# Anthem reviews are trickling in and they're not good



## KnightBrolaire (Feb 20, 2019)

64 aggregate from opencritic right now
https://opencritic.com/game/7084/anthem
70 from metacritic (only 4 reviews though)
https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/anthem/critic-reviews

Basically the TLDR is that the game is pretty, shooting is good, the story is meh, load times are horrendous and ever plentiful, bugs are everywhere currently, missions are super repetitive and amount to "kill everything and activate the objective".

So it's essentially EA's half assed attempt at making Destiny mixed with Iron man.


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## MFB (Feb 20, 2019)

Had a feeling the missions would be all the same thing as that's all the demo was, so good to know I made the right call skipping out on this one


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## beerandbeards (Feb 20, 2019)

Ooof


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## wankerness (Feb 20, 2019)

The silver lining is since they put all their money into this, the game they just released and put no marketing behind that's actually GOOD is still free and doesn't look to have been severely meddled with like usual.

The bad news is that when Anthem bombs they'll probably try monetizing that more aggressively


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## GatherTheArsenal (Feb 20, 2019)

Damn i was hoping it would get better reviews, it seemed like they were doing something different with this one.... guess not. Still though I'm not writing it off though yet til I try it.

But kinda not surprised on the luke warm meh feeling, for awhile now the whole formula of "multiplayer-shootemup-resurrect-rinse&repeat" is getting old in the eyes of a growing number of gamers, despite big sales. The genre is starting to show its lack of substance IMO.

I mean how many times could you release multiple games a year with the same (almost exact) premise with a different setting and expect it not to get old? I know I'm generalizing the genre but I know I'm not alone when I roll my eyes everytime another multiplayer shootemup is announced.


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## Ralyks (Feb 20, 2019)

I heard the day one patch is suppose to fix the load times.

Otherwise, sigh. I was hoping this would cure the itch that Destiny 2 left behind after I gave up in Forsaken after a couple of weeks. Oh well, back to go through the back catalogue...


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## TedEH (Feb 20, 2019)

This kinda just sounds like modern gaming in a nutshell. Big gaming company that everyone loves to hate releases a flashy title that jumps on all the bandwagons but nobody really asked for, always online, full of micro-transactions, released in a janky state, targeting a vocal audience who will tear it to shreds but still play it for hours on end for who knows what reason.


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## Mathemagician (Feb 20, 2019)

I bought Borderlands 2 for like $20 a year or so ago on PS4 and had a great time. Looking at the clips for this game I kept thinking “why would I play this over more borderlands?” And couldn’t get more than the flying mechanic which is admittedly cool. But I dropped $100 on Destiny 2 at launch, and then the same for BLO4S and that’s my mistakes for this decade.


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## wankerness (Feb 20, 2019)

Mathemagician said:


> I bought Borderlands 2 for like $20 a year or so ago on PS4 and had a great time. Looking at the clips for this game I kept thinking “why would I play this over more borderlands?” And couldn’t get more than the flying mechanic which is admittedly cool. But I dropped $100 on Destiny 2 at launch, and then the same for BLO4S and that’s my mistakes for this decade.



You'd play it because there is actually a playerbase. That's kind of how they get you with these things; the only way to be sure of keeping up with the crowd is to buy the new thing since they all did. If everyone just kept playing Borderlands 2 then the world would be a better place.


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## TedEH (Feb 20, 2019)

wankerness said:


> If everyone just kept playing Borderlands 2


I still play Borderlands 2 sometimes. If Steam is to be believed, it's the game I've poured the most hours into. I play it entirely single-player though, so how many other people are playing makes zero difference to me.


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## Ralyks (Feb 20, 2019)

Man, now I want to play some Borderlands 2. I cannot give up on that game until I get the Platinum, which I'm pretty close to.

I guess what I really want to say is, yeah, I'd pick more Borderlands 2 over what Anthem is shaping up to be. Hell, I'll even play some more Pre-Sequel. Yeah, I said it.


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## wankerness (Feb 20, 2019)

I played it single player mostly (I think between console and PC I had ~200 hours, got to max level and did all DLC on every single class before the DLC ones like psycho), but it's a LOT more fun multiplayer as everything's balanced around it, especially at higher difficulties where practically every single enemy will 1-shot you and it's all based around having a healer on your team to do rezzes etc. Problem is, most of my friends didn't like it and playing through the low levels is HORRIBLE since it forces everyone to listen to all the dialogue as you advance through the story.


