General Gaming Anthem: Reddit fan survey indicates "over half" of the launch playerbase has permanently quit as BioWare lists multiple job positions for the game

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

BioWare hasn't revealed any official stats about the game's current userbase, though it did sell impressively in its first week, but a new player-run survey conducted through Reddit provides a clearer, yet somewhat disconcerting snapshot of Anthem's health two months after release.

 

BioWare has posted multiple positions for game designers that will focus on item creation, combat balance, store management/rewards pipeline, and loot systems.

[Xbob42]

Jesus Christ, Gamesradar can't be doing so hot itself, got like 5 ads at once on my phone screen. It's like 3:1 ratio of ads to content.

 

[JPDunks4]

I stopped playing til more content, which they are showing the new Stronghold tomorrow.  Still one new stronghold wont be quite enough, so I hope its more than that.

 

I also stopped playing Division 2 way quicker than i stopped playing Anthem though.  

[DarkStar189]

Haven't played Anthem for probably 3-4 weeks now.  Not sure when I'll circle back to it.

[Rev]

They cancelled the live stream about a half hour before it was due to start claiming that their fiber was cut. It's postponed an entire week. Pretty sad what's happened to this once promising game.

[crispy4000]

I'm sure they're bleeding players, but a Reddit poll is also far from scientific.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

7 minutes ago, crispy4000 said:

I'm sure they're bleeding players, but a Reddit poll is also far from scientific.

I originally did have "highly unscientific" in the title as a descriptor, but I naturally assumed that it would be redundant

[Mercury33]

I stopped playing till there’s more to do but I’d be back in a second if they can deliver on it. 

[Rodimus]

Never played it. Figured I would wait and see.

[Brick]

It'll be like Destiny: wait a year and there will be significant changes and additions making it worth a buy.

[Rev]

It needs to be reworked from the ground up I think. Seems the code is so convoluted they can't even make small changes without breaking a bunch of other things. The damage scaling of weapons decorrelates weapon damage numbers from the actual life bars of enemies so the numbers (and inscriptions on items/weapons) are basically super convoluted lies. Gameplay is super fun but there is so much broken in the game, I don't know if there's enough incentive there to justify them fixing it (since they already have our money and can't get more of it). I strongly suspect they'll drop support for the game soon.

[Man_of_X]

How does half of a fucking thousand people indicate half the player base?  While I would say that a good chunk of the player base has probably put it on pause until things improve, that article is literally saying nothing.

 

For me, they got my money and I don't regret it one bit.  I'll be with them to the end, but I can easily play something else until they sort things out.

 

As for saying the game is too broken to fix?  What the fuck is that?  Do we have some super secret knowledge of how this game was developed to say such a thing?  Somehow I think not.

 

The Division is the poster child for why you shouldn't give up or drop support for something like this.  The parallels to what Massive went through on D1 are almost identical.  Fantastic and detail world? Check.  Fun gameplay? Check.  Incredibly complex systems that are a real challenge to have working properly and not have something broken? Check.  Lacking content and meaningful things to do?  Check.  Fucked up loot situation at launch?  Check.

 

If given the chance, they'll fix it and it will end up in a really good place.  I don't know how you can just say fuck it to 6 years of development cost and abandon it.

[Rev]

3 minutes ago, Man_of_X said:

How does half of a fucking thousand people indicate half the player base?  While I would say that a good chunk of the player base has probably put it on pause until things improve, that article is literally saying nothing.

 

For me, they got my money and I don't regret it one bit.  I'll be with them to the end, but I can easily play something else until they sort things out.

 

As for saying the game is too broken to fix?  What the fuck is that?  Do we have some super secret knowledge of how this game was developed to say such a thing?  Somehow I think not.

 

The Division is the poster child for why you shouldn't give up or drop support for something like this.  The parallels to what Massive went through on D1 are almost identical.  Fantastic and detail world? Check.  Fun gameplay? Check.  Incredibly complex systems that are a real challenge to have working properly and not have something broken? Check.  Lacking content and meaningful things to do?  Check.  Fucked up loot situation at launch?  Check.

 

If given the chance, they'll fix it and it will end up in a really good place.  I don't know how you can just say fuck it to 6 years of development cost and abandon it.

Are you ok?

[Dexterryu]

2 hours ago, Man_of_X said:

How does half of a fucking thousand people indicate half the player base?  While I would say that a good chunk of the player base has probably put it on pause until things improve, that article is literally saying nothing.

 

For me, they got my money and I don't regret it one bit.  I'll be with them to the end, but I can easily play something else until they sort things out.

 

As for saying the game is too broken to fix?  What the fuck is that?  Do we have some super secret knowledge of how this game was developed to say such a thing?  Somehow I think not.

