Anthem (Bioware's new property)

Have to say, aside from some connectivity issues, they improved a fair bit with this content dump. Of course, loading times are still far too long, as is respawn time.

But gunplay is good, they've moved off the frankly ridiculously broken Tesla Dome and Flamer primer / combo that meant a colossus could solo most things and have made melee a bit more functional with melee weapon slots.

It won't keep me focused for long, but I think this is a step in the right direction. Now, they just need to do a Warframe and optimise the system over time, if they want this to make a comeback.

I would like to correct my previous statement: the masterwork detonator blades for Interceptor give you 10% resistance increase on each hit that lasts 10 seconds and can be stacked five times.

And I got my hands on a masterwork primer stunstick for Ranger today. Every hit adds 3% to the Ultimate bar. That's even crazier. Too bad I had absolutely zero luck on the Colossus melee, as that's my most neglected Javelin and I would like to boost it a little bit.

Ben Irving, one of the lead producers on Anthem, has left the Bioware/EA:

Unless EA is willing to stick with Anthem over the next couple of years in hopes of Bioware pulling itself together, I think it's safe to conclude Anthem is truly doomed. I don't see it being updated, let alone supported past 2020.

I wonder where he's going to work now. I'd scroll down the comments in the thread to see if he mentions it...but I've learned not to scroll down Twitter threads.

Twitter thread comments are cesspools, just like Youtube comments.

Nah it looks like he just left.

Something is changing on the main map. A big-ass tentacle made from those keyhole-like metallic thingers lying around just wrecked the ruins of the Library of Dunar.

Also, the new masterwork/legendary weapons are mostly fun to use, there are two that are too weird to use and Bad Omen is basically a Fusion Rifle from Destiny with all the aiming difficulties involved, but the rest is all right. Jarra's Wrath, AKA the one from the bullshit first trailer is in and works like an electric shotgun. Razorwing chucks buzzsaws that bounce between enemies. There's a chain lightning gun, a laser that deals more and more damage with each second, etcetera. The weird ones shoot out a slow ball of energy and call down a powerful lightning from the sky.

So yeah, I guess Anthem is done now. No more content updates

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2019/09/18/bioware-explains-whats-next-for-anthem-and-its-not-terribly-reassuring/#115d56e26b61

And chalk up another Bio Ware failure.

Man it's gonna be bitter when EA kills them, but with everyone good leaving and the studio's quality control going down the shitter I actually won't blame them.

It just unfortunately kicks a lot of their audience to the curb. Even if Anthem didn't cater to that demographic at all.

The sad fact is that Bioware has been underperforming for a while now even before Anthem. It'd be easy to blame EA for everything, but I'd argue that Bioware's lack of direction and strong leadership played bigger roles.

If Bioware is to have any hope to survive, it needs to knock the Dragon Age sequel out of the fucking ballpark.

<remembers them describing it as "Anthem with dragons">

...Welp.

Edited by M84 on Sep 18th 2019 at 10:59:17 PM

Yeah I think we can safely assume DA 4 is gonna be their last game by now.

And I would've so loved to see a Jade Empire sequel at some point :/ ......

Any idea where some of Bioware's original developers went?

The Doctor left video games completely, one to invest in entrepreneurs and the other to make craft beer.

I don't think anyone finds this particularly surprising. A lot of people called it. It would be helpful if they publicly apologized, but not strictly necessary.

Now they really need to throw everything behind DA4. If it's not a masterpiece, Bioware is done.

Considering they are doubling down on the live service and multiplayer thing going by all the rumors rather than the strong single player rpg everyone wants, that ain't gonna happen.

See, it's BS like this that make me wish someone would buy out EA just to quit this middle-fingering to players and the video gaming community in general.

The BS EA's pulling with its "surprise mechanics" being painfully obviously gambling and the crunching and other unpleasantness going on within its subsidiaries (not sure if there was bullying involved) really deserve more than a few spots in the "wait, that's illegal" list.

