Anthem Archives - Page 2 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Prone to Rant

April 9, 2019 by Belghast

I love it when a game makes me seem like a whiny madman. I regularly read reddit, but very rarely comment about anything. However my frustration levels with Anthem have been growing to the point where I occasionally want to vent. I mean I try my best to keep this blog fairly positive, or at least balanced… but the Anthem reddit has been a salt mine since release so I figured it was a safe place to vent my frustrations. After today’s patch still announced no relief to the loot woes… I wound up venting at the nearest thread basically stating that apparently Bioware considers the current state of the game to be working as intended. To which I threw this lengthy comment.

So they have stated that loot isn’t where they want it to be. However it has been 52 days since the launch of the game and there has been a constant drumbeat from the player base that “loot is broken”. They have “accidentally” fixed loot twice to much praise from the players, so I find it hard to believe they do not understand which levers need to be pulled to give us what we actually want.

What I do believe however is they do not understand the kind of game that they built. They seemingly created Destiny with Flight… but with the loot system from Diablo 3 without fully understanding what makes either game tick. In Destiny… Exotics are these rare drops that feel super special when one happens, but that only works because every Exotic Weapon that you get is a curated roll and in the case of the armor that has some variation you have a way of re-rolling the stats. Diablo 3 on the other hand has a lot of variation in the loot and with that a bunch of crap items that are immediately going to get sharded… but the drops are plentiful which makes up for the fact you are going to keep very few of them.

If they want to continue to be Destiny with Flight and Diablo 3 Loot… then they need to make the tweaks and turn on the fountain of loot that makes that concept work. Either that or they need to change Legendaries so that they drop as perfectly curated rolls for optimal play if they want them to still be as rare as they are currently. The current combination is an incongruous mess.

I don’t want to abandon hope… I really don’t. However after gearing up all four Javelins to Masterwork level, and with the very limited content that is currently available there isn’t much for me to do right now other than decide either to walk away and cut my losses until “Year Two” and everything magically gets fixed like it did for Destiny, Diablo and The Division… or to keep slamming my forehead into the brick wall until I am dizzy enough not to care about the lack of legendary drops in GM2.

I had heard the term “Reddit Gold” before but never really understood what it was. I had to get Ashgar to explain to me how exactly it works because I legitimately had no clue. Apparently someone paid money to give me an award for that post? Anyways the funny bit about this when I got home and I did my daily run of trying to get a key and then doing a stronghold to use said key, the game decided to actually drop a legendary.

It is actually a fairly good legendary at that, if you are the type of person who enjoys playing with sniper rifles. I run with Siege Breaker for one reason and one reason only… it can freeze targets. Otherwise I would probably never use a sniper rifle in this game, and unfortunately because I know I squandered my luck on this drop it will probably be another week before I see something else. There was someone in the comment thread that theorized that they are working on some sort of a Stronghold challenge similar to Nightfalls in Destiny 2, and that maybe it would reward guaranteed legendaries. There is still supposed to be a large patch in the works for some point this month, so I guess we will wait and see. In the mean time I am trying to decide if doing dailies to get crafting materials and crappy decals is worth logging in on a daily basis.

Since I complain that Anthem is a game that wants to be Diablo 3 but doesn’t exactly understand Diablo 3 Loot…. I decided to play some actual Diablo 3. The last few nights I have been hanging out before bed working on my Crusader on the Switch version, and last night I wound up playing while upstairs in my office piped through my Elgato HD. I find it weird that my default method for playing consoles right now is through a capture card, but it more or less works other than the fact that it doesn’t take amazing screenshots of the switch given the amount of upscaling that happens. Over the weekend I finally beat the main story and now I am focused on running Rifts and doing bounties. Over the last two nights I have worked my way act through act doing a full set of bounties… only to realize that apparently the season that I started playing on is over and that didn’t count towards the normal seasons journey achievement. Ultimately I am progressing too slow to really be worrying too much about seasons in the first place.

