So the Anthem open demo happened. That was... a thing.
Yeah, the VIP and subsequent open demo for Anthem didn't go quite like BioWare hoped, I would guess. I know I wouldn't be happy if I were a BioWare developer right now, and the vitriol surrounding everything that is EA isn't helping either. There's a vocal group of people who are screeching at the top of their lungs that Anthem is the Antichrist, and it's very hard to go anywhere on the internet to get away from this group. I don't agree with them, after giving the open demo a good 15 hours of play I can definitely state that there are great things waiting inside the game. But will I buy it at launch? ...Uh... well, about that.
You see, we were told by BioWare that the Anthem demo is a six-week-old build. That means 6 fewer weeks of bug fixing, a changed economy at launch, and a few other things that the company listed as changes from the full game. Depending on how you read this announcement, it means that the demo is six weeks old from the time of the VIP demo launch, so a total of 9 weeks to fix everything wrong with the demo build. Or, it's a difference of 6 weeks between when they built the demo and when the game will be playable on Origin Access Premier on February 15th. In either case, I have disappointingly little confidence in their ability to fix the game by then.
As a BioWare fan, this is really starting to hurt. I was willing to write off Mass Effect: Andromeda as a one-time failure, a result of an extremely troubled development cycle that forced a complete re-imagining of the game's core concept not once, but twice over 5 years that meant the game we got was built in an unbelievably short 18 months. But now Anthem's demo has been fraught with insane bugs over its two weekends, from crashes to infinite load screens to server issues to who-knows-what-else. This isn't the BioWare I've grown to love all these years.
My personal experience with Anthem was on PS4 for the open beta this past weekend, and I personally had a lot of bad experiences. The game completely crashed on me three separate times. I got stuck gaining 0 experience after leaving freeplay more than once. I experienced severe sever connection lag despite being connected through ethernet, which means the server tick rate is horrendous. And on one notable occasion, I entered one of the world's dungeons to complete a world event, and the dungeon didn't load for 8 minutes. I was stuck in the skybox with no terrain around me, barely able to move around while stuck in the falling animation, as I tried desperately to hit enemies that teleported around the map while my friend completed the dungeon by herself. Oh, and the strike? I wouldn't know how fun it is, in three attempts we never completed it because a key item never spawned the first time, forcing us to quit and retry, and then the server crashed the other two times we played it.
The worst part about all of that is... I like the game. Fundamentally, I think there's a great game hiding under the technical problems. Flying around in Javelins is fun, I like the gunplay, the abilities feel great to use, every Javelin chassis plays completely different, it's all there under the gunk. The roleplay is lighter than previous BioWare games, but I don't really mind that much because I know Dragon Age 4 is in development and that's the real meat I've been waiting for. And on top of that, the super fun mech combat more than makes up for the lack of genuine depth in Fort Tarsis. But when I can't go more than thirty minutes without encountering something that massively tarnishes my experience, my fun is kneecapped.
So I find myself stuck. I want to support Anthem for two reasons: 1. Because I actually like the core gameplay, and 2. Because... well, EA has a history of canning companies that underperform. Visceral met that grizzly end a year and a half ago, and even though Dragon Age 4 has been announced... I have very little confidence that if Anthem fails, EA will still let them make it. But the technical issues present in the demo build, those don't excite me. The fact that they only have a few weeks to fix this stuff doesn't excite me. The fact that we have yet to see the real economy of the game, that doesn't excite me. Instead, I'm left befuddled, sad, and ultimately anxious for the future of my favorite game creators and confused as to why this game isn't getting another 4 months of development to ensure a smooth launch. And in its current state, I don't think it's justifiable to spend premium price on this unstable mess. I'm damned if I do, damned if I don't.
Will we get Dragon Age 4? Here's to hoping. But with the way things are going, I've already got some whisky set aside to pour out over BioWare's grave.
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