I will mirror the many people who brought up concerns about loading times and glitches, but I enjoyed the combat more than I expected to. I think they did a disservice in starting everyone with the Ranger which in my opinion is the most boring/basic of the Javelins (especially after getting to use the others).

I’m actually kind of blown away by how different the Javelins feel from each other. The first one I unlocked was the Storm and it was an absolute blast! Being able to hover above the battlefield and deal out so much damage was really satisfying and made switching back to the Ranger that much more painful (I think it could be fun, but it was hard to adjust to after using the Storm a lot, especially against the Titans).

For the last couple hours of the demo they unlocked the other Javelins for everyone and I got to try out the Colossus. Again, I cannot not overstate just how different it plays/feels from the Ranger and Storm. It doesn’t have regenerating shields like the other Javelins and it doesn’t have a dodge (when you dodge with it, it pulls out the shield instead). While initially feeling super prohibitive, I got used to it and had a lot of fun with it. I especially liked how much more connected I felt with the team. The Storm feels a little detached just floating above everyone casting magic while the Colossus requires you to stay in the fight (to pick up the health drops) and encourages you to help out with your teammates by taunting to soak up damage or expose weak points for them to exploit. The Colossus also uses different guns than the other suits (it can use the normal guns, but why would you??). It has grenade launchers and mini guns which were a nice change of pace.

I think what intrigues me the most is the teamwork and coordination that is encouraged, and I think will be required on harder difficulties. I played everything on the game on Hard and while talking and teamwork wasn’t necessarily required, there were quite a few wipes when everyone split up. Having to set up abilities, combos, and the timing of those with each other sets it apart from Destiny for me.

I think the city felt a little bland and sterile, but the conversations and situations that arose with the characters actually had me laughing. I also don’t like that there aren’t other people around. Though they’re apparently adding a shared hangar space to hang out with other pilots. I also believe that like Destiny, this game will be much better played with friends. The demo definitely convinced me to pre-order, but I understand why others feel differently.

This is good to know.

@wolfstein_3d: Wow, only 3 Strongholds at launch. After playing and kind of enjoying the demo despite the bugs, I have to say finding this out is very disheartening. I was already thinking Stronghelds felt like rather a middle step for End Game content, like Destiny's Strikes. There is going to be a lot of competition in this space for players time/money in 2019: Destiny 2's continued Annual Pass (Joker's Wild will probably launch 1-2 weeks after Anthem) plus whatever/if they do Fall 2019 (now that they are self publishing they may not release anything), Division 2 that kind of perfected itself post launch and will come with 3 Dark Zones and likely Incursions soon after/at launch (only 3 weeks after Anthem), and MH: World's Iceborne expansion. Anthem really needs to hit the ground running with a strong End Game, because all of these other franchises will have that, otherwise it will be DOA with or without a great Campaign. I'm starting to feel like this might be The Division all over again that doesn't get good until a year later when everyone has forgotten about it and moved on. I hope that's not the case.

If the open world wouldn't feel so empty, it would only be half bad but 3 strongholds only is still a extremely low number. I am just afraid the contract system will not be enough to keep me interested over an extended period.

In a couple of days we should know more about all the endgame systems since February 1st the NDA on max level content ends and you can expect a lot of outlets and youtube channels to cover it then.

Still at this point I will wait till the game launched and opinions on the longevity of Anthem form. I made the mistake to buy vanilla Destiny 2 after the initial reviews been fairly positive. But a lot of professional reviewers play the campaign and move on to the next assigned game without putting much emphasis on the endgame loop.

I wasn't expecting the Digitigrade legs to look so weird. I didn't play it, but a lot of footage came out, and that's what stuck out to me. I think it's because the legs are the only part that's all that much bigger than the person inside, at least on the smaller javelins (Which is a silly name for power armor IMO), so lanky long legs attached to a more or less regular size body.

They also didn't do their due diligence when it comes to the metal plates making up the suits either, the (presumably?) metal plates around the waist just flex like regular skin rigging.

I'm really suspect of that armor entering animation, they kind of put their legs in, then their arms just kinda magic into place and the visor drops for some reason while they're still getting their head into the helmet.

I also suspect their cheating with the helmet size, I don't think someone's head could actually fit in that helmet with their face that far back from the mask.

@phos: Yeah the legs look pretty terrible.

Loaded up Destiny 2 for a bit and... I dunno, I kinda keep thinking about this game. And like I recognize that it's totally not the total package for me when it comes to video games. It honestly reminds me of stuff like Global Agenda or Tabula Rasa, and there's just something... oddly endearing about those games for me. Just some video-game-ass video-games. Like Mace: The Dark Age or something.

I'm sure no one would want to be compared to Mace, but whatever, I played my fair share of that thing and make the comparison without condemnation. :P

@phos: i'm giving you a digital fistbump right now because every time i see the 'suit up' animation i'm thinking "legs in aaaaaand i guess i have no arms?"

