anthem Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

AggroChat #555 – MMOs and PSOLikes

February 1, 2026 by Belghast

Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Thalen

Good Morning Folks! We are down a Tam this week and had some topics that were sitting on our list for a bit. We start off talking about the official end of Anthem and the Mark Darrah video that effectively provides an autopsy for the game. Loosely related, we talk about the impending death of New World in January 2027. This forces us down the path of talking about what the heck even makes an MMO anymore, and how we largely agree that it requires random interaction with other players to count. We decided that the lobby-based games are PSOLikes since the first game we can remember that was that way was Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast. From there, we talk a bit about Shape of Dream,s another Roguelike that Ash and Kodra have been playing. Bel shares his thoughts on Legacy of Phrecia 2.0 in Path of Exile, and Kodra shares his endgame thoughts about Path of Exile II. We wrap the show up talking about the impending patch in Guild Wars 2 that is going to add quickplay for raids and the new Fashion Plates adjacent system.

Topics Discussed:

Anthem is Offline
New World will soon Die
What Makes an MMORPG
PSOLikes
Shape of Dreams
Path of Exile Legacy of Phrecia 2.0
Path of Exile 2 – Endgame Thoughts
Guild Wars 2 Fashion Plates

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Goodbye Anthem

January 13, 2026 by Belghast

Yesterday was the day that the Anthem Servers went offline officially. This poor game lived such an ignominious fate, and in truth I had not really thought about it in years. However my friend Carthuun reminded me of its passing yesterday, as did a bunch of YouTube channels. It was a really important game for me… until it wasn’t. I wanted this thing to be so much more than it was, and I tried the hell out of making it my next Destiny. It has so many problems, so little content, and so many hamfisted decisions. There was a fun core there, but in an effort to slow players down and keep them from grinding through all of the content… they made the game feel deeply unrewarding and lost me in the process. If you want a proper eulogy for the game then I would suggest that you check out the video Paul Tassi posted yesterday.

I think for me personally I am going to prefer to remember the good bits. There was a really fun gameplay loop when it worked, and roaming around the big open world in an Iron Man suit was a fucking blast. Once they dialed it in, the controls felt amazing and all that it really needed… was more content. However that is unfortunately the most expensive thing to create… and it felt like EA was trying to foist this game out on us and not really fund it. I am not sure what came after those first six months, but supposedly the game improved over time. I don’t think it actually got much in the way of more content, but there was a weirdly devoted Reddit to the game. The thing I am probably going to remember the most is the soundtrack and how much I really loved it. I would love it if someone figured out a way to make this game work with emulator servers, since we should be able t still get the client via steam. However I doubt it had a large enough player base to support that sort of nonsense. You were a cool idea Anthem, but sadly Electronic Arts is a shitbag that did not allow you time or funding to turn into something cool.

I’ve been back in Path of Exile a bit working on challenges and this morning I checked my mappers and finished up Legendary Leagues. Essentially I would really like to hit 34 challenges, and I am sitting at 32, which of course means that I need to squeeze out two more. There are some that I could just pay for carries to complete, but I always hate doing that because it feels like failure. There is one for having run a bunch of map modifiers and fragments, and that one just takes immense time mapping in order to knock out. In theory it is relatively easy to do so, I just have to play a lot, and if I put on an audiobook I can burn through that. However I have not been on my audiobook game lately because I have wanted to spend every moment I can with “Erasure”. However last night we just hung out on voice chat while we both did our own things and that was extremely nice.

This morning I rolled a bunch of originator maps in an attempt to get several that did not have truly onerous affixes on them. That is my core problem with Tier 16.5 is that they have the same pure butts modifiers that T17s have. In theory I should be able to burn through these without much issue, and since I am already level 100 on my Righteous Fire Chieftain, I don’t much care about taking deaths. I know yesterday at one point I took a death, momentarily cringed, and then remembered I was max level and it was no big deal. I think leveling in Path of Exile II made me once again conscious of the damage loss penalty, and I am having to remember that I already beat that boss in Path of Exile 1. I am off today so I am probably going to throw on a book and grind maps at some point.

