So what does everyone think now the demo has landed?

finished all the missions, pretty meh overall. It was fine but definitely didn't do anything that wowed me. Flying was the best part for sure. One of the worst pre-mission hub areas I've seen

Its a neat start screen.

My impression is, "wow... I sure wish I could get a mission to load."

Guess I'll try again tomorrow.

I just got it working so I'll give impressions later, but it was very dumb for them to make everyone be a ranger then level up to pick one other suit. We should've had a choice from the start.

played about two hours on pc.

I hope it's because of the older build but holy shit this game is badly optimized. I hope it's better at launch.
Gameplay is kind of bland so far, it's allready so repetitive. Fly there, shoot some stuff and interact with an object or hear some dialogue. Go back to fort tarsis and rinse repeat.

Fort tarsis itself couldn't be more boring, it's so devoid of any life. You just have the sense the npc's are put there as props, they just stand there. Also i hope they increase the movement speed while there, it's such a slog to navigate that place. It should be alot snappier to get around.

The javelins themselves are ok i guess, the combat seems a copy paste from ME:A, wich is fine. The ai seems pretty basic and dumb tough, they just soak up your bullets and then fall over and die. The shooting is fine but nothing more. Flying around like iron man looks pretty cool, but combat doesn't seem to take advantage of the mobility of your character.

To me it just feels like a poor man's attempt at a destiny clone. It feels very devoid of any kind of soul or it's own identity. D2 has it's issues, but the core gameplay is so satisfying and fun. Anthem just feels bland in every way to me.

Kind of bummed out actually.

Was really looking forward to Anthem, however after having played it for 3 hours the moment to moment gameplay already wears thin on me.

Traversal and ability combos are the most satisfying part, but in particular the shooting doesn't feel all that great. You can definitively see the gameplay roots in the Mass Effect series.

Enemies are foremost bullet sponges and the AI seems overall fairly limited.

Have a hard time seeing me playing Anthem in longer sessions as it's intended, so will probably cancel my pre-order.

@frytup: Yeah this is my exact feeling, I loaded, it went to a loading screen got stuck at like 95%.

Reloaded, it went in and I accepted a mission from Mattias

To go on the mission I had to load the mission, it didn't load.

Relaunch the game, it tells me I have a mission in progress do I want to resume, click yes, now it's still on the start screen and there are no options to do anything.

I'll maybe try again tomorrow but from what other people are saying it hardly seems worth the trouble.

Well, was looking forward to trying this out and pre-ordering because it looked fun but I'm not going anywhere near this at launch. The whole demo is a gigantic mess so I want no part of that launch day. Might get it when it gets a big discount or used. Next month is jam packed with other games I want to play anyways

@syndrom: Yeah, the lifelessness is the thing thats really killing this game for me. (no pun intended)

It doesnt help that I was just playing Monster Hunter World prior to this, which just feels so much more enthusiastic about the shit you're doing, even if its pointless stuff like killing a huge lizard to make some sort of helmet.

The biggest issue is the performance though, I was wondering why the motion blur was so intense but after turning it off it's obvious they're trying to mask the shoddy framerate (playing on the Xbox One X) granted this is a demo but they're less than a month away from launch which is worrying, that and the long loading times (assuming it does load) really test my patience. Also playing the game reminded me of Dark Void which is never a good thing.

I really hope Bioware turn it around because I love a lot of the games they used to make and would like to see more of those but I dont know about this game.

Finally got to play it late last night on PS4( Had to restart the console to even get in). I have to say though....I'm mixed on it. On one hand, I like the Javelin designs and the world thus far. On the other hand, the shooting isn't grabbing me much. I did finish all of the demo missions and messed around with the Interceptor which was neat.

But with that in mind, I still remain CAUTIOUSLY optimistic on this game. Nothing about it has blown me away yet it doesn't look like a complete trash fire either. This will be the first game in a while where I won't pull the trigger on it until I hear from reviews and player reactions.