@phos: The javelines are more like bodysuits with an exoskeleton rather than an Iron Man suit. If you look at the customization screen for the visuals of the suit to pick materials the waist (and part of the torso behind the chest), part of the legs and part of the arms default to fabric/leather/rubber. You can make them a metal visually, but I think the thought is more that part of the suit is soft and part of the suit has metal platings and exoskeleton features.

Gave the open demo a try. I'm perplexed by the perspective change between Tarsis and expeditions. I get what they were going for, but all it ends up doing is emphasize the shortcomings of their cutscenes and dialogue system. If they had just gone full third person with talking head NPCs but then actual cutscenes it would've worked so much better. This halfway approach just feels super outdated.

As for the action, I enjoyed it more than I expected. The flying feels good and the auto-aim seems extremely generous (making up for certain other weaknesses). It felt messy though, but I'm gonna write that down to being thrown into the middle of things.

Lastly I have to talk about the Forge interface, 'cuz that thing is a trash fire. First off you have this first-draft looking slanted menu that's just designed to take up as much space as possible to fill the void of the big white/gray lifeless background. Then you have this zoomed out view of the Javelin where you move a cursor around to pick the parts you want to customize, except you're not, you're moving the viewpoint of this menu for some reason. But then you pick a part and now you're no longer moving a cursor but operating a menu with a bit too large non-descriptive "icons" and again this giant comparison UI placed on the opposite side of the screen (top bottom) so you either have to focus on the comparison or the icons you're browsing. None of this looks good, none of it feels right and it's just a bad UX overall. Also, why are the weapons displayed hanging in the air next to the Javelin even though you can't interact with them or see their stats or anything ?

Why is this menu this separately loaded feature at all ? Why not overlay it on the Javelin in Tarsis so you get the full scene and not just this strange platform ? Or better yet why can you only access it this one specific place ? Why isn't it just a standard inventory menu you can bring up anywhere ? Even if you can't change things in-mission it would be nice to be able to bring it up and check loot etc. I dunno ... this thing just blew my mind.

@ares42: So is the demo is actually working to an acceptable degree? I was going to give it a go after work and the gym, but I won't bother if the entire experience is a total cluster-cuss like last weekend.

@therealturk: I had no issues at all on PS4.

Digging this game more now that the demo actually works this time. Combat is fast and fun, flying feels good, looking forward to the final release.

NDA for Endgame's been lifted:

• 3 Extra Difficult Levels

• 3 Strongholds (Dungeons or Strikes)

• Repeatable Daily Story Mission/Legendary Contract

• Repeatable Contracts

• Open World with Events and World Bosses

• No Raids

• Cataclysms - Events on Open World that are the major point of Anthem's endgame

For the type of game Anthem is supposed to be, this seems shockingly little content.

Like a fraction of vanilla of Destiny 2. For me a pass and maybe revisit 6 months post launch - either because Bioware expanded the content to a reasonable level at that point or because EA pulled the plug and cut post launch development to a minimum - either way the long term potential should be clearer at that point.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/am6iai/anthem_embargo_lift_on_endgame_confirmation_of/

Holy hell the Infiltrator is a ton of fun.

But playing more of this... I kinda just wish the world was more interesting. Even honestly just going back to the Mass Effect well and being like "no epic storyline, just some space freelancer shit" I'd be okay with it.

Either way though, there might not be enough content in this thing up front to justify the jump for me. It's fun though.

Got in just long enough to poke around the Codex and explore a little around Fort Tarsis and . . .

Holy hell. It's not good. At all.

The Codex entries are some of the blandest shit I've ever read. It manages to be a mishmash of proper nouns of Important Sounding Things, but none of it is given any meaning. Not only do I not understand what it's talking about, but I have no desire to find out more about it. Everything about it feels like they were just running down a checklist of stuff to hit.

And then there's the fact that Fort Tarsis feels . . . dead. Dead sound, dead faces, dead environments, dead everything. They've got a ton of people standing around looking like they should be doing something (talking, working, eating, etc.), but there's no interactivity at all. You walk past them and there's no ambient dialogue and the animations are only lined up in sort of this vague way rather than looking like people engaged in an actual conversation.

And then there are the faces. I think I can say that after Mass Effect Andromeda, BioWare needs to fire whoever art directs the character design, or else move on from Frostbite if that's what's causing the problem. It's like no one ever looked at a picture of an actual human being. The characters all have these dead, glassy eyes and an almost impressive lack of facial features. The skin is so unnaturally smooth that it goes beyond the Uncanny Valley and goes straight to an Uncanny Canyon.

And don't even get me started on the voice acting.

I really hope the gameplay picks up once I get into it. It's going to need to be A+++ stuff to overcome what I've seen so far.