I also played a bit of Minecraft last night, working on my world that I created named after “Erasure”. It continues to pay off significantly and I found some pretty early diamonds at -5 Z height, or just shortly after ending the deep slate layers. This allowed me to craft my first diamond pick, and sped up my progress descending to bedrock. I’ve harvested so many resources while hollowing out my 8×8 chambers on the way down. I’ve got worlds of iron, gold, copper, redstone, and lapis and an overabundance of raw rock resources. In theory I am probably going to start using the deep slate in combination with cobblestone to build up my tower a bit more so that I can see it even further from base. I also made some shears and got some wool. When I deforested the top of the hill I was building on, it made it so more farm animals spawned giving me much better access to resources.

In theory I need to find some wheat so that I can start breeding cattle. I have tons of cows roaming around near my base and in theory should probably go with the good ole tried and true “meat hole” approach for infinite food production. In order to do that however… I need grain, and in order to find grain…. I am going to need to roam around a bit. The tower is going to make sighting where I am in the world much easier so that is probably the next major expansion project. I should also start to create an above ground fenced in area for crop production and the eventual creation of said “meat hole”. I did hit bedrock and at some point I am going to start setting up branch mining, because once I have access to diamond… I want more of it because diamond picks speed everything in this game up so much.

Tonight is going to be sibling time. We need to make another attempt to get out of relegation territory in Calamity Ops. In theory it really does not matter to much other than it being a point of pride, but we just need to stay together in rank so we can keep doing it together. We also have a new set of Grandmaster keys so we will be doing that tonight, and during the day I might try and unlock the full tower defense mode so we can do some of that. I am not sure when Morgran’s Hunt begins, but I know it is soon as well. Thursday is reset so we may get together really quickly that night and try and get in some early Calamity Ops then as well. I love sibling time, but I am also trying to coax “Erasure” into joining us if for no reason to hang out and listen to the nonsense that Ace and I get up to.

Anyways! I hope you are having a great week. I am pretty freaking happy at the moment, or at least happier than I have been in awhile. I kind of want that for everyone.

Loot Problems

March 11, 2019 by Belghast

Shocking to no one I spent the majority of my weekend playing Anthem again. It was a bizarre weekend for those of us who spent both Friday night and Saturday playing because some things happened. Firstly the the 1.0.3 patch that we were expecting to land on the 12th launched a bit early on the 9th around 7 am, meaning when I woke up for the day I had a significant patch to download. However Friday night… they did the thing where they accidentally set the loot drops too high and we were getting Masterworks left and right. Once again the community thought this was intentional… because ultimately it is what we have been clamoring for all this time. However with the launch of the patch it was rolled back… and it has been a bit hard to separate the good of the patch with the bad of having loot nerfed again.

Anthem has a loot problem, namely that it is way too stingy with Masterworks but more importantly too stingy with Legendaries. All told I have gotten 4 Legendary drops in what is now 164 hours worth of play time. Dividing that out it is me seeing a Legendary drop every 41 hours of play time. There are folks out there who have racked up similar hours and have yet to see a single one. It was the futile hope of the player base that when we removed Whites and Greens from dropping in post 30 content… that it would have a positive effect of skewing the number of Masterworks and Legendaries we would get. However as some testing has shown… essentially every green and white drop was replaced by a purple… which is awesome if you are just getting started but more disenchant fodder once you enter the hunt for Orange and Lime (that’s what I am deciding to call legendary green). There is an interesting post that was up on the reddit over the weekend… where a player farmed 200 drops with +95 luck before and after the patch, linking to the original thread but going to post the data here for reference.

