Anthem (Bioware's new property)

The excuse the developers gave for the "bug" is incredibly suspect. I'll explain.

The Level 1 being superior to the level 45 isn't confined to just one weapon. I personally tested it with the autocannon Cloudburst and its level 45 counterpart Fist of Stral.

A level 1 Cloudburst easily beats the level 45 Fist of Stral at taking down enemy health bars.

But the problem goes far beyond simple level scaling. Fist of Stral has an in-built ability that's supposed to add +100% damage as the weapon fires. Cloudburst does not have this. Even with scaling issues, this should make the Fist of Stral much better, but it does not.

But, wait, there's more.

The specific Fist of Stral used in testing ALSO has a +250% damage inscription on it.

Even if somehow the two guns had the same base damage due to a scaling issue, the perks on the level 45 should still make it better than the level 1. They in fact do not. They don't seem to do anything, actually, when it comes to killing enemies faster.

So, to summarize: Not only is the level scaling not working as they claim it was intended, but damage boosting abilities and inscriptions also do not function to actually increase the weapon's damage either, just inflate the numbers displayed.

The developers play it off as a simple bug with level 1 guns, but the ENTIRE system is a lie.

Amazing.

On the subject of cheating hit percentages, I'm reminded of an Extra Credits video that once mentioned that games do this on purpose.

For those who can't watch the video or don't want to give the channel views:

Basically, some games use hidden mechanics in order to enhance your experience. For example, in order to give players an adrenaline rush in a tense combat situation, the game might do things like have your life bar show less health than you actually have, make your last rounds of ammo do much more damage, make the first fatal hit leave you with a sliver of health while making you briefly invincible to damage, etc.

An especially interesting example they bring up is that games like Bioshock have enemies always miss their first shot at you, so as to not make you feel like you were unjustly ambushed and giving you some more time to get your bearings on the situation.

Fire Emblem handling percentages seems to fall into the category of "fudging percentages to make it feel more 'right' to players." The video mentions that things like missing a 50% chance twice in a row or missing a 95% chance feels bad and wrong to players, which is why some games do the background fudging.

The video also brings up an example similar to the bit about weapon levels in Anthem not affecting damage. The video mentions a racing game called Hi-Octane that showed different stats for cars, but the cars actually behaved exactly the same. Apparently having those stats made the cars feel different enough that there were debates over which car was the best.

Edited by dragonfire5000 on Mar 7th 2019 at 12:10:26 PM

But now we have seen the Wizard, will we just pick up the opium pipe again?

I'd have preferred it if each gun just had a different FEEL rather than this damage stuff. The looter shooter element just adds... gumpf... that I don't think Bioware are any good at (You see it in the gear in the Dragon age games - the first games had set loot and equipment; but DA:I had the whole crafting /stat stick stuff which actively made the whole thing feel... weird)

Just switch gun types to have different fire rates (And thus DPS) and higher level guns just have an increase change of applying different status effects....

I don't think its quite the same thing though.

Its not like the cars in that game were ones you had to unlock after hours and hours of work and it also sounds like they had enough attributes to fudge someone saying one was better over another due to being better at 'x' stat. With the stats not quite being measurable. Its also kind of a different time of gaming but that's more semantic. Though I DO actually like the choice, to be clear.

The guns in Anthem verifiably don't change the damage output in a game where, while I haven't played because I neither want to nor have a system capable of it, it sounds like you do have to put effort and time into upgrading and getting better guns. So there's now player time and energy going into unlocking/purchasing items that don't actually mean anything. Why upgrade my gun load out if none of it matters? Just stick with the starter equipment.

Its a game design choice that is now activly making the experience WORSE rather than adding to it as all players who put time and effort into those guns aren't actually being rewarded and feel bad about wasting their time. I get there are probably some logic trains of making sure low level players can still contribute to combat but... Beef Gates is a trope for a reason and Tropes Are Tools.

I also, again, wonder how long they reasonably thought they'd get away with this and what the hell they expected the reaction to be.

Anthem is a trainwreck and I'm scared for Bioware's future.

