Demo Impressions

After getting to play a little bit of the Storm javelin yesterday, my impression of the game improved mildly, but this was still a bad demo. It seemed structured in a way that highlighted every flaw of the game rather than the good parts of it. For example:

Starting players with the Ranger suit was a bad decision: It's fine to have a middle-of-the-road suit that is easy to learn, but the Ranger was structured in such a way that was exceptionally boring to play. For those not in the demo, in addition to guns, each class gets two class items bound to L1 and R1, and a support item bound to L1+R1.

In the case of the Ranger, this was a frag grenade on L1, a wrist missile on R1, and what is essentially the Destiny Titan bubble on L1+R1. In 10 hours of playing the Ranger, I found more powerful versions of those items along with a sticky grenade and a cluster grenade with seeking projectiles. That's it. No variety, nothing that made me reconsider how I was playing the class. It was just tossing out grenades and missiles when they were off cooldown.

It got real boring, real quick. I wouldn't fault anyone for deleting the demo before unlocking an additional suit because it felt like the most paint-by-numbers generic game design on the planet.

It was also a mistake to only allow players to pick one additional javelin: While the VIP demo eventually had all the suits unlocked as a mea culpa for the game crapping the bed last weekend, in the free demo players only had access to a single additional suit. I picked the Storm and, good gravy, what a difference.

Unlike the Ranger, in only about 2 hours with the Storm, I found a bunch of ability drops that constantly changed how I played the class. I could now reliably set up and detonate my own combos, buff teammates, and improve my damage output. It felt dynamic and fun, and I wanted to also try the other javelins to see what they were about, but players were not allowed.

This also brings up the point that if you didn't like the Ranger, you only had a 1/3 shot of finding a class you did like. I was fortunate in that I enjoyed the Storm, but if I hadn't I would have left the demo with a really negative opinion of the game, rather than being able to explore and find a class that maybe spoke to me more. Given the purpose of a demo is to get people excited about the game and also give them a representative slice of what it's about, letting people choose only two javelins was a dumb decision.

Fort Tarsis is bad: The Fort is probably the worst "hub" I've seen in a game in quite some time. It's really, really static and mostly consists of a bunch of NPCs standing around without actually doing anything. There are people who are supposed to be engaged in conversation, but their animations only vaguely line up like people talking and there is no ambient dialogue - just this sort of murmur of background noise that sounds like someone recorded a busy conference room from a long ways down the hall.

There's just no movement to it. There's no wind moving curtains, NPCs stay locked in place, and the player moves pathetically slowly. Destiny's tower, for all the shit it gets, at least feels like something that could exist in some alternate universe. People are doing things there - there are ships going in and out of the hanger bay, commerce is going on etc. Anthem's hub just makes you laugh about how comically bad it is.

The character models and voice acting are even worse: You would think that after all the complaints over character models in Andromeda that BioWare would have given them special attention going forward. If anything, the character models are even worse in Anthem. Several of them would not be that far out of place in Oblivion - overly smooth, featureless doll faces with bugling, unblinking eyes. It isn't so much an Uncanny Valley as much as an Uncanny Canyon. It's legitimately hard to look at. It's like no one at BioWare bothered to look at a human face before starting to model anything.

And the voice acting is some D- tier stuff. That might partly be the writing, which seems limited to cut-rate Joss Whedon lines consisting of quips that aren't actually funny. The other part of it is that the voices are just bad. For some reason a lot of the actors seemed to think that because they are in a sci-fi fantasy game that it means they need to turn the funny-voice meter up to 11. It was painful to listen to.

Those are just the highlights: There were tons of other issues, too. XP not calculating after Freeplay, random crashes, issues with icons on screen being too small, text randomly changing sizes or getting stuck on screen, item deconstruction taking obnoxiously long, convoluted menus. The list goes on.