I think the combat and flight is excellent, but everything surrounding it is banal. They don't do anything with the flight system they've created other than make you travel from point A to point B. You can imagine all the neat stuff you could do with this gameplay in a proper video game game, but it's set against the backdrop of a mundane loot shooter that gets old in about an hour.

I would not buy this game, based off my impressions from the demo. If they add more interesting and varied scenarios for you to utilize the flight and combat, if the hub world is more fleshed out and the story wasn't told through radio chatter it might be worth playing. But with their monetization system, even all those things would be irreparably damaged. As of right now it feels like the skeleton of a video game.

@wolfstein_3d Yeah that's...not enough for me. You would think the one lesson developers would have learned from Destiny 2 is to launch with more of an endgame, not less. I'll be watching how they support this but 3 dungeons/strikes and some public events/bosses is not enough of an endgame for me to be interested at launch. Unless the story turns out to be amazing, but I'm not holding my breath.

Now I'm just a dog and all and I hate ragging on things other people might enjoy,
so instead of saying what I didn't like, here's what I did like:

• The javelins look alright.
• I like the digitigrade-inspired legs and how they animated.
  
• The weapons felt varied and sounded weapony.
• Some of the town npcs had cool hats.

My early impressions of this thing are alright. I'm with everyone content wise, and was at Destiny 1 at launch. But we haven't seen the story or how long the campaign is. If it winds up being a bit more like Diablo in that way where grinding the story on harder difficulties gets loot or something. Who knows.

The combat is probably the best thing in the game thus far. It finally feels like a game designed to use the one strength that studio started switching towards during later Mass Effect days. The flying feels good. I'm about 3 hours or so into the demo and have only seen two of the Javelins (Colossus and the starting Ranger) but they feel varied and fine. The javelins having ability slots that drops with varied gear means all of their unique abilities evolve a bit more over time than what you'd see in Destiny, which I think sets it apart a little. There are moments during encounters where you actually don't have to just play it like a shooter, and the Ranger is far and away the class that does the most of that.

The other thing I actually didn't mind was the characters. The story at it's heart seems very, go here save the world, there are people looking for ancient artifacts we've all done this before. But regardless of if I went into free-play, or if I went into any actual expedition everytime I came back to Fort Taris several NPC's had enough unique dialogue that made me a bit excited? Felt a little Mass Effect. Most of the dialogue was consistent, ergo evolving including the odd dialogue option. It was all just back story or side story for the characters in Fort Taris, so if there is more of that and that leads to some unique missions out in the world, could very well play into Biowares strengths of side storytelling.

So much of this is still wait and see though. The demo is structured in a very odd way, locking off a lot of stuff in ways that doesn't make much sense.

I will say it looks absolutely stunning on an X1X at 4K, but the performance just ain't there, though hopefully it's smoother at launch.

I agree with Jeff in that the gun-play feels lifeless but as someone who likes ability spam that part of the combat has been fun. (This is based on Last Weeks demo, haven't tried this weekends demo yet.)

But as someone who is still trucking along with Destiny 2 & The Division 2 out in March and have friends playing/interested in both), I can't really juggle all 3.

Man, my thoughts on this game are all over the place.

It’s fun. Powers and guns feel good, if not great. Moving is pretty fun, too. They keep you on your toes running, flying, hovering, dashing, and monitoring your cooldowns (movement, skills, and melee). So that’s satisfying. Also, there’s priming and detonating combos, which should be fun with a team, like Mass Effect 3.

Shared world loot shooters need to find a new way to deliver stories. Having some poorly voice-acted faceless character drone on in your ears about some bullshit while you’re trying to coordinate with your team is a bad idea. It makes me long for “I don’t even have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain.” I really just need these characters to deliver vital objectives. No more.

The town seems ill-conceived at this point, but maybe it makes more sense in the full game. At least it’s small in the demo, so it doesn’t break-up the coop too much. As a longtime Bioware fan, it sucks to see such shit writing and actinf, but hey, these games shouldn’t have much story anyhow.

My biggest gripes were 1) that underwater area of the stronghold, who thought that was a good idea??? and 2) an open world with a zillion loads, no warnings that your teammates are pulling you into loads, etc.

Seriously, if you need that many loads, don’t make the game open world and coop.

@therealturk: I’m with you on all of that. The game itself is fun, but not without some serious headscratchers. The “normandy” stuff seems fucking TERRIBLE by Bioware standards. I guess this is their new normal for world building and storytelling? It’s a bummer.

All I wanted from this game was to play Ironman. But flying with PC controls is the worst. It feels sluggish and unresponsive. I'm gonna pass on Anthem, what a bummer.