To go back to the fire emblem case, the supposed intent is to better fit with what humans think of rng and generally benefit players(player units generally have better accuracy than enemy units so they benefit from the system). It's also worth noting that newer games changed up a bit that formula, which is now 3*dice roll a plus dice roll, divided by four. BUT ONLY if your hit chance is above 50%. Otherwise, it's actually a simple roll one die.

I have no idea why they went with that but the end result is a good middle ground between reality and simply averaging two rolls. An interesting thing to note is that veterans of the series did notice that while playing. They didn't eyballed the maths of course, but a good number of people realized something had changed, typically with 80% hit suddenly not being that reliable and 30% hits actually hitting.

To expand on something different, monster hunter cheats in a similar way about attack values of weapons between weapons classes : the displayed numbers are actually the true attack value times an arbitrary, meaningless number assigned to each class of weapons. So a 1300+ atk greatsword and a 400 something dual blades actually have the same true attack value, both inflated by a different amount.

The catch here is that this "true" attack value is then multiplied by something much more obscure called the motion value, that varies for each attack but is globally largely superior on greatsword than on dual blades that makes up for the difference of speed of the two weapons.

That, and the general damage formula of monster hunter is a doozy. So the fake numbers are only there to give you an oversimplified representation of that, not to outright lie to you.

This shit, however, is plain hilarious.

Edited by Yumil on Mar 7th 2019 at 12:54:27 PM

Even if this specific event hadn't occurred and blown up like it did, people were starting to cotton on to the fact the numbers they were giving players were fishy.

People who went out of their way to stockpile gear that's supposed to lower their ability recharge time were starting to notice it both doesn't seem to do anything until it gets to a certain threshold and doesn't do anything past a threshold either.

Then the developers explained how Luck works, how it doesn't do anything past +90 even though you can stack it well into the hundreds, and even at it's maximum, it only turns a 1% chance into 2%.

I sort of wonder if bioware gets the appeal of looter shooter. Like. At all.

Or if they know and are willingly taking the piss.

Bioware's forte has never really ever been for the intriguing gameplay elements. It's always first and foremost story.

Even their more successful games tend to have pretty bad elements (MEA has great controls, movements and abilities, but the enemies are dumb as rocks, and the environments rarely make full use of it, and enemies offer no reason to use the system's multiple loadout gimmick. Compare any linear mission to any of the areas you meet while driving around. ME 2 has great enemies and environment that complement each other, but also has stiff and rigid controls).

I can fully believe that Bioware does not understand looter shooters. Again, see DA:I where the crafting system and the loot system are at odds with each other.

Edited by Ghilz on Mar 7th 2019 at 10:31:17 AM

It sounds to me like they took the mechanics of one game design and stuck them with the gear of a different version? Like, they went through a few builds of the game and there was one that didn't have much weapon variation beyond some minor, distinct passive effects but they thought played pretty well, and another that was a more typical looter shooter that had some definite issues but increased player satisfaction. So they put the skin of the latter onto the body of the former

I'll echo the sentiments of others - they wanted a single player game with a co-op element, to build on the ME 3 multiplayer success (But with a PLOT!)

Except EA then probably said "Something something" live service. And, instead of having a diverse set of weapons to mix and match, they looked around and decided to bolt on a looter shooter loot system. Except they didn't look at the background mechanics of HOW those things work in other games.

Bioware has always cribbed elements off other games but never QUITE understood their appeal. They are more successful when they plough their own furrow (Dialogue trees, stories, etc) - like when they did open world in DA: I - the game didn't NEED it and in some maps it actively hindered things. DA 2 was the attempt at GRIMDARK but not quite there; DA: I - the crafting system that just felt... weird.

All this being said, I'm having a blast just taking it at face value. Then again, i'm not too fussed about "stat" chasing, just the gameplay of flying around shooting things. But I don't like the unfair mechanics of other things:

Ash Titans just having TOO many attacks that are barely telegraphed; the Escarii in the Stronghold just randomly shifting between attacks then dumping Mooks everywhere; the inconsistent power recharges.

They should've had just a large selection of weapons, then some uniques that drop with set stats and MAYBE a pool for higher level gear. But make the CHOICE of weapon the meaningful thing - not whether or not it gives you +1% to sexy danger stats.

Seriously, it reminds me of 1.0 ff14. where its so painfully obvious the devs didnt sopend any decent chunk of time playing other games of the genre and simply reinvnmted the wheel but in a vacuum.