Even if this fails, I'm sure Dragon Age 4 will turn things around for BioWare.

O Geez the times i get that loading bug :'(. This demo definetly worse then the Falout 76 BETA at least that thing worked (kinda, it loaded at least)

To end with a positive i like the bug stronghold that boss battle was A OK.

I really want to like Anthem but I think I'm done with health bars over bullet sponges and numbers flying off of them. We need something new and different, and "Fly like Iron Man and fight with Ancient Alien Tech" just doesn't do it.

I've been craving a new looter shooter because I don't like Destiny 2's endgame so was cautiously optimistic about Anthem. Unfortunately on top of the technical issues there are some iffy design choices that have put me back into waiting until after release to buy it. I cancelled my pre-order for now. Bioware and EA can still win me over because I still like the general feel of flying around and shooting but I can't drop $80 CAD and hope that launch is any better.

It is painfully boring. I really wanted to like it. I was in the closed beta too and still gave it a chance in the VIP. ugh. It takes the best part of ME:A, the combat and makes a game just about that. The problem? While it was the best part of ME:A and better than past ME combat... i found it boring.

The hub area is soulless, shooting was boring.. i REALLY didn't like hunting for the beeping objects. The blur motion toggle needs to work. It sucks.

That said, it runs no problem at 4k 60 with ultra on a 2080 ti/Titan RTX. But everything looks super soft and jaggys are all over. SLI doesn't work. Forcing it causes a blinky nightmare.

The story is at the same level of dumb as density 2 (i didn't play the first one)… pretty much this is D2 but more boring with less engaging combat. (I didn't like D2, but i did play like 60+ hours of it because it filled some time. I did enjoying the shooting in that.)

I foolishly got the Origin pass thingy that gives me access all EA games. I thought it was a ok deal when i got it. Something has to be good, right? BFV? nope. Anthem? nope. Sport games? I hate them.

sooo.. EA == you are dead to me, but you won because you have my money already.

I kinda feel like impressions are moot with these lifestyle shooters.

Destiny, Division, Warframe...they all changed so much, and often to their detriment, I think. I’m assuming Anthem will be the same.

I can’t really say that I’m interested in plopping down $40-60 for a game that I might like for a few months, until the devs overhaul it and I cease to give a fuck.

Not great, not great. All I know is that I'm glad I'm only out $15 for a month of Origin Access instead of paying $60+ for the game in its current state. I know it's an early demo, but bugs aside the game just feels clunky in combat and empty when not.

Oh my... I watched Brad play a little and thought it looks kinda dull so I downloaded the demo with low expectations. But I was done after 5 mins. First off, it runs really poorly on Xbox X. The menus seem clunky. I hopped into the first mission and got a message "Out of mission boundaries" and it sends me to a load screen to put me back into the right area. The area happened to be swarmed by like 10 enemies who promptly down me in like 10 seconds.

Quit and pass. I judge harshly I guess.

I haven't gotten into the demo yet, but these impressions are concerning. It seems like this demo might have been kind of a misstep on BioWare's part. I mean, kudos to them for putting the game out there and letting people try it before plunking down a ton of money on the thing, but based on the reaction here there are more canceled pre-orders than people getting hyped about the game. That might not be a problem if it were just limited to GB, but a lot of the previews going around have that same "it's got some high points, BUT . . . " vibe.

Sort of feels like BioWare might have wanted to do this like 6 months ago when they might have been able to tweak some things rather than putting a demo out a few weeks before release when this is pretty much going to be the game that goes out the door.

I wonder how much, if any, panic is starting to spread there right now given the seemingly lukewarm reaction to the demo.

Maybe I never played myself to death on Destiny and The Division but I'm.. enjoying the game? Technical issues aside (failed mission loads having to restart the demo, some lag, etc.), I find myself enjoying the combat quite a bit, especially in regards to using agile movements to get around the combat encounters rather than fighting forward in a straight line. Unless you're tanking with the Colossus but that dude functions like a battering ram with the shield up which took me a while to realize that even the heavy moves but in a different way. I was expecting to be pretty lukewarm on the game after the Unfinished, maybe even find it a tad boring. But the gameplay just clicks for me in some way.