Pre-Patch Numbers

Common: 17 items at 8.5%
Uncommon: 24 items at 12%
Rare: 34 items at 17%
Epic: 102 items at 51%
Masterwork: 21 items at 10.5%
Legendary: 2 items at 1%

Post-Patch Numbers

Rare: 28 items at 14%
Epic: 163 items at 81.5%
Masterwork: 7 items at 3.5%
Legendary: 2 items at 1%

The original poster went to the trouble of documenting all of their loot with screenshots, but accounting for randomness it does appear that the Common and Uncommon slots are now just Epic items, which again is great for people getting a start in the game but bad for anyone who has collected a set of epic gear which now happens frighteningly fast under the current loot environment.

All of that said… I am still enjoying myself and have managed to cobble together gear for three different javelins at this point. I will probably be starting on the Storm at some point soon once I have spent a bit more time fine tuning the Interceptor. Right now I have something that I would call a proper build on both the Ranger and the Colossus, and I will be farming content until I reach that point on the Interceptor as well. How I am getting there… is because I am exploiting the fact that Strongholds drop a guaranteed ability and Legendary contracts drop a guaranteed component. While I only have three legendary contracts available to me each day, it seems that Quickplay on Grandmaster 1 difficulty tends to place you into a Legendary Contract more often than not… and doing this nets you a guaranteed component as well. Stronghold Quickplay similarly nets you a guaranteed ability drop… however in my experience this is bugged out the vast majority of the time and not really worth your effort.

Now I realize there are a lot of players out there that have been having issues with the game nonstop since release. However for the most part I had not… until this weekend when I started heavily relying on Quickplay. That functionality seems to be far more buggy than the rest of the game, and I am wondering if the majority of the issues that players have been encountering have revolved around trying to do this abbreviated path to loot. Normal Quickplay seemed to stick me in far fewer bugged out instances than it did before the patch, however when something went wrong… it went REALLY wrong often times causing me to have to either go through a loop of being bounced back to the loading screen like the above screenshot… or having to hard kill the client. Starting Missions, Contracts, Strongholds and Freeplay myself all resulted in predictably smooth gameplay… however any time I dared to mess with Quickplay I was effectively playing with fire.

Another byproduct of the patch is that overall Javelin power feels like it has increased, and a side effect of that is that none of the lower difficulty ranks seem to be anywhere near as populated as they were. Thalen reported issues getting full groups on normal difficulty as he was playing through the story and leveling, and I personally experienced a challenge getting groups at hard difficulty when I was attempting to finish getting the epics on my Interceptor. So one of two things has happened… either the average player has released that they can now crush Grandmaster 1 thanks to the power scaling, or more likely a lot of players have just stopped messing with the game out of frustration over various issues. Neither case is great for the game as a whole because it makes it harder and harder to onboard a supply of new players. Grace will be starting up this week and I will be curious to see how that experience is as a new player and whether or not the matchmaking is as quick as it was for the rest of us that started out. Side note since I have done this pretty much every week, throwing out a screenshot of the Alliance contribution screen… I have yet to hit the hard cap for the week.

One final screenshot of note… since I played a bit of Warframe this weekend… I am pretty sure these two chests in the hanger area are a nod to that game. Anyone has played much Warframe will notice that they have a lot of lockers scattered throughout the ships that look suspiciously similar to these. Also oddly enough playing a lot of Anthem has somehow made Warframe feel more manageable? I was not nearly as motion sick playing it yesterday as I have been in the past, and the way too zoomed in perspective did not feel anywhere near as bad as it had after playing the whirling ball of death that is the Interceptor. I still greatly prefer Anthem, but I have a feeling I could probably start to finally delve into Warframe if I so choose.

So where we are left is that Anthem needs to make a lot of changes quickly. Chad Robertson the Head of Live Services chimed in over on twitter with some comments to this whole situation. It spans several tweets so quoting rather than just pasting the thread for ease of consumption.