And thats usually a very very bad idea

Edited by Midgetsnowman on Mar 7th 2019 at 8:48:38 AM

Yeah, if Anthem were allowed to be a single-player game it would have been a classic Bio Ware hit, but no, EA had to shove them into making something that they had no experience in making.

I think I nailed it on the head pages back before release.

They were told to make a game, and they looked at other games of the genre, but they didn't understand the logic behind the choices those games made and why they worked. Like copying someone's answers.

Sure, I can remember 2+2=4. But if I have no understanding of why 2+2=4, then I will likely stumble when it comes to 2+3=? and 3+4=? on the remainder of the test. Its not just copying down the results. You need to be aware of the internal logic behind choices.

So, sure, big damage numbers are great for a lootnshoot and I've even pointed out that Borderlands are totally the type of people to make the numbers mean fuck all for the sake of a joke. But Anthem doesn't have that tone and doesn't quite know WHY people like those big numbers. People like those big numbers because it means they learned the game systems. It is validation that you have the right approach.

From what I've seen bandied around, it isn't the guns that have borked scaling, its the enemies. Shooting a enemy with a low level gun scales it's health down/apparent damage up compared to higher level guns on higher scaled enemies.

This was supposed to help high gear and low gear players play together and both feel useful, but just completely breaks the whole system it seems.

According to Bioware, yeah.

Though that still raises questions about why the displayed damage values don't match. And if the damage values ever actually were representative.

According to Bioware this will be fixed on the March 12th update. Guess We'll see then as people are bound to experiment to see if the numbers actually match up.

Edited by Ghilz on Mar 7th 2019 at 1:38:55 PM

even if thasts how it actuially works, it still exposes a major problem in a game where in theory, the whole point is to get cool loot that makes you better at killing more shit, if the loot doesnt actuially do what it says.

It means GM 3 monsters arent bullet sponges because of your gearscore, theyre bullet sponges because they always scale to be bullet sponges

Remember what I said about a shit-meets-fan situation down the storyline?

Here's a backstage photo taken by Tassyn's VA. If Bioware needs the actors for Tassyn (bottom center), Sentinel commander (bottom right), Dominion's Evil Genius (bottom left), Faye (center), Haluk (top right, wearing a mocap glove) and even Owen (top right), then we're in for something big.

Also, does anyone recognize the chick standing in front of Nick Tarabay and TJ Ramini? The one with the pixie cut?

Well if there's one thing in this game that actually works & works well, its definitely the actors performances.

Kudos for giving their all.

Edited by slimcoder on Mar 8th 2019 at 1:26:44 AM

I think the pixie cut is the Freelancer VA (Female)

I think.

Didn't Evil Dominion Guy get eaten by the Cenotaph though? At the very beginning in Yarrow's story of Freemark?

Maybe that's why the Urgoth are back? They WERE gone but somehow silencing the relic caused the Anthem to remake them? And he had something to do with it?

After all, why give a character a name and recognisable model then NEVER USE HIM or refer to him again?

Ugh, reading about this fudging and deception makes me glad I wasn't looking forward to Anthem.

It's sounding like EA is cheating everyone all over again and BioWare is doing this bad stuff on purpose to get out of it...

Does it even look like they'll get into at least a little trouble for this? Like actual, "you're-crossing-too-many-lines, clean-your-act-up-now" trouble?

The only time that happens is when they fuck up bad and their stocks take a huge hit, like when Battlefront 2 was happening.

And yeah, this is a real shame. I like the world and whatnot, but if Bio Ware wasn't fucking owned by EA this could have been so much better!

The problem is that EA demanded stuff from Bioware that Bioware just wasn't prepared to deliver. And Bioware cut corners and took shortcuts to try to make it work.

Anthem is something of a culmination of a lot of the issues that Bioware has had for years, really. Kind of like how Fallout 76 was the culmination of Bethesda's issues.

Edited by M84 on Mar 9th 2019 at 1:00:15 AM

So are their stocks taking a huge hit yet? Because it’s sounding like they’ve learned absolutely nothing from Battlefront 2 and history’s repeating because of it...

Any hit they would take from Anthem is probably being covered by the surprise success of Apex Legends.