On Saturday night, I logged into BioWare’s new game Anthem and loaded up what I thought was a mission called Finding Old Friends. Instead, I got to play an entirely different mission: Finding Old Friends On Facebook While Wondering If Anthem Will Ever Actually Load. Advertisement Anthem, which came out February 15 in early access and launches for real on February 22, is riddled with bugs and issues, some of which may be fixed in the day-one (read: day-seven) patch. Perhaps the most prevalent issue is the loading times, which have been absurdly long for many players, myself included. After sitting through a number of painful loading screens in previous missions, I finally pulled out a stopwatch for Finding Old Friends. The period from hitting the launch button to entering the game took an excruciating two minutes and 24 seconds. But that wasn’t all. By the time I got into the game, my other three squadmates had already gotten way ahead of me, so I had to watch yet another loading screen as the game yelled at me for lagging behind and teleported me ahead to catch up. Then, after shooting some aliens and watching a mid-mission cutscene, I watched a loading screen pop up for another three minutes or so before Anthem decided it’d had enough and booted me from the game entirely. That was about the time I decided to shut down my PC and go take a few stabs at Martyr Logarius. This is a problem that BioWare says it’s fixing in Friday’s patch, which isn’t much comfort to anyone who dished out extra for one of EA’s subscription services to play Anthem a week early. It also makes me think of an amusing anecdote. Last January, in a piece about the severe pressure that BioWare was feeling on Anthem, and about how the studio had rebooted and paused Dragon Age 4 as a result, I reported that the game had been delayed from fall 2018 to early 2019. I wrote that, as BioWare sources had told me, the fall 2018 window was “never realistic” due to Anthem’s rocky development. Shortly afterwards, EA confirmed that delay in an unusual fashion. On a quarterly earnings call in February 2018, EA CEO Andrew Wilson said that it wasn’t actually a “delay” because actually, the game would’ve been ready—they just wanted to move it away from Battlefield V. “Regardless of how it’s being portrayed, we’re not looking at that as a delay,” Wilson told investors. “The date is chosen by portfolio balance, not product readiness.” And, wrote the Wall Street Journal: “The company denies a report in videogame site Kotaku earlier this month claiming the change is due to development being behind schedule... ‘It’s not a delay,’ EA’s finance chief Blake Jorgensen tells the WSJ. ‘People are trying to create a story.’” Advertisement Now that it’s February 2019 and Anthem players need to wait for a day-one patch to fix critical game-breaking issues, those EA executive comments sure are fascinating.<doc-sep>Anthem's launch feels messy. Read Steven's review in progress for detailed thoughts on the game so far—there's an enjoyable core of exploration and combat, here, but the game's issues feel so big that it's hard to envision them all being quickly fixed. Loading screens are clearly the biggest problem, but there's more besides. Below, we decided to talk through them one-by-one. For context: Samuel's played ten hours and Tom's played 15 hours, so assume the items discussed here reflect that. It’s worth remembering that persistent shared world games like Destiny and The Division tend to endure painful changes in the opening year or two when they make contact with a large audience. Anthem is strange because it hasn’t launched in a vacuum, and yet it makes mistakes that both Destiny and the Division have corrected during their lifetimes. It's worth saying that a few issues mentioned below are being addressed on the game's official 'Day One'—the 'full' release this Friday. Check out lead producer Michael Gamble's Twitter thread for a sample of that. The damned loading screens Samuel: The loading screens in Anthem are so, so bad. I've moved the game to my SSD (the day one patch should have some optimisations for HDDs ), but jeez, whatever way you slice it, they are far behind what I would expect from a game in 2019. I'm sure there are loads of challenges in making a game that looks this nice stream a big, open world—but they're too disruptive. I'm also getting a weird error where I seem to load into a mission about 30 seconds after everyone else, meaning I've started expeditions getting the rubber banding warning below, leading to another loading screen after already sitting through one. Tom: I’m surprised at how disjointed the co-op experience is. It should be easy to keep a group together and flow between expeditions and Free Play, but the game breaks parties up with long loading screens, cut scenes, and mandatory returns to Fort Tarsis. More on that later. We don’t know about the technical limitations that the devs are working with, and I’m sure they wouldn’t choose to put a loading screens between exploration, dungeons, the forge, mid-mission cutscenes, Tarsis, and the Launch Bay. They’re there, though. I caught up with quite a lot of reading on my ipad over the weekend waiting for those screens to pass. There are points where you have to go from the open world into a small room