Right now I just want to hit 70 so I can gear out in the Thorns set which is hands down my favorite way to Crusader… and a play style that I thought would translate well to handheld mode. By the end of the night I managed to hit 58 and just a little bit away from 59, which means right around the corner I will start being able to collect Deaths Breath and finish unlocking the rest of the stuff in camp. Additionally it means that I will be able to start Cubing some of the low level drops that I have gotten like the Heart of Iron that I managed to get during my 40s. I am still only playing on Hard and have not ratcheted up the difficulty at all… but without Haedrig’s Gift I feel like that ratcheting process is going to go way slower as I try and painstakingly collect a set of Invoker gear.

It would be nice of Haedrig’s Gift worked for pretty much any character to be honest, season or not. The highlight of the night was seeing my very first Menagerist Goblin on the console and it dropped one of my favorite pets… the Flaming Skull. At some point I will have to test out how grouping works as I know a handful of my friends have the copy on Switch. That said this is largely a before bed solo grinding game for me as I find it incredibly relaxing. I do however wish there was a way to link your Blizzard account and get some sort of cross play going on. I somehow doubt that is going to be a thing anytime soon unfortunately.

Oracle of Our Age

April 3, 2019 by Belghast

We all knew it was coming, but yesterday Kotaku’s Jason Schreier posted his break down on what happened during the almost seven year development odyssey with Anthem… formerly known as Dylan and formerly known as Beyond. The truth is I had not made the connection there to the original Dylan prototype that was shown off and Anthem… and I also did not make the connection to the leaked Beyond name and Anthem. I somehow thought both of those were scrapped concepts… and I guess in truth they ultimately were. If you have not had a chance to read the article then I highly suggest you do so. There are so many ways to write a post mortem of a game… but Jason always seems to land that perfect mix of giving damning evidence with a non-hyperbolic touch. In most of these tales the staff are the heroes struggling to make the best product they can while caught in a bad situation, and the tale of Anthem really is no different.

What rings true about this for me at least is that I have a lot of friends in game development who have been willing to open up about the process behind closed doors. This is a trust I have not broken other than speaking of these moments in generalities about the industry as a whole without specifically naming names. Ultimately that is probably why I continue to get the treatment of folks willing to talk about them to me. However the anecdotes I hear tell me that the tale of Anthem or Destiny or Andromeda… are not unique to those specific companies but instead a problem with the industry as a whole. There is a manifest destiny that they can punch through any game development cycle with enough hours spent and enough midnight oil burnt… to the detriment of the employees family life and often times sanity.

I know folks who have left the games industry after finding out how generally unstable it is, and found a much better niche in the world of the corporate sector. Growing up… building games was my dream as it is the dream of so many people. My path however lead elsewhere as subtle circumstance after circumstance lead me to the comfortable safety of managing a group of developers. However these side stories that I have been trusted over the years have told me that I ultimately made the right decision. I could not handle the instability and the fact that the majority of folks who work on a title wind up getting laid off and having to find a brand new workplace in-between releases. Then there is the problem of only having specific locations where a group of studios tend to clump… and of those… the only one that is really palatable to me personally is Austin Texas.

The tale of Anthem weirdly gives me hope and renewed patience towards the game as a whole. If they could make the core mechanics of the game feel so good within effectively the last six months of production… imagine what Anthem would have been given another year of development time. I also feel hope because now the game as a whole seems to have been transitioned to the Bioware Austin live services team, and quite frankly I have a lot of faith in that group. Opinions may vary but I feel like they have done an excellent job with the growth of Star Wars the Old Republic, which is another one of those games that I return to regularly to gobble up the content that has been put into the game since my last visit. I feel like it is a better game today than it was at launch by a large measure, and this is in spite of the weird monetization schemes that the game has.

What I am ultimately hoping is that EA will give them time and space to grow Anthem into a really amazing game at some point down the line. The issues are large, but only really something that kicks in once you slam into the concrete wall that is the progression scheme. Shortly after the release of the post Bioware made what feels like a very hollow response, which tells me two things. Firstly they only read the bullet points that Jason Schreier claims to have sent over before publishing the article and wrote the piece entirely based on that. Secondly however it tells me that the points that were made rang true and set them on the defensive. All of this seems really odd given the level of transparency we have gotten from the community team about the state of the game, which makes me think this came from a highly disconnected corporate level instead.

