Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Community Reaction to Anthem

The gaming community's reaction to Anthem is really harsh. It's getting savaged in press and reviews, and on the internet.

I think the reaction is excessively harsh. Anthem's moment-to-moment game play is superb. It has some issues, that's true. But it's about what you would expect from a game like this. It isn't a "You must play this!!!" game. I wouldn't recommend it to someone who had no interest in looter-shooters. But if the general idea of the game attracts you, you'll probably enjoy it a lot.

The best explanation I've seen for the scale of the reaction is that Anthem is the "last straw" for a lot of gamers. There's been a whole host of AAA games which have disappointed recently, especially with regards to polish, and Anthem is just the point where the crowd decided to make a stand. It's a particularly attractive target as EA is so hated, and thus the community can indulge in the narrative that EA ruined the once-great Bioware.

One thing that concerns me, though, is that there is one game cited as "Anthem should have been more like this": Monster Hunter World.  Now, it might be true that MHW was much more polished on release. But MHW was released on consoles in January 2018, and the PC release was months later, in August 2018.

An awful lot of the "polish" problems are PC problems which only occur on some setups. Differing loading times, that sound cutting out bug people keep complaining about, occasional crashes, etc. Absolutely none of which have happened to me. From my perspective, the game is rock-solid performance-wise. Even the lack of text chat is really a PC problem, and doesn't really apply to consoles.

I'm concerned that the lesson EA and the games industry will take from the contrast between MHW and Anthem is that the simultaneous launch on PC and console was a mistake. That Bioware should have just released a polished console-only game, and launched the PC version months later.  If that console version had played how Anthem plays on my computer, then I think the reviews would be 10 to 20 points higher. But as a PC player, I'd rather not see that future.

In any case, I don't think Anthem is as bad as much of the online reaction is making it appear to be. Even if much of the complaints are rooted in reality, it feels like they are not weighing the sheer fun of the game. If you're interested in the game, I strongly recommend the Origin Access subscription route to try it out.

4 comments:

  1. Given all of the lunacy out there by the torches and pitchforks crowd --just look at the people trying to destroy Captain Marvel's Rotten Tomatoes ratings-- it seems that people are ready to believe the worst about everything.

    Most of the complaints I've seen about Anthem is a mashup of No Man's Sky with Fallout 76: there's nothing to do and everything is buggy, coupled with a "this story sucks!" thrown in for good measure. If you'd have created a generic "gamer complaint" script to rate video games, you'd have been able to generate the output concerning Anthem.

    I'm not exactly sure what the endgame the gamer complaints are hoping for with Anthem. Are they expecting Anthem to be fixed? Are they expecting EA (or Bethesda or Activision or whomever) to change? Are they expecting EA to spin off Bioware? Are they expecting CD Projekt Red (or whomever) to "save" gaming with a new release? If these are any of the hopes of the gamer complaint crowd, they obviously don't know how businesses work.

    If they just want "good games", then that's so nebulous that you might as well throw up your hands and walk away. What's good for a person who likes FIFA 19 isn't necessarily good for a fan of Mass Effect. And what works for those two might not work for a WoW or League fan.

    Here's where I wish there was more critical thinking involved rather than purely emotional keyboard mashing.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah, I agree. It seems these days that things are either amazing or terrible, and there's not a lot of room in between.

      Delete
  2. I have been hit by a number of bugs in Anthem including occasional freezes, sudden restarts, and (once) the sound cutting out permanently in the middle of a stronghold run. This is a bit annoying, but I have aging and non-standard gaming hardware (Mac Pro, Late 2013) so I'm not surprised and can't really hold it against Anthem. Plus I think I'm just getting used to early release games having bugs that get fixed eventually and I just play around them until they are.

    Worst bug that seems to affect everyone is tied to the quickplay feature, which is a great option in theory. However, there is a quest to do 25 of them so it feels forced. Trouble is, almost all of the quests I spawn into are broken such that the objective will be to destroy 5 caches but there are only 4. Or I have to get to the second camp, but the way point is stuck and there isn't a second camp. People keep joining and leaving these bugged missions and sometimes killing endless waves of enemies for nothing, and it just keeps the bugged mission active forever. The time to get into and out of one of these missions is not insignificant and exiting prior to completion (rightly) doesn't give credit for the quest objective.

    But again, I expect the quickplay bug will be resolved eventually and it doesn't really take away from what Anthem offers. Figure I'll just avoid it for a while.

    I have been quite enjoying Anthem, especially the strongholds and am glad I got a subscription. There is a roadmap showing a great deal of upcoming expansion content, so it should stay interesting for quite some time and give more value for the subscription.

    But I dunno. People like complaining. Personally, I'd rather have a good game with some major bugs now than wait several months for a more stable version of the same game. Especially if it's a game that has been hyped and I am waiting for.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I think the quickplay backfilling was a solution to the problem of people leaving in the middle of mission for no reason. Which is a real problem in many games.

      But it's triggering on the false positive of "bugged missions". It might have been better to not backfill missions at all.

      Delete