Anthem called Early Access by Developers now

[Michael]

After reading what happened, you're almost left with the sense that the game is incredible for the actual time put into it. I mean, if they can do that in 18 months, imagine what 6 years of development efficiency could have been. It's almost like ... they could have delivered what they were trying to promise (and more).

i read its more like 5 years (from design to release) (Since release of ME3)

 

[Phil]

I am not anti-EA just to be clear, I like many of EA's games I still buy NHL almost every year and yes NHL19 was really bad but over the past few decades EA has also created some of my favorite games as well. I still think a large reason game companies push unfinished bad products out the door early is because we the consumers buy them before we play them, their sales sky rocket in pre-purchase/pre-order phase and so they figure what the hell just ship it people are going to buy it anyways and 2 months later when were all sitting here on the forums bitching the bottom line is Anthem made them money and it wouldn't shock me right now the way things are going if Anthem gets scrapped entirely before the year is out. I mean 2 months and look at the internal strife and inconsistency on their press releases they can't even decide what the games current status is and how to proceed, smells like another epic disaster with Anthem being shut down within a years time.

 

[Lorddarthvik]

After seeing many articles and videos titled "Anthem is dead" I came here to see what the more optimist crowd of you guys had to say about it. Sadly I see those titles weren't that far off after all.

@Harkonan
But can you blame ppl for buying into the hype of cg trailers and flashy promises, when you are here on this forum for the exact same reason? LoL


It's up to the devs to deliver on what they've sold you on with cg trailers and to keep their flashy promises , and you have every right to bitch about it if they don't.
If it weren't a video game but a physical product or something other, they would get sued and fined into oblivion for misleading advertisement or fraud...
Yet just because it's a video game, those who didn't get what they were sold on are told to shut up and get over it cos it's a video game and so it's all justified somehow.


Unless the shouting gets much louder via Not Paying for crap half finished games like F76 and Anthem, the cycle of pushing out crap games while attacking the disillusioned buyers/blaming the fans will continue and we will be all worse off for it.

Too bad to see Anthem turned out to be what it is, I wasn't aware of the apparently overhyped features, and could only see it for the "cheap destiny clone with iron man suits" that it is (only thanks to my ignorance and laziness to catch up on the promises and hype). I would have liked it to be better received overall, I might have considered buying it.
I like flying iron man style and shooting stuff just like the next guy, so I guess it's a question of wait and see.
Comparing Anthem to No man's lie doesn't leave me with much hope though lol

 

[Montoya]

After seeing many articles and videos titled "Anthem is dead" I came here to see what the more optimist crowd of you guys had to say about it. Sadly I see those titles weren't that far off after all.

Its true, but the reasons will vary.

I have a lot to say on this topic and I said most of it in my last video on Anthem.

I disagreed with a lot of haters early on because its all subjective based on what kind of games you like.

I played 2hrs of NMS (after it was fixed) and found it incredibly boring, while others love the game style and still play to this day.

I found Anthem extremely enjoyable. The first 20hrs of the story line was good, not great, but good. There were obviously problems, broken timelines, corners cut and areas you can see needed a lot more polish like changing weapons at the forge (now fixed, you can do it at any point without returning to Fort Tarsis).

Some very basic QoL fixes have been implemented like the horrible loading screen issues. Again, the loading screens were not the breaking point for me, but they were for others.

My biggest problem with Anthem is that this is supposed to be a game as a service. Its not a 50hr game, it is supposed to be something I can log into and play every day. I had a lot of fun for the first 100hrs playing with other TESTies, we had a solid 20-30 TESTies in there every single night.

Hours 100-250 were spent maxing out all the Javelins, and this is where the problems begin to really take a toll. The loot issue, which is STILL not fixed, throws you against a progression wall. If you can't improve your Javelin after 3-4hrs of play, there is less incentive to log in the next day.

My play time dropped from 3hrs, to 1hr to just logging in and run a Stronghold for 20min... not get any better loot.. and log off.

I have not logged back in for weeks and probably will not unless something major changes to make it worth my while.

This is their problem now, even the most hardcore of fans are not logging in because the momentum has been lost. It will take something spectacular to get them back.

I hate to call Anthem "dead", but its definitely not in a good shape. The biggest risk is that EA and Bioware see no way to save it and move onto the next project, which is probably something they are already discussing IMO.