We appreciate all the feedback from the community on the game. We love the passion and share it. We’re not yet fully happy with the game’s loot behavior either. One of the downsides of moving so fast to improve is that we’re making changes to complex loot systems in several areas and it’s then harder to know how it’s performing. In the next few months, we’re expecting to make significant changes, but we’re starting with some incremental ones so we can better navigate that evolution. Our goal is to ensure the best possible player experience.

So while I appreciate this comment, because they are actually saying words in reference to problems… which is a step above a lot of studios out there. The biggest problem that I have with this comment is the fact that he mentions the time frame of “the next few months”. I am not entirely certain that they have months… and more likely have weeks to sort this out before players simply give up and file this game in the bin of “check back for year two” like so many of us did with Destiny. We already see the signs in matchmaking of players dropping out of the system, which is a bad sign. Additionally the temperature of the Reddit has shifted drastically over the last few days, which was a different situation than the inflammatory YouTube community… they were positive and hopeful and I think were pinning their hopes on the patch from March 12th fixing a lot of the major issues… namely with loot drops. That however has drastically shifted to a community demanding fixes now, because Patch 1.0.3 did not deliver the solace they were hoping for. While I am still playing the hell out of this game… I cannot say they are necessarily wrong in their frustrations.

There have been two situations where supposedly accidental loot changes have “fixed” the game. In both times the game felt so much better because it didn’t feel bad when you got another Masterwork with crappy rolls, because you knew another one was right around the corner. The unbridled excitement of actually seeing a legendary drop, and knowing that this wasn’t a once in a career thing… made you care less about also getting crappy rolls on it too. Loot needs to flow like water Diablo 3 style so you can pick through the dross and cobble together something resembling a proper build. Nothing is more frustrating than getting a bunch of abilities you don’t care about… when you have a specific style of play that you enjoy on your character… but feel forced to use the Masterworks because the item level increase makes them just flat out superior to using a proper build. All of this felt less of the case when the loot was accidentally generous… and the players will not be satisfied until we get something resembling that state again.

Anthem Demo Weekend Two

February 4, 2019 by Belghast

Outdoor cat has officially been fed so I can now sit down and start trying to compose my feelings about Anthem Demo weekend number two. The first “VIP Demo” weekend was for folks who had pre-ordered the game and I will assume a certain batch of influencers that were brought to that special EA event to record footage. You can scroll through my thoughts about that weekend in a post I made last week, but for me and most of the AggroChat crew it was a buggy and often times unplayable mess. However there was enough good there laying just underneath the covers to make me interested and quite honestly miss playing the game. So while I was not on nearly as much as I could have been… I played a significant amount of Anthem this weekend. I managed to get in a Stronghold… this games version of a Strike and spent a significant amount of time just roaming around and doing World Events and the little mini-dungeons that are available off the segment of the map we had open to us. It galvanized my desire to play this game… and largely reinforced my decision to keep playing the “shootymans” class the Ranger… who appears to be a really amazing single target dps class.

What I want to talk about the most however is what a difference there was between the first and second weekends. During the first weekend it was a constant struggle to be able to play this game… and in the second…. everything just sorta worked flawlessly. Sure there were some minor glitches like for some reason our javelins would not load on the “reward” screen. Additionally I have never actually seen the full suit prep sequence because the game kicks me over to a loading screen when I assume that sequence is designed to make us ignore how generally long loading into an area takes. However what was gone was the need to keep closing the game with task manager and loading back in to successful get into a mission. I could just play the game as it was intended to play and this made me way more open to grouping up with friends given that it was a predictable sequence rather than a struggle to get all four players into the same instance.

I’m very impressed with how communicative Bioware has been during this whole sequence… and more than that I feel heard. We all for the most part universally complained about how bad Mouse and Keyboard Flight/Swimming felt…. and they acknowledged that yeah… it feels less than optimal. These changes are apparently already in the “live” build of the game, but what is even better is that they have started giving us a run down of things that will be fixed before the initial EA Premier launch on the 15th and what will be in place by the 22nd.

