Anthem: Bioware's next Mass Effect-like IP

[Jtbrig7390]

SWTOR had endgame. SWTOR had engaging story content. SWTOR didn't brick people's computers. What does anthem have?

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.

[Deverux]

SWTOR had endgame. SWTOR had engaging story content. SWTOR didn't brick people's computers. What does anthem have?

The story/single player content of SWTOR was really nice, despite the combat feeling like a 2006 WoW clone.

[Yriel]

It's like my nightmare coming true now - Ubisoft of all publishers releases an amazing smooth AAA game with a ton of content that does it right, while Bioware releases an absolute trainwreck that has nothing, but graphics behind it.

I mean, it's not really that surprising with Division 2 since it's basically Division 1 on a new map. It would be quite a feat to make that release bugged.

[crusadernero]

It's like people forgot in what state SWTOR was released.

Sure, SWTOR was not in a perfect state. But that game had alot of content before you reached max level and started on endgame stuff. What is it in anthem? 10 hours maybe with content/Story before you start repeating yourself? And they worked for over six years on that? What the hell did they spend all that time on? was 90% of the work making the game look great?

SWTOR looks like dogshite compared to anthem, but atleast SWTOR got some content for many hours in it. This game(anthem), is rubbish when we know its coming from BioWare. They should have higher standards. I bet many of them know it to.

[Gaidax]

SWTOR HAD a great story for MMO, but that's about it. Once the story was done the whole thing fizzled.

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Been thinking about buying them to play through since I never did, but ugh... in my experience very few games age well and it gets hard to try and get through them. Like I looked up videos for ME1 and it just doesn't seem like its holding up well. It'd be one of those "play it for the story, not the game play" type games.

Also doesn't help that I never heard the end of the ME3 ending or ME:A stuff.

What you can do and it legit works is this, buy all ME games including ME1, then do ME1 intro quests up until Citadel and muck around Citadel just to understand the world a bit more and meet key people there.

This will take like 2-3 hours top and give you a good crash course intro onto why you are important, who are races and the world and intro into whole mystery you will be slowly solving all 3 games.

Then fire up ME2 without importing character - what it does is launch some sort of interactive comic where all key events of ME1 are retold and it allows you to make critical choices during the comic to set the ME2 proper and then play ME2 proper and then ME3. In ME2 make sure to do all companion loyalty missions, because you will know why.

ME2 already looks decent and its combat is modern and ME3 is great really, you will clearly see where Anthem takes its combat and enemies from.

I highly suggest playing these, it is legit the golden ages of Bioware. After playing through ME you will legit be left stumped asking yourself what the fuck has happened with Bioware, how they got from that to... this.

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You don't need to bother with Andromeda, because sadly, that story is abandoned, it did refine combat further though, it's pretty much what is in Anthem's core, so people claiming Anthem is some sort of first try are wrong, combat in Anthem is proper exactly because they took ME combat and basically tweaked it a bit and there you go.

I mean you even had Jetpacks and Hover in ME:A and whole combo and armor/shield systems with vulnerabilities and such is basically ME system proper.

Even skills and enemies are heavily borrowed, Spark Dash is virtually a shitty version of Biotic Charge and here you too have 3 major factions with enemies that resemble a lot ME ones.

Though ME had some awesome enemies, Phantoms are making my blood boil with blocking bullets with biotics, having invisibility and having a 1hit K.O impale if you mess up and let them come close.

Dem phantoms.

[Big Thanks]

EA_Help sent out a request for help from the players to list the issues in quickplay.
Community is not happy.
"We are officially Beta Testers guys" kind of deal

https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-...t/td-p/7672714

[dope_danny]

"kind of"?

[kail]

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.

It also performed like crap as well. My PC was able to handle WoW and GW2 like a champ, but suffered plenty with TOR despite it being the worse looking of the 3. Both games seem to share the core issue where the endgame is just repeated content (a single raid in TOR and a few Strongholds in Anthem) accessed via menu in some city/hub.

TOR did have a story though, of that I give credit to their devs for investing it into an MMO. This is all from a perspective of when I played TOR within the 1st year of release so not aware of what's changed.

[Edge-]

SWTOR had endgame. SWTOR had engaging story content. SWTOR didn't brick people's computers. What does anthem have?

Oh hell no it didn't. SWTOR had a pathetic endgame that players rioted over, leaving BW's only response as "just play the other class stories!"

There are quite a few parallels between SWTOR's struggles and the struggles of Anthem. Chief among them seem to be BW's desire to fit every genre into the "BW formula", something that's very difficult to do and they didn't get right with either SWTOR or Anthem. The "BW formula" actively clashes with the rest of the design of the games, leaving them often feeling disjointed.

EA_Help sent out a request for help from the players to list the issues in quickplay.
Community is not happy.
"We are officially Beta Testers guys" kind of deal

https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-...t/td-p/7672714

Man, I saw this in the reddit and it's dumb. This is some pretty standard shit for MMO's/online games when they're trying to track down a lot of issues, many of which they may not be able to reproduce in-house because they may be connection issues related to folks ISP's.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's fair to say the game is unfinished. But not for things like this. This is a good thing, they're putting out the call for more info so they can more quickly fix issues with the game. That means they're trying.

[Katchii]

EA_Help sent out a request for help from the players to list the issues in quickplay.
Community is not happy.
"We are officially Beta Testers guys" kind of deal

https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-...t/td-p/7672714

As much as I agree with the backlash, because this kind of shit should have happened a LONG time ago and it's pathetic that they released a game in this state, BW doesn't really have a choice. It would be logistically impossible for them to find every single problem every player is having, they don't have the man power.

