Search the Community

New patch 1.40 Anyone who has the game, if you haven't tried the cataclysm stuff yet, now is the time. All events in side it are up, all Javelin armor from the event is up, gear reward chests bought with the currency from doing it are all available this week so you can go for whichever type you want (new guns, melee weapons, and new/upgraded support gear), etc. This patch also increases the vault storage by 100 slots which was sorely needed. Also, the cataclysm is home to easily the best cosmetic in the game. Can give your Javelin grabbit ears.

You could also play Fire Emblem WHILE installing. ? Rewards from challenges for all this stuff is nice to see. Almost everything has emotes or cosmetic stuff tied to it. Nothing in the "seasonaseasonal" that uses the cataclysm currency seems too far fetched for price either. Could get basically anything I want with a couple hours of playing. Not like the regular store where you have to play constantly for like a full week to get anything. Added new legendary events to freeplay as well that are cool. And they have a timer before starting and show up on the map and everything. They're slowly figuring this shit out. XD

Pretty good so far. The new content itself is some story stuff that explains the new area and then going into the new area is something like a high difficulty, open world dungeon that is balancing survival with getting shit done in a time limit. Some really interesting new mechanics. Will take some time to learn the ins and outside and how to do it efficiently. I'd say it's definitely worth checking out if you already have the game. Probably don't buy yet unless you see an excellent sale price. There is still some fixing that needs doing for sure.

The 1.30 (Cataclysm) patch is out. Lots of big changes in addition to the new content. Guilds are in (though functionality outside of some weekly reward stuff seems limited to an app at the moment). Luck has been removed from Gear and what was max luck is now a baseline droprate increase for everyone. Adjustment to enemy health in higher difficulties to make them less spongy. New gear and melee weapon types including (finally)masterwork and legendary quality gear for the support slot. Tons of other tweaks and fixes. I would say some of the underlying issues with the game are still present but this is a massive step in the right direction and hopefully now that the current dev team has this under their belt, their release cycle time will start to improve. Patch notes

Okay, so they clarified some things a bit. Mainly, the fact that, though the Cataclysm event is 8 weeks long, that doesn't mean the content will go away after 8 weeks, and that it would be kind of weird to make a whole new area and all this other stuff, and then remove it 8 weeks later. Was rather vague on details, but there is more to this than just the 8 week event they were referencing.

Doing stream right now. Talking about the Cataclysm event and showing off the new area. - Cataclysm will be an 8 week event, 2 of which is a "pre" event period. - Will have leaderboards and support a repeatable, competitive element. - New story, missions, and high end cutscenes will be involved - This will take place in a new area of the game. - New faction has formed within the Dominion as a result of the main games story, their leader Vara will be the main antagonist from the sound of it. - Map contains various "arenas" with different events and objectives to score points. - Can only spend certain amount of time flying in the cataclysm itself before you take damage. - Gain points meeting objectives and completing arenas and things of that nature. - There will be a time limit that is extended as you complete objectives, as well as score multipliers and things of that nature. When time runs out you're given a score. - Event will have "Inversions" that give buffs to certain things each week. Things like 400% increased ult charge, half time on ability charge or double damage on certain weapon types. So basically like the things on Nightfall strikes in Destiny, but everything is a beneficial effect. - New weapons and masterwork gear - Melee equippable slot. Not DIFFERENT weapons for the javelines, but will have different effects. Example given was Ranger melee is a primer electric ability. Can change it to be a detonator instead. Plan is for all Javelin's to be able to swap between different elements and primer or detonator for their melee. - Masterwork and Legendary Support gear (FINALLY) - New items will have a higher power level than existing items (kind of expected, but it's probably good they say so or I might worry. >_> ). -Event will have currency tied to it and a special vendor you can buy chests from ( ). Items available in chests will change throughout the event. - Removing luck stat, all Javelin's will have set "luck" to what the max was when it was a stat so effectively more loot will drop for people unless they were try-harding the game already. Any gear with the luck stat is having it replaced by armor. - PTS will go up sometime next week and will be up for 2 or 3 weeks. They really want feedback on the systems they're putting in before it goes live. First week will be strictly testing for the event itself, and after they will patch the new loot in for feedback on that. Definitely looks good overall. Not sure how I feel about this being an "event" (even if it does go for 8 weeks). The only way this is going to work is if they keep their dev. cycle really strong and have shit progress consistently. So this event will finish and another of equal size/length will start within a week or two after and keep progressing the story/world forward. This is basically going to be end game content so they can't just end it and then wait a month or more before something else happens or people will lose it. Time will tell. Austin has a LOT of experience with online services and this style of development and whatnot so I have some hope that once they stabilize with what they're doing, we'll see some consistent stuff from them. PTR is PC only which sucks for me I guess. Might actually consider contributing feedback on this since they probably legit need it and will be hard up for people not just screaming "LOOT" over and over again which is usually what 75% of the stream chat is. It's already been clipped for anyone that might want to actually watch it:

Just because they're not saying anything doesn't mean they weren't working on it. In EA's quarterly financial call they had not too long ago, they flat out said they're still fully supporting the game as it sold incredibly well and fills a gap in their lineup. Say what you want about the company, but they're not going to lie to their shareholders. That's about the only thing they DO care about. The press on the game has been the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. When two of the guys started working on something else, people lost their fucking minds talking about how they were giving up on the game and all this other shit. They were two of the Edmonton team that had stayed on extra time to help with the transition to Austin taking over the game. They literally said months earlier that that was going to happen. Those two didn't have anything to do with the development of the game pretty much from the point it came out, outside of said transition, and the transition had finished. Still plenty of people playing the game. Unless I play at utterly bizarre times, I always have a full group when I do a random thing. Probably the only thing that would really be dead at this point would be the regular story missions since everyone would be done with them. Even if there weren't a lot of people playing, if they fix the stuff they need to it will be fine. There have been plenty of games that have had a resurgence after worse states than this.

Nope. That's one of their "big" projects so I'm assuming we'll see a complete overhaul (which it needs). Most people bitch about the drop rates, but there's not anything particularly wrong with that. RNG is a bitch, but I get Legendaries pretty regularly just playing on GM1 (like I said, I've completely maxed out 2 different javelins). So I'd expect something more profound. Hopefully alongside new content. Once they get a couple more strongholds in too, that will help. Have 4 now. New one was really fun, but definitely need some variety. 6 strongholds and some "higher" tier of content (some kind of raid style thing) would be much more well rounded.

Everything they've been doing has been for the better, but if you've stopped I don't see any real reason to start back up for a while. Wait for some big additions and really meaningful changes. I'm still playing a little bit each day mostly just saving up currency and what not and doing individual javelin challenges and stuff. Have both Interceptor and Colossus completely decked out in Legendaries and have all of their challenges done thus far. As long as they get shit out before I run out of side things to do, I'll be happy.

1.20, First update in like a month: https://www.ea.com/games/anthem/news/update-120 They've been pretty silent and rumor is they've been in pretty heavy crunch to catch back up to where they wanted to be at this point. Tweet went out a couple days ago about new story and lore content being finished up, and this update apparently has a lot of "under the hood" changes not listed that are supposed to set up for their first big roadmap thing that was originally supposed to have happened already, so we'll see how fast they can get that out. As such, they're also adding a Test Server on PC and will have the "Cataclysm" thing on it to test starting tomorrow it sounds like and will also be doing a stream about it around 3pm CST: https://answers.ea.com/t5/News-Updates/Update-on-1-2-0-the-Cataclysm-and-next-livestream/m-p/7902351#M15 Patch has some solid stuff in it either way. Can "fast travel" to the different strider locations now, map will show collectibles and rare enemies when you're near them and things like that on top of a lot of bug fixes and some ability buffs.

Yeah, despite the intense bitching about the game that's still going on, they are steadily improving it. The loot thing is just whatever though honestly. Drop rate is fine. I've had a full set of Legendary stuff for quite a while and I rarely play above GM1 (only did 2 a handful of times and have never touched 3). Mostly they just need to fix item score on the shit to reflect difficulty and/or make the rolls less retarded (either tighten them up more than they have, or let you reroll specific things with crafting mats since they have NO use otherwise outside of making a new character). There's no real reason to go up in difficulty after GM1 because stuff doesn't get BETTER it just has a chance to drop more often which is almost unnecessary. The fact that you can get a Masterwork weapon on Easy that is the exact same item level as what you could get on GM3 is kind of stupid basically. I would say don't rush load it up again. Wait for some of their end game stuff to go in. The Mastery system at least should help a lot if it's what I think it is.