Gave it a second whirl today to try out the javelines I had not yet tried. Overall I feel like they are all viable and fun in their own way. As most have said Ranger is really a middle of the road type of thing, not bad but really feels like the central pillar with no real defined role other than damage dealing and slight assist. Decently useful on it's own. Colossus feels like a walking shield if said shield had artillery, found that javelin really useful in some missions where you had to hold off waves on enemies, really beating them back and being a wall between the enemies and your team. It's one of the few times in games where playing a tank really felt like what I imagine that is supposed to feel like. But Colossus feels a little hampered without a team to deal more damage faster.

The Storm javelin feels very much like a mage, as some have said. But I don't really agree with the criticisms that hovering is such a big issue. I felt like I was hovering and reigning down damage without worrying too much about overheating. Also quite liked that whenever I was on foot I could just throw up a wall and use other powers beyond the wall to keep damage away. Still, like the Colossus, Storm needs a team but specifically a tank at some point. Even if easier enemies are fun to wipe out with powers, bigger enemies need something else to aggro so you can focus on throwing out your stuff without having to hide.

Interceptor was a bit of a surprise, it's close quarters combat abilities are fierce. To the point where I almost was curious if it is almost too good. Grunt enemies and even some slightly stronger ones are like slicing through butter with a hot knife. Even if they manage to damage you some, you're killing them off and getting health so quickly it's not even worth thinking about. Not to mention you're fast, so if you get in a tight spot it's easy to get out of dodge. But I am guessing that it's a class that much like Storm needs some tanking or otherwise assistance when it comes to larger heavier enemies due to it's abilities seem tailed to clear out the grunts.

I'll also add that compared to Destiny, one of the things I really like about this game is that you're never locked to a class. You basically have 4 (or more since you can do subclasses of load outs on every javelin) classes to chose from at all times that can be kept at similar power levels. Which makes variety a little easier to come by.

does anyone have a sense of the single player experience? i don't have anything that can run the demo, and i know the demo itself is a fairly limited portion of the overall game- but is anyone getting a vibe off the encounters or enemies? does it feel like you're going to have a bad time if you're not constantly grouping up?

@mellotronrules: It's definitely more of a grouping kind of game, certain encounters even during regular missions might become a pain in places if you're solo (tho technically not impossible). But the game also just auto matches you with people unless you specifically tell it to limit you to a private session.

The M&K controls can be improved massively by adjusting both the "precision" and "responsiveness" of mouse flight way down (as weird as that sounds yes) and it matters a great deal in how they feel btw. The developers also already outlined how the flying has been further tuned in several ways in the main release, in a post (the demo is an old build).

I guess the actual game might be good, but from the demo impression alone, I think I'd rather play Andromeda.

@goosemunch: Fighting those giant space worms in Andromeda was way better than any encounter in this demo.

That’s not to say the full game won’t be better.

I thought the stronghold was largely forgettable and unenjoyable. There was one “boss” encounter at the end of the...second or third mission, maybe...where you were in a grassy area fighting some walking turret boss and his minions. That was pretty good and the most fun I had in th demo.

I’d just like reason to believe that there will be quality content that isn’t super-repetitive. I’m skeptical, but hopeful.

Certain encounters are a pain even in groups. That second story mission in the demo was a total pain in the arse. Just keep spawning a bunch of elites into an area with a boss that is already a bullet sponge? Yeah, that's great encounter design.

I started liking the demo a lot more once I unlocked the Storm Javelin. I really didn't like how the other Javelins feel/play but the Storm feels great. It's fast and nimble and it's heavy reliance on comboing abilities together for big damage. I tried the Colossus for a bit but it is just too slow and felt really clunky in combat, which might be the point of that Javelin but it just didn't feel good at all.

My big gripe with the demo is it's difficulty. I don't know if I'm missing something or what but I really wasn't a fan of every encounter I came across in the missions being elites which were almost impossible to bring down by myself and would melt my health bar in a few hits. I'm really hoping this isn't indicative of how the full game will be because I am having a fun time and I am interested in giving the full release a shot.

Took me forever to get in the servers, had to restart it once to actually get in. The game runs really bad on a brand new PS4 Pro. In some instances during the first person sequence while walking around in that town, it felt like it was dipping below 20 fps. Then the gameplay isn't that fun either. It has some good concepts but it doesn't feel good to play and it's mostly tedious. There's some good concepts on it, the flying around could be really cool and it was definitely my favorite part but the mobility feels clumsy, just like everything else. The menus are a complete mess too. But at least the suit designs are kinda cool and there's some nice customization options for the materials, colors, and decals.

Tried to play it alone and it takes forever to do the mission since you can only move forward after you kill all enemies and you're alone killing them one by one. On other instances you have to wait until a meter fills up while you're in a certain area but enemies can't get too closer to that area so you're constantly waiting for the meter to fill, go out of the area to kill enemies, come back again to fill the meter some more, go out again to kill and so on until that part is done. It seems like the kind of team that a team of players would tackle easier. Basically, it's doable alone, but it's incredibly tedious. Also, when you're alone all enemies swarm after you and in some situations it's hard to tell what the hell is going on in the screen and what you're shooting at.