Right now I am pretty much logging into the game on a nightly basis, but only long enough to do whatever challenge grants me an Elysian Key. The last couple of nights I have not stayed in long enough to actually run a Stronghold to open said Elysian Chests. However even the rewards that you get from these chests show that the order of operation has been to take a pat of butter and try and make it spread across an entire loaf of bread. So many of the vinyls that you get are lackluster or are simply resized and less cool versions of the ones that come from the paid shop. The team is struggling to add meaning to the game without having a backlog of content to put in place. I love the core of what this game is so hearing about the struggles and what they accomplished in spite of them… makes me want to stick around and see how things evolve.

That said I also don’t necessarily begrudge anyone who does not care at all about the heartache and struggle that the employees went through, and simply points at the bottom line that they paid for a finished game and didn’t get one. If you are in that camp… then it might just be time to cut your losses and return later when there is the inevitable patch that fixes everything and gives this game their “Taken King”, “Forsaken”, or “Patch 1.8” moment. The fact that I can rattle off a list of moments in Anthem’s direct competitors timelines where the games went from sorta crappy to pretty awesome over night shows that this is not a unique problem they face. Even Diablo 3, which is the title they kept holding themselves up to has their “Loot 2.0” moment that fixed so much of the game. I will be holding out for that day and continuing to poke around in the meantime. Feel free to just use this blog as a litmus test for when it is a good time to check it out again. You know without a doubt I will be making happy posts if that day comes.

Clones of Fort Tarsis

April 1, 2019 by Belghast

The other day I noticed that there were three NPCs with the same face standing in line at this meat shop. I figured it was probably just a weird occurrence with the NPC generator putting the same model all clumped together accidentally. However last night I noticed that there were 4 standing in line… and when I turned the corner there were two more. I made a post on twitter about this and by the time I got back to the game as I had simply alt tabbed out, they were ALL within the frame of a single screenshot. Sure there are subtle differences between each of them but they ALL have the same face. This leads me down a path that I was talking about in Slack the other day… but there is no such thing as a random number generator. Effectively you try your hardest to create randomness with a computer, but you will never quite get to truly random because in my experience trying to write them over the years… they have a tendency to get stuck. This makes me wonder if a lot of the loot generation within this game is suffering from a stuck sequence. Imagine if you will a D&D encounter table… with the really interesting encounters happening towards the top of that scale. Imagine also that you have percentage dice that for whatever reason don’t want to roll anything higher than a 85. I have no clue why loot is as fickle as it is, but a when you see things like our six clones it makes you wonder. Additionally not in this shot there are two kids running around with the exact same face, so this may be fairly common in game and I just didn’t notice it until recently.

As far as content in Anthem goes… they have at least roped me in with the whole Elysian Chests thing. At a minimum each night I do whatever the daily challenge is that rewards a key, and then run at least one Stronghold to open that chest. So far I have gotten a bunch of shitty crafting materials and a handful of extremely lackluster vinyls. The ones you purchase off the shop apply a design to the majority of your lancer, but the ones you get for free… are in general a sticker on your shoulder and maybe something on your helmet. Again very disappointing as compared to what I went into that system expecting. However the limited nature also triggers my desire to catch them all before they disappear. I am certain that at some point in the future this game will pull its head out and become extremely fun, and I sorta want to make sure I don’t have pangs of regret by not getting something cool along the way. After a very long dry streak I did manage to pick up a Legendary version of the weapon I use for priming targets, so I am super excited about that. I would have probably rather had some defensive stats on it, but I will deal with it as is because it is lime green and not orange. I also wish that 50% physical damage was not limited to the weapon, but oh well you cannot control the rolls in Anthem.