Just did the new Stronghold. Was a lot of fun. Really liked the setting and the feel of size of it. Felt a little light on enemies, and we really need an Outlaw based stronghold. At least it wasn't more Scars though. Lot of interesting visuals to the place. The feeling of coming up into the boss chamber really sells one of the things I love most about this game.

Yeah, lots of good stuff on there it looks like. Can also start contracts straight out of the mission select screen instead of having to pick them up in the fort, and can launch a new mission straight out of the mission completion screen instead of having to load into the fort or launch bay first. That will keep the flow going a lot better during end game play. A few bug fixes I've been waiting on for a long time too. A few little quality of life things too, including projectiles now pass through friendly javeline's. No more fat ass Colossus walking in front of you just as you throw a grenade and having it bounce off their fat ass. Doesn't look like they're going to keep up with their roadmap though. Was hoping to see their Mastery System that was set for this month since it's supposed to be an "expanded progression" system (assuming something like the Paragon system in D3). Trying to not play too much until that's in now that I've done all the main and side quest stuff. Just been doing dailies for the Elysian Keys and to stock up on coins in case the store has something interesting.

By management in that statement I was referring more to project management. Employee management is shit all across that industry pretty much. Those guys need a fucking union. Not sure how likely that is though with how spread out the game development industry is.

Saw that just a bit ago. Hopefully they can start to iron this shit out though I'm not overly hopeful. Most high end developers are probably almost identical (in terms of stress and morale for the employees. Not necessarily the shitty mismanagement).

Yeah, he updated the original article stating that he sent them an outline and then they published their response pretty much minutes after his article went up without actually reading the full thing. Sounds like they COULD start learning from their recent mistakes. There are some hopeful threads in the article overall now that I've had a chance to read the whole thing, but they really don't have any missteps left at this point. Glad to see that the people who will more or less be running the game now seem to have their shit together a little better too. The updates so far have done a decent amount for the game and I'm honestly more impressed with it now knowing the specifics of what the dev cycle was like on it. If they can keep up the pace they may actually be able to turn it around in the public eye but will have to see how it plays out. They've been weirdly quiet since the last patch. Haven't even seen their community guy on reddit recently.

It's not entirely a greed issue per say (in some cases at least). This game was in development for 6 years. That's 6 years of dozens to hundreds of people working on a game where no profit is being made from the work done. There's a breaking point where SOMETHING needs to be released and mismanaged companies like EA just make it more obvious when resources aren't being properly allocated or there is a lack of oversight ("Bioware Magic" will see us through). Where one game needs maybe some better QA testing and a solid day one patch, others need a years worth of scrambling and some massive overhauls to set straight. Unfortunately the latter is becoming more common with the advent of 'live services' where the company can see a base line pay out for work performed thus far and finish it on the run (FUCK IT! WE'RE DOING IT LIVE!). Much like how the loot box concept in F2P games was taken by AAA publishers and shoved into full priced games, this is basically the AAA version of "early access". That being said, I sincerely hope to see a turn around of Anthem in a shorter time than it's contemporaries which all took about a year and the work so far seems to lean in that direction but the state of morale that appears to be prevalent at Bioware currently is a bit disheartening. Also makes me worry about what may ultimate happen with the next Dragon Age game if it continues. Side note: I find it mildly baffling that apparently the flying was not a constant in the game since it's easily one of the best and most well rounded systems the game has by far. Give whoever planned that shit a raise. O_o P.S. Polygon's turn apparently: https://www.polygon.com/2019/4/2/18292304/bioware-press-response-anthem

Similar shit with Andromeda too. That particular writer is really big on exposing that kind of stuff. Think he actually wrote a whole book about the situation at various AAA developers.

Missed the part about the game's lead designer dying in July 2017 as well. That probably rocked the boat harder than a lot of other things. Here's the blog post Nick referred to that acts (in part) as a response to the Kotaku article: http://blog.bioware.com/2019/04/02/anthem-game-development/ Jason Schreier (Kotaku article writer) has since responded to the blog post, specifically highlighting the part that says "We don’t see the value in tearing down one another, or one another’s work. We don’t believe articles that do that are making our industry and craft better."