If the goal was to get people excited about this game, I'm sorry to say it was a pretty miserable failure. If this had come out 4-6 months ago with the expectation that a lot of this stuff would get fixed, then it might be different. But with less than three weeks to go I fully expect this to be a trainwreck on release.

In the defense of the social hub being a steaming pile of crap:

With faster movement (that evidently had to be disabled because it would overload the servers...) and NPCs properly enabled I think it would be fine. One of my bigger annoyances was just that I had to walk across the entire place to talk to one NPC. Anyone else would start a line and then have "this is not in the demo" on my screen.

Once everyone is enabled, I can see this being no better or worse than most hub worlds. It sucks to walk across the map but the idea is that you would be grabbing bounties or selling loot or whatever on the way.

That being said: I once again say Warframe got it right with Fortuna/Eidolon. The first time you get there you pretty much have to walk around and do a quest that shows you where everything is. After that you just use your menu to warp to the different vendors.

I think my final takeaway from the demo was that while I liked the combat, skills, loot, and customization, I didn’t like much else.

If you could take a javelin and lift-and-load it into a game with an open world that felt alive, enemies that were interesting, a story that I can care about, and an engine that can support the world without constant loads, I’d be much more interested.

As it stands, if I have some super excited friends who want to play, I may join them to goof off and check out loadouts and stuff. But I only played with one person who seemed at all into it. Everyone else I know who played bailed within 30-40 minutes.

I think a lot of this game also boils down to respecting time. I had an hour to play before the super bowl and decided to see if I could find this event with giants and whatever else was going on. I flew towards the fire in the sky and was rewarded with loading screens and being reset on the map. I looked around for 55 minutes and found nothing. So that was another super sour taste for EA and Bioware to leave in my mouth...that was the last I played of Anthem...trying to give it a chance and experiencing load after load as I fruitlessly looked for something promoted as special for players.

@gundato: I think part of my problem with Division, Destiny, and Anthem (I’ve played maybe 30 minutes of Warframe), is that there is so much downtime.

The worlds don’t feel great, so you need to run around these kinda shit hubs when I’d rather just have a menu on my ship, to use Destiny as an example.

I think I’d be way more into these games if it didn’t always feel like there was someone behind the scenes stretching for time.

If I go to play Borderlands, Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, Overwatch, old Halo games...I’m in and playing. Even Diablo, I can just get out there and play pretty much immediately.

With shared world games, just getting to a point where I can play can be a real UX nightmare.

@nutter

I would give Warframe a bit more time. As long as you aren't doing Plains of Eidolon or Fortuna it is basically that. Lots of instanced missions with very little time spent in the hub world (which is almost always best handled via a menu anyway).

One of the best comparisons I've seen is that it is like the original Guild Wars. You have an open hub that you can hang out at, but you are spending almost your entire time doing instanced missions for loot and said open hub might as well just be the D2 Battle.net IRC client.

Now, whether there is enough content in those missions to keep you entertained is a very different question. But it at least solves the shitty UI problem.

@gundato: I think I played it...early 2018? Very briefly...long enough to know I probably chose wrong with a bow.

I briefly had fun with launch Division (until endgame), and Destiny 1, I thought, got really special with Taken King right up until Destiny 2 totally lost my interest.

Aside from that, I feel like I spend a lot of time actively disliking these sorts of games, which is a bummer as I love shooters, RPGs, coop games, and have been playing Diablo in some capacity since Diablo 1. When they work, they’re special and I get it. I just feel that they work too infrequently, for me.

Well it seems like they should have never had a VIP demo. It did far more harm than good. The vast majority are going with that the game is a complete unplayable mess and will always be that way. I'm guessing no one even attempted to play the open public demo which worked perfectly fine, because not a single youtube person is mentioning that all of the issues were fixed. Seems the game is getting a whole new level of hate, that not even Destiny could pull off. It's insane how much people stick with first impressions. It truly does seem like the game is done for, and it hasn't even been released yet.