I think if there's some criticisms I would level at the game it would probably be that the free roam feels a bit aimless (but that might change if you get into crafting or whatever) and whenever you fly off some area it tells you to return to the mission area or you'll be transported to your team. I think that could have been handled better to make the world feel less restricted.

The story hub is not great but I never felt like it bothered me.

Can anyone else get another javelin? It keeps telling me that I unlocked another one but when I go to the forge there is no pop up to pick a second. I'm also stuck at level 11 for some reason. No matter how much XP I get in the world when I go back to Taris it never increases my XP bar.

I just now finished the demo and the last story cutscene froze all of the characters in place with no dialogue. Just a bunch of silent mannequins stuck in their starting animation pose. Didn't freeze the game though! The "Press B to Skip" still worked so I could go straight to the "Thanks for Playing - Press X to Buy Anthem" screen. No thanks. I think one month of Origin Access is enough.

Anthem no you were supposed to try to emulate the good parts of Destiny!

@deckard: @casepb:Your XP being stuck is a known bug and the reason I'm done with the demo for now at least, hopefully they can fix it before next weekend. No access to a second javelin is a real bummer.

Also had the same bug for the last cut scene, but I was skipping them anyway because none of it seemed interesting.

Overall I'm getting a real Andromeda feeling from the game, in that the action is fine, everything else less so.

Nearly everything about this demo pushed me away from the game, and I'm someone who has had plenty of good times with Destiny. Though it obviously isn't true, this game, at least from what I played of the demo, feels like it was put together in 6 months. The world feels lifeless, the missions appear uninspired, the combat... is fine I suppose. That part was a bit hard to tell because the game runs at about 15 frames per second on a standard PS4.

So I've done just about everything there is to do in the Demo, so here are my thoughts:

Things I liked/didn't have an issue with:

Aside from technical issues that I hope and pray are least serviceable at launch I had a really good time with Anthem. I think a lot of the complaints about it being boring are people who just played the Ranger Javelin. It's kind of like saying Mass Effect is boring after just playing the Soldier and not, like, anything else.

I eventually chose to unlock a Colossus at level 12. To my surprise I learned that instead of a dodge he has an actual shield. Instead of a dome barrier he has a taunt. This immediately piqued my interest because even with these two changes it already opens up Anthem's group play to be way more interesting to me than Destiny's. The friend I was playing with picked the Storm, and we immediately discovered that he could freeze enemies and that I could blow them up and deal a fairly large aoe explosion. That I could also taunt and he could throw up a wall in front of me to block damage while I layered an large AoE mortar strike down on them. I loved this. This is really what i've been missing from games like The Division and Destiny, these classes feel distinct in a way that other games like this often do not. I generally found the shooting fairly satisfying, bar a couple of weapons that I just didn't like that much (which is a similar problem I have with Destiny), but the chain gun and LMG felt very good to use and even some of the shotguns were more interesting than I though. I don't feel like the shooting is as good as Destiny, but I don't think most games get shooting anywhere near as good as Destiny. I will say that combined with abilities and movement, the gameplay feels about on par for me at this point.

I thought the story, while stripped of the context of a greater narrative had nice little fun touches that I'd expect from a company like Bioware. Fighting 3 of the same enemy and then taking the mcguffin back to him only to have him split into 3 was actually a really nice touch that I wasn't expecting.

I was kind of torn on the dialog options, because Bioware is sort of known for doing more than this, but looking at other games in this genre two is still better than none. I don't really feel any attachment to my particular character, but I don't in Destiny or the Division's mostly voiceless protagonists. I did enjoy talking to what NPCs I could though, I thought the interaction with the bartender was cute and talking to Zoe about her kid was kinda fun. We'll see how this pans out, but for now I'm interested.