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## Mathemagician (Feb 20, 2019)

Yeah my 40 or so hours (1.5 slow playthroughs) was entirely single player. I am not dropping $60+ a game to keep up with strangers. At that price I throw my money at games like FF14 since as an MMO it gets steady story and content updates and the playerbase generally holds if not grows over time. 

Every few years like this year i’ll buy a COD just to play with my buddies who got too hyped and all pre-ordered.


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## BlackMastodon (Feb 20, 2019)

Mathemagician said:


> I bought Borderlands 2 for like $20 a year or so ago on PS4 and had a great time. Looking at the clips for this game I kept thinking “why would I play this over more borderlands?” And couldn’t get more than the flying mechanic which is admittedly cool. But I dropped $100 on Destiny 2 at launch, and then the same for BLO4S and that’s my mistakes for this decade.


I was also burned by Destiny 2, that's why I didn't bat an eye when Anthem was announced. The biggest kick in the balls for me here is that they put Mass Effect and Dragon Age on hold for this subpar, rushed clone of other games. I feel most sorry for BioWare here, just seems like they're at EA's mercy whenever it comes to their games for the last decade, and EA just views everyone as a cash printing machine.


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## Mathemagician (Feb 20, 2019)

What’s hilarious is that EA is a behemoth that still makes plenty of money but cannot actually “get ahead” of anything enough to have THE game in these newer genres of MOBA, survival, battle royal, etc. 

They do fine but it seems like they’re always chasing last season’s goldmine.


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## wankerness (Feb 20, 2019)

That's usually how large corporations in any field function, I think.


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## dhgrind (Feb 22, 2019)

For all the advancement in technology games keep getting worse due to big business. 

Oddly enough I log into warframe daily even just to collect the login rewards... 


Anthem was too little way too late. They should have been on D1’s heels not D2’s wreckage. Ea was a guarantee that this game would be half baked.


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## KnightBrolaire (Feb 22, 2019)

dhgrind said:


> For all the advancement in technology games keep getting worse due to big business.
> 
> Oddly enough I log into warframe daily even just to collect the login rewards...
> 
> ...


Warframe is a lot of fun because of the movement/shooting mechanics being so damn good and varied. I've been playing off and on since the closed beta and it's insane to see how much that game has added over that time. The melee overhaul, the jetpacks, pets ,etc are all cool ideas that make destiny/anthem seem barren in comparison featurewise.


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## AxeHappy (Feb 22, 2019)

Anthem was gonna need to be real good to pull me away from Warframe but every review I've read from gaming places I enjoy has completely bagged on it. 

I was willing to give it a chance, as I'm an old school Bioware fan boy, but fuck it looks...rough. 

The Javelin cosmetic customisation seems on point though...


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## beerandbeards (Feb 22, 2019)

I’m actually enjoying Anthem so far. My brother and nephew got it so as a coop it’s enjoyable. I guess we will see after a week or so.

Seems like they fixed a lot of stuff so far. Definitely noticeable from the demo


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## Mathemagician (Feb 23, 2019)

Yep I discovered Warframe on PS4 two years ago and after about 20 hrs switched to PC so I could be sure I’d have the lastedt content support. And I dropped 200+ hrs over the course of last spring in it just having a blast. They turned farming in the game and it makes me WANT to give them $$$. They got like $70 out of me and I feel it was totally worth it buying the nonessential crap I bought because the game itself is so fun.


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## wankerness (Feb 23, 2019)

I heard a description of it from someone in which they said "this is definitely not Destiny 2, it's more Diablo 3" which made me slightly curious. But, not curious enough to try it until it's a lot cheaper.


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## beerandbeards (Feb 26, 2019)

I pretty much played all weekend. It was a very fun experience. I played with my brother and nephew so we always had a squad to play with. I didn’t experience any bugs or lag during my game play. I’d say the loading was a little long at times but it wasn’t as bad as reported. Look forward to playing again and advancing the story.

I’m starting to think that reviewers only post negative reviews to gain views and clicks....


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## KnightBrolaire (Feb 26, 2019)

anthem has a 60 aggregate score from 52 critics and 43 score based off 2361 user ratings over on metacritic.
opencritic has it at 60% as well based of 62 critic reviews.
even if you filter out the outlier scores like 0 and 10s, it's still getting lambasted by people that paid money for the game.


