Anthem Archives - Page 3 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Losing Hope

March 27, 2019 by Belghast

Despite my own admonishment yesterday morning I allowed myself to get a little hyped about the possibility of finally getting to cut loose in Anthem and make progress again. I should not have done this, because once again… Anthem is a buggy mess following the 1.0.4 update. This starts early when you are greeted with an empty news screen, which isn’t the end of the world but was sort of a harbinger of events to come. The patch included a bunch of quality of life improvements, some of which exist like the summary screen you are seeing above showing all of my gear and sort of giving us the beginnings of what I hope will ultimately become a stats page. Additionally there is no load time to get into the Forge and you can access it anywhere within Fort Tarsis just by bringing up the escape menu. However the whole being able to see what World Events are active thing does not appear to be in the game, because in none of the four or five freeplay sessions I joined last night could I actually see any events up and active.

One of the big tweaks that was supposed to be coming was an increase in the general quantity of good loot that we would be getting from doing stuff… namely anything that rewarded a chest or from the bosses at the end of Strongholds. This appears to have completely broken and now those Stronghold bosses are no longer rewarding the guaranteed Masterwork at all, and instead just seem to give you a fist full of purples and blues. I spent a significant amount of time on Hard mode running content with Neph last night and something seems to be broken there as well. Previously when running with friends on a sub Grandmaster difficulty I would see a lot of those “Starter” Masterworks dropping. In spite of doing three Strongholds and a could of contracts I saw zero Masterworks which was previously unheard of… just doing anything on Hard seemed to reward me a handful of those starter weapons. I did manage to get a single Legendary but it didn’t actually drop anywhere that I could see it and instead was the harbinger of another bug… apparently players can pick up your loot and then stuff just randomly shows up in your inventory. I mean I am thankful in this case and in truth I think loot should work more like Destiny in that if it drops it automatically gets tossed into your inventory without having to pick up anything. Sidenote… I took this photo because if you notice three characters are the same base model standing side by side which is a little uncanny valley.

The other big thing that was touted with this patch was the introduction of Elysian Chests at the end of Stronghold missions. These were supposed to sweeten the pot and make us want to start running strongholds again with a touted inventory of a couple hundred cosmetic items available for us to find. When they were announcing them they stated that there was also a chance of crafting materials and gave the example of 30 Masterwork Embers… which seemed like a reasonable trade for a cosmetic item. Getting 30 Chimeric Alloy on the other hand is not worthy of giving up a cosmetic and just feels like shit given that this is the most basic generic level 1 crafting material that you can gather up spending five minutes running around in freeplay. It feels bad wasting your daily key on something like this, and there are thread floating about showing that four chests were opened and all four gave low tier crafting materials.

I did however manage to get a Vinyl later in the night, but that just spawned another bug with the patch. When you get something cosmetic from an Elysian Chest, it won’t show up in your inventory until you have logged out of the game and logged back in. Even then… I am not sure if Overcast is bugged or what but it doesn’t seem to appear on my Lancer at all so not sure what it is actually adding but it certainly looks nothing like that icon… which I am assuming is a generic icon for all cosmetic rewards given that it shows a bunch of materials in the background. Additionally this patch was supposed to allow us to stay in flight longer… but it feels like it has had the opposite effect given that I no longer have the longevity in air that I did before and seemingly diving no longer lowers heat as much as it did. Basically… we got 1.0.4 and already desperately need 1.0.5 to fix the shit that was broken again this time.

The problem for me is that I am ultimately losing hope that they will manage to pull their shit together. What I used to view as being scrappy and responsive to issues… I am just now seeing as a very sloppy development methodology that apparently involves little to no quality assurance. The fact that loot was bugged at the end of Strongholds… should never have made it into production on a patch that was touted as fixing Strongholds. It took exactly one time running a Stronghold to notice “hey… we are not getting our guaranteed loot”. The fact that loot is still as stingy as it is now is a complete sin, given that was the beat being pounded fervently like a drum from day one… that Diablo only works if the loot flows like water allowing you to account for the completely useless items that you get and shard. What we are left with is signs that Bioware has nothing up their sleeve and are just trying to eek out for as long with the limited an repetitive content that is available, and rationing of Legendary and Masterwork drops is seemingly their master plan in trying to make this content last until they can create more.