And no, it shouldn't matter if the EA methods are printing money. No one should be doing what EA is doing because it's just not right.

eh, I don't think appeal to altruism is very relevant in that discussion. Like sure it's easy for the lootboxes cause there's a lot of legal ground to get something done about them, but it's a lot harder to punish EA's habit of running studios into the ground on those grounds. A company's a company, it's expected that they gotta make money.

I find it more interesting to note they are even catastrophically bad even in a soulless greedy perspective. They waste talented people and popular I Ps by the dozen. They are passing up so many opportunities for long term growth and to establish big names franchises because they are so obsessed with the short-term profits it's not even funny.

like, you don't need to appeal at how anthem disappointed so many people and was "not right" to do. You can just point at anthem and say "this game wasted millions of dollars and a popular studio that could have been used to get a lot more value by focusing on one of their successful franchises instead. That's a bad move." You can point at battlefront in general and say "EA has one of the biggest movie franchise ever made to their disposition and they've done two games with it in six years and both of them have been failures." (it's not even from just our perspective, it's also from theirs, since the games are "below expectations".) That's a disastrous move.

Edited by Yumil on Sep 19th 2019 at 4:05:36 PM

Who would buy EA? Only someone bigger and less ethically minded. So, no - I don't think that will fix things.

Indeed- Anthem was a trash fire from both a "let's creatively make a great game" standpoint and a "let's cynically create a cash-making machine" standpoint. It was a directionless mess of development with no direction or vision.

Edited by GoldenKaos on Sep 19th 2019 at 3:08:01 PM

There is legal action being taken against lootboxes, so hopefully DA4 won't have those. Even if the legislation doesn't go through, it would be unwise to put them in a game while they're under discussion (of course, "unwise" summarizes EA, but anyway).

Anthem was a dumpster fire in every way, from a story perspective, from a gameplay perspective, from a live service perspective, and so on. Even if DA4 emphasizes more of their live service bullshit, they can at least make it better than Anthem. Except while EA can live with it merely being "better" than Anthem, Bioware needs it to be a masterpiece.

As for someone buying out EA, the problem is that their sports games and so on are still insanely profitable, so they're too big for some random well-meaning company to buy up. Really, their sports profits are at the root of a lot of their problems, as they're convinced that they can apply the same lessons to their single-player and story-heavy properties and gain instant success.

It's a shame, because, like Destiny, Anthem seemed like it had a great setting and awesome art design, it just turned out to be a shite game.

Except that Destiny got better because Bungie was actually willing to put the work in.

Both Destiny games had a vision but came out rough and were then backed by years of support and further development, and were transformed into truly great games to fulfil those visions.

Anthem was a mistake from day 1. They plopped it out to die so that they could try to get some fiscal return from the YEARS they'd spent faffing about playing with different mechanics and concepts and getting nowhere.

In terms of post-release support, they are like night and day.

Edited by GoldenKaos on Sep 19th 2019 at 3:44:42 PM

I don't know whether Bioware decided to ditch the harebrained concept of releasing new content every three months having realized they wouldn't be able to keep up after they fucked up last time and ended up releasing the content planned for May in August and sat down to come up with some serious rework when it's done, or are they just waiting for the game to die. You can read their latest post both ways.

TBF, Anthem wasn't doomed from the very beginning. There was potential. The problem is that the potential was squandered after months of Bioware leadership not being able to agree on what kind of game they wanted to make. And by the time they finally settled on Looter-Shooter, they outright refused to look at Destiny so they could maybe learn from it.

Edited by M84 on Sep 19th 2019 at 11:04:55 PM

Oh, when I say from Day 1, I didn't mean from the absolute birth of the game (sorry, use of hyperbole there). At the start of development, yeah - there were tons of places where they could have gone. A lot of the ideas mentioned in that exposé were really cool and if someone had been able to show some leadership, we could be raving about Bioware being geniuses right now. But, frankly once it got to that place where the EA exec came round to say "show me what you got", their fate was sealed. There was no way to save it at that point I don't think.

And the point of no return was probably some time before then, since they were faffing about and treading water with no idea what the game was for years.

Edited by GoldenKaos on Sep 19th 2019 at 4:17:04 PM