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## Xaios (Feb 26, 2019)

It's been a long, _*long*_ time since user reviews were any kind of accurate measure of a game's quality. They are hyperbole incarnate. Granted, I'm not saying that they don't contain accurate information about the problems that a game has (at least if you're willing to spend the time separating the wheat from the chaff), but the way "normal people" weigh specific aspects of games (and movies) is not what I'd call balanced. It's especially problematic with the current Youtube culture of reviews where catering to trendy outrage = clicks = mo money baby. Even without that, you still run into thinking like this: "8/10 gameplay, 9/10 graphics, 6/10 story. However, I had a couple animation bugs that were annoying, even though they didn't impact my playthrough whatsoever. Get it together, Publisher X! 2/10."


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## wankerness (Feb 26, 2019)

KnightBrolaire said:


> anthem has a 60 aggregate score from 52 critics and 43 score based off 2361 user ratings over on metacritic.
> opencritic has it at 60% as well based of 62 critic reviews.
> even if you filter out the outlier scores like 0 and 10s, it's still getting lambasted by people that paid money for the game.


Seriously. That read like "I liked thing that someone disliked, therefore all reviews are bs" /facepalm

It sounds like something that's fun enough if you're not very discerning. Kind of like Mass Effect Andromeda, which I enjoyed. I'll wait until it hits 20 dollars like I did with that one.  Maybe, anyway, I don't do the multiplayer thing.


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## KnightBrolaire (Feb 26, 2019)

Xaios said:


> It's been a long, _*long*_ time since user reviews were any kind of accurate measure of a game's quality. They are hyperbole incarnate. Granted, I'm not saying that they don't contain accurate information about the problems that a game has (at least if you're willing to spend the time separating the wheat from the chaff), but the way "normal people" weigh specific aspects of games (and movies) is not what I'd call balanced. It's especially problematic with the current Youtube culture of reviews where catering to trendy outrage = clicks = mo money baby. Even without that, you still run into thinking like this: "8/10 gameplay, 9/10 graphics, 6/10 story. However, I had a couple animation bugs that were annoying, even though they didn't impact my playthrough whatsoever. Get it together, Publisher X! 2/10."


even if you completely disregard consumer reviews and focus on critic reviews, it's getting lambasted. It's not like consumer reviews can't be useful, if anything I'd say they're actually more helpful since these are people that actually paid money for the game, rather than a critic that got handed a review code/copy. Plus, you can pick up on the general issues of a game in the consumer reviews pretty quickly since there's a fair number of people righting truncated bullet pointed reviews, whereas game publications tend to go into more depth and drag reviews out to get you to click on more crap/get more ad revenue.


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## Xaios (Feb 26, 2019)

KnightBrolaire said:


> even if you completely disregard consumer reviews and focus on critic reviews, it's getting lambasted.


Oh don't get me wrong, 60% is definitely not GOTY material, but neither is it Over the Road Racing. It's thoroughly "meh." Despite what more extreme viewpoints might say, "meh" does not equal "lambasted."


KnightBrolaire said:


> ...since these are people that actually paid money for the game


Uhhh, not so much these days. Review-bombing of games by people who have neither purchased nor played a game is a commonplace occurrence now, generally because they're angry at the developer or publisher. I guarantee that lots and lots of people who submitted scores for Battlefront 2 didn't actually buy it. For these people, accurate representation of a game's merit is not the point. Even if their grievance with a developer or publisher is legitimate, it's still an abuse of the system.


KnightBrolaire said:


> Plus, you can pick up on the general issues of a game in the consumer reviews pretty quickly since there's a fair number of people righting *truncated bullet pointed reviews*, whereas game publications tend to go into more depth and drag reviews out to get you to click on more crap/get more ad revenue.


You and me probably won't see eye-to-eye on this, but personally, the part I've bolded is not a positive in my perspective. If I'm going to spend $60 ($80 in Canada) on a game, I want to know as much as I can about it, short of spoilers, because the cost of the game isn't the only expense. Not only is there a significant time expenditure, but also potentially the cost of new hardware. Bullet point reviews are entirely too shallow to give good contextual information. Even after it was proclaimed as the second-coming of open world RPGs, I still read a boatload of reviews of Breath of the Wild before buying it, and while it's true that I also had to shell out significantly more for the price of the console, it's not the first time I've done so for a game I really felt was that worth playing.


