Bioware's "Anthem"

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Daidraco

Daidraco

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rhinohelix said:
IIRC The game that we played was made in like 18 months after 5-6 years of various scrapped development cycles. So much of it was bullshit, though.

The world sucked because someone was married to the idea of traversing environments, and you had to have all of these different environment types in small compact spaces, and therefore you had to limit player travel so they see all of this diversity: Such horseshit. You could only fly so far so I can see what the fuck terrain you generated? THE WORLD IS EVER-CHANGING or what the fuck ever they made the story out to be so you can get stoned and put mountains next to underground water tunnels? Someone wants to copy the Prequels? WTF is this shit. It looks cool in the trailer but added so little to the game.

The story wasn't bad per se but so...meh. It's actually not terrible given how poorly optimized the coding of the game was. Shades of diversity but I didn't have a huge problem with it that I recall and I am hypersensitive to the BS. Its been a while, now, and I may just have blotted out whatever that was there.

The combat was really fun, I super enjoyed the Colossus but when someone found out the math was all fucked and the most damaging weapon was your starter pistol because of how they implemented scaling? Come the fuck on. YOUR ENTIRE GAME IS LITERALLY BUILT ON MATH LIES.

I went out and bought external drives for my Xboxes so my kids and I could play it without the long loading times. They weren't bad investments, I still use them with my XSXs today but known that the game was only really developed in the last 18 months before launch, all of the above is to be expected.

There have been bigger disappointments, Star Wars Galaxies, maybe? I am sure, and I am glad someone finally got their Ironman game but this and Andromeda were the end of Bioware as we knew it for sure.
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The only super obvious "diversity" cast into the game was the homosexuals in the city. End of the world, barely any humans left... makes sense. Sure. whatever. But you are correct that it wasnt so in your face that you would do anything to get away from it. Was that because they just wanted their presence in the game and thats it, or was it because they didnt have enough time to load it down with a bunch of woke shit - who knows.

Which really, if its true what people have said in the past that you're referring too - that the game was basically designed from the ground up in 18 months, and the name and hell, flying, wasnt even concrete by that point... you gotta be amazed at what they did do in that small bit of time. I liked the premise of this game better than Destiny - so if they would have had the time, I think the game would have been a winner.
 
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Crone

Crone

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Daidraco said:
The only super obvious "diversity" cast into the game was the homosexuals in the city. End of the world, barely any humans left... makes sense. Sure. whatever. But you are correct that it wasnt so in your face that you would do anything to get away from it. Was that because they just wanted their presence in the game and thats it, or was it because they didnt have enough time to load it down with a bunch of woke shit - who knows.

Which really, if its true what people have said in the past that you're referring too - that the game was basically designed from the ground up in 18 months, and the name and hell, flying, wasnt even concrete by that point... you gotta be amazed at what they did do in that small bit of time. I liked the premise of this game better than Destiny - so if they would have had the time, I think the game would have been a winner.
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Imagine if they had released it as an open beta, and then kept fixing it? Would have been awesome.
 
Grabbit Allworth

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Hekotat said:
Yea I loved the scout class game play. The combat was really fun and on occasion I'd load up just to run a dungeon.
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I played whatever the Heavy was called and the move where you'd drop out of the sky and crash into a group of stuff sending them flying and/or dead was awesome.

The gameplay was excellent and I remember thinking during the beta that if what we were seeing in it was a good indication of what the rest of the game was going to be like, I could see myself playing it for a long time.

Unfortunately, the beta was, essentially, the whole game.

Huge, HUGE missed opportunity to make an excellent game.
 
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Hekotat

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Grabbit Allworth said:
I played whatever the Heavy was called and the move where you'd drop out of the sky and crash into a group of stuff sending them flying and/or dead was awesome.

The gameplay was excellent and I remember thinking during the beta that if what we were seeing in it was a good indication of what the rest of the game was going to be like, I could see myself playing it for a long time.

Unfortunately, the beta was, essentially, the whole game.

Huge, HUGE missed opportunity to make an excellent game.
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I agree, I wish they would have put the same effort into it that SE did to Final Fantasy 14. A real shame it had a lot of potential.
 
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mkopec

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Hekotat said:
I agree, I wish they would have put the same effort into it that SE did to Final Fantasy 14. A real shame it had a lot of potential.
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I seem to remeber a few months after launch, after taking a big shit on this game, most of the management and director left the company .Maybe they knew deep down that it was an un-salvageable mess. This was a big budget game too. Was supposed to be the Destiny killer. This was one of THE premier western RPG game companies of the late 90s early 2Ks too. All fucking ruined by mismanagement and letting the woke purple hairs in the building. You go to their web site and all you see is their legacy on display. 10-20 yr old games with nothing of note since. What a shame.
 