The encounters feel kind of designed around people already knowing how to use their abilities a little bit, maybe even combo, since we are dropped in at level 10 in the demo, and a lot of people playing it aren't doing much of that (being their first time) and can just be standing there in one spot shooting, so when most of the squad is doing that the missions can indeed become a pain. With at least one or two people who know how to combo abilities, use their ultimate, how crits work and dodge/fly/hover their way across the fight they kind of become cakewalks.

@therealturk: First time I did that I lucked out and the boss spawned on some kind of root or ledge below the main area. I was solo and still died though, then it was just normal. :(

@tennmuerti: We were using ultimates. Constantly. They just do so little damage to the bullet sponge boss that it didn't really matter. Beyond that the instant you stuck your head out form behind cover you were probably dead because there were about another 12-15 high tier elite enemies that had also spawned and would keep spawning no matter how many you killed. It took us almost 30 minutes.

And to add insult to injury the game then bugged and didn't tally any of the experience we got from the mission. So . . . not awesome.

Needless to say I have uninstalled the demo and plan to stay far, far away from this one come release. I get the sinking feeling we had better start planning for a post-BioWare world. Unless there is a lot of things they aren't showing in the demo I have a hard time believing this is going to be doing well within a few months after launch.

@therealturk: That sucks, but it also seems abnormally long for that boss. Last run that I joined in to help someone else do it (on hard, so double enemy hp and dmg), there were just two of us (after host DC'd) and it died in probably less then 3-4 mins? (To be fair we both seemed to know the boss, ignored the elites, spammed ability combos, dodged all his stuff and I at least went for maximum weak point crit dmg with a sniper rifle.) But even starting out i haven't rly seen pugs have that much trouble with it.

Ran it on PS4 pro and it was really chugging, not sure if anyone else had that experience. Otherwise the gameplay was fun enough and I like the style, the enemies weren't particularly interesting or engaging to fight though. Also the menu systems don't seem particularly intuitive to me.

@therealturk: Was that the walking turret boss? I played that coop with one friend. It took a few shots, but that was by far my favorite part of the demo.

Crud. When this game debuted, I had a strong feeling I was going to fall in love with this game...but I'm strongly considering uninstalling this beta after not even finishing the first mission. Getting downed in a no-respawn area is awful, you're just stuck staring at an error screen praying that a total stranger will rush over to help you but the game isn't very communicative about who's down and where. A lot of this game's UI feels designed for somebody sitting inches from their screen rather than feet. To add insult to injury, both times my full squad died the game just up and error'd out to a report screen.

Beyond that, this game just seems exhaustingly difficult if you aren't playing with mics/friends. Destiny 2 had a lot of problems but being too hard was never one of them; both Destiny games were full of encounters that were so smartly designed to be just hard enough without going over the edge into being outright frustrating and the combat works whether you're in a communicating squad or just a group of strangers thrown together. Anthem's encounters have these huge mobs immediately, in the very first mission where you're still getting used to the controls and what your generic starter Javelin can do...it all feels very slapped together and lacks a considered flow.

I can see glimpses of a game I'd still really like in here, but right now I just spent an hour having absolutely zero fun and that's a real bummer.

@nodima: If I play this, it’ll be with a group. If my option was to play alone, I’d just skip it.

This is from someone who’s getting MK and DOA to play alone, too...

I worry about the variety of the missions and the amount of content. Warframe has something like 20 unique mission types? In Anthem I feel like I've done three things, if that.

Plus the one unique thing about Anthem, flying, generally doesn't factor into the combat gameplay loop. So really the GIMMICK is just a fancy way to travel. I'm playing as Storm, probably the most consistently air bound Javelin, and hovering around just feels like slow high angle strafing, not flying. I wish there could have been a way to work flying into the gameplay loop more, like some sort of half ground shooter half flight combat sim dynamic just to take advantage of the fact that these things are in the air and flying feels so nice.

Decided to give the demo another shot and I'm more keen on the game than the first try around, but this is still a very unpleasant experience from a technical perspective. I haven't got anything nicer to say about the UI or the impact of the gunplay. I tried switching to a heavy pistol since I was pretty much married to hand cannons in Destiny but without the spray and pray aspect of an assault rifle it just made more starkly clear how little thud there is to the basic ballistics. The basic powers are pretty fun once you realize how often they refresh, and if there's enough variety there I could see that being the main draw of the game.

Unfortunately, this thing is just not working for me at all. I've finished two or three missions (just did the three fire golem boss fight) and only once have I actually gone through the process of viewing badges, XP and loot collected rather than the game hard crashing to the XMB. I went to progress the mission with Matthias and the cutscene loaded up a still life with the dramatic background music but the characters never animated. I've had the game hang like this near the end of a load as well and never press through. In other words, I've had to close the application - or been forced out of it - after every single mission, and the load to get back into the game can take as long as five minutes sometimes.