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## beerandbeards (Feb 26, 2019)

My comment is based off YouTube reviewers specifically. They seem to create a lot of negativity for every game it seems to me (at least games I’m interested in). Then there are viewers/readers that are easily influenced by said reviewer and will follow that narrative. 

I obviously can’t prove how someone reviews a game, also it’s purely subjective. I just think it’s amazing hyperbolic comments can be. Maybe I got lucky and all the issues that others have noticed I just haven’t seen yet.


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## TedEH (Feb 26, 2019)

beerandbeards said:


> They seem to create a lot of negativity


I'm sure I've probably said it before, and I still think it's true: YouTube has done some significant damage to how people think they should judge games. There's so much cynicism, sarcasm, anger, etc. in the character of video content - and I get why it happens - but I think it sort of enables people to act the same way. Enable is the wrong word, I can't think of the right one at the moment.


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## beerandbeards (Feb 28, 2019)

Never played Battlefield V. You’d assume the game was terrible from Metacritic scores based on the actual gameplay, or graphics.....


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## TedEH (Feb 28, 2019)

Those scores have nothing to do with any actual gameplay, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, unless you meant to be sarcastic or something.
I think that screenshot does a good job of summing up the politics of game reviews though:
"This isn't MY battlefield."


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## beerandbeards (Feb 28, 2019)

Exactly the point I was making. The scores were not based on gameplay or graphics but on some social bias. Gaming scores seem to be unrealistic and should be taken with a grain of salt. Experience the game for ourselves and you might be surprised.


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## BlackMastodon (Feb 28, 2019)

Review bombing is only one of the reasons I think the gamer community as a whole is pretty cancerous. This level of childish toxicity is pretty much why I don't bother with multiplayer games anymore. Also why I just read professional reviews and take them with a grain of salt. A couple of times I've seen them give a game 9/10 but under Cons they actually listed "none." so wouldn't that make the game 10/10? Basically no matter what you have to sift through several reviews and make you own conclusions.


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## wankerness (Feb 28, 2019)

The fact review bombing is 100% the field of angry nerds (seriously, no one else has ever done it), usually of the incel variety, often racist, makes it so if they ever just disable user reviews across the board on RT/Metacritic I won't be sad at all. IMDB is about the only place where they're really useful, since there are tons of movies (that I watch, anyway) where there will be literally 0 professional reviews and then a few user reviews that are actually coherent and helpful. Just disable them for any movie that has more than about 20 professional reviews and we'll be all good. I guess they'd still bomb the "user score" on imdb, but who cares, no one uses that for deciding anything about new releases.


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## Mathemagician (Feb 28, 2019)

The thing is that at least at larger reviewers they have to maintain professionalism. Back in the day if a fighting game came out and there wasn’t someone on staff who LOVED fighting games they would preface it by saying that, then they would go into detail about each feature and what the did/did not enjoy as a casual fan. An employee who was a hardcore fan may have loved the game & it’s mechanics but still had caveats about the systems not being clearly explained to new entrants, and that the lack of single player content could be a turn off to many casual fans, etc.

Now it’s just “reviews” from regular people who prefer another game and don’t want the new one to succeed.


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## Leviathus (Feb 28, 2019)

I have BFV, it is kinda shitty tbh...


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## wankerness (Feb 28, 2019)

Mathemagician said:


> Now it’s just “reviews” from regular people who prefer another game and don’t want the new one to succeed.



What? Most reviews at "big" places are shills in the POSITIVE direction if anything. There's NO benefit to being overly negative other than outrage clicks, but those aren't reviews that hit until after the release since people that do that have to buy their own copies. "Professional" reviews absolutely skew positive. Some developers, EA most notoriously, will not send review copies to reviewers unless they're pretty sure they're going to get a positive review from them, and will cut them off as soon as they don't. People that are paying for their own copies of the games in order to review them are the only ones you can even possibly trust. Game reviews are a clusterf*ck. It's a very different story with movies since all critics can see everything screened for the public no matter what their personal reputation is.


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## Mathemagician (Feb 28, 2019)

That’s the thing. If they skew positive you can take it with a grain of salt.

“The newest call of duty got a 9/10 or 10/10. That means it delivers more COD just like every prior game.” So you know there’s nothing groundbreaking there but maybe that exactly what you want.

If a game has a 7 or 8 out of 10, you know you’ll probably like it if you’re a fan of the genre as a whole, but it may not be your cup of tea otherwise.

