guy do you mean, Mathias? He's an arcanist who is one of the key supporting characters in Fort Tarsis.

I think he's talking about the Dominion leader (Doctor Harken).

[Adam Jensen]

I think he's talking about the Dominion leader (Doctor Harken).

Yeah that guy. He shows up at the beginning and I expected to see more of him but then he never showed up again.