Other than Anthem I spent a significant amount of time playing Breath of the Wild on Cemu, and have cleared my second Divine Beast. I did the Zora Beast first and then since it seemed to be the next closest worked my way through the Goron area. I found the second Divine Beast way easier than the first one, but I am not sure if it was simply that I went into it knowing what to expect or if it was simply that the fight was much easier. There was a mechanic that I glommed onto pretty fast during the second boss that largely trivialized the encounter, so maybe it would have been rougher had I not tried that. Now I have made my way over into the Gerudo are and am trying to figure out how to sneak into the town. I’ve already seen the next encounter which is apparently a giant robo Camel? So effectively you have an Elephant, a Salamander/Lizard thing, a Camel and a Giant Birb? I say Salamander largely because in Japanese games they tend to be fire aligned, and a lot of other lizard types are lightning aligned.

Regardless still having a blast finally getting deep into this game, and key is one small tweak that made the experience immediately better. There is a plugin for Cemu that allows you to disable weapon durability, keeping you from having to play the game of constantly swapping weapons. That one tweak changed the experience from something I bounced off of out of the frustration of trying to keep finding more decent weapons to use, to something I have dug into hard and am loving. This was my biggest complaint when the game released, and not shockingly once it was gone my experience felt so much better. When playing on the Switch I made a conscious decision to go for the Zora area because I had read online that you could get a repairable weapon there. So much was my focus on trying to stay fully equipped that I altered my path just to make sure I could keep some reasonable gear. Take weapon durability out of the game and I just wander freely without a concern of getting into an area and not having any weapons. It has been a liberating experience, so much so that I really think there should be a toggle in the official game to disable the stupid durability system. In the meantime however I have Cemu and it gives me that functionality.

And finally… I have seen the second credit roll of Stormblood and am officially ready for the release of Shadowbringers. This one was way shorter than I was expecting, and largely entailed a single quest chain. So here is where I am going to complain about Square Enix because they have started doing something that drives me insane. There have been a few quests towards the tail of Stormblood that involved a bunch of cut scenes and multiple phases… all without checkpoints so if you fail at any point you have to complete the entire sequence over again. I absolutely failed the final quest of this expansion a few times until I sorted out the dance of the fight, and each time… it forced me to play through a sequence that was largely on auto pilot and un-fail-able… before getting to the REAL fight. They need to quit this shit and divide things up into multiple quests. That said I did enjoy the tail end of Stormblood quite a bit and I am looking forward to Shadowbringers continuing things. Overall I think Stormblood was a much stronger expansion than Heavensward was… however nothing holds a candle to just how great the post release content was for A Realm Reborn. Stormblood however was way closer to that, so I am hoping this means a return to wider themes. Based on what I saw at Fanfest Tokyo, I am guessing that is absolutely going to be the case. Heavensward had its moments, but there was way too much horrible Elf politics for my tastes, and the Dragons were not much better.

How was your weekend? Do anything interesting in game or in the real world? Drop us a note in the comments.

Friday Smorgasbord

March 29, 2019 by Belghast

Anthem Loot Issues

First up in the Friday Smorgasbord is some more Anthem discussion. I have been playing pretty much every night since the patch drops and at a bare minimum completing the steps required to get a key to unlock a “cosmetic” chest. That is in quotes largely because I am still getting way more useless tier 1 materials than I am actually getting decals or materials. At least they came out and stated that there are no armor pieces in the Elysian Chest, which is I think in part what we were all hoping to get. The vinyls have all been super lackluster at least compared to some of the other vinyls available in the game. On the loot front there is an article from Paul Tassi at Forbes that pretty much sums up what is wrong with the game right now… it is literally all about the loot. He suggests increasing the drop rates by 300 to 400% and then still questions if that would be enough for the sort of game Anthem actually is… but the Devs apparently don’t understand that it is. RNG can be amazing or it can be a harsh mistress. For example Wednesday night I had a grand ole time where I managed to rack up three new legendaries during the course of the evening… a component actually for the right class from a GM2 Legendary Mission, and then two new weapons… one each from GM2 Strongholds. This still felt stingy to me, but at least was something. Last night however I walked away with nothing really of use from doing two legendary contracts and a stronghold all at Grandmaster 2 level.