 

The Division is the poster child for why you shouldn't give up or drop support for something like this.  The parallels to what Massive went through on D1 are almost identical.  Fantastic and detail world? Check.  Fun gameplay? Check.  Incredibly complex systems that are a real challenge to have working properly and not have something broken? Check.  Lacking content and meaningful things to do?  Check.  Fucked up loot situation at launch?  Check.

 

If given the chance, they'll fix it and it will end up in a really good place.  I don't know how you can just say fuck it to 6 years of development cost and abandon it.

The difference with Division was that the publisher shoved the game out the door before Massive was ready. That's fairly well documented.

 

Looking at things we've heard from various sources it sounds like Anthem's problems are rooted from studio disfunction. I hope they turn Anthem around like the Division did, but I'm wouldn't predict it at this point.

[Rev]

29 minutes ago, Dexterryu said:

The difference with Division was that the publisher shoved the game out the door before Massive was ready. That's fairly well documented.

 

Looking at things we've heard from various sources it sounds like Anthem's problems are rooted from studio disfunction. I hope they turn Anthem around like the Division did, but I'm wouldn't predict it at this point.

Yeah, BW also recently dropped support for Andromeda and the way that unraveled was very similar to what we're seeing with Anthem now.

[atom631]

On 4/16/2019 at 7:21 PM, JPDunks4 said:

I stopped playing til more content, which they are showing the new Stronghold tomorrow.  Still one new stronghold wont be quite enough, so I hope its more than that.

 

I also stopped playing Division 2 way quicker than i stopped playing Anthem though.  

 

whats funny is i realized im pretty much tired of TD2 also. Even though there is a ton of content.... the loot sucks. Yellow are just not exciting to get , purples are useless, exotics are nonexistant and the green sets blow.  The last few sessions I would play for 2hrs for a marginal gain in stats. I dont want to theorycraft with spreadsheets and spend hours in the shooting range equipping and unequipping gear to see what my DPS looks like. I just want to kill shit...and at the end of the day, TD2 gameplay is no where near as fun as Anthem. 

 

With that, your post prompted me to check playtimes. 66hrs in Anthem.  72hrs in TD2. 

 

 

[PaladinSolo]

I haven't played the division 2 at all, and the reason for that is the game just looks boring as shit to play, third person shooter filled with hip height walls and loot based in reality, but whatever.  With that said i think Anthem is a lost cause, it lacks a lot of basic RPG stuff like inventory management, weapon and gear stats are a number and then a bunch of percentage increases and unless you get one that increases damage by 150% or higher its not worth using, and because of that you don't actually know if the weapon is worth equipping till you go through like 5 minutes of load screens only to find out its not worth equipping and are stuck using shitty gear cause theres no inventory or having to go through another 10 minutes of loading to keep playing, then theres combos, they explode things die, no way to know how much damage any of it does cause the game literally just calls it a combo and is vastly stronger than any other weapon/ability in the game so it doesn't actually matter how much damage your weapons/gear do as long as you set yourself up to basically forever chain combos.  Add to all of this that content is getting pushed back, and lol.

 

I have 83 hours in Anthem and haven't touched it in weeks, you just hit a point even with legendaries dropping, that they either all suck or are barely an upgrade and theres really nothing to do with them even if you get a good one other than run the same content you just grinded for 83 hours.

[JPDunks4]

Anthem needs a lot of work for sure.  I don't regret the purchase, I am disappointed cause i think they could have had something really special if the development wasnt so F'ed up.  

 

I still hope they can fix things.  Don't know nearly enough about Development to be able to predict anything, but i don't think they will abandon it anytime soon.  Its pretty clear they were so quick to try to fix stuff that the updates were breaking more than they fixed cause of how rushed they were. 

[Man_of_X]

6 hours ago, Rev said:

Yeah, BW also recently dropped support for Andromeda and the way that unraveled was very similar to what we're seeing with Anthem now.

 

Andromeda wasn't a live service. And yes, I'm ok  lol.

[Dexterryu]

On 4/18/2019 at 9:59 PM, Man of Culture said:

The other difference is that Ubisoft has been consistently improving themselves and their games support over the years, going from "lol, look at how bad & glitchy their games are" to releasing massive, feature complete and actually good games with continued support and amazing community interaction. Bioware and EA don't have this going on and based on the recent Kotaku article, I would say that it's safe to write off Anthem as another Fallout 76.

The one critique I have of UBI right now is that their games are a bit... samey. AC/FC/Division all seem to be built around stronghold capture with lots of POI's to hit. Great open worlds but they are starting to feel like cookie cutters with a different coat of paint. That said, what they've been putting out the last few years have been technically solid and well built. Now I'd just like to see them start branching a bit, maybe adding some narrative. Hopefully Beyond Good and Evil 2 starts something on that front.