Except that the public demo didn't work perfectly fine, at least on PS4Pro. I had three instances of the game kicking me back to the title screen during a mission, one where a story cutscene straight up broke and wouldn't move forward, and I was unable to receive any experience from doing Freeplay at any point during the weekend. Certainly not what you would hope to see for something that they were terming a "demo."

Hey, it's great if it worked for you and you got some enjoyment out if it, but for a lot of folks it didn't. And just as it's stupid to assume the game will always be broken, it's equally foolish to assume that all the issues people were seeing are going to be magically fixed in the next three weeks.

The lesson here, as always, is to wait for release. If it works then, great. If it doesn't, you're not out anything.

Kinda glad they put out the demo, because it runs exceptionally bad on my PC. Which is a bummer, 'cuz I was vaguely interested in the concept of "destiny but learning from destiny's mistakes". Interested to see digitalfoundry take a look so I can see if it's just me, or if something funky is going on with Anthem under the hood?

@casepb: I loved Destiny from Taken King on, so I have a special level of scornful hate for Destiny 2.

I’m ambivalent towards Anthem. If those fuck-awful loads are nowhere to be found in the final game, I may get suckered in. Those loads really killed the open world for me.

@nivomi: They already took a look at the demo, and as many who played the demo noted, it definitely wasn't running well. Hopefully they get the performance sorted by launch, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Digital Foundry - Anthem Demo

@casepb: Yeah, you must not have been paying attention, because a lot of problems were still present even in the open beta. I only played the open demo, and I still came away with a negative opinion. Even if you ignore the many technical problems that people experienced on both the PC and console versions of the game, plenty of people, myself included, were critical of the game itself. The shooting was bland, the technical performance was not great, there were still connection issues, the loot seemed very uninspired, the hub station of Fort Tarsis was an astonishingly poor attempt at a population center, enemies vanishing, and even when the enemies managed to remain in the same universe as the player, they were still a chore to fight as a result of some pretty mediocre AI, the underwater sections seemed to be a callback to the horrible underwater platformer levels of the late 90's and early 2000's, the voice acting was cringey, the dialogue options were a joke in how limited and useless they were, and all around the game just seems like it is being rushed out 6 months early, despite the fact that it has supposedly be in development for 6 years. It is disingenuous of you to chalk up all of the criticisms of Anthem to people basing their impression solely on the VIP demo, while ignoring the open demo.

@jacksmedulla: Just going by what comments I've read on other sites, and the only thing anyone ever mentions is that the game infinitely loads or they can't connect or whatever. I will admit I only played the open demo for about 3 hours just to try all the javelins out but I had zero problems. I played the VIP for 8 and I do admit I had quite a few problems, but I tolerated it. I came out with a pretty positive opinion. The game ran great on my PC and looks amazing. The gunplay wasn't bad at all and felt satisfying. The abilities were pretty damn awesome and fun to use. The flying and mobility was very cool, by far the best thing any looter shooter has ever done. I skipped most of the story bits because it's a demo and I don't want any of that spoiled. The little voice acting I heard it was fine though no reason to complain, I'm not picky at all when it comes to that though.

I'm kind of confused what underwater sections you're talking about though. The small section of underwater I went in was nothing more than a tunnel you simply went through.

I have to hardly disagree on that one. The gunplay was by far the worst aspect of the moment to moment gameplay and felt underwhelming.

The visual representation and AI response when shooting enemies was basically not existent to the point I asked myself at time if it actually registered the shots at all or if the shots got lagged out. The only indicator for landing shots been heath bars going down.

It's no where near as pleasant as landing shots in other shooters in particular Destiny or triggering combos in Anthem with detonator abilities.

I started with zero expectations and zero interest. I tried the demo twice and just quit before really doing anything, I just hated everything. Then decided last minute let me play this one more time, privately. It clicked then, the game play was fun and I really enjoyed myself, even if it did feel like the results of The division and Destiny having a baby.