I also didn't hate the PC flight controls as much as I thought I would. I played the Alpha about a month ago and it was pretty bad there and I was expecting bad again when they said that most of the fixes they'd made to the PC controls were in later builds than the one the demo is running. Maybe I'm less allergic to mouse deceleration or acceleration I don't know, but I had little serious issue with the combat or flight controls, aside from some wonky default keybinds on abilities that I had to rebind.

I didn't find the AI bad either, it was completely serviceable on normal difficulty and about what i expected it to be. Coming from similar games it seems to be about par for the course. There was also a good amount of enemy variety I thought and the fact that they don't telegraph weakspots as much as Destiny does was a nice touch. I felt like I had to remember where to shoot certain enemies. Also like in Destiny I ended up with something like a priority list for which enemies I wanted to take out first either because they were annoying or because they'd kill me pretty quick.

Performance was another thing I had no real issue with either. I currently run an AMD Ryzen 7 1700 Eight Core @ 3.00 GHZ, 16 GB of ram and AMD Radeon RX 580. I rand the game a fairly consistent 60 FPS with some small drops to 50 or so in hectic areas.

Now for problem stuff.
Bugs/Technical Issues:

I didn't run into the infinite loading screen bug that often the first day, the game would load 90% and then crash instead, this happened mostly when i was transitioning from Fort Tarsis to the world. Today i've been hitting that loading screen bug pretty hard and I honestly can't say I enjoy it.

There's been some of the most severe rubber banding I've ever seen in a video game. I once played Wow with a satellite internet connect with 15k ping and it was less bad then this. This has been pretty frustrating today, as I tried a couple of times to do the dungeon.

I've also run into enemies despawning randomly, and for one story mission all the enemies spawned at once before we even triggered them. These are minor issues though and didn't break any particular story mission, it made one of them slightly harder but not impossible.

Another bug my buddy ran into one where he couldn't pick his second javelin, but we entered and exited freeplay a bunch and he was able to eventually unlock his Storm. This is most likely causes by issues with the demo itself and less the actual game.

And lastly the loading times on my regular-ass HDD were on the slow side.

Things I actually don't like:

I think the menus are pretty clunky and can be hard to navigate and tell if you've done the thing you want to do. It's only a little worse for me though than Destiny, which also has really bad menus.

Like everyone else I wish you could move faster in Fort Tarsis.

There was a lot more loading screens than I thought there would be, but let's see how it on launch.

The game doesn't feel as open as maybe it should because of the way you select missions, you can't free play into a story mission which was kind lame for me to be honest. I understand why they do it, it's because there's honest to god matchmaking for everything, which is really nice (when it works).

I wish you could freeplay solo without forming a squad, but that could be just a demo thing because you totally could in the alpha more than a month ago.

TLDR:

I had a good time with Anthem, despite some technical issues and I'm looking forward to actually picking it up and playing it when it comes out. The combat and gameplay clicked with me in a way that I wasn't anticipating and that I really enjoyed. I think it says a lot that I played until late last night, but still woke up early this morning to play some more (or to attempt to), even thought none of this matters in terms of character growth and gear. It's a game I like playing and I want to play a lot more.

So the Ranger isn't exactly all that fun, but I knew that going in. I think I will like it a lot more if I could play as the Storm, but whatever I will still get it at launch. Flying around took some getting use to with a mouse. Fighting wildlife is fun and feels enjoyable. Fighting humans feels less fun and like fighting generic lifeless robots that have no coordination or even a voice.

The worse part for me is the slowness of Fort Tarsis, it sure looks pretty but holy hell it's so slow to get around. They also really just need a way to just instantly start the mission screen, and not force you to always run to the Javelin area. I knew this game would be far from Destiny quality going in, so I wasn't really disappointed or surprised. I was more surprised to see people actually thought this would be even as good as Destiny.