I had fun playing with Neph but there was a slight pang of bitterness as I didn’t even see starter Masterworks as was regularly the case when dropping down to the lower tiers before. Right now I am contemplating starting a brand new Pilot just so I can have a set of Javelins that match the level ranges of my friend still down in the lower rungs, hoping to maybe be able to get them up in level enough to run the higher stuff with me eventually. Tam, Ash, Kodra, Waren and Shiana have all moved back to Warframe which is apparently having a great streak of content to engage with… and Thalen, Grace and Neph are all way down in the level range and fighting against the fact that there is limited queuing available sub Grandmaster 1. Then there is the problem that if you want to solo this content you will end up getting effectively half of the experience as if you were grouping… because the Alliance bonus matters that much. Neph for example played the game entirely solo other than a bit of running around and doing World Quests and as a result finished the main story and all of the side content at level 15… whereas I was something closer to 22 from never not grouping.

I am getting frustrated at this point, and super close to just giving up. I want Anthem to be a great game and in some aspects it is… and in other aspects the Bioware team does not seem to understand what sort of game they want it to be. After seeing the second failed patch in a row that seemingly caused more havoc than it cured… I am starting to fear that we will have to wait for whatever this games “Taken King” or “Patch 1.8” ends up being, when they finally grasp how to make it fun and rewarding. The gameplay feels fun… but the rewards feel like a mockery of what they should be.

Anthem Patch Day

March 26, 2019 by Belghast

Today is in theory a big patch day for Anthem that should be clearing up a lot of the ills that the game has. However I am not exactly holding my breath. What I mean by that is I am certain that there will be in fact a patch today, Game Update 1.0.4. What I am doubting is if it will fundamentally improve the situation for those of us stuck in the limbo between Grandmaster 1 and being able to feel viable in Grandmaster 2 and beyond. What is needed to fix this is Legendaries, and not only that but viable Legendaries. Both patch 1.0.3 and the server side loot tweaks were supposed to give us some remedy, and while I have seen a greater frequency in Masterwork drops it has done nothing to help fill my screen with lime green. Ultimately knowing that today’s patch was on its way served to disincentive me from playing the game at all… because why should I invest any time at all in a largely broken loot system when if I just waited a week there would in theory be some fixes.

Game Update 1.0.4 for #AnthemGame will release Tuesday, March 26th on all platforms. We'll have Update Notes tomorrow as well to go along with the download going live.

FYI: We also have scheduled server maintenance tomorrow from 6:30am – 8:30am PDT/9:30am – 11:30am EDT as well.

— Andrew Johnson (@UNTDrew) March 25, 2019

I think where I am with this game is that I really enjoy the moment to moment game play, but now that the progression train has slowed I am struggling to stay invested given that there is such a limited pool of content available to players. I think the Elysian Caches will help somewhat because it gives a long tailed chase mechanism… and quite frankly what better reward is there than things that make your Javelin look awesome. So that alone will make Strongholds worth running again. Additionally there are the Legendary missions that should produce some replayability of existing content and given how enjoyable some of those story missions were… I can see that helping as well. Quality of life changes like being able to see what World Events are active at any given time will also be a welcome change. The main problem I foresee is that the game really needs fresh content to add to the mix, because as it stands three Strongholds just isn’t enough… when a good deal of us have every line of dialog in them all memorized at this point. I would prefer never to hear again about not wanting that omelet.

I will of course be checking it out tonight and I am hoping that I am wrong, but I am sort of trying to tamp down my expectations so I don’t turn into one of the heaps of rage that inhabit the main reddit. Once again I highly recommend LowSodiumAnthem if you are hoping to stay a fan of this game rather than wading into the mire of hatred of the official Reddit. Bioware Devs post on both locations.

What I wound up spending most of my time last night doing however was playing some more Breath of the Wild via Cemu. The screenshots don’t exactly do it justice of showing off just how damned good this game looks running in 4K resolution. I am consistently impressed by just how good it works, but then again… the developers of Cemu have been tweaking and refining this for roughly two years now with a lot of community modding support that adds in compatibility fixes. I’ve surpassed where I was progress wise from the Switch and have put in around nine hours of gameplay so far, almost all of it stable. The instabilities thusfar have involved encountering something I have not seen yet and having the emulator pause to build shader cache. There are in theory downloadable shader caches that would fix this problem… but I have not really spent any time investigating how to get my hands of them.