I would rather a review skew positive as a know entity, than read about how a game is “crap and bad”.

Perfect example being street fighter 5 at launch.

I only use training mode and online matchmaking. To me people who play fighting games for single player are fucking insane. Like.... why? It’s not rewarding to cheese an AI fight, and when you up the difficulty the AI genuinely reads your inputs so it’s not even like playing against real people.

The game at launch had everything I needed, training and multiplayer. So for me I know that a review that game it 7/10 is fine. But for a casual fan who plays these for arcade and story modes seeing “damn this only got a 7? Pass” is still helpful. You know the reviewer rounded up to a 7 and isn’t some random hater.

Known biases are acceptable if clear. It’s people pretending to be unbiased that suck.


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## MFB (Feb 28, 2019)

I think a large part of reviews being broken is that we've broken our own 0-10 rating metric. If every game is a 9/10, then 9/10 really means nothing and they're all average; realistically, every game review should max out around a 7 or 8 as a "really good" or "great," and then have 9's and 10's drop when something monumental comes out as a franchise entry or is so original it's like "why don't we have more of this?!" I try to avoid .5 ratings just because usually can hard-call whether or not something is +/-1 point, but there's an exception to be made for some things that need it.

A 5/10 isn't a bad game, it's literally an average one, so anything above that quantifies as "above average."


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## Xaios (Feb 28, 2019)

wankerness said:


> It's a very different story with movies since all critics can see everything screened for the public no matter what their personal reputation is.


True, but with the caveat that actual "film critics" are an entirely different animal than "movie reviewers," who are generally held to a much lower standard, if at all. Granted, it's not like film critics don't sometimes cater to an audience either. Just look at Armond White, who manages to somehow interpret every movie that he doesn't like as being a secret exaltation of what he perceives as the moral degeneracy in Hollywood in the age of millennials, liberals and Obama (and often also manages to branch off into similar blathering about politics when discussing movies he does speak well of). The irony is that, when he doesn't go full hateboner for all things left, he's actually quite a skilled critic, but in order for a movie to have a shot at getting legitimate criticism from him instead of a vomited knee-jerk diatribe, a whole bunch of other factors have to align to his own views first, such as the politics of both the movie itself and everyone involved in making it, and his (seemingly completely random) list of film directors that he seems to actively either love or hate on a level that goes far beyond professionalism.

Most legitimate film critics though are members of critic societies, and that affords them some protection from the being blackballed by studios. Given how much sway review scores can have on the box office, that's a fair consideration. The real thing though is that film critics aren't as reliant on an income generated by ad revenue originating from film studios in order pay the bills (ad revenue yes, but not from the studio or distributor). Gave reviewers on the other hand generally must rely on the ad revenue they receive from the very entities whose games that they review, so objectivity is always going to be an open question. This is because the places online where gamers tend to congregate, and where studios ultimately focus their advertising efforts, are also the places where game reviews tend to originate, whereas marketing for movies tends to be far more generalized in where and how it appears.


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## TedEH (Feb 28, 2019)

On some level, when you're talking about something like a game, there's not really any number scale that can be settled on to just rank every game. It's not the number that matters, it's the question of why that number was awarded. On some level, I think it falls on the reader to dig into what the awarded number really means, given that opinions are going to vary, priorities or tastes could be different, etc. I don't want to know that a game is "good", I want to know what someone might or might not like about it.


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## wankerness (Feb 28, 2019)

MFB said:


> I think a large part of reviews being broken is that we've broken our own 0-10 rating metric. If every game is a 9/10, then 9/10 really means nothing and they're all average; realistically, every game review should max out around a 7 or 8 as a "really good" or "great," and then have 9's and 10's drop when something monumental comes out as a franchise entry or is so original it's like "why don't we have more of this?!" I try to avoid .5 ratings just because usually can hard-call whether or not something is +/-1 point, but there's an exception to be made for some things that need it.
> 
> A 5/10 isn't a bad game, it's literally an average one, so anything above that quantifies as "above average."



I see a lot of morons rigidly apply the US grade scale to the number scale, which insists that thus 6/10 is a D- and anything below is an F. An 8/10 is not even good with that mindset (C+/B-). It makes no sense to me AT ALL - I always equivocated the 5 star system to the numbers, and stars tended towards 3/5 being average/decent and below being meh->bad. I engaged in arguments the first few times I saw that, but it was futile, it's not an uncommon thought process. I guess school broke their brains.