to press F on an object, and then travel through another loading screen to get out of the small room and back into the open world. These stingy rubber banding warnings Samuel: Hope you don't spend more than five seconds admiring the scenery or looking for resources during an expedition, because you'll probably be confronted with this obnoxious warning. To be honest, you'll probably get this even if you're not dawdling in Anthem. Worst of all, it replaces the heat meter on the HUD, so if you're trying to catch up with your party, you have no indicator that your Javelin is about to overheat in doing so. I appreciate that you don't want party members flying off away from the objective, but this screen could be more generous. Tom: If you haven't played the game this might sound like a small thing, but it's in your face constantly and it punishes you for stopping to pick up a resource or flying just a little less efficiently than the foremost member of your party. You do need a system to pick up players that have fallen behind, but it's far too aggressive at the moment. Pacing issues Samuel: The loading screens between missions, free play and Fort Tarsis all contribute to an overall slugging pace between missions. And then there's the inane conversations back at Fort Tarsis, which are usually mandatory to open up more story missions. The long breaks between activities just suck: loading screens, Fort Tarsis, and occasionally, mandatory mid-mission cutscenes. In one mission, you're off to the headquarters of someone called Princess Zhim, and there's a long, totally unnecessary cutscene in the middle, that presumably all four players have to watch simultaneously. The game crashed for me twice after this cutscene. If it had crashed a third time, I wouldn't still be playing Anthem. Tom: BioWare has added a run command to Tarsis since the 'VIP' trial but it's still painfully slow to get around and if you're playing with a group you don't really have time to soak up side stories about the trader who has run out of grain. You can't view or change loadout in Free Play Samuel: It's not really 'Free' Play if you can't customise your inventory mid-game, is it? I'd love to have the option to swap or at least customise my Javelin in Free Play, out of combat. Instead, it's trapped in the Forge behind another loading screen, forcing me to leave Free Play to make even minor changes. Experimenting with loadouts is basically no fun if it's hard to access all your stuff. Tom: I can see why you might want to keep loadout management confined to the Forge. Perhaps you want players in the field moving and fighting without pause. Maybe you want to preserve the fiction of carefully gearing up a Javelin before a run. In reality though I want to check on my equipment all the time, and I’m discouraged from experimenting with gear combinations when I have to hop from Free Play to the Launch Bay, to the Forge, back to the Launch Bay and back into Free Play to make a change. The UI Samuel: This is definitely a smaller complaint, but there are a few problems with the UI. In-mission, when you're asked to locate items around the environment, an indicator on your HUD points you towards your objective—some intel, echoes, whatever—and it can only point in four directions, not diagonally, or in three dimensions. That would probably help in a game where you can fly, and where your objectives might be on elevated surfaces. Another small thing: I wish you could set waypoints on the map in Free Play. Playing with the PC Gamer team yesterday, exploring together in Free Play had to be communicated via voice chat, which isn't ideal when you all just want to fly off to the same location. Boring loot excited to do 1% more heavy pistol damage with my first piece of rare loot pic.twitter.com/Wtbf3PGp7iFebruary 17, 2019 See more Samuel: Where I am in the story, I'm just earning the same guns with different numbers over and over again. Maybe this changes deeper into the game, but James, who finished the game over the weekend, didn't seem thrilled by his first piece of Epic loot (see above). To be fair, the early game in The Division just handed you lots of anonymous rifles and machine guns, too—so I'll reserve judgment on this for when I've put a bunch more hours into it. Tom: Almost every piece of loot you find in Anthem is just a collection of numbers. At level 19 I’m sure I’ve seen every gun model in the game. I’m not unlocking new cosmetic options, or stuff I can bolt on to my Javelin. I’ve had some fun lining up numbers to boost my close-combat acid-focused Interceptor, but for the most part the treasure you’re picking up is a rectangular bit of UI with some +x% values on it that you slot into another UI screen in the Forge. Perhaps the endgame will introduce new types of loot that will change the way my character looks or behaves. Maybe there will eventually be a point to the crafting system too. There’s no sign of that yet though. Bugs Samuel: Both me and Tom had to restart the game this weekend because all the audio cut out, which is a known issue that's apparently being addressed for the 'full' launch on Friday. I also had a glitch where dialogue switched off for part of a mission.