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Re: Anthem [PC, PS4, XBone] - February 22nd 2019

Posted: Wed Feb 06, 2019 11:44 pm
by Animalmother
I suppose it's a bit like saying a film studio made these 3 great films but after that made 10 duds. All depends on the talent behind it.

Re: Anthem [PC, PS4, XBone] - February 22nd 2019

Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2019 7:22 am
by Sly Boots
Hudson is back at Bioware now btw.

But didn't one of the main writers leave between ME2 and 3? I'm sure I read something about all the stuff that they'd set up in the second game, relating to dark energy, which may have acted as a more interesting motivation for the Reapers and removed the need for the controversial 'star child' at the end, basically went completely ignored in ME3.

Re: Anthem [PC, PS4, XBone] - February 22nd 2019

Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2019 9:02 am
by Wrathbone
I'm not sure if the writer left or whether they were simply told "we can't do that now" due to time pressures, but there definitely was an early intention for it to be something around dark energy and not the star child. I could be wrong, but I think the lead writer for Mass Effect was someone different to Dragon Age's writer (David Gaider, who has now also left). I've made my peace with ME3's ending - with the DLC and extended ending, it's an improvement over the original vanilla calamity. The Leviathan DLC is so fundamental to understanding and contextualising everything that I can't believe it wasn't part of the base game. It's like reading/watching LOTR without knowing that Sauron exists and created the Ring.

Oh, and regardless of what Bioware staff have claimed is not the case and whether or not it makes perfect sense (it kind of does), I still really like the Indoctrination Theory interpretation of the ending.

Re: Anthem [PC, PS4, XBone] - February 22nd 2019

Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2019 9:06 am
by Sly Boots
Yeah.

By a similar token, I'm playing the Trespasser DLC for DAI now for the first time, and similarly can't believe this wasn't included, as it's basically the proper ending for the game.

Also, can't believe the prothean party member was DLC, that absolutely should have been part of the base game as well.

Edit: and yes, the indoctrination theory is just too good to not be canon, it basically explains everything.

Re: Anthem [PC, PS4, XBone] - February 22nd 2019

Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2019 9:10 am
by Wrathbone
Sly Boots wrote:
Thu Feb 07, 2019 9:06 am
Yeah.

By a similar token, I'm playing the Trespasser DLC for DAI now for the first time, and similarly can't believe this wasn't included, as it's basically the proper ending for the game.
Absolutely. While the gameplay of Trespasser isn't a highlight of the game, the implications of the story on the entire DA series are huge. For someone like me who's heavily invested in the series and its lore, it was like Christmas morning.

Re: Anthem [PC, PS4, XBone] - February 22nd 2019

Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2019 9:24 am
by DjchunKfunK
Everything that happened with Mass Effect 3 should be tossed in a fire and removed from existence.

Going back to Anthem, Bioware have released this calendar to show what is coming to the game post launch.

Image

Image

Re: Anthem [PC, PS4, XBone] - February 22nd 2019

Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2019 5:35 pm
by Hatredsheart

Re: Anthem [PC, PS4, XBone] - February 22nd 2019

Posted: Sat Feb 16, 2019 9:42 pm
by Sly Boots
PCG review in progress:
If you can't tell, I'm not enjoying my time with Anthem. The combo system is a clever innovation that rewards teamwork and aggressive but smart use of my javelin's abilities, but that's about the only worthwhile thing I like about Anthem aside from it being gorgeous. I prefer my BioWare games to be ugly on the outside and beautiful on the inside. Hopefully the story takes a sudden turn that sparks my interest and makes all these characters and bits of lore matter, because there are better RPG shooters I could be playing instead.
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/anthem-review/

Basically shooting good; most of everything else bad or boring.

Re: Anthem [PC, PS4, XBone] - February 22nd 2019

Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2019 3:22 pm
by Medicine Man
The bizarro Mass Effect

Re: Anthem [PC, PS4, XBone] - February 22nd 2019

Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2019 5:17 pm
by DjchunKfunK
I've played a good few hours of this over the weekend and the biggest take away is that this game is a bit of a mess. They have clearly gone big on the narrative to try and differentiate Anthem from other games in the genre but the problem is that it's just so generic. The main plot is your usual stop the big bad getting the space maguffin and they try to inject personality into the characters in the fort by allowing you to have little conversations with them but it all feels so naff. The clearly want to make it feel like you are walking around the Normandy getting to know your team but it ends up feeling like you are walking around the citadel talking to boring NPCs.

Then there are the weird design choices.