All that said, I still think Anthem is one of the more beautiful games design wise. The traversal and level design are incredible! Game play is smooth and easy for new players to learn. There are so many things they did right, but they are greatly overshadowed by the massive incompetence of player agency and progression design.

I hope they can save it, but the longer it takes, the less financial sense it makes for Bioware and EA.

 

[Phil]

Even worse now as some of the top dev's for Anthem have been reallocated to DA4, this game is just about dead and I honestly give it a year before its completely yanked off the servers as EA will not want to invest time and labor into a game that won't bring in new revenue, The damage is done, the articles and negative feedback, the scores this game generated have demolished any hopes this game may have had, anyone looking at Anthem will see the reviews and scores and unless its under 20$ no one will touch it.

This is what I mean when a company launches a title and it fizzles and dies in the first month, the damage is to great to sustain even if they announced some big expansion or fix down the road many of us would not even give it a 2nd chance unless we are so bored or have absolutely nothing else on our radar we won't even touch it because the company screwed its consumer base with lies, manipulation and down right false advertisement.

Anthem could have been great but once again the corporations and profit oriented priorities sunk another title and will go down as one of the worst in the past 10 years.

 

[NaffNaffBobFace]

All I know is a bunch of us called this out early on and we were attacked for it, now after some articles are posted everyone understands why we were so frustrated and animated about the whole thing, we saw this for what it was an unfinished, unpolished beta test passed to the consumer at full price.

I love BioWare, yes they made a huge mistake whether that was their fault or EA's it doesn't matter its not just EA and BioWare doing this there are loads of companies selling crap to the consumer and banking on it by offering early release bonus rewards, season passes, early access etc.... were creating our own problems by buying these games before waiting on the reviews, I am as guilty as the next person I am eager to play them and bored off my ass so I spend money on a game I might not have paid full price for if I had known what the end game was going to be. If I had known 1 month into Anthem I would never play it again I never would have paid full price knowing how bad the end game is, period. Promises were made, video's were shown that were not in the game and that to me is just borderline fraud at this point.

Anyways, its sad but its only going to get worse as companies have figured out how to sell their junk without people knowing how bad it is till its to late, or we as consumers have to outsmart them and stop pre-ordering, pre-purchasing their junk until reliable reviews are made available and put it back on the companies to produce quality products.

this is true, people were in disbelief and I wouldnt say attacked. That is a pretty stretch, we talked about it and there were people who disagreed with our views, no one attacked anyone.

Sirs, I recall the conversation and I will eat my previous words where I took a counterpooint to your observations and concerns.

You called it well and were not wrong, who knew this was going to come from such a trusted and well established studio? You did. I am not ashamed to retract my previous comments - I feel I have learned a good lesson here :)



EDIT - Just got to the part of the thread where it says about no apologies, I want it noted that I apologised before seeing that!

 

[Radegast74]

Its a mix of both.

We know that publishers turn the screws hard and need a solid release date for projects. There can't be indefinite delays or long periods of polish. However, with Anthem, it was 75% Bioware's fault, and the other 25% being EA forcing a hard deadline.

Told you all BioWare is a rotted corpse of a once great company.

It definitely is a mix of shared responsibility for this crap. I would like to think Bioware could/would bounce back, but at this point, I don't think there is really anybody left at Bioware from the old days (?). The creative DNA and leadership seems to be gone. Unless they worked hard to instill that DNA into the culture, but I highly doubt that...

...I was astounded to have read in the Kotaku article that *nobody* had played the game before they released it. How could that be possible? Right at the time I read that, I was reading old fan stuff about Super Metroid (I'm old!) and maybe this is a Japanese thing, but everybody (!) on the production team **had** to play the game and complete it. Even the cute lass who wrote the music (her time: "about 3:30" with "about 98% completion" ... holy cow!).

Link for those interested: https://www.metroid-database.com/old_site/sm/interview.php
Excerpt:

Running a meeting? What do you mean?

Osawa: Those in the staff not familiar with the game had to run through it from start to finish.

Sakamoto: It was kind of a debug. Everyone could see the game. That way, everyone could watch an unskilled player play it.

Osawa: We went too far! (Laughs) Or to put it another way, it was our reference for making changes.

Sakamoto: Because if it could teach us, why wouldn't we do it? If we compromise, two months of hell might become one month. I wanted to fix this problem, but maybe I didn't. I had to make the puzzles shallow so as not to hurt someone who didn't understand them.