Fair enough. I get there needs to be some sort of balance between amount of loot and quality of loot for most of these games but they all seem to completely fuck it over and it takes a year or more to sort it out. The biggest issue is nobody seems to want to take what other people have done right and start from there. Like there's some weird, driving NEED to "Do it different" than everyone else but there aren't really many options. Borderlands definitely seems to have the best approach with "Here's 5 million different kinds of gun configurations. Figure out what the fuck you want to use yourself." Even that's not perfect, but it at least gives you options. XD

Same but with Interceptor. I need to get to the others eventually for their gear challenges and Colossus specifically for the two guns that only they use but I keep not doing it. XD

And that's been most of them when they first come out. The Borderlands games seem to be the only ones that actually know what they're doing. Destiny started decent and then went downhill so fast nobody wanted to do anything to get loot because the stuff from the original raid outshined it, Destiny 2 was worse than Anthem is originally. Diablo 3 loot was fucking horrendous originally. Division loot was boring and generic. Can't speak for Division 2 but what I played of the demo was basically a continuation of D1 though maybe that changes at endgame. I never said there wasn't some interesting stuff, but high end drops are hard enough to come by that chasing perfect roles is almost impossible right now so it's not worth worrying about. There's enough in the game to focus on otherwise that I don't see the need to get bent out of shape about it. When I run out of things to keep me busy then maybe I'll worry about it. The key problem is that they games Legendary items (equivalent to Destiny's exotics without the restrictions of only having 1 gun and 1 other) aren't actually unique. Each gun type has 3 "styles" and they're the same for each rarity (common, uncommon, rare, epic, masterwork, legendary). At the Masterwork rarity, the guns (and other equipment), though still the same "style" get unique abilities, some of which are REALLY cool. But then the Legendary stuff is identical to the Masterwork version visually and function wise just with bigger numbers attached (though the unique ability isn't any stronger). If these were more like they are in something like Destiny where they were wholly unique and had set, really nice affixes on them then their rarity would actually be worthwhile. Drop rates right now treat them like they ARE Destiny exotics without the actual payoff unless you get REALLY lucky. Just focusing on other things though, I've got nearly a full set of Legendaries already with a bunch to spare (stuff for other Javelins or different gun options on top of what I have equipped). So I'm nearly as far along as people that are trying to find efficient ways and/or exploits to farm shit without any of the headache. IE: Best not to focus on it when you have other things to do in the game.

Dragon Scale metal is pretty hot. As an interceptor I really like a couple of the new components as well. Still trying to get a decent roll on a Bloodlust one because that thing is amazing. Really makes up for the nerf to our lightning on consecutive melee strikes one. Best thing to do right now though is not play it for the loot. I've just been focusing on challenges and stuff and get a pretty steady stream of upgrades just not worrying about it with only limited complaints.

Damn. Beat me to it. Some pretty good stuff. Fixed the armor and shield bugs where extra armor and shields from Inscriptions wasn't always loading right so that's good. Only thing I see that people might bitch about is the Elysian Chests not having armor pieces in them (and honestly, they really should) but everything else is good stuff. My favorite inscription got a small nerf, but one of the new ones added should make up for it at least. XD Being able to use the forge anywhere in the fort and having no loading time on it is going to be wonderful. Now they just need to get caught up to what their trailers showed and let you board a Strider in Free play and some missions to gain access to the forge and what not and we'll be good. >_> Edit: So apparently increasing the loot threshold on bosses and chests kind of fucked some things. People are getting MORE loot but not better. Used to be a guaranteed masterwork item from GM1 and higher bosses and now it's not guaranteed so people are losing their minds. I personally have got 3 legendary drops already today from legendary contracts and the legendary mission on GM2 so I'm pretty happy. >_>

There's a half assed sprint function (basically makes it a brisk walk instead of a slow plod) . Not sure what it is on PC but with a controller it's the same button you use to start flying out in the world. @Nick It does. You can convince the weird fort safety/janitor guy to leave the fort near the end and then the water fountain doesn't get fixed I know. There's a few people that will leave or not depending on what you say to them. Biggest difference I saw was with Raythe telling you she lost her Javelin to the Regulators. I told her I would go with her to meet with them about getting it back and my wife didn't and the whole thing played out quite a bit differently. There's a maintenance on Tuesday so hopefully that means the big patch with the new stuff and shitload of changes will be coming along side that.