I hope things go smoother for people at launch, and it seems like not everyone has been having near as hard a time as I am, but this has just sucked all the life out of trying to give Anthem a second fair shake for me. This is a hard pass for me at this point, demo or not.

From the couple of hours I've played of the open beta, I've got mixed feelings:

The Good:

The Colossus feels like a goddamn tank and I love it.

Flying is cool.

Combat as the Colossus feels satisfying.

I enjoy the frenzied, large-scale battles. I think with enough experience, it would be really fun corraling enemies into big combos with your squad.

Javelin designs have that right mix of looking sci-fi badass and highly functional.

Cons:

The Ranger is pretty bland. I get the decision to start the demo for every player with the most basic class: make it simple for people to understand the fundamental flow of traversal and combat!

It just didn't leave me much of a good impression. Playing as the Ranger was just... okay. Fine. Competent. The only thing that I loved was its ult, because missile barrages will never not look awesome as fuck.

I think if the demo had let players choose a class from the beginning, there wouldn't have been so many complaints about the "game feel" being so average. The Colossus plays so different from the Ranger, and from what other posters here and players in other forums have said, the Storm and Interceptor classes also have significant differences in how they play compared to the Ranger.

Nothing about the world pops, visually or narratively speaking. There wasn't a single gameplay moment either that I could point to as a highlight. I wouldn't even have minded if there had been a totally scripted sequence in the middle of a battle or while you were flying toward an objective that forced the player to look at and engage with. Anything that would have gotten people talking about ~that one cool thing in the demo~.

Soooo maaaaaany goddamn loading screeeeeens

The UI is in this awkward spot where it's going for a slick style but it just lacks any sense of flair or satisfying feedback. The menus just feel half-baked.

Experienced some progression-halting bugs and latency problems, but I assume those things will be fixed when the full game releases.

-

I don't need this to take over my life for months and months so I'm not so concerned about end-game content, but I see how other players who do want a reason to keep playing for a long time can find the reports about the launch window content worrisome. If I can enjoy this for a couple of weeks to a month, I won't have too many complaints.

Let me preface this with explaining why I may be a bit biased/not willing to give it a proper shake:

Maybe I didn't read the ninety million pop-ups to their fullest and maybe I got really fucking confused on how to launch the manifold mission (evidently double clicking the mission doesn't do it) and accidentally entered into matchmaking. Optimally I would have done this solo so I could learn to play the game, but I didn't.

And said matchmaking put me in a game with "AHUGECOCK". Now, I am by no means a prude. But when you are constantly trying to find mission markers to fly to and just see "AHUGECOCK" in giant font on your screen constantly, it kind of puts you in a bad mood. And it is pretty hilarious that the social screen was so broken that it took me probably five minutes to figure out how to report that user for an offensive name (evidently you hit escape, find the social tab, wait for the expedition page to finally load, click them, hold G, and then find the dropdown for report next to "add as friend"...)

Whinging aside: I really didn't like it. The social area was way too frigging slow but I've been told that is going to be fixed. The interface to get into a mission was equally cryptic and felt like "let's be different for the sake of being different", but I concede that might be the new normal and I play old ass games.

I would have preferred the option to pick which javelin I wanted to play as, but it was probably smart to give me the boring ass one to learn the controls. I DO find it hilarious that I got about forty popups to help me find Solas but nothing to explain the controls. But I was also swapping from m+k to gamepad pretty regularly as I tried to figure out what felt right. I THINK I figured out how to fly but I might have just been sprinting everywhere because I think I overheated and lawn darted a few times. Or I got shot. Not entirely sure.

And the moment the gunplay started the game REALLY felt bad. Maybe it has to do with being given a generic plinky AR when I tend to use DMRs in games like this, but I could never really tell if I was doing meaningful damage to anything. Part of that had to do with matchmaking with three people who actually liked the demo and had maxed out their frames, so my screen was fairly regularly exploding with particle effects that I had no hand in. Which is a great way to let you know what kind of game this is.

Similarly: Load times are shit. I was on an SSD but I think it had the problem of needing to wait for the entire fireteam to load? So having a 30-40 second load to go activate a terminal before another 30-40 second load to go back to the open world was "fun". I know it is lame to compare everything to Destiny, but I would think unloading the other players for instances would be a pretty standard tech.

And between hating my gun, not really getting the frame's powers, and having "AHUGECOCK" plastered across my screen, I ended up alt-f4'ing the fuck out once I found out there were at least two covenant bases to destroy (?).

Maybe Anthem will be fine when the full launch happens, but this demo made me transition from "That looks kind of cool and I'll probably buy it because I like the genre" to "Fuck this shit and I hope Bioware lasts long enough to make a game I care about again"

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And, just because we are gamers, let's compare everything.

