Inferring from this that you’re on PC - does it run choppy for you too? I know the engine is a finely tuned V12 of a thing but it’s also not… great looking if you drop presets down.
I tried on both pc and ps4
On pc it has my i7 6600k from 60 to 100% useage at times. My 1070 is maxed out. I use my pc for 3d work mainly and it made my temps soar like never before. Default settings were on high.
Tried it on my ps4 pro this morning and the fans are mostly quiet! God of war makes more noise. Like what the heck is going on here.
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I’m fairly certain there’s a good game underneath the general server instability, poor-ish performance, mushy mouse aim, other technical faults and mediocre encounter/mission design
I’ll let other people find out
don’t forget poor enemy design, weak weapons, and terrible worldbuilding and dialogue
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I am okay with the dialogue but the line readings are pretty eughh
also, developers, if I shoot an NPC enemy, they better flinch instead of being The Wall (though I do appreciate that when my colossus smashes the ground, it’ll stumble enemies even with shields)
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Already out of the gate, there’s some sorta framerate/judder thing going on with the first person town that’s making me nauseous.
Hmm yeah I’m out. Not even flying around is that much fun.
Can report that everything works fine on xbone
I spent like two hours customizing all four suits last night. I have invariably looked leagues cooler than everyone else I’ve gotten in a mission with. Time well spent.
I want them to expand the appearance customizer and let you sell your custom looks in a store like you can with paintjobs in Forza. Then I can just make paintjobs all day and rake in the pretend dough
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remember y’all this is supposed to be the bob dylan of video games:
Casey Hudson, executive producer on the main trilogy, would start a new team at BioWare Edmonton to work on a brand new intellectual property, which they gave the code-name Dylan . (That new IP’s code-name, a source said, came because Hudson and team wanted to make the Bob Dylan of video games—one that would be referenced for years to come.)
via https://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-troubled-five-1795886428
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surely analysts and shareholders will be referencing it for years to come
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also came across this while searching and i enjoyed reading it
The statement “We want to make the Bob Dylan of video games” is something that only makes sense to someone who has never listened to Bob Dylan. For starters, which specific era of Dylan? …
What BioWare knows about Bob Dylan isn’t his lyricism, or his songwriting, or the messages he spent decades imparting onto his listeners. It’s the fact that people reference him. It’s the fact that he’s celebrated and held as an example of “high art”.
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the Dylan (Bob Dylan, 1973) of video games
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I legitimately enjoy the design of the colossus suit and its gamepaly loop of “walk into enemies, apply status effects, COMBO” but seriously, why the hell can I not flamethrower with the shield out, it makes no sense
I’ve only managed to play three missions and several minutes of the Freeplay mode (getting the typical glitches along the way). I went into it expecting to not like it and I was very sour on it after the first mission, but I softened on it a little bit the more I played it. I still don’t think it’s good but doing the COMBOs helped quicken the pace of combat a lot.
The gunplay isn’t satisfying but considering how much you rely on your abilities I think I could probably accept it as just filler between the relatively short ability cooldowns, but I wonder how much variety you truly have in your ability loadouts. It looks like you get two offensive abilities and one defensive, and if you’re doing COMBOs then you’re going to follow a set rotation. The abilities I tried were auto-seeking projectiles so it’s not like there was a lot of finesse or depth to using them. It feels like a game flow that can get very boring very fast if you don’t have a ton of viable builds to play with and if enemies are too spongy and don’t give you the satisfaction of a kill quickly enough.
The enemies are hard to distinguish from the environment so I honestly can’t even tell if they have different behaviors or not. I just look for the red dots above their heads and shoot whatever I see. Between that and the constant explosions and special effects, visibility is very poor.
Flight is a fine thing to do but I haven’t seen any interesting integration of it into the gameplay or environment design. You can fly from checkpoint to checkpoint, which makes traversal and level design inconsequential between setpieces. But you also have an overheat meter on flight meaning actual battles turn into the more typical grounded affairs, with the occasionally float/double jump. I don’t think they ever figured out how to marry the concept of flight into the rest of the game.
I don’t get what they’re going for with the home base. I didn’t pay attention to it for variety of reasons while I was playing but walking through that town is so slow and I don’t understand why. When you first boot up the game you start so far away from the mission start location and it takes so long to actually walk there. Talking to people for missions takes forever. It’s just really badly paced.
The game has way too many loading screens during missions and it totally kills the flow. It’s like playing OG Monster Hunter.
Customization is okay. I like how you can choose textures and very bright colors, instead of everything just being very dull and understated. I can also see the micro-transactions around that aspect getting annoying because I imagine anything interesting will cost a ton of in-game money to get you to spend real money.
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All that said, if this were like $30 I think I’d be able to accept it as the jank-fest that it is. I don’t know that these demos have helped Anthem’s image at all so it will be interesting to see how its sales shake out and what happens with Bioware in the ensuing months. I kind of feel like people like old Bioware enough that they’d hold out hope for the new Dragon Age even after Andromeda and hypothetically Anthem.
I do want to play Warframe now though.
I’m not sure if Anthem is the Dylan project mentioned years ago; I believe Anthem came together fairly quickly in response to Destiny. Maybe Dylan was canceled or folded into this? Or maybe it was Anthem all along.
I am almost positive the first-person town sections are done by a different team. This is 3+ BioWare studios and definitely Austin (the Old Republic team); they’re chasing Ubisoft’s distributed development model. Ubisoft is very very good at it by now and it still results in games incapable of rising above mediocre; I think BioWare is still in the learning stage. This is the next step of connection from Mass Effect 3’s separated single- and multiplayer games. Stitching together different bits like this is rough and might also account for the long loading if it wasn’t resourced far enough out.
I’m going to bring back the single thing that bothered me the most to see if I’m just odd – did anyone else feel like they had to look away in the ultra-close cutscenes with your ‘witty’ partner? He moves so close it felt like he was invading my personal space and I actually looked away from my TV – a novel experience in a game, to be sure, but not very pleasant or intended!
I think that’s less a consequence of how close they’re actually to your avatar and more having to do with first person viewpoints in general being way too zoomed in (whenever I think of Desert Eagles in FPSes, I just picture some idiot holding the thing up to his cheek)
Seems like they’re cueing off the cutscene direction of Far Cry 3 – we can use the mocap camera as a participant and act into it! – but that was really designed for villains. That’s probably a good way to describe it, it feels like a cinematic technique used to make someone look threatening.
I get this
BUT
I feel like this is a legitimate question to levy at games like these because they disproportionately put the interesting encounter design in the endgame
which is a whole 'nother discussion
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Bioware fans for the most part are rooting for Anthem to fail and the company to fold so that they can say I told you so. I think one could make an argument that they are some of the worst fans in gaming and their relationship with the company became toxic years ago.
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