[Xbob42]

I dropped off of Anthem hard once it became apparent there wouldn't be any decent updates for quite some time.

I dropped off The Division 2 hard as soon as I finished the first "part" of the story and realized World Tiers were nowhere near as cool a concept as I had envisioned.

The Division 2 is just so goddamn boring to play. I dunno how anyone has fun with cover shooters. The abilities all take a million fucking years to activate, too. There's a massive delay on everything. Fuck, it's so plodding.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Anthem's Waning Playerbase Is Starting To Create Matchmaking Problems

Anthem is starting to have problems consistently matchmaking full teams for various activities on various difficulties. Higher difficulties especially will often have you load into missions without a full team, and then not add any more people as you play. That is…obviously not what you want for higher difficulties since most activities in the game are scaled for full teams.

[DarkStar189]

Jumped in tonight to try the newer Stronghold that was added.  For the first 15min it was just me and another player.  Half way through 2 more people did join which was nice.   That was only on the hard difficulty though. I fell off the game pretty hard and am only lvl 28.  Really don't feel the need to go back for a while though. 

[PaladinSolo]

The problem with adding strongholds with the current loot system is if its not easier to do than tyrant mines why bother, unless they added boss specific loot they're wasting their time.  I have no desire to even try out the new stronghold either.

[Keyser_Soze]

11 hours ago, SFLUFAN said:

Anthem's Waning Playerbase Is Starting To Create Matchmaking Problems

Anthem is starting to have problems consistently matchmaking full teams for various activities on various difficulties. Higher difficulties especially will often have you load into missions without a full team, and then not add any more people as you play. That is…obviously not what you want for higher difficulties since most activities in the game are scaled for full teams.

 

Anthem is EA's Artifact.

[Keyser_Soze]

 

[skillzdadirecta]

4 hours ago, PaladinSolo said:

The problem with adding strongholds with the current loot system is if its not easier to do than tyrant mines why bother, unless they added boss specific loot they're wasting their time.  I have no desire to even try out the new stronghold either.

 

it's actually pretty fun but until they fix they loot, it's only worth playing once or twice really.

[SaysWho?]

13 hours ago, SFLUFAN said:

Anthem's Waning Playerbase Is Starting To Create Matchmaking Problems

Anthem is starting to have problems consistently matchmaking full teams for various activities on various difficulties. Higher difficulties especially will often have you load into missions without a full team, and then not add any more people as you play. That is…obviously not what you want for higher difficulties since most activities in the game are scaled for full teams.

 

29 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

 

Man that's sad. That's something that continues to be a huge problem with multiplayer games. If you break out like Destiny or Fortnite, you're a smash. But if you either have huge problems or just don't catch on, nobody can really find out what they're missing.

[TwinIon]

I was holding off on this one until they fixed some of the bigger issues it has, but it seems that if that ever happens, there might not be a player base left.

 

I can't believe Anthem has fewer players than Fallout 76. What a disaster.

 

I wonder if this will be enough for Bioware, or any studios, to take another look at Blizzards' old "we'll release it when it's done" mentality.

[XxEvil AshxX]

31 minutes ago, TwinIon said:

I wonder if this will be enough for Bioware, or any studios, to take another look at Blizzards' old "we'll release it when it's done" mentality.

 

I'd even settle for "don't announce a game until you actually have a game."

 

Shit not even the guys on Shark Tank will let you pitch something unless you actually know what you're pitching.

 

Bioware/EA literally had less to show than some schmuck on Shark Tank.

[Mercury33]

8 hours ago, XxEvil AshxX said:

 

I'd even settle for "don't announce a game until you actually have a game."

 

Shit not even the guys on Shark Tank will let you pitch something unless you actually know what you're pitching.

 

Bioware/EA literally had less to show than some schmuck on Shark Tank.

 

I love Shark Tank

[Mr.Vic20]

I tried to return to anthem after this last update and my profile is gone. Just gone. Restarted and tried it two different times throughout the course of a day, same problem. 50+ hours of progress, disappeared! Any desire I had to play this game is now firmly gone. 

[skillzdadirecta]

5 hours ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

I tried to return to anthem after this last update and my profile is gone. Just gone. Restarted and tried it two different times throughout the course of a day, same problem. 50+ hours of progress, disappeared! Any desire I had to play this game is now firmly gone. 

 

Which platform?

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

20 minutes ago, skillzdadirecta said:

 

Which platform?

It's @Mr.Vic20 - I can 100% guarantee that it's Origin (PC)

[Mr.Vic20]

24 minutes ago, skillzdadirecta said:

 

Which platform?

pc