Destiny is still, and probably "always" will be, the king of the genre when it comes to guns that feel fucking GOOD. Its Bungie, they know how to make a shooter, even if they don't understand loot or progression

Warframe is my personal jam because I find it to have the best movement and most interesting loot system (Borderlands only works in SP). And the powers are great in a way that I don't mind launching with an AoE rave that kills everything because I am still able to murder a lot of shit and the missions themselves tend to be fast enough

Anthem has MUCH worse shooting than Destiny. I was hoping the movement would beat Warframe (it is a frigging Iron Man suit) but it really doesn't. Hell, I think Anthem even has worse gunplay than Warframe, but I would need to get a proper DMR to really compare them.

In a lot of ways, Anthem feels like Plains of Eidolon (Warframe). I mostly just sprint from place to place (maybe Anthem will add archwings and hoverboards eventually) and then it is any other shooter. Except that Anthem somehow has even worse gunplay and camp design.

All in all: I guess I just saved 60 bucks. I guess I'll go spend that on more Warframe RMTs?

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And just to be more constructive (and save this if EA/Bioware send out a survey email), most of this is fixable

Gunplay? Whatever, that is as subjective as it gets. I hate it, I am sure some people love it.

Social and matchmaking: I understand that policing names is hell on earth (I am in the Warframe community...). But just don't put the randos I matchmake with front and center. Give me an icon with no username. And put on a VERY simple filter that can track stuff like "AHUGECOCK". I don't care if they aren't allowed to play or not. Just don't put them in the general hopper.

But also, don't force me to matchmake for a story mission. Maybe I would have liked the story. I don't know because by the time I got my bearings someone had already triggered the next bit of dialogue.

Load screens: Maybe it is the tech. I don't even mind having a loading screen before I enter an instanced area (even if "nobody" else does it...). But don't make me enter an instanced area for two lines of dialogue and no actual gameplay.

Most of this is VERY fixable. And the fact that this was chosen for the demo for a game launching in order weeks is really concerning. It either means Bioware have no idea what makes these kinds of games fun OR that this is the only mission that was "ready" a few weeks ago.

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And one last bit: HA HA. I got an email notification with "AHUGECOCK" right in the subject line. That is more on EA/Origin but I find that one to be hilarious. Can't wait until we start getting the REALLY fun usernames.

And the fact that I got more amusement out of seeing that in my inbox than anything to do with the demo is pretty fucked up.

I think I spent about 5 hours playing the demo over the weekend, and I can't say I've come away impressed. That's not exactly surprising, given how I had not been enthusiastic with anything I saw from press events and E3, but damn, it is disappointing. The premise seems right up my alley. Mech suits, sci-fi, third-person, and loot, are all things I am very fond of, yet Bioware has somehow managed to blend that all into a tedious, uninspired, and technically busted mess.

Apparently Bioware has been working on this for 6 years, and I can only assume that the majority of that was attempting to jerry-rig the frostbite engine to sustain an open world, co-op, looter RPG. Otherwise, the studio must be completely rudderless. The "hub" world of Fort Tarsis is an absolute bore. Even if they add the ability to run, it's still going to be a lifeless Chuck E Cheese animatronic show. The characters are still going to be boring, uninspired cliches. And it's still going to be a poor replacement for what would be handled better with menus.

So many of the design choices behind this game are baffling to me. I can only hope that the demo represented a very small glimpse of the content available, but based off what Bioware has said, Anthem will have the same problems as Destiny 1, potentially even to a worse degree. I am going to be really interested in how well Anthem does, both critically and financially, because it seems like yet another misstep from a studio owned by EA that was once held in high esteem.

I had a ton of fun making my Interceptor look rad. It's really cool that you can change not only the color of various regions on your suit, but the type of material too. I have reservations about naming that a main draw in the real game, because it's tied to microtransactions. It remains to be seen how many roadblocks there will be on the road to Anthem Fashion.

I don't know what that says about Anthem, also, that the fashion is the only thing that really got me jazzed. I played plenty of Destiny 1 & 2 and have come to the conclusion that I don't have space in my life for that kind of game. I do have space for the games BioWare typically makes, though, and it kind of bums me out that this has taken priority over those.

Played the free Demo on Friday and (tried to) a bit today (on PC).

Only 2 technical issues. First, when returning to Tarsis after the third mission on Friday, the cutscene never played. Felt like the game froze, but was able to skip out of it and got the "You helped the Triplets" message. Stopped playing at that point. Second, today, just around the time of the "event", I was in free roam, and right at noon EST (I'm assuming this is when the event started) the game just kicked me back to the loading screen (my hands, etc). Stopped playing at that point.

