Dexterryu

"a narrative- and character-focused State Of Decay with a Far Cry level of freedom in approaching scenarios." This sounds really good to me. Like most of the previewers I had more or less written this one off, but the fact that almost all of the previews seemed to be saying the same good things means either the game is actually good (and better than we were all expecting) or the marketing team did an excellent job convincing them.

I've had this pre-ordered for a while. Glad to hear you guys are liking it and it's similar to Division, which I really enjoyed.

Yep, me too.

To continue to clarify... the actual gameplay I have very little issue with. It's the story/character interactions that I'm mostly disappointed with. As I explained... it feels like the publisher and developers had different ideas and tried to compromise. My opinion is that the game suffers because of it. My opinion is that if the game were more narrative driven and had the character interactions & choice that Bioware has been great at in the past that the action would feel more meaningful. I work in IT/Software development myself and if I'm seeing things correctly it's exactly the sort of thing that happens when a team has a product owner that's forcing decisions on the dev team. It's functional, but not what it could be.

I'm hopeful they can turn things around and give the game some character & heart. If EA supports the game like Ubisoft did with Division then players will stick with it/come back. Division launched in really bad shape technically, exploit/cheat-wise, and content-wise. 4-6 Weeks in the community shrank rapidly but after 1.8 was released many came back and still play. I hope Anthem does the same.

It's probably both. I played probably about 12-15 hours over the weekend (up to level 17 I think). I made my post more as a bit of a commentary to what IMHO, EA has done to Bioware. Through DA:I -> ME:A -> Anthem it's been a downhill trend that's drifted away from characters and story and more about checkbox/time-sink games designed to entice micro transactions.

I'll chime in here... I've been a Bioware fan dating back to the 90's with Baldur's gate. I REALLY wanted to like Anthem. I really want to like Anthem. The combat and flying around is fun... but the rest is not so much. When I look at DA:I, ME:A, and now Anthem I see the studio pulling further away from what made their past games great. I'm talking about the heart of the game. The characters and the way you can connect/interact with them. The way character interactions gives you choices that impacted the story of the game. The characters and interactions right now are a couple of binary choices that break up long winded monologues. The side characters hardly ever interact with each other and always seem to be standing in the same spot (nothing like the Normandy where walking through the ship you'd see various characters around having conversation about stuff that happened). I'd also argue the forced multiplayer component almost strips away the possibility for companion characters (and the usually fun intra-party banter) makes the missions/combat to feel more generic because it's just about the actions and less about the why. Matchmaking puts us with random people who mostly don't talk and typically want to race through missions and not explore. The story and missions feel like they were written to have characters along with you. In fact, the tutorial and first mission feel pretty darn good because they're basically single player. In light of these things, early "review in progress" comments that I've seen feel very accurate. This game feels like it was heavily influenced by executives picking from a list of cool ideas.

Subscribed to the $15/month of EA Access so I could play this game without paying the full price. Kinda glad I did that so far. I've played a bunch so far today and I am trying really hard to like it. So far it's just not clicking with me and and I can't figure out why. Not getting into the characters, the combo system is fun but the gunplay & combat outside of that is sorta meh. So far I've unlocked ranger & storm so maybe I just haven't found a Javelin that fits me yet.

How are the controls on PC for flying? Fixed from the demo?

While Origins wasn't as good as City, it was still a very good and fun game. I liked the counter-counter mechanic too. So definitely looking forward to this.

How are the PC Mouse controls for flying? When I played before they were way too touchy even at 0% sensitivity (like a 3" 360 on 400dpi). It was really hard to control.

I played it up to a point. Did the tutorial/intro stuff. After that could never get matchmaking to connect. Not sure how much we can say with the NDA.

Excellent article. I still use Steam and it's my prefered platform to download/manage games but I don't think much of them as a company anymore. They've had incredibly poor support for a long time. To hear that developers have the same problems is not a surprise.

Good decision, IMHO. The latest gameplay looks better than the last one but it needs to have some sort of stamina meeter so you can't just infinitely jog faster than the swarming zombies and kite them around/escape.

I like both as long as they aren't trying too hard. Witcher 3 and ME Trilogy nail it. Most Blizzard games do too. A good example of trying too hard was AC: Origins. There was a questline where an NPC had a kid that Bayak connected with... but that connection was shown for like 30 seconds. Then the next seen the local bad guy who I hadn't met yet somehow drowns the kid. All off screen. It's supposed to be sad/dark but the game didn't do much to build a connection with the characters for me to care. Conversely... look at the character development in a similar amount of time in Bloody Baron in TW3. They establish the characters, give you their background and motivations. You're much more connected to them so when stuff happens you're invested. Light/Humor is the same for me. Though I imagine this has more to do with taste. It's Seinfeld (which I like) vs Will Farrel slap-stick (which I usually just roll my eyes at).

This actually highlights some of my issues (minor) with the game. Though with you actually having been there I'd love to know your feelings on this. The game makes Greece seem more mountainous than it is... these pictures make it seem more hilly/than mountain. It's one of those things that drive me a little nuts in open world games (something that Witcher 3 and RDR did really well) and that's not adding unnecessary mountains/climbing. It's almost like silently padding the length of the game forcing you to either ride around/climb over a bunch of stuff.

I have it on my list of games to follow/buy, but the latest gameplay didn't impress me much. The Zombie horde doesn't seem to be too intimidating. That said, the last time they showed it (E3 2017?) it looked really good... almost like Horizon Zero Dawn(from a gameplay perspective) in a zombie apocalypse. So it's gone from a "must buy" to "I want to read reviews first".

I'm fairly far into it... I'm pretty luke warm on my thoughts so far. Feels like it has some pacing issues... I'm finding the towns with NPCs to be fairly boring. They probably should have made side quests doable while on the way to/in line with the main quest rather than on their own since they are basically just boring fetch/kill quests. There are parts that are fairly forced... like certain points where Lara loses her guns but isn't able to pick up the guns from fallen enemies so you're forced to force kill shotgun guys with a knife. The combat sections in the first two games felt like I had more options and more sandbox where this one they introduce a mechanic, have an in game tutorial where you use it in that section and then mostly don't use it again because of another mechanic they want you to use.

All digital for me now, especially now that Amazon Prime offers no benefit. 1) I hate the clutter of physical disks/cases 2) I hate having to switch disks to switch games. 3) Their is ALWAYS a discount to be found. 4) I never have to worry about scratches\losing my games. 5) I own the rights to them regardless of new PC/Console.

Usually 1 SP game at a time and then I have common MP games that I'll jump into with friends here and there (Overwatch, PUBG, Fortnite, Destiny 2)

Most COD single player games are short and fairly decent.

They can't review anything without injecting some liberal political slanted commentary anyway. I'm OK with whatever political opinions but it seems like they often go out of their way to find something to be offended about in any game.

The game looks great but without anywhere to get a pre-order discounts I'll just wait for the inevitable holiday sale. Not really missing out on anything by doing that with a single player only game.

Movement just seems slow... So does combat. I'm not really impressed at this point.

I'm not sure how I feel about this... If it's a good story all the way through with interesting characters like Witcher 3 then awesome. If it's just more and more unrelated missions, items to collect, etc... to pad out the length then I'm not excited at all to hear this.