Anthem - EA’s next PR disaster after BF 5

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RomanesEuntDomus said:
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.
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When he first went to fly out it took me 10 seconds to realize that the ‚open world‘ is basically divided into 3 or 4 paths you can take.

Style over substance
 
RomanesEuntDomus said:
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.
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The water effects (waterfalls, flowing rivers, etc.) look pretty good to me (but I'm a sucker for good water effects in a game), and rocking a pink/gold colossus was entertaining, but the art design is a mess and it's all just a big scrambled egg of color.

RomanesEuntDomus said:
The flying around looks really lame and I don't even understand how flying around in a power-armor could ever be so unappealing.
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The flight controls are fucking awful. They're somehow floaty and hyper-sensitive at the same time. Actually steering the fucking thing is nearly impossible. I cannot believe someone at the studio played it with these controls and decided "yup! This is great! Perfect for a demo!"
 
Disrespected Pronouns said:
Every time you see something form this future bomb, remember that the incredibly dumb per-announcement hype was this was going to be the "Bob Dylan of Video Games."
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Bob Dylan's horrible voice rapes my ears and this rapes my eyes so it's not the world's worst metaphor.
 
I had a good time with the demo, when it wasn't crashing to shit. Once I tweaked the control settings so that I wasn't crashing into walls constantly, it was fun going around like Iron Man and raining missiles down on everything. The suit abilities were where the fun was, as the guns were fairly generic. It would've helped a lot if they'd gone Borderlands goofy with the guns to liven them up; as it was I only resorted to using the guns when the better attacks were on cooldown. Also the big suit amused me constantly since you can deploy a huge-ass tower shield and then rocket boost trample things in your way.

Better than Warframe? Well. The flying is better; Warframe's flying stages suck balls and I die inside whenever it makes me use the archwings. And being able to rocket overhead, hover, and then start hurling fireballs into a fight is a more fun use of the third dimension than Warframe's maps. But Warframe has better guns, a couple dozen suits instead of four, and doesn't cost sixty bucks.
 
Fuzhou said:
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.
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That's because Frostbite was purpose-built to make Battlefield-style games, and because Mirror's Edge Catalyst was made by the same studio, so they had familiarity to tweak it to work for Mirror's Edge.

The problem with EA's obsession with forcing the engine on all their other studios is that Frostbite frequently lacks features necessary to make games in a non-FPS genre, and those studios are forced to develop the engine themselves, with what I assume is some token level of assistance from the experts at DICE. So the engine becomes increasingly unstable as more and more cooks are shoved into the metaphorical kitchen.
 
I wonder how the story is supposed to be told in this game. The main location (the Fort) is a solo session while the missions are based on forced co-op/matchmaking. The live service model is the enemy of storytelling.

RomanesEuntDomus said:
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?
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The game has no soul. The hub from the E3 demo felt more alive, the NPC engineer looked like a proper mecanic instead of a NPC from ME:A. The fact that Bioware never thought about having a social area in the game is just unbelievable.

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.
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There's no art direction. The javelin classes don't look like they belong in the same universe. The Interceptor looks like a Warframe. I had fun with the Storm javelin though, it felt like an adept from Mass Effect.
I find it sad that Bioware went with a middle-eastern theme for their Fort. Bungie already did it with the Tower in Destiny 2 (every female NPC wear a hijab). There's no social hub, the world outside of the Fort is empty, no amount of rock formations and trees will hide that.
 
Ponderous Pillock said:
The problem is the issue of cost. Really, most summer blockbusters we should be paying $80-90 for the base game with how much money, tech, skills etc actually go into it. This is the first reason monetization became a thing to try and cover that gap using whales instead of the general consumer.
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You make a good point. We should just pay more for shitty games.

In reality, that logic is terrible. If they were somehow actually losing money on game sales, then they need to spend less money making the damn games. People generally don't want to pay more than 60 bux for a new game, and even that's a ridiculously high price point. Who the fuck asked for AAAAAAAA graphics and motion capture and a multi-million dollar advertising campaign?

The fact that smaller publishers manage to make money without charging 90 dollars for their games shows that EA should be able to manage that as well.
 
Corbin Dallas Multipass said:
You make a good point. We should just pay more for shitty games.

In reality, that logic is terrible. If they were somehow actually losing money on game sales, then they need to spend less money making the damn games. People generally don't want to pay more than 60 bux for a new game, and even that's a ridiculously high price point. Who the fuck asked for AAAAAAAA graphics and motion capture and a multi-million dollar advertising campaign?

The fact that smaller publishers manage to make money without charging 90 dollars for their games shows that EA should be able to manage that as well.
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Not what I said at all. Nearly everything else in our lives has gone up due to inflation. Guess what hasn't?

Vidya. Your average game cost $50 in 1990. Still costs $50 today, some 29 years on.


By inflation alone we should be paying $80-90 per game. Which is the $50-60 we pay now after inflation from the 90s. EA has several golden child franchises it won't have pried from it's cold, clammy hands which it could easily slap that higher price tag on, cut the microtransaction bullshit out totally, give people the full game and just go "Ah but it's officially licensed." and your average consumer will just nod and accept it. They do for every other "officially licensed" product and that goes double for sports and star wars fans.