<doc-sep>Anthem, Electronic Arts and BioWare’s new co-op-focused online role-playing game, has only been released for EA Access (Xbox One) and Origin Access (Windows) subscribers, but the game is already experiencing server issues. Anthem, which doesn’t officially launch for most players until Feb. 22, relies on users to be online to access the game, let alone play any kind of missions. Early in the morning of Feb. 15, the day the game went live for early access, Anthem started to experience server issues that prevented players from launching any missions. These problems became more common until the servers seemed to go down completely on PC, greeting players with a splash screen saying that the “Anthem service is currently unavailable.” According to EA Help, EA’s customer service Twitter account, the company is aware of the connection issues and is encouraging players to keep trying. This isn’t the first time that Anthem has experienced connection issues. During the VIP Demo, which launched on Jan. 25, players ran into many of these same issues, including the Connection Problem screen when first logging into the game. Those early problems remained persistent throughout the game’s first day, but were mostly cleared up by day two. Update: Anthem’s servers seem to be more stable now and players are able to get into the game as well as start missions.<doc-sep>
Anthem’s “day-one” patch dropped last night, and while it addresses a host of performance issues, bugs, and other frustrating problems, the update has also broken the game’s frame rate for many players on PC. One of the most prevalent criticisms of BioWare’s new loot shooter during its early release period has been its grueling loading times. The long wait can be annoying in any game but especially in Anthem, where load screens occur mid-mission as well as every time you go to load up your inventory. Since yesterday’s 5 GB update went live, lots of players, including myself and other Kotaku staffers, have noticed significant improvements in this department. Unfortunately, the new patch has introduced other problems, including noticeable hits to the frame rate on PC and more instances of rubber-banding. Where I was getting a frame rate consistently in the high 50s on medium settings, it now frequently dips below 30. Even weirder, the frame rate isn’t capped during load screens now, so it sometimes hits over 1,000, making the GPU sound like a wind tunnel. Kotaku’s Jason Schreier, who had been getting 70-80fps prior to the patch, said Anthem started running closer to 50 following the patch until he lowered some of his graphics settings. Kotaku’s Mike Fahey said he also noticed a dip, and it’s clear from the game’s subreddit and official forum that other players have as well. Mark Darrah, the game’s executive producer, wrote on Twitter that for some people the issues appeared to be related to Nvidia changing their settings as a result of the update being installed. Meanwhile, someone on Reddit claimed to have fixed their performance drop by changing the default format for their audio down to 16 bit 441000 and messing around with the texture filtering options in Nvidia. Needless to say, people’s mileage has varied and this isn’t the type of thing most people want to be trying to diagnose after a big patch. Some of the update’s improvements have worked out. Colossus Javelins can now revive fallen comrades while holding their shield up, something that has rescued my squad on a number of occasions already. Weapons and gear now also have numbers next to them showing how much their stats have been boosted by accompanying modifiers, making it easier to compare and contrast different Javelin builds. Other fixes haven’t worked as planned, at least in my personal experience. While loot is supposed to drop from bosses at the end of Stronghold missions now, I still haven’t seen it happen. Not that it would matter a whole lot if it did, since the mission completion timer often starts at three seconds or less, sometimes whisking me away before I even realized a fight was finished. The warnings for not being in the right mission area don’t appear to have changed much either. I still routinely find myself flying close to squadmates on our way to fight some enemies only for the game to flash a timer counting down to when we’ll be transported to the objective. It really defeats the purpose of embarking on adventures in a big open world. The day-one patch even removed a significant feature from the game. As confirmed by Darrah on Twitter, quickplay for Stronghold missions is not an option at the moment. “We will reenable it once several issues are resolved,” he wrote. Quickplay is basically Anthem’s way of loading you into a mission star ted by someone else to fill in any gaps left by departing players. Doing so nets you bonus experience, which can add up to a lot when it comes to Stronghold missions. At various points in the game it can be one of the best ways to grind. In all, these problems have really put a damper on what otherwise appeared to be an update full of worthwhile improvements. While BioWare said in a livestream yesterday that this week of early access for EA subscribers on PC and Xbox One has provided valuable feedback that’s reflected in this patch and will shape future ones, it’s clear at this point the game would have benefited from even more time before release.