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sakkath

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I would say it was mostly ruined by management trying to turn it into a microtransaction cash cow. I remember reading a post mortem on Anthem and towards the end there was a lot of management pressure towards creating spaces in the game where players could stand around and see other players so they would ooh/aah over cosmetics and want to spend $ to get it.
Instead of focussing on the issues the base game (which was very good) had such as itemization and endgame content.
 
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Ambiturner

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mkopec said:
I seem to remeber a few months after launch, after taking a big shit on this game, most of the management and director left the company .Maybe they knew deep down that it was an un-salvageable mess. This was a big budget game too. Was supposed to be the Destiny killer. This was one of THE premier western RPG game companies of the late 90s early 2Ks too. All fucking ruined by mismanagement and letting the woke purple hairs in the building. You go to their web site and all you see is their legacy on display. 10-20 yr old games with nothing of note since. What a shame.
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That's crazy, though, because I don't think it was unsalvagable at all.

Add more content, tone down the forced and pointless out of suit stuff, fix some of the broken shit, learn how to itemize and you got something solid you can milk with DLCs and cosmetic mtx's like Destiny

They even announced they were going that route until abruptly saying "on second thought, fuck this game"
 
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mkopec

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sakkath said:
I would say it was mostly ruined by management trying to turn it into a microtransaction cash cow. I remember reading a post mortem on Anthem and towards the end there was a lot of management pressure towards creating spaces in the game where players could stand around and see other players so they would ooh/aah over cosmetics and want to spend $ to get it.
Instead of focussing on the issues the base game (which was very good) had such as itemization and endgame content.
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Thats the thing though, what you say didnt make sense from that standpoint either. Because in the city you didnt stand around with your suits showing off your wares and paint jobs, no, you ran around without your suit. And micros at the beginning were all about the suits if memory serves me. The thing about micros is you cannot force them either. Build a solid good game and people will come and people will spend. They only need to look to their past game, SWTOR which prolly made a billion by now.
 
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mkopec

mkopec

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Ambiturner said:
That's crazy, though, because I don't think it was unsalvagable at all.

Add more content, tone down the forced and pointless out of suit stuff, fix some of the broken shit, learn how to itemize and you got something solid you can milk with DLCs and cosmetic mtx's like Destiny

They even announced they were going that route until abruptly saying "on second thought, fuck this game"
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Depends what was under the hood, right? Im not a dev but I have a feeling the shit was pretty messed up if they just decided to let it die and cut their losses.
 
rhinohelix

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mkopec said:
Thats the thing though, what you say didnt make sense from that standpoint either. Because in the city you didnt stand around with your suits showing off your wares and paint jobs, no, you ran around without your suit. And micros at the beginning were all about the suits if memory serves me. The thing about micros is you cannot force them either. Build a solid good game and people will come and people will spend. They only need to look to their past game, SWTOR which prolly made a billion by now.
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That was a big part of the design problem, I think: How do you monetize something that people didn't get to see you wearing, that only you spent time looking at unless you were on the fucked up world maps with them?

It was that disconnect that they couldn't bridge; they had one social area where you could wear your suit pre-mission but it was so lame, no one I knew ever used it. It was either random or premade, and the natural of travel made it so it was hard to see/visually track people outside the combat areas.

As others stated, the game needed a FFXIV style rebuild from the ground up. Get rid of bouncy castle limited Travel, the weird fucked up terrain world, optimize loading times, make the math work. Diverse terrain, sure, but the whole paradigm of "its fucked up so you can do amazing things" ease off the pipe, smokey. You can have diverse terrain and still give a sense of place, paths, and landmarks to the world. Much like Destiny, you didn't need other cities to make the world feel big but what did need to do is give a reason why the players didn't go there. In Destiny, its the Last City. In Anthem, there were other cities that I recall but the player never went there. There were other empires of humans. I am sure there story based reasons. "storms"

The Colossus ("The Heavy") was one of my favorite classes in any game ever. Anyway. TLDR its dead, the game could have been great if they had spent another couple of years optimizing the code and working out the narrative and design issues. For lots of reasons, Bioware isn't what it used to be /sigh.
 
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sakkath

sakkath

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mkopec said:
Thats the thing though, what you say didnt make sense from that standpoint either. Because in the city you didnt stand around with your suits showing off your wares and paint jobs, no, you ran around without your suit. And micros at the beginning were all about the suits if memory serves me. The thing about micros is you cannot force them either. Build a solid good game and people will come and people will spend. They only need to look to their past game, SWTOR which prolly made a billion by now.
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That's why they wasted all of that time after launch implementing that space where you stand around in your suit. Not the city, some other instanced area, I forget what it was called. You could launch missions from there and some other stuff but it was really half arsed/rushed. And they wasted time on that nonsense instead of adding content or implementing the itemization changes earlier (which they apparently did eventually but it was too late by then).
 
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goishen

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Well, one ideology that I hope to never hear again is, "Looking good makes you feel good."

wat? That's just so fucking dense it's just ugh.

The marketing for this shit show of a game was rife with it.
 
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