The reason the smaller studios typically make money is because they're not using as expensive stuff or have smaller overheads as all non-legacy companies do. In EA's case they have daddy shareholder to answer to as well which adds easier ways of getting finance but also different complications.
 
The only thing I'm getting out of this is that EA and most other large publishers just suck at efficient management. Isn't there a blog from one of the makers of Mafia 2, where he talks about how bloated video game companies have become, where you have several groups of people working against each other at any given time?
You used to have 1 or 2 guys writing a story for a game that was 20 hours long with complete worldbuilding and branching storylines and sidequests. Nowadays, you have several groups of writers making a 4hour campaign for "brown-and-bloom #1237834" shooter, where all the protagonist does is walking from A to B while mowing down mooks.

I would almost believe that the largest aspect of the costs is the graphic fidelity, but companies reuse old engines for decades, so it#s anyone's guess where all the money goes to. Modeling some bald space marine shouldn't cost you millions in the three digit range.
 
I paid the dollar for a month of EA's subscription thing to see how the launch goes. As a bonus, it lets me play Titanfall 2 in the interim, which I'd meant to get to but never bought. I'm a person who actually enjoyed playing Division, however, so I think I have a higher pain threshold for sorta-plain shooters than most. But oddly I've never felt much incentive to play the Destiny series, when lots of people are saying Anthem is basically a Destiny clone. I even got Destiny 2 for free back when Activision was offering the base game, I should probably get off my ass and install it one of these days.
 
If a studio gets bought by EA, it's kinda like having a parasite that's impossible to remove.
neural said:
I think EA has pretty much lost all of its ability to make an interesting game. So it's a very hard pass from me.

I think the last EA game I bought for myself with true and honest enthusiasm (as in not merely picking it up for someone else) was the original Dead Space, and even back then, interesting EA games have been very few and far between. I legit can't wait for this company to go down entirely, even fucking Activision can occasionally come up with a game that interests me (Crash trilogy remake).

It's an absolute shame what EA is doing to game studios, that's the real loss here imo. Like them or not, Bioware used to be a very talented and capable studio, so was Visceral Games, and Westwood, and Pandemic and and and..etc etc.
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Well, there was Shadows of the Damned...

Yeah that's kinda it.
Ponderous Pillock said:
The first Dragon Age had three years of worldbuilding before they even began development. DA2 had a year deadline.... start to finish.

I don't even fucking like Dragon Age but even that is such a huge pile of bullshit.
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It's like that quote "You have your whole life to write your debut album, and 12 months to write the next one."
Disrespected Pronouns said:
Every time you see something form this future bomb, remember that the incredibly dumb per-announcement hype was this was going to be the "Bob Dylan of Video Games."
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...It varies between brilliant and baffling?
 
Ponderous Pillock said:
The first Dragon Age had someone who had a legit PHD in Mythos and ancient history or some shit like that. The woman's name escapes me.

The second one had Hamburger Helper in it.

The first Dragon Age had three years of worldbuilding before they even began development. DA2 had a year deadline.... start to finish.

I don't even fucking like Dragon Age but even that is such a huge pile of bullshit.
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Keep in mind that worldbuilding is essentially building a lane for the series to go through, you're not gonna sit down and remake an entirely new world every single time you make an installment for the series, that would be too time-consuming.
 
neural said:
Keep in mind that worldbuilding is essentially building a lane for the series to go through, you're not gonna sit down and remake an entirely new world every single time you make an installment for the series, that would be too time-consuming.
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No, but I strongly suspect had she remained on board after DA:O we'd have not had the retarded "we choose out gender" changes to those horned dudes.
 
neural said:
Keep in mind that worldbuilding is essentially building a lane for the series to go through, you're not gonna sit down and remake an entirely new world every single time you make an installment for the series, that would be too time-consuming.
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That's true. With that said, Dragon Age 2 took place in a setting not seen in the first game and only mentioned in the DLC expansion. I'm assuming they didn't plan out Kirkwall's layout, civics, history, etc, when they were planning Ferelden and the lore seen in Origins, based solely on how poorly thought out the end result was in Dragon Age 2. That year deadline might not have been the only reason the series went to shit but it did not help anything.

Ponderous Pillock said:
No, but I strongly suspect had she remained on board after DA:O we'd have not had the exceptional "we choose out gender" changes to those horned dudes.
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Last time I looked on the official Bioware forums, they constantly talk about that and all sorts of degenerate garbage. If your wondering why Bioware games are now cringey dating sims with awful gameplay, part of that is because EA knows they need to appeal to the people who make up their official forums.

Don't believe me? Take a look at this as an example, and imagine a whole community made up of people like him.

Talis sweat autism.jpg
 
Henk Hill said:
Last time I looked on the official Bioware forums, they constantly talk about that and all sorts of degenerate garbage. If your wondering why Bioware games are now cringey dating sims with awful gameplay, part of that is because EA knows they need to appeal to the people who make up their official forums.

Don't believe me? Take a look at this as an example, and imagine a whole community made up of people like him.

View attachment 658579
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Huh, that is some world-class spergery right there..
 
We are talking about people who willingly subject themselves to stuff like this:
without dying of shame.

And Bioware is trying to pander to these people...
 
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