Anthem - EA’s next PR disaster after BF 5

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Basketball Jones said:
I feel like they just described a really common thing in video games and tried to make it sound unique. @_blank_ you mentioned not messing with it that much, but did you ever feel it was imbalanced in any way?
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Yeah, what I've seen thus far is pretty standard fare for your usual shoot & loot game: you standard with some basic weapons, you go out, kill some things, and sometimes they'll drop a nicer gun. Complete the mission and then you get access to said weapon (you can't hotswap in-mission however. So it's more akin to -surprise- a Mass Effect game than it would be Borderlands).

One other option you can do is with crap drops you can break 'em down for parts and have the weaponsmith/blacksmith put together for you a nicer toy. No idea if you have to acquire weapon blueprints or something, but I believe that's the general idea. Again, nothing amazing or innovative here.

But yeah that blurb is just complete pure pablum. I could say the exact same thing for freaking Earth Defense Force. And the "feeling strong from the start" is because the game at least in the early onset doesn't provide much of a challenge if you're used to playing games like Destiny or Mass Effect or Just Cause, or, well, Earth Defense Force where it's typically you versus 10-20 baddies trying to murder you simultaneously. If anything, playing it solo, the whole thing got very boring very quickly.
 
Fuzhou said:
So last night I gave the beta a shot on both Xbox (One X because why not) and my PC (1050 ti, Ryzen 5 1600 and 16 GB of DDR4-2666 RAM) and shockingly, medium settings got me a solid 30FPS but anything lower and it looked like ass, and anything more and my PC was shitting itself.

It seemingly is like a mix of Medium and High settings on One X from what I can tell, sadly, my capture card doesn't come until Monday so i can't tell if it is those settings via pixel peeping but hey.
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Frostbite is one of the worst engines of all time, of course the game is ugly and runs like ass.
 
Raging Capybara said:
Frostbite is one of the worst engines of all time, of course the game is ugly and runs like ass.
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It didn't used to be this bad though. The Bad Company games ran really well, and BC2 was pretty well optimized.
Also, Mirror's Edge Catalyst didn't run like ass like this does.
 
Sinners Sandwich said:
How can this fucking game already have 90(!!) awards. For what?? This is a big lie. These awards are worthless.
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Wait what?
It's like they aren't even trying any longer to hide how blatant this Award-shopping is. The only good thing about this is that it wastes a little bit of money via the "marketing" budget on top of the production cost.
 
RomanesEuntDomus said:
The only thing that could save this is if the story and the character interactions are really good later on in the game, but chances of that are slim at best.
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Banking on Bioware to write a good story

:stress:

BigRuler said:
that's the wrongest opinion ever
baldurs gate 2 is one of the best classic PC RPGs ever created, and they have plenty of other games under their belt that range from good to great (neverwinter nights, mass effect, jade empire, knights of the old republic, ...)
hate on modern bioware all you want, but nobody can seriously deny their past achievements
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Reach into antiquity to make them look good.
 
Whenever EA wants to put down a studio, they force them to make a game in a genre they don't excel in. That's how they killed Westwood. Maybe Bioware has become an embarassment since Andromeda.
 
Ruin said:
So I tried the demo and my number one question is why the fuck is this game so ugly? The mecha's look alright but environments and character textures look like they're from a PS2 game. Could they not pay someone to create or hell even buy high quality stock models for 100 million?
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Did they shift the same art people from Andromeda over to this?
 
RomanesEuntDomus said:
Wait what?
It's like they aren't even trying any longer to hide how blatant this Award-shopping is. The only good thing about this is that it wastes a little bit of money via the "marketing" budget on top of the production cost.
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It's the one of the first things in the Trailer. They think gamers are idiots.

Nepper, Schlepper Bauernfaenger.
 
Ruin said:
So I tried the demo and my number one question is why the fuck is this game so ugly? The mecha's look alright but environments and character textures look like they're from a PS2 game. Could they not pay someone to create or hell even buy high quality stock models for 100 million?
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It reflects a deeper problem with the art direction, which is essentially incoherent. I can't tell what flavour of sci-fi it's trying to be: It's like a crude mixture of Destiny, Firefly and Avatar.
 
The problem is I don't think EA's reputation has recovered. The announcement of a Titanfall fucking F2P Battle Royale (WITH NO FUCKING TITANS LOL) is NOT going to help Anthem. It feels like EA wants Bioware dead and can't just outright destroy them.

RJ MacReady said:
It reflects a deeper problem with the art direction, which is essentially incoherent. I can't tell what flavour of sci-fi it's trying to be: It's like a crude mixture of Destiny, Firefly and Avatar.
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The art direction is bland as fuck.

Compare that to Warframe's Fortuna Introduction:


Its like a fucking musical. Its goddamn amazing. But the art direction for Warframe, in general is fucking gorgeous. I know I'm pimping Warframe a lot, but I'd rather people play a good looter shooter than this soulless shit driven by EA and a shell of Bioware who can no longer do good games.
 