It makes a bad first impression with the server issues, loading issues, lag, etc but the graphics and gameplay were good. It'll probably have a better story and more of a story than Borderlands, Destiny, Warframe, and Divison since those 4 other games in this subgenre have awful or almost nonexistent stories.

Everything that gives me pause about Anthem is pretty easily fixable by Bioware. I see no reason to rush into judgement. Instead of buying it day one I'll probably do the 10 hour trial Feb 15 to see if the server issues affect the actual game and if there are any other major issues, but the core mechanics are good.

@deathstriker: I don’t have that much confidence about the story aspects. Creating a compelling, cohesive story in these kinds of open-world games is hard enough as it is. I think Borderlands pulled it off the best, even though much of the writing was pretty cringe-worthy in 2. The Division’s story was fine except for being very disjointed by the nature of the mission structure. And Destiny has always had the issue of much the lore being asbracted out of the game to begin with.

@deckard: I don't remember Borderlands having a story beyond the opening cut scene and saying "get to the vault" a bunch. Divison lacked a villain and a lot of other stuff. Destiny's story felt like a little kid wrote it "use light to fight the darkness" SMH. I'd give Anthem a good shot at beating all of them in terms of story - the ceiling isn't high. Having a voiced main character helps a lot too.

@deathstriker: I was thinking of Borderland 2 more than 1. And you’re right, I’ve played almost 100 hours of The Division and couldn’t tell you any of the plot points other than “dollar flu.” Destiny is also generic. Anthem just seems barren.

@deathstriker There's a fair amount of interesting stuff in Destiny, but as deckard wrote, it's unfortunately mostly in lore text or in D1 grimoire cards. Thankfully the continuing Dreaming City story-line in Forsaken was a step forward in that regard and has started to incorporate some of the more cerebral sci-fi fantasy elements into the game itself. Brad gets into it a bit during the GOTY podcasts. Hopefully it's a direction they continue down.

What I am curious about is just how much of a "Mage from Dragon Age Inquisition" The Storm class/whatever feels like. Cause I had a lot of fun running around calling down lighting, throwing fire/ice and such at people back in that game. Cause that'd go a loneg way on selling me on the game for sure.

@bladededge:I don't think it's necessarily a 1:1 comparison, but Storm definitely feels like a backrow caster type situation. Also it has guns too.

@deckard: Keep in mind we've seen very, very little of the overall story for Anthem. Some reports going around that the missions in the demo aren't even critical path stuff but are side quests.

@bladededge: The storm reminds me of being a biotic in Mass Effect and somewhat a mage in DAI, the ranger is s solider from Mass Effect, Colossus looks like he plays like a Krogan from ME3 multiplayer, and the interceptor has a lot in common with infiltrators from ME and rogues from DAI.

I like being mages and the storm felt great. The ranger was kinda boring to me.

Gonna be a party pooper and say that it's too glitchy for now. And I have a good PC, it's not about it. So for now I'll go bck to RF online and wait till the devs finish the game.

Ya this is a bummer. I finally managed to get into the second mission but the controls completely changed and I couldn't figure out how to fly. I cancelled my pre-order but I'll be keeping my eye on this game to see how it goes. I'm rooting for them, but the game comes out in less than a month and this feels like an early beta build.

Although I think they mentioned that this demo build is actually 6 weeks old so maybe there's hope.

Haven't played it yet, but from what I've seen it seems more like The Division then Destiny - at least in combat. Very curious to see how it grows.

played some more, unlocked the colossus. And did the dungeon thing. Gameplay still feels meh, it's just feels so copy paste from other games.

Also, why in the actual fuck doesn't this game have some sort of text chat on pc. This pc port feels like such an aftertought. I hope the launch build is better than this.