UI Clicking on visible options in menus fixed for 15th Feb (except social which is 22nd Feb)
Navigating Menu tabs with Q and E instead of old keybindings fixed for 15th Feb
Forge rotation speed with mouse improved – 15th Feb
Scrolling with mouse wheel wont zoom your javelin AND scroll the menu (will be contextual based on where your mouse is) – 15th Feb
D-Pad will show as keyboard bindings – 15th Feb
Turning off Motion Blur in settings now works (decoupled from post processing) – 22nd Feb
HDR toggle available – 22nd Feb
Camera Shake slider added – 22nd Feb

I’ve said it before but I believe that Bioware feels the pressure that this launch has to go fairly flawlessly, given the perceived failing that Andromeda was. The whole multiple launch dates thing does not do it any favors, especially considering that a lot of the issues that plagued Andromeda were fixed by the end of that first week. EA has a bad habit of shredding game studios, and the whole teasing a Dragon Age game… I think is more insurance than anything else to try and keep delaying that decision. If launch goes like last weekend however I think we are going to be just fine, and what I really want is the same level of communication that they are giving the community to continue into the first year of the game.

I really do think that Anthem might be the game that can finally blended the different looty shooty genre players together. There is enough here to intrigue the Destiny players with a rich and interesting lore and the Ranger class being essentially a “Destiny” class where it is mostly gun play with a few abilities. There is also something here for the Warframe players that want move movement and ability spam… and the Storm and the Interceptor fill those roles nicely. Then there is a class for the player who just wants to be a big freaking mech in the form of the Colossus. What is better is that gameplay feels more enjoyable when you are running with a pretty decent mix of the four classes. Ranger as far as we can tell is going to be the class that has the highest single target damage… so great for boss killing. Storm is the battle tactician that takes an overwatch position over the battlefield and can effect large swaths of it with its abilities. Interceptor is the fact melee shredder that is probably going to be excellent at grabbing objectives and avoiding taking damage. Then you have the colossus which is the king of staying alive… as was seen this weekend when Ashgar absolutely saved the day by surviving long enough to start bringing us all back up during a stronghold. They all have their key niche and all feel great when played together.

Ultimately I progressed my character as far as it probably could have been during the Demo. I managed to upgrade every slot to a level 19 rare item and my final build was an Light Machine Gun for my main weapon… a Marksman Rifle for my secondary to melt anything at a distance like snipers. Then I would run poison darts to act as my primer… that also doubles as a debuff that causes me to just deal extra damage to that target. Frag Grenades after trying a bunch of different options seems to be my detonator of choice, and also a decent crowd sweeper. Then muster point is what I was running as a damage boost for helping to burn down those big mobs. As far as components I was running one to increase Frag damage and another to increase LMG Ammunition, and it was a build I was pretty damned happy with. I could in theory go for a max damage build by picking up the devastator sniper rifle, but I never got one of those to drop for me and did not see it in the crafting tables. I also settled in on the above paint scheme which is pretty much the colors I tend to choose in any game that gives me the options.

Towards the end of the weekend they started an event that caused Primals to spawn in large numbers and frequency… so I managed to get in and take down a few of the bigger ones. In fact I was fighting one of the big primals when the servers went down, so no clue what loot might have dropped. Weirdly the game let me keep fighting, so I am guessing part of the world is cached on the client itself? This gives me concerns when it comes to what hackers are going to be able to do to the game… but without a PVP element I am not entirely certain how much it will effect me. I am a little saddened that it sounds like while my weekend was smooth and flawless… others that had a flawless previous weekend… started encountering disconnect problems during this test. I’ve now played 16 hours worth of the Anthem demo and can say that I am looking forward to starting on the 15th. If you have not already picked up the game… you can pony up for a month of Premier… which gives you a discount that you can then apply to your preorder… and will also give you access to the full game on the 15th instead of the 22nd.

So my awesome readers… are you picking up the game? Will you be joining me on the 15th or are you waiting on the 22nd… or are you just going to take a hard pass?