If you die in an area that doesn't allow respawning you have to wait for a teammate to pick you up. Whilst dead you can't do anything and I mean anything. You can't hit escape and quit out of the mission if people are just turtling away and not getting anywhere or if you keep wiping on the boss over and over. You have to wait for the party leader to quit and then for you to become leader before you can quit. The only other way out is to ALT-F4.

Seeing if someone is down is quite difficult, they have a little icon on the screen but it's pretty small, there is also an indicator on the side next to their name, but again it's pretty small and when there is a lot of action going on on the screen it is hard to tell if someone is down. They need to have something similar to Destiny where the game audibly tells you when a teammate goes down.

The social space is just a large brown room that is empty except for a bunch of kiosk that you can use, there are no NPCs behind these kiosks so the place feels like a ghost town. However it does highlight how pointless Fort Tarsis is, I'd much rather just have all the NPCs I need to talk to in one room and then get on with the missions.

I still can't get my head around the loot being dolled out at the end of a mission, it removes so much of the pleasure as you just see a long list of stuff at the end. The loot is also rather uninspiring with all the guns looking pretty similar and without any real flair. You also can't use items that have the same stat bonus, so if I have two items that give me +10% to melee damage I can only use one of them.

Missions are all very similar, they are either 'kill all these enemies', 'collect these things and bring them back then kill all these enemies', 'stand in this circle while a counter goes up and kill all these enemies' or a combination of the three.

The loading, boy the loading. To change your equipment at the Forge you need to sit through a loading screen. To go on a mission you need to sit through an animation, that you can skip by hitting escape, then sit through a loading screen to get to the mission map, then choose a mission, then matchmake and finally sit through another loading screen before you are in the world. If you are running the game on a hardrive then expect to sit through another loading screen shortly after as your teammates who are using an SSD will have motored ahead and the game tells you you are outside the mission area, gives you 23 seconds to catch up and if you don't loads you into the correct part of the level. It's not just the amount of loading screens you have to sit through it's also the time it takes, even on an SSD. I think this might be down to the Frostbite engine as I know Battlefield has similar loading issues.

When you load into a mission it takes about 20 seconds for the waypoint marker to appear. Why???

Then you have the bugs. So far I have encountered three mission breaking bugs which meant I couldn't complete the mission so had to quit out. One was half way through the other was at the end, both are known about on the internet. There is a sound bug that makes the sound disappear and requires the game to be restarted to come back again. The lag from the demo, where you shoot an enemy and it reacts a little bit later is still in the game but thankfully I have only encountered it once.

On the plus side the combat can be quite fun at times. I'm playing an Interceptor who is melee focussed and going in and wrecking enemies is quite good fun. It becomes a little less fun once I have to start using guns a lot as they all feel pretty similar and the shotgun is bad, which is always a black mark against a game.

I'm going to play through the story and probably a bit after that to see what the legendary weapons are like and if that improves things at all but right now it feels rather uninspiring.

Re: Anthem [PC, PS4, XBone] - February 22nd 2019

Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2019 5:56 pm
by Medicine Man

Re: Anthem [PC, PS4, XBone] - February 22nd 2019

Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2019 6:17 pm
by Sly Boots
Remember when they said ME Andromeda was so meh because they had their A team working on Anthem. Well...

Re: Anthem [PC, PS4, XBone] - February 22nd 2019

Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2019 6:29 pm
by Mantis
How anyone couldn't have seriously seen this coming I'll never know. It was obvious from the first glimpses of gameplay footage that this game would be pretty uninspiring.

Re: Anthem [PC, PS4, XBone] - February 22nd 2019

Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2019 7:50 pm
by Sly Boots
55% on PCG :shock:

https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/anthem-review/

Even knowing how meh people have said it is, that score has surprised me a bit!

For comparison they gave Fallout 76 60% :lol:

Re: Anthem [PC, PS4, XBone] - February 22nd 2019

Posted: Fri Feb 22, 2019 8:27 am
by Wrathbone
I don't understand all the comments about how great it looks (apparently one of the few positives). Maybe I'm missing something, but I think it looks a bit guff, with too much going on while somehow appearing dull and characters that have so many weird spiky bits protruding from their armour that they almost seem formless. It's as though one of the Bioware artists vomited rainbow skittles over a canvas and then started outlining shapes to form a scene.

Is it just that it looks technically proficient while having an artistic style that is both bland and busy?
Sly Boots wrote:
Thu Feb 21, 2019 7:50 pm
For comparison they gave Fallout 76 60% :lol:
That's a gut-punch! Though I'd argue the 60% was far too generous.