They fucked up, they know they did and they need help in fixing the issues and aren't above asking for it. That's overall a good thing. It's still shameful that it's happening NOW, after people paid for a finished product and didn't get one, but it's still the right thing for them to do at this point. It's shows their sincerity in their desire to find and fix issues in this game and make it try and live up to the players expectations.

[Gaidax]

SWTOR was a good shot at story in MMOs by Bioware, its big issues were spotty performance, complete lack of endgame (exascebated by the fact that the amazing leveling stories suddenly stopped with nothing like that in the endgame) and the usual balance and such issues.

[kaelleria]

Sadly, I think a 3 month beta period could have taken care of these issues...
Unfortunately EA doesn't really do that.

SWTOR was basically unplayable at launch if you weren't playing a caster. Crazy animation desync due to how they structured their processes.
It was a different time, but I'm more inclined to agree with Edge that they don't have the best engineers at BW unfortunately.

[yasiru]

To note, there are a few items you can only earn by specific activities in game...
Off the top of my head there are 3 that require a bit of effort.

One is the Gold material

The other is the Reaver Vinyl

And the last is the Foundation Vinyl

As I said earlier, I hope they add more and they've been talking about it...

The easiest to get is the Foundation Vinyl as it's just killing 4 named titans during the There Be Giants event. The hardest is probably gold as it takes a ton of grinding.

Technically there are some armor sets too that can only be purchased in the forge using Coin, so I think those count as only earned in-game as well, though I know you did specify event earned.

[Edge-]

Sadly, I think a 3 month beta period could have taken care of these issues...
Unfortunately EA doesn't really do that.

None of these games do that, it's not just an EA thing.

[kaelleria]

None of these games do that, it's not just an EA thing.

True, but a lot of the early bugs could and would be ironed out with a beta period like we used to see with MMOs.

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Technically there are some armor sets too that can only be purchased in the forge using Coin, so I think those count as only earned in-game as well, though I know you did specify event earned.

There's actually quite a bit of visual progression...
For example, you start off with only Dirty and Old wear states and very few materials...
As you progress you unlock new materials and new wear states.

The problem is that anyone who used premiere or preordered the LoD edition got interesting armor right off the bat, so that bypassed visual progression for basically everyone playing early.

[Dhrizzle]

The story/single player content of SWTOR was really nice, despite the combat feeling like a 2006 WoW clone.

That's like complaining that FPS games have combat that feels like a Doom clone - it's the whole point of the genre. Plus I felt that SWtOR implemented the mechanics way better than WoW - all those linked groups of regular/silver/gold-elite mobs meant you had to put a bit more thought into each pull and when to use CC/cooldowns. Combined with every class having access to tank, heal or DPS "pets" it made the open world feel more like a dungeon.

- - - Updated - - -

What you can do and it legit works is this, buy all ME games including ME1, then do ME1 intro quests up until Citadel and muck around Citadel just to understand the world a bit more and meet key people there.

This will take like 2-3 hours top and give you a good crash course intro onto why you are important, who are races and the world and intro into whole mystery you will be slowly solving all 3 games.

Then fire up ME2 without importing character - what it does is launch some sort of interactive comic where all key events of ME1 are retold and it allows you to make critical choices during the comic to set the ME2 proper and then play ME2 proper and then ME3. In ME2 make sure to do all companion loyalty missions, because you will know why.

ME2 already looks decent and its combat is modern and ME3 is great really, you will clearly see where Anthem takes its combat and enemies from.

I highly suggest playing these, it is legit the golden ages of Bioware. After playing through ME you will legit be left stumped asking yourself what the fuck has happened with Bioware, how they got from that to... this.

ME2 and 3 are less clunky than ME1 but they still have pretty tedious cover-based combat, just spiced up a bit by different RPG-style abilities. Story wise Anthem isn't as galaxy-spanning epic as the whole saga but with the characters and little side-vignettes it's still clearly BioWare story with less impactful choose-your-own-adventure options.

- - - Updated - - -

Sadly, I think a 3 month beta period could have taken care of these issues...
Unfortunately EA doesn't really do that.

SWTOR was basically unplayable at launch if you weren't playing a caster. Crazy animation desync due to how they structured their processes.
It was a different time, but I'm more inclined to agree with Edge that they don't have the best engineers at BW unfortunately.

I swear my processor is made of magic as I seem to avoid 99% of the performance issues people complain about.

[D3athsting]

This game appears to have memory leak issues, goes decent during first mission then, mission after mission hd starts working endlessly causing mega stuttering and random 3-4 sec freezes especially with weather effects making it almost unplayable, hell it takes up to 5 minutes to close after quitting game via UI or alt-f4

[kaid]

Jesus christ, why do they even need denuvo, isn't it an always online game? What the fuck.

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.

[D3athsting]

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.

:roll safe meme: Don't need to hack the game if the game itself allows you to cheat without hacks

[Gaidax]

ME2 and 3 are less clunky than ME1 but they still have pretty tedious cover-based combat, just spiced up a bit by different RPG-style abilities. Story wise Anthem isn't as galaxy-spanning epic as the whole saga but with the characters and little side-vignettes it's still clearly BioWare story with less impactful choose-your-own-adventure options.

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. In Anthem everything is 100% same shit no matter what you say in convo, except for like some side banter in the fort. In ME? Wrong response at wrong time and you could have your bloody companions end up dead or in your bed or backstab your ass. In Anthem if I’d say to Faye she’s a frikkin’ psycho - nothing would change, but you don’t have the option to do it anyway, unlike what you could say in ME.

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.


Trying to compare ME to Anthem is like frikkin’ comparing world fame level works of art to what your kid doodles in kindergarten drawing lesson.