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## MFB (Feb 28, 2019)

wankerness said:


> I see a lot of morons rigidly apply the US grade scale to the number scale, which insists that thus 6/10 is a D- and anything below is an F. An 8/10 is not even good with that mindset (C+/B-). It makes no sense to me AT ALL - I always equivocated the 5 star system to the numbers, and stars tended towards 3/5 being average/decent and below being meh->bad. I engaged in arguments the first few times I saw that, but it was futile, it's not an uncommon thought process. I guess school broke their brains.



I've given up entirely on people who don't realize you can't correlate a 0-10 scale the same way you use A-F grading. If you try to do that, you're already lost to us.


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## beerandbeards (Feb 28, 2019)




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## wankerness (Apr 2, 2019)

This is a good article about the making-of:

https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964


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## MFB (Apr 2, 2019)

Read that during my lunch break, it was so god damn depressing to read, and realize it wasn't going to better no matter how much I read; but I like to think that with the failures of Andromeda followed up immediately by this, it sends a big signal to EA and the shareholders that you can't just burn-and-churn and hope it continues to work. At some point the system falls apart, and Anthem is the result of that - too many important people hit their limit of bullshit, and walked away leaving them picking up the pieces, and we now see what that looks like (not good.)


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## KnightBrolaire (Apr 2, 2019)

I'm not really surprised that there was a lot of pivoting and general lack of direction with anthem's development. It really showed in the final product. The kind of work schedules some of these developers have to work are beyond grueling, that kind of crap is why studios like team bondi and some of the ubisoft teams died off.


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## BlackMastodon (Apr 2, 2019)

Holy shit. Explains a lot about what's been happening at Bioware for the last several years. Cuts down a lot of hope for another good Mass Effect game.


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## wankerness (Apr 2, 2019)

His Mass Effect Andromeda article was almost as good, it just had less content due to being less colossal of a leadership disaster. https://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-troubled-five-1795886428

What's interesting about these is how little blame is on EA with Anthem in particular, it's mainly idiotic leadership over at Bioware. I guess I jumped to conclusions.


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## MFB (Apr 2, 2019)

I wouldn't even say it's idiotic, it's just a total LACK OF leadership, as they said a lot - no one was there to make a hard decision on anything to get everyone on the same page. If there was one person making a bad decision for everyone to get behind, that'd be one thing, but this is just that they were trying to avoid that person by having it be decision by council, but nothing got done that way either, and then we ended up with Anthem in it's current state


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## wankerness (Apr 2, 2019)

MFB said:


> I wouldn't even say it's idiotic, it's just a total LACK OF leadership, as they said a lot - no one was there to make a hard decision on anything to get everyone on the same page. If there was one person making a bad decision for everyone to get behind, that'd be one thing, but this is just that they were trying to avoid that person by having it be decision by council, but nothing got done that way either, and then we ended up with Anthem in it's current state



Some of it's blatantly idiotic, like them refusing to look at Destiny and instead saying look at Diablo 3. If you don't look at your closest competition, that's just irresponsible. Then the YEARS of hemming and hawing and doing nothing, which is most vividly described by that section about the meetings where people would disagree over something and no one would take leadership and say what they should do and thus nothing happened at them. The infighting between Bioware studios. Etc. There were leaders involved in all of that! They just didn't lead, except with that moronic decree about refusal to take tips or improve upon the game they were most closely competing with. I guess we're basically saying the same thing.

EA's refusal to pay licensing fees for Unreal Engine is their one huge crime in this story that I saw. Some of the commentariat on that article discuss other studios and experiences where leadership tried to do that but were persuaded to pony up since the amount they'd end up paying in man-hours and human misery for forcing them to use a new/inferior engine would end up outweighing the license fees


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## MFB (Apr 2, 2019)

Ah right, I forgot about the "game that shall not be compared to" aspect, but in the Top 3 errors, I'd say it's the least egregious of the bunch. The other two being lack of leadership and game engine switching lead to FAR bigger problems with the framework and identity of the game before you even get a chance to do something like compare your product to someone else's game.


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## Konfyouzd (Apr 2, 2019)

GatherTheArsenal said:


> But kinda not surprised on the luke warm meh feeling, for awhile now the whole formula of "multiplayer-shootemup-resurrect-rinse&repeat" is getting old in the eyes of a growing number of gamers, despite big sales. The genre is starting to show its lack of substance IMO.