Essentially everything about this process is sort of caveat emptor… but seeing as I have done this level of nonsense many times in the past it didn’t worry me too much. Suffice today however there has been copious amounts of virus scanning before I interacted with anything that I acquired in this process. This is probably the first time however that I have seen modern emulation give a game that is on a current platform a run for its money… or in this case greatly improving the visuals. I know there is similar magic you can do with a 3DS emulator, but thusfar I have not really had the horsepower to really make those games perform to their fullest at 4K resolutions. However if you are interested in that sort of nonsense then I would point you at the Simply Austin Youtube channel to see examples of what can be done. It is so bizarre to me how far emulation has come from the days of me trying to play Final Fantasy V on ZSNES and having to apply a frame skip to get some semblance of something playable, to being able to run modern games on high end PCs.

Please note… that while I totally support emulation, I don’t do so as a dodge to getting free games. I have a closet full of classic game systems, and in the case of both Cemu and Citra the Wii U and 3DS emulators respectively I have owned all of the games that I have tried playing. Especially in the era of struggling game studios… they need you buying the games instead of figuring out ways to get free copies. I didn’t exactly have clean hands throughout my high school and college years, but now I think in part I buy so many games as a way of making up for my former warez peddling past. If Nintendo for some reason started releasing these games on PC… I would likely lose all interest in emulating them in the first place. However I somehow doubt that is ever going to happen, and as a result… Nintendo consoles will always be the most widely supported emulation platforms.

Incentive Not To Play

March 21, 2019 by Belghast

I am still very much in vacation mode this week and as a result the posts are happening way later than normal. Yesterday Bioware hosted a developer stream and you can check out the VODs on Twitch or Mixer or if you are like me and prefer a bullet point list there is one up on the official Anthem Reddit and a slightly different one up on the Low Sodium Anthem Reddit. Unfortunately both of them seem to have missed at least one detail, but if you are interested in the Reddit at all… I highly suggest the Low Sodium version for overall better reading experiences. Ultimately they went over a bunch of changes to the game for both performance and quality of life as well as adding a few new systems in. First up there are the Elysian Caches that will spawn at the end of Stronghold missions and upon opening will reward either crafting embers or vanity items. I with it was BOTH and not either… and there will honestly be hell to pay if one of these chests starts pooping out lower tier crafting embers instead of Masterworks. The example they gave was 25 Masterwork Embers… which honestly is nowhere near as relevant to me as a Vanity item… so I am hoping that isn’t the majority we get out of these chests. Ultimately each player can get a key through a daily quest and if you have four players with four keys you end up with four times the loot at the end. Opening a chest grants items to everyone in the mission, so I have a feeling we will probably start saving these keys to run with our friends rather than with random people.

On the ever important loot front they stated that they are greatly improving the loot from chests and from the bosses at the end of strongholds, meaning that while you will still get one guaranteed drop you will have a higher likelihood of seeing additional Masterworks and Legendaries instead of the seemingly fixed 2 purples and an orange allotment that we seem to get now. I am hoping this actually maps out into something that feels like progress because for me at least the 1.0.3 loot changes have not actually worked out to being more Legendaries. Again I am at the end of the curve where I shard everything I get from pretty much every bit of content I run. Another big change is that they have removed the loading screen for the forge and put in what appears to be the start of a stat screen where it now shows on a single screen everything in your load out. Legendary Missions are going in which will be retreads of story missions but at harder difficulty and with what they are calling an Apex monster at the end of each, which is going to be like an Ancient Titan or a Luminary or something that is big and that already has its own higher baked in chance of dropping good loot. However the biggest improvement that I am looking forward to is that supposedly World Events will now show up on the damned World Map… so you can navigate your way to them instead of wandering around blindly hoping one will spawn.

I am in this weird place with Anthem where I am super excited to see the changes continue to happen, but it also disincentives me from actually playing the game right now. Why would I spend hours grinding in frustration when all of the activities are in theory improving their loot chances with the next patch? Right now it is targeted at Tuesday, so I will be looking forward to them and hopeful that they actually provide what feels like a benefit rather than just something that maths out over a high number of iterations.