There are so many things in this game that just feel bad as the player once you reach what currently passes for an end game. The truth is there is nothing that would normally be classified as end game. The game has no PVP so no super serious equivalent of the Trials of the Nine would ever exist in Anthem. Similarly there is nothing along the lines of a Nightfall and there is most definitely not a raid that can be completed weekly with a group of other players for a shot at amazing rewards. There are no weekly bounties that you can complete that guarantees you an item that will be an upgrade, and we are completely missing something similar to exotics that have a guaranteed curated roll. So what is left is a lot of grinding and perfecting your builds, which is maddening when it is entirely dependent on the slow trickle of Masterworks and Legendaries. I have friends that are doing GM2 nightly… that have yet to see ANY Legendaries and consider me extremely lucky that I have had multiple. While the game desperately needs a true end game… the more pressing problem will always be the loot and until they open the floodgates no one is really ever going to be completely happy.

Divine Beast Vah Ruta

I eventually took a break last night and returned to my Cemu Breath of the Wild play session. When I was last playing I had been working my way into the general area of the Zora kingdom to tackle the first of many Divine Beasts. I am not sure if there is a chosen order, but the furthest I managed to get with this game before setting it back down again… was to head in this direction. So last night I made it through the sequence of annoying lightning attackers to get to Zora land and made my way about collecting Lightning Arrows. I set about collecting the arrows while avoiding the Lynel… which went fairly quickly given that pretty much every tree in the vicinity had at least three stuck in it. There were a few times I had to duck out of view and wait but managed to get it taken care of then glided my way down to where I was meeting Sidon to make the run on the Divine Beast. I made it through the sequence surrounding disabling the “defenses” and started on the first level of the dungeon before I finally called it for the night. I do like that Breath of the Wild pretty much just lets you do a save state wherever you happen to be in the world. I greatly appreciate its mobile roots allowing me to pretty much abandon ship whenever I need to. So tonight I am likely to return and actually finish the first of the Divine Beasts because I am finding the gameplay way more compelling when playing it on the PC… I am weird like that.

Borderlands 3

I had to work yesterday and was in meetings… so I completely missed what apparently was a mess of a reveal at Pax East. However I did manage to watch the nice and pristine YouTube videos later that afternoon. I have to admit at first I was not super impressed with what I saw, but largely this was due to my own false expectations. In my mind when I think of Borderlands 1 and 2 Trailers… I am actually thinking of the Game Intro sequences which are absolute masterpieces. I forgot what a Gearbox Borderlands reveal trailer actually looked like… and judging it by those standards this one is a better trailer than the ones that came with either 1 or 2. For example the original Borderlands Trailer… feels absolutely nothing like what we think of as the Borderlands Style. Then with Borderlands 2 we pretty much got a very similar type of reveal trailer as we just saw with Borderlands 3… like shockingly similar. So by those comparisons… Borderlands 3 comes out just fine.

I feel like there were probably story beats that I completely missed because I never played the Telltale Games spinoff game. What I was hoping for was some semblance of the story beats that we would be seeing in the new game. For me what makes Borderlands as a series special is a mix of the interesting characters, quirky humor, almost MMO style questing, intersting gunplay, the faucet of loot, and a bunch of interesting character class choices. The trailer doesn’t really give me much to go on other than there are a bunch of guns… one lady can become shiva, another pilots a mech and then you have two gunner classes that while visually different didn’t do much to actually distinguish themselves from what we saw. There were characters shown that I recognized as being part of the Tales from the Borderlands series but that I don’t know much about. I would be lying if I said I would not be playing it, but I am also not nearly as hyped as I thought I would have been at this point. I am sure as more tangible information comes out about the game I will get more so.

I am guessing based on what are the villains that we are going to see a way more raider-centric storyline than we did with Borderlands 2. The biggest problem with my general sense of disappointment after watching the trailer for the first time… is that I was ultimately expecting this instead.