@wolfstein_3d: I had watched many videos before hand and new exactly how it was going to be. I will totally admit it's far from Destiny quality and I was never expecting that in the first place. I guess that's why I wasn't so disappointed. I was very much expecting it to be around the quality of Andromeda, which I had fun with I will admit. I knew going in what to expect from BioWare, which have never had high quality gunplay in any of it's games. I understand that a fair amount of people will find it lacking, especially compared to Destiny.

Couple things for me:

1. Encountered lots of little issues/problems.

The puzzle in the one mission made no sense until I looked up online how to do it for the second time. Not a bug or glitch but just, poor? Maybe you'll have an idea to look for those little lights several hours into the game but not starting at level 10 on this mission in the demo? It's fine, it might be better in the live game.

Dropped from a mission while playing with my friend. We earned no xp or drops from the half we did do. Hopefully you will and even more that this is super rare/doesn't happen in the live game.

Got glitched where a mission wouldn't continue. The I think fortress mission(strike) is where you had to collect the echoes and drop them off at the little crystal shard thing. Well, the second time where you need to collect 12, we did all 12, we turned them all in and you can tell because a jutting out crystal goes away every time you do(and the little circle of them was empty) and every enemy was dead but the game was still telling us to get them, so everyone left because it was glitched beyond repair.

I have a 3570k, 8gigs of ddr3 and a 1070. Card and cpu overclocked. Decent/good. The processor and ram are old but redoing that entire section of the pc is expensive; all I've done is that new card a couple years ago. It's not top of the line, but this game doesn't run super well and maybe that's on me but I'm not used to taking such drastic framerate/settings hits.

Why can we not play all 4 suits in a demo where mech type changes how you play and it's completely possible people only ever 1 like type of suit? I get that I didn't give you money already EA, but all the suits were in the damn demo. It's not like they were being held back for release or they weren't far enough along.

2. But there was joy to be had.

I found it fun to fly around. I know most people are saying the ranger was super boring, but I thought it was fun if conventional. However with my friend playing a storm and using lots of ice skills, my impact abilities were constantly comboing off him and being able to do that was the most fun I had in combat. He was basically "tagging" enemies with ice while I was around him for me to follow up for a huge chunk of damage.

While my most fun combat was ranger with impact combos, interceptor was more fun for me to control. The problem I had was not entirely understanding the ability system and losing access to the ones you start with. I don't remember salvaging them, but the genji like shurikens the interceptor came with were very strong, accurate and recharged quick(and I never found another replacement to this). I found most of the interceptor abilities flashy but kinda suck ass to use.; style over substance. Better understanding of the combo system or different skills might help. I really didn't like the send out ghost suit attack, blink strike, venom spray was buff but so close range, ice glaive didn't do much damage but also didn't freeze often enough etc.

As in my first point, comboing was fun. It was mega fun. Trying to get on one side of the massive shield enemies to distract so someone else could shoot them in the back was cool. With the piddly pop guns you start with, everyone being a ranger at first(impossible to combo with eachother without some different skill drops atleast and still kinda ineffective in demo without other classes) and being dropped in atleast several hours into the campaign I do understand the bullet sponge, weak guns feeling. I didn't hate it, but I felt it, until the guns and skills rolled in that things started to click and go by -much- faster. At times I felt weaker than I wanted to alone, but felt ultra powerful playing "correctly" with team mates.

I don't think this demo did a great job. As positive as I was on the experience, I have caveats about it and others rightfully so found little if any enjoyment at all. This would've felt fine 6 months out; less so a couple weeks out even if the demo we're playing is "slightly old". We'll see soon enough. I think for me the movement options are what elevate the game to something I care more about than just the looter shooter nature of it. Not to say they're perfect or that useful, but it just gets at a type of gameplay I really enjoy.

The demo unsold me on the game, I was going to get it, but it feels bad (framerate) and the world is weirdly separated into chunks, and the way it groups you with other players feels wrong (jump to a loading screen, destroing any feeling of continuity). I’ll might play it later, if it gets more polished/cheaper.