In other news I joined LeavingSafeArea as it appeared to be the Clan with the highest density of folks that I know. Not that I am actually providing any sort of tangible benefit to the clan yet, but I did roam around a bit last night in the area of the White House dedicated to that sort of thing. Apparently in the post apocalyptic future we have randomly floating screens that seem to be projected from nowhere in a very specific location? Whoever this Enforzer person is has a MASSIVE lead on the rest of us. I am still very much in wander around aimlessly mode and explore the city. I knocked out a handful of side missions last night and then struggled to queue for the next main mission. I am not sure if I have missed the boat when it comes to running those missions with other players, or if I just need to bump up the difficulty to catch back up with the train. Right now I am still digging the Marksman Rifle and Shotgun Combo… and have upgraded what represents that combo more than a few times at this point. I miss my preorder shotgun, because none of the options I have found in the wild where anywhere near that good… however I had to walk away when I started getting options that were 2000 more damage. Still enjoying myself but I have to say… the most excited I get is when I see a new cosmetic item drop.

Reevaluating Siege Breaker

March 19, 2019 by Belghast

Some time back in the land before the 1.0.3 patch seemingly screwed up my legendary drop rates… I picked up this weapon the Siege Breaker. I had mostly ignored it given that sniper rifles are not exactly my jam, but them noticed the perk. Three shots in a hit streak causes it to freeze the target. Now this only works if the shields are down, but unlike a lot of the other abilities does not require you to hit a weak point. This means you can do some freaking awesome crowd control tricks with this weapon, especially on shutting down cannons and turrets that are way the hell across the map from your current position. It does little unfortunately to most of the sniper types given that they are highly shielded. Even with knowing this I still didn’t really use it much because once again… I am not a big fan of sniper rifles.

Then in my travels I stumbled across a suggested Ranger build for easing into Grand Master 2 and given that I was feeling less than effective there I opted to give it a shot. First off the build in truth is a tweak of the sort of build I was already going through which relied on the double detonators of Recurring Vengeance and Last Argument that I have already written about before. Essentially this means you have to prime the target through other means, or in this case with either melee or siege breaker. Other than Siege Breaker it relies on Divine Vengeance that also seems to have a small chance of catching the mob on fire and priming them as well. Divine Vengeance has the interesting perk of causing a large fire explosion every time you land three weak shots in a row… and since this fires four round bursts it is pretty easy to get a proc pending you can dial in on a weak point. What I did not realize is that these explosions seem to have a staggering effect and do a somewhat effective job of secondary crowd control and even have a chance of knocking flyers out of the air.

As far as components go the build relies on a bunch of them that either increase survival, boost damage or cause you to get your combo faster… and quite frankly that last one is greatly increased by Last Argument that can fill half a combo bar if you get a really good multi target combo off. The goal is to always be able to combo something, and when in doubt use Divine Vengeance to mop up the little trash mobs along the way. So far it seems to be working extremely well and I feel way more comfortable roaming around in freeplay and doing GM2 strongholds. That said I didn’t have any luck last night with the drops since I firmly believe my account is now cursed post 1.0.3 seeing as I had been getting pretty much one Legendary a night up until the drop of that patch, and have gotten exactly one since. I hope they come up with a more permanent and generous solution in the near future, but I am booned to finally have a build that I am comfortable doing solo content with. I also need to hook up with Weiward at some point and do group content since we are both largely in the same position of just needing to farm a ton of legendaries.

At some point the very needy Kenzie the cat wanted to snuggle so I went back downstairs and chilled out on the sofa playing some Division 2. I wound up grouping up with other players for the first time and running a story mission with some randoms. I am not sure if that upscales based on the number of players that you have in a party, because if not… wow that was going to be a rough story mission. Unfortunately I seemingly clicked on the wrong mission and wound up running one two zones over instead of the one to open the zone I was organically planning on moving into. I am effectively finished with the first area and now will be moving into the second. For the seasoned players… is there a sort of check list somewhere in the game so I can see visually how far from finishing a zone I am?

At this point I am in need of both weapons… and the trusty shotgun seems to be peforming worse than it was previously. I forget who suggested that I would need to swap around level 8, but they nailed it. The only problem I am seeing is that replacement shotguns don’t have anywhere near the capacity of this one. The game seems to indicate that I might be able to upgrade the weapon… but I have a feeling that is more endgame stuff and not something I can realistically do right now given that I have no clue at all what the crafting component that I am missing is. All in all still enjoying myself but while Anthem is something I am still gearing up to play very seriously once I get a group of AggroChatters up to the appropriate level (or quite honestly Grace)… Division 2 is my solo jam.