Overall this game isn't for me. Tarsis is so badly done. The UI is badly done. No inventory access except at the Forge in Tarsis. Why? No way to see what you have equipped (that I could tell) out in the world. This is not, from what I've seen, going to be the next great Bioware RPG.

The combat felt fun, but didn't feel like it would hold up as interesting for long, at least for me. I did watch a stream of the Stronghold, and, combined with the encounters I did (the first 3 missions), I don't think I'm impressed with the encounter design.

I did find the open world amazing to look at. But also very boring to be in. In free roam I never got any mission to aim for (before I was booted by, I think, today's event).

I get the impression this free Demo will not help sales. I was on the fence about Anthem, and I'm definitely not going to buy it now. It seems like the kind of game I'd love (I prefer 3rd over 1st person, I generally like Bioware RPGs, and I enjoy loot games), but what Anthem offers doesn't seem to be very good. I don't know why they didn't include any sort of tutorial, or why they made Tarsis a 3d walking menu selector.

My thoughts in no particular order:

It's gorgeous in 4K HDR. The stark contrast between standing in shadow at the base of a valley and the bright, sun-lit cliffs high above, the dazzling reflection of sunlight on the surface of the water, or the almost neon red and blue of the health and ammo drops that really pop against the background.

The sound is a mixed bag. I think the abilities sound great, but the guns are a little flat. Was there any ambient sound at all? I can't remember.

Loading screens. Ugh. You're telling me they can stream the entirety of this open world as we fly around, but they need a loading screen for a cave with two rooms? That needs to be "fixed". Or at least give us a warning first. It's such an abrupt slap in the face.

I was not impressed with the Stronghold mission. The sum total of the instructions we're given is "Collect Echos". Okay? What are the Echos? What do we do with them? What is the Artifact? It looks like a giant subwoofer to me. Why does anyone want control of it? What are these crystal bits in this ferrofluid? These echos can be locked in cages? Ha ha, what is that nonsense? I can't destroy these cages so how do we unlock them? Oh, they just magically unlock after we beat this wave of enemies? Boring! The storytelling, UI, and encounter design was a spectacular failure here.

The difficulty spike of that walking tank boss, wow. That encounter made me question whether or not BioWare knows what they're doing here. That sounds like a dumb thing to say, but the spike was that huge.

I'm not sure why some abilities are neither a primer nor a detonator, or why you'd ever use one like that. Not being either means I basically ignored them altogether.

The UI needs work. Examples: the dots above your squadmates are blue, and the mission tracker icons are orange, and yet the navigation icons are blue? Shouldn't they be orange to match the mission tracker icons and to differentiate themselves from your squadmate dots? The list of your equipped weapons and abilities in the upper-right corner of the forge screen needs more at-a-glance information: what the weapon types are, and whether or not the abilities are primers or detonators. That weird delay between pressing the button to scrap an item and the item disappearing from the list needs to go away.

I wish they'd allow Private matchmaking across all modes. Pop up a warning on Strongholds and Free Roam if you must, but allow it anyway. The last thing I want is XxBIGGNUTZ420xX flying around being an ass in my Free Roam.

Was anyone else constantly running out of ammo? The ammo drops seemed a bit too scarce to me.

Is that map all there is in the released game? If so the gameworld seems quite small. I mean, I'd rather have a smaller map packed with things to do than a larger one that's mostly empty, but this map seems small and empty. Color me alarmed.

I tried the demo out for about two hours on the weekend. It didn't sell me on the game at all.

The shooting is terrible and I don't see them being able to resolve that with better weapons because so far better just means more damage. There's no weight to the weapons. A shotgun is an assault rifle that fires slower.

The flying is ok, but the limitation on how long you can do it really sucks. At one point in the first mission you have to fly up a cliff face. Because I misjudged it, I came up short, fell down and had to wait until my jetpack worked again so I could fly up. In contrast to the weapons having no weight I feel like the flying has too much weight.

For some reason, flying and swimming despite being near identical use two different inversion options. So I went from flying to swimming to flying to swimming because the direction that holding the stick "up" in kept toggling.

The solider class they start you with is the most boring class imaginable. Hovering with him in combat doesn't feel good.

I'm not a fan of the loading screens. The first mission again - you load, go to a cave, load into the cave, find out the door in the cave is locked, load out of the cave, go to three different defense points and fight off waves of enemies. If you get too far away from your team, that's a loading screen. Go back to the cave and load in.

Colour puzzles in your first mission, with no indication that you should be looking for tiny little lights somewhere on the platform and with no easy way to communicate with the 3 other random players who are trying to solve the same puzzle? What are you doing?

Turned motion blur off but it still exists in the city. If you move the mouse too fast, enjoy the blurry mess until you stop moving it.

Thought it controlled like garbage and the game ran terribly on my PC. My 1070 and 6700K run every other modern game on High/Max at 1440p, but I couldn't hit 60 in the Anthem demo even with all settings on Low.