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.

1 hour ago, BasemntDweller2 said:

 

 

The review is on point. Thats about what I'd score it. 

Yep, me too. 

4 hours ago, Xbob42 said:

I think part of the issue is weighing what you wanted the game to be because it's Bioware, with what the game clearly was going to be based on literally everything we saw and heard about it. This wasn't No Man's Sky where everyone was wondering what the hell you were going to do in the game, this was clearly a looter-shooter from the get-go. How do you reconcile that disconnect without it just seeming like you're whining that Bioware made a game you don't like? "Bioware made the wrong game" is such an arrogant and dismissive statement, it's a total asshole thing to say. Maybe it's even right! But are they never allowed to try something new? We assume a lot of EA influence, but are we sure this just isn't a thing Bioware was really passionate about on their own? "A fantasy sci-fi Iron Man game" sounds a helluva lot like a Bioware concept.

 

It's completely fair to be disappointed a company didn't make a game you wanted, and to wonder about what it could've been. But I think to some extent that shit needs to be left at the door when you start making a review. Reference their past work, tell us what you thought about it, but your musings on what they should've done (outside of how this game could be better, not them simply making a different game) are just really audacious filler. Something best left to message boards, not reviews. Imagine if we got that with every review -- just the reviewer taking 15 minutes to really tell us what game they should've made instead, rather than telling us what the game's problems are and where it succeeds/fails.

 

This game has an atrocious UI, the map is borderline useless, there's too many load screens, there needs to be more mission variety, the AI is pretty bad, the guns aren't very interesting, the first-person town stuff doesn't work as well as Destiny's third-person town, and the third-person social space is pretty bland and boring, the story is way way better than other looter-shooters, but is still pretty weak, the GM difficulties are simply sliders that scale enemy health and damage instead of fun modifiers (Motherfucker I am NOT the defense force) and plenty of other problems ranging from minor to pretty annoying.

Those are all real, tangible problems the game has that hopefully get improved ASAP. You do not need to add the fantasy game you could've had on top of that, or exaggerate existing problems because getting 50 melee kills somehow took you 9 hours instead of 5 minutes. When we exaggerate or create problems that are unfixable ("I wanted Mass Effect instead!" is not an actionable problem, I'm sorry) or outright make up issues, that detracts from the power and effectiveness of proper feedback and just becomes a shitting contest.

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. 

11 minutes ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

What I find so disengenuous about these “reviews” is they KNOW most of the people won’t be able to play the game until at the earliest 2/22, and they KNOW there is a huge day 1 patch addressing a fixing a bunch of stuff, yet they all seem to be rushing to get their videos finished before the patch and actual release. 

 

I get that that maybe some people were hyped thinking Anthem would have the content of a year 2 Division or Destiny title. I don’t know why they thought that, but I can see some thinking if any dev could do it, it would be BioWare. But it seems like there is not a willingness to allow Anthem a chance to grow. It either needed to be as good as Y3 Destiny, or not release at all. 

 

Just a a few hours in and there is more lore being explained and set up than all of Destiny 1 and the Division. I saw a guy on Inside Gaming saying he didn’t think the story in Anthem was that great because he was skipping through every conversation and dialog choice and has not felt like he was missing anything.  Except a fucking story it seems. 

 

Some me people are salty that BioWare made this over more Mass Effect, yet they are the same people that destroyed Andromeda over animations and visual bugs. I think they were people still pissed over ME3’s ending. 

 

I can understand telling people to wait if they felt Division and D1 and D2 were lacking at launch. But fans of both those games seem angry at Anthem and a yelling for people to never buy it. Just so they can go back to making their Destiny videos complaining that Bungie doesn’t listen to its community.  

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.

1 hour ago, Moa said:

 

I get being upset that Bioware is moving away from what you enjoyed about their games, but since the initial announcement of Anthem it has been crystal clear what type of game it is going to be. It sounds more like you wanted Anthem to be a game that you would like than you wanted to like Anthem.

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. 

2 hours ago, Man_of_X said:

 

Skill up is an intelligent guy that does well thought out reviews and videos for the most part.  He absolutely has a serious bias in this case though.  Also, he can go fuck himself for his snappy little thumbnail.  He doesn't need to do that with the subs he has and announcing to the interwebs that the game is garbage is not only inaccurate, but will definitely affect sales.  He is also not the only one that does this.  You only have to look at Arekkz for the correct way to do it.

 

I just want Bioware to get the same chance that Bungie had with Destiny (even though year one of that game should have killed the fuck out of it) and Massive had with the Division.  So fuck all of the youtubers that feel the need to wave that flag to the whole world instead of just putting a video up with their impressions where they can say whatever the fuck they want.  Again, with the subs they have, they don't need to do that.

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.

On 9/26/2018 at 1:11 AM, skillzdadirecta said:

Why exactly are people so down on this game?

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.