@deckard: I think the million dollar Anthem question on Story is how much influence did Drew Karpyshyn have on it before he left last March. Casey Hudson commented on it by saying "Story will always be an important part of every BioWare game. Drew has wrapped up his work on the project, but Anthem’s Lead Writers and their teams continue to do amazing work developing the world, story, and characters." So if by wrapped up his work, he actually finished what he set out to do, or it means he quit mid story. I think that's anybody's guess. I think it would be hard for most people not to consider Drew one of the top industry writing talents, so if he did get to write or at least outline a story for the team at Bioware Edmonton to finish, Anthem will be in a pretty great spot. If not, we might end up with another Mass Effect 3 ending blunder type situation.

As far as my take on Anthem so far goes though, I'm actually far more concerned, like most around here, about the gameplay bugs. I've played quite a bit of Anthem this weekend, hitting Level 15 last night, and attempted to play far more of it than I've been able to. I've seen the 95% bug at least 60% of the time I've tried to load in (was unable to play at all Friday night due to it), had the unplayable rubber banding issue a few times, had the final cutscene only display an image of the 3 guys and play sad music so I had to skip it entirely, and many of the other small hiccups this demo put out. Best case scenario this 6 week old Demo has already had these issues fixed, and only destroyed confidence in many consumers and cost them a few million sales. Worst case, EA has pushed this game out far too early and it's going to be another Fallout 76 nightmare that's not really even playable at launch. Which is really sad in all honesty, because when Anthem actually plays it's rather fun in the same vein that Andromeda was a lot of fun from a Gameplay perseptive. Especially as Storm, pulling off team combos is something hard to find in many games. Mass Effect did it really well in Single Player, and doing this well with friends is a really novel concept that I feel like I'd enjoy a ton.

But I think like many, I have the same reservations many have had after playing the demo. There are far too many loading screen's in places that don't seem to need them, like tunnel entrances that don't look like they'd require one. The End Game needs to be strong to keep up with games like Diablo and Destiny, and nobody else in the industry has been able to accomplish this, even The Division, so the hope for that is a bit slim. Another big concern is that this is a games as a service game (I could have sworn someone at Bioware called it a Platform and they wouldn't have sequels but I can't find that to confirm, I could be making that up), but all of the DLC plans going forward are free. This tells me that updates to the game with be extremely minor or they are lying. It isn't possible to support a Games As A Service type game like Destiny without influxes of cash from time to time. And personally, as a consumer, if I enjoy the game, like I do with the Destiny franchise, I have zero problem paying for new content on a regular basis, especially if that content is significant. As much as some might disagree, Destiny frequently earns it's value in content drops. $40 for Forsaken was an incredible value because it had a bigger size/scope that 99% of $60 releases in 2018. By the same token, it's current DLC Season Pass, isn't earning it's value in many minds, with Black Armory being rather underwhelming to date. But the hope is that the other 2 drops as part of that pack make up for it, especially the Summer release of Penumbra. So for Anthem, I just don't see being able to keep up with the Games As A Service model for free, that doesn't seem practical. It makes me think the game/franchise will be dead entirely in 3-6 months until a sequel arrives in 5+ years.

All that said, I'm still keeping my pre-order, because Destiny is my jam, I don't expect Joker's Wild to be very great, and at the worst Anthem can be a blunder and distraction game for a month or so like The Division was a few years ago.

I need to play more to know if I like Anthem or not, but one thing that stood out to me was the music. Sarah Schachner is one of the most exciting composers in games these days and this might be her best work yet.

Okay, so at first I was a bit iffy on it. Saw a Polygon article that was like "the gameplay is on par with Destiny" and thought "naaaah you outta your mind."

After playing a bit more and alongside a different javelin, it's still not nearly as smooth-feeling as Destiny, but it gives me what I got from ME3 and Andromeda co-op (or at least has the potential to, depending on how the other javelins pan out and what you can do with them) but with more interesting open spaces and the ability to fly like a fucking boss. So it's pretty fun! The movement is clunky in the way that Inquisition and Andromeda's movement was clunky, which is a bummer straight-up, but double-jumping and dodging into flying into an ultimate into landing a couple headshots with a heavy pistol all makes for a pretty damn good time!