I am glad that I'm not alone in this feeling. It seemed--since people keep making similar games--that I was in the minority. I may still be, but this comment is refreshing nonetheless


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## MFB (Apr 2, 2019)

Shooters to me are definitely more of the "is the gameplay fun enough to keep me coming back" vs the experience of say, an RPG where I'm supposed to invest in the story/world. A shooter can have those extra features to make the game that much better, but at the end of the day, I need engaging gameplay for them most of all; and I'm sure it'd come as no surprise to anyone to say that Titanfall 2 and DOOM are in my top 5 FPS franchises.

Whereas every EA shooter has the same exact feel, and on top of that, every loot shooter feels the same - so why wouldn't a loot shooter feel the same as every other when a company who's games all feel the same decides to make one?


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## wankerness (Apr 2, 2019)

You think Borderlands feels the same as anthem/destiny? I’ve never played the latter two but I sure liked borderlands. Only played solo. If destiny feels the same maybe I should check it out.


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## MFB (Apr 2, 2019)

Borderlands enemies I dont recall being as spongy as the ones I faced in the Anthem demo, but it definitely reached a point of "how many of these quests are fulfilling something vs just doing them for completion percentage?" where even the loot you got made you go "...Eh, I can just sell this at least." It's saving grace was the sheer level of absurdity it goes to with things like decapitated enemies mutating, over the top characters, playing with friends, and all the ways to make shit blow up


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## wankerness (Apr 3, 2019)

MFB said:


> Borderlands enemies I dont recall being as spongy as the ones I faced in the Anthem demo, but it definitely reached a point of "how many of these quests are fulfilling something vs just doing them for completion percentage?" where even the loot you got made you go "...Eh, I can just sell this at least." It's saving grace was the sheer level of absurdity it goes to with things like decapitated enemies mutating, over the top characters, playing with friends, and all the ways to make shit blow up



Borderlands avoided feeling like a loot treadmill to me as I played it mainly to experience the different playstyles of the different characters/builds. Once you're max level the characters' abilities become something you use constantly, while at low levels everyone plays the same. The quests having a lot of character helped. But yeah, I sure didn't start playing on the hard difficulties, it was a waste of time and needlessly frustrating to me solo as all you were doing was getting incremental upgrades to stats/weapons; there were no more ability upgrades or anything. After the first completist playthrough I also knew which quests to skip!


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## BIG ND SWEATY (Apr 3, 2019)

MFB said:


> Titanfall 2.


Man talk about the most slept on and underrated shooter ever, I grabbed it when it was like $5 on Playstation and had an absolute blast while playing it. Never touched the campaign, I almost never play a shooters campaign, but I've only ever heard good things about it. I'm glad Apex Legends has brought some much needed attention to the game because people were missing out on a seriously great game.


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## wankerness (Apr 3, 2019)

I read the ps4 deals subreddit and that is seriously top 5 most recommended in those threads. People LOVE that game, always rave about the campaign and point it out as one of the best deals whenever it’s on sale. It’s too bad all this popularity seems to have happened long after it “flopped.” 

I still haven’t played it, but I have it!


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## KnightBrolaire (Apr 3, 2019)

wankerness said:


> I read the ps4 deals subreddit and that is seriously top 5 most recommended in those threads. People LOVE that game, always rave about the campaign and point it out as one of the best deals whenever it’s on sale. It’s too bad all this popularity seems to have happened long after it “flopped.”
> 
> I still haven’t played it, but I have it!


the campaign is actually a ton of fun. the level designs are quite good and varied, same with the weaponry and titans. 
I really wish more people played it on PC, but they really fucked the game over with its release slot.


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## MFB (Apr 4, 2019)

What's really insane, is that it's only going on 3 years old, but you'd think it's 10 years old the way people talk about it  I did the same thing and grabbed it at the end of 2017 for $6 for the Ultimate Edition - the ULTIMATE EDITION, for SIX. DOLLARS. - and I tore through the MP for the next few months, and then finally cracked open the single player, and it was just as good as the multiplayer! Was it a little short? Sure. Could it have been a bit more difficult? Also yes. But as a story and overall gameplay, it was a blast, and I was sad when it was over.


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## Ralyks (Apr 7, 2019)

Titanfall 2 is a highly underrated gem that got stuck being released literally between a Call of Duty and a Battlefield game.


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