RJ MacReady said:
It reflects a deeper problem with the art direction, which is essentially incoherent. I can't tell what flavour of sci-fi it's trying to be: It's like a crude mixture of Destiny, Firefly and Avatar.
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That's kind of one of my biggest hangups with the central hub - the fact that the entire time I was there it felt like there was no real organization to it and it was just a bunch of ideas thrown together despite whether or not if they made any sense.

For example, let's think back to the Normandy in the Mass Effect trilogy. Things were laid out in a fairly understandable way. Crew cabins were in the crew cabins, the chef was in the mess hall, Joker was piloting the ship, just basic common sense stuff. Everything had a disciplined, feel to it, and the art style and the ships interior architecture gave the feeling that you were above to do some deep sci-fi adventuring.

In Anthem however... I have no idea what is going on. You first spawn in what looks like a castle basement, where there's seems to be some kind of virtual training in one small room to the side and then like an open-air market just a few steps away, again, in some basement. Is this important? I don't know. You head topside through some doors that seems to be influence my Middle East architecture, just stitched into a 16th century medieval fortress, in the middle of a foreign space jungle. There are seemingly more open-air markets, what looks like cafe tables where there are people "talking," and some guy perched above what I assume is a barbeque pit, but he's perched in such a fashion that it makes about as much sense as trying to drive a car from the backseat with broom handles. And then at the edge of the market is where Zoe the mechanic is working on your javelin. It's just... there. Not in some garage or any place that even says "javelin mechanic." it's just... there in the middle of everything. Nothing makes sense!
 
_blank_ said:
In Anthem however... I have no idea what is going on. You first spawn in what looks like a castle basement, where there's seems to be some kind of virtual training in one small room to the side and then like an open-air market just a few steps away, again, in some basement. Is this important? I don't know. You head topside through some doors that seems to be influence my Middle East architecture, just stitched into a 16th century medieval fortress, in the middle of a foreign space jungle. There are seemingly more open-air markets, what looks like cafe tables where there are people "talking," and some guy perched above what I assume is a barbeque pit, but he's perched in such a fashion that it makes about as much sense as trying to drive a car from the backseat with broom handles. And then at the edge of the market is where Zoe the mechanic is working on your javelin. It's just... there. Not in some garage or any place that even says "javelin mechanic." it's just... there in the middle of everything. Nothing makes sense!
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Oh no, it sounds like Zion from The Matrix if Zion were made by complete morons.

Zion at least had a setup which vaguely made sense, you had the main living area, the meeting cave, the docklands and their defences...
 
So is this a bomb yet? Seems like it's the closest thing we'll get to a AAA rendition of Lawbreakers/Radical Heights.
 
That Chris Guy said:
So is this a bomb yet? Seems like it's the closest thing we'll get to a AAA rendition of Lawbreakers/Radical Heights.
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We won't know for a week and then some when reviews start dropping and claims about sales figures start swirling around, but I expect it will be extremely underwhelming in both respects. There's almost no hype for this game. The most people I've seen talking about it at one time was during its E3 announcement and even then the general feeling on Twitch and Twitter was "Destiny clone".
 
Ponderous Pillock said:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=CPikVHsQTu8
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This is so weird.
The hub has a bunch of NPCs and there's many details in the background, yet it looks so... lifeless. "Sterile" might not be the right word, but it looks so barren. Do you guys know what I'm talking about?
The environment looks lush and even though the mix of styles clashes a little, it's not bad in and of itself. It's interesting to look at, but it still is somehow lackluster. Nothing really draws the eye. I guess it's too much noise, so overall it just looks like a clusterfuck.
When the player is flying around with those rocket engines or when he's blowing up tons of enemies with that missile launcher, that should be fucking badass... but the flying around looks so boring and uneventful. The combat, too, looks wrong. There's abilities that make the whole valley explode in bright red plumes of fire, yet the attacks don't feel like they really pack a punch.

Is this just my bias? There's everything that should make a game that at least looks cool from a gameplay vid, but it looks bland and strangely boring.

The flying around looks really lame and I don't even understand how flying around in a power-armor could ever be so unappealing.
I mean, I played several hundreds of hours in Elite Dangerous and I still enjoy manually docking or just flying from A to B.
And this game looks like it's tedious to fly around in a power-armor for a minute in comparison. How?
When it comes to the illusion of a breathing, living game world, I can't understate how amazing Kingdom Come: Deliverance works for me. That game just feels alive with the tiny things that NPCs do at every turn. This game, on the other hand, looks like it's populated by mannequins that flap their jaws at each other before they stagger on to the next spot where they just awkwardly stand to flap their jaw some more.

I really don't understand Anthem at all. There's everything to make a decent game (an amazing one, even), I even somewhat enjoy the mishmash of designs with the oriental buildings, the futuretech and so on... but it invokes absolutely no feelings whatsoever.
It's like lukewarm tapwater.
 
The problem is they initially marketed and sold Anthem as a "Classic Bioware experience" so big on story, big on worldbuilding, big on those "little moments" and flavouring.

It's obviously shaping up to be none of those things.
 
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