Completely zero interest in the story and the world unfortunately, sorry. Big part of that I think is I was just so curious on how the game would actually play, so maybe if I get the game once it's out I'll give it a more fair shot. Aesthetically, it's nice to fly around caverns and stuff, and the jungle's fine; the javelins look great insofar as they remind me of customizing my armor in the Mass Effect trilogy. But yeah, if there's enough variety to the things to do and the kinds of ways you can kit out your javelin, I might actually pick this up.

This and that Destiny 2 DLC, and then I'll be solid on games where I can jump around and shoot stuff to unwind.

@syndrom said:

That's driven by some FCC regulations that kicked in beginning of 2019 - basically all games released going forward that want to have text chat need to support text to speech and speech to text additionally.

You can read up on here and here is some comment from bioware on that topic.

They want to add it down the line but since TTS has apparently not been implemented in games (of that scale) it requires a significant amount of extra development.

@wolfstein_3d:

Wow, I had no idea about that. As someone who is legally blind, if games started implementing a TTS feature, it could be a game changer. I'd love this for WoW.

Yeah I think it's a good thing mid term. Once the tech is more established it should be second nature to implement it. Will be interesting to see how something like Division 2 or other games that have a larger focus on social interaction will handle it short termed. Most likely they will try the Anthem route to skip text chat for that reason at first.

@hestilllives19: Yeah I am baffled that EA is still sticking with Frostbite for these open-world games. It was clearly never meant to handle a massive, seamless environment. It was impressive they hacked the engine to work for Dragon Age Inquisition but that was 5+ years ago.

Ok, but what i i don't want to play as a cyber mage?

Ow, my bad then, i didn't know that!

Ye frostbite is a great engine for FPS-games, anything else is just a mess.

One really concerning information that has been brought up by a dev during an IGN stream - apparently Anthem will launch with 3 strongholds (dungeons) only.

The free roam aspects didn't grab me much, in particular because the max player count being limited to 4 in all game modes.The open world feels fairly empty.

This sounds awful light on content.

Once I tried the Storm class, I was hooked. Hovering above the battlefield (which buffs the Storm's shield too), raining death from above, dodging sniper shots, and dishing out sniper damage of my own was just a blast. I loved ME3 multiplayer, and the combat in ME:A, and this is really scratching a similar itch. Once you get into the rhythm of the combat, mixing flying around, hovering, gunplay, and offensive and defensive abilities, it does feel really dynamic, even if the AI isn't really anything to write home about.

There are still a handful of issues that I'm concerned about, though. The instability and the 95% load bug were particularly troublesome, and the game needs better optimization. I was on an Xbox One X, and in areas with lots of enemies and particle effects (especially in the 'hold the point' in the cavern section of the stronghold), the frame rate took a serious dive. But the demo was branched off from the main game about 6 weeks or so ago, so it's hard to know what is and isn't going to be a continued issue for the current launch build. For example, I know a common complaint is the walk speed in Fort Tarsis, but I saw a dev on Twitter say that there is a faster walking or sprinting option that they deactivated for the demo due to streaming issues, so who knows how many things have or haven't been fixed already in the main game?

I think my biggest concerns are going to be the amount of content and the story, though. I liked some of the stuff they showed off, and the characters in Fort Tarsis seem to be decently written (I really enjoyed convos and cutscenes with Matthias), but I'm skeptical that they'll be able to develop a compelling story in this mainly multiplayer framework. And as someone else already mentioned, there are only 3 strongholds in the launch game, and they've been quiet so far on what endgame content will actually look like. I'm really hoping they open up more over the coming weeks about what that will look like going forward.

Overall, I really enjoyed the game when it was working, and I'm looking forward to having another fun loot chase with compelling combat and team mechanics built in. The amount of compelling content makes me nervous, but I'm looking forward to trying the full game out with my 10 hour early access on the 15th.