 Alright, quick heads up on what I've been working on. I played Resident Evil 2, and not only is it really good, it's an amazing look at how much games have changed, and how hard it is to have games like this in an age where walkthroughs are published before they even release. I'll be doing a quick video on the indie game Gris, and how there's a place for games that are more about their beauty than their gameplay, and I just played the game Oxenfree, which I absolutely loved. Finally, I finished my third playthrough of Dark Souls 2, and I think I've now given it a fair chance, and I'll be looking at why it still makes me angry every time I play it. But today we're going to take a look at the Anthem, quote unquote, demos. I played the closed beta, the VIP beta, and finally hours of the open beta, and I've got some thoughts after the logo. I'm not going to get too deeply into critiquing this game yet, because I plan on playing it through upon release, but I can comment on the marketing, on quality of life issues, and the performance that were on off for the last few weeks. And so you have a decent understanding of what you'll see. I need to let you know what I played the game on. I played Anthem on the Xbox One X and on the PC, and as you look at the footage, I want you to know what kind of PC it's actually running on. I've got a GTX 1080 and an i5-8600K processor with 32 gigabytes of RAM. It's not a super top-end PC, but it's a pretty damn good machine, and I've yet to install a game that doesn't default to ultra settings. In its current build, on my pretty damn nice gaming PC, I could not get a consistent 60 FPS at 1080p. Enabling vSync, which I almost never have to do, I was able to hover around 60 FPS, but with inexcusively frequent frame drops, stutters, rubber banding, and in Fort Harsis, the performance was just simply abysmal. The game is poorly optimized for PC in almost every single way. As far as settings go, they are subpar, including no field of view slider, and a motion blur toggle that does almost nothing. In fact, this game has the most obnoxious nauseating motion blur I have seen in a very long time. It was so bad I literally could not play anymore, and eventually found a way to reduce it by turning off ambient inclusion because the motion blur toggle doesn't toggle the motion blur for some reason. And the really weird thing is I saw zero improvement in performance by dropping settings down. Even going down to medium gave me no appreciable difference in performance out in the world. I didn't try low because I just totally refuse. What is the point of having a decent PC if I have to ever play a game on low? I'll just buy it on the Xbox One X in that case. Even leaving aside the disastrous infinite loading screen problems and consistent matchmaking failures, this is shaping up to be a pretty bad PC port. Menus are really annoying. They require key presses all over the place and like two or three clicks anywhere where one click would do. Almost everything about every single menu is poorly designed and obnoxious, and it's clearly made with a controller in mind. And even there, they are still bad menus and a terrible UI in general. Mouse and keyboard controls are bad, with key bindings being annoying, flying feeling just awful with a mouse and a keyboard. I ended up switching to a controller and enjoyed the game much more once I did. So from what I've seen so far, Bioware has a ton of work to do to even get this port to acceptable much less good. And I will just say it again, the interface and menus and Anthem are just really inefficient. It takes five inputs to launch a mission. The loadout screen is clunky and slow. Everything about this game, aside from flying and space magic, screams unfinished and unpolished. And there were just so many really poor quality of life issues all over the place. And when I say the game feels unfinished, I'm not talking about the content, which I can't make a judgment on yet. I'm talking about all of the other systems that make a game either easy or onerous to engage with. One really quick example, when you pick up a piece of loot in the world, it does not credit to your inventory until you finish a mission. So if you're disconnected, or you have to leave or the game crashes, you lose all of your XP and loot. Why would anyone possibly think this was an acceptable design choice? Locked loadouts are bad enough. And yes, you can only change your gear at a kiosk in the hub area. But some missions can take 30 to 50 minutes. And having played a bunch of online games, I am 100% positive that disconnects and server issues will abound early on. Meaning you can have an hour totally wasted if the server boots you. Which happens 33% of my time during the recent demos. Literally, 33%. One of every three missions, I wasted my time completely because the server booted me. Now Anthem is a tremendously important title for Bioware in EA. It needs to be successful and the most important part of successful game is the gameplay. So, how does the game feel? Anthem's gameplay is pretty good. I am one of the few people who enjoyed Mass Effect Andromeda. Its story was admittedly awful, but I enjoyed the combat so much that I was able to finish the game and had a good time playing it. I generally do not like third person shooters at all. I haven't liked any of the Gears of War. I didn't love the Division. I don't like the combat in GTA or really any third person shooter outside of Vanquish, Dead Space, and Mass Effect Andromeda. The game has to really shine to win me over as a third person shooter. It has to have something different than all the others. And Bioware's last third person shooter delivered in a way I was simply not expecting it to. Mass Effect Andromeda had a really fluid and aggressive combat system that felt fresh and unique. Anthem is basically Mass Effect Andromeda's combat system plus flying. It's got the same gunplay. The powers are very similar to Mass Effect Andromeda's biotics. It even has the same boost jump and dodge that made Mass Effect Andromeda so fun to play. And the flying is really fucking cool. So the basic systems are all in place to produce a combat experience I should absolutely love. But I don't love it. I only like it. And that's because there are several things about the combat that do not work at all. All of the javelins have a heavy focus on mobility and the maps are all quite vertical which in theory should lead to fast paced and chaotic encounters. But sadly they often just don't. Instead it plays very much like a cover based combat system on any setting above easy. Enemies are hyper accurate so even dodging or literally blasting off and flying will not stop you from getting damaged with hitscan weapons. And Anthem has made the strange decision to have non-regenerating health and shields that recharge absurdly slowly. If your shield breaks the only thing you can do is hide behind a rock and wait for like 10 seconds until your shield recharges. And enemies can break your shields in moments. What this means is that you spend an annoying amount of time not playing the game. You spend a bunch of time standing behind a rock and because there's no actual cover system it both looks goofy and leaves you unable to do anything. When you take cover in a game with a cover system you're still actually interacting with the game. You can see your enemies and form a plan. You can blind fire and you can look at the cool animations. In Anthem you have to actually break line of sight with the enemy to take cover which means that all of your time spent recharging your shields is spent looking at a rock. I understand the desire to not have a cover system as the game seems to be built on mobility. But in order to actually take advantage of the game's greatest strength you need to allow players to mitigate damage without hiding behind rocks. Bio air should have had movement or at the very least flying be the primary means of evading damage. Or they could have had a healing class. As it stands the game is a strange mix of systems that don't feel terribly cohesive. It's a cover shooter without a cover system. It's a horde shooter that requires you to not stay in the line of sight of hordes of enemies. Likewise enemies can have just insanely unfun levels of health when on normal difficulty. Bio air would be well served by calling the easy setting normal and growing up for there because the game is extremely fun when played on easy and just dreadfully annoying on normal before becoming toxic on hard. I understand that the gear system is meant to mitigate this but a normal mission means that's the preferred way to play the game and what is called normal here is not fun or at least not as fun as easy. I have said over and over and over that the very worst way to implement difficulty in a shooter is lazily increasing enemy health. On normal enemies have too much health although it is tolerable. On hard enemies have more than double health and do double damage. I make it a habit to play most games on hard because I enjoy a challenge but an example one thousand of this very thing difficulty is only fun when it reinforces the core design choices of your combat system. Anthem is at its most enjoyable when you are flying around and fighting large groups of enemies but the second you turn the difficulty up to normal or above you're left carefully plinking away at them and hiding behind rocks it actively breaks everything that makes the combat system unique. I've rarely had a game that is so clearly more fun when played on easy than Anthem. Enemy AI, unit type, spawn density none of these things change in any way whatsoever based upon difficulty. The only change is enemies turn into annoying bullet sponges and do double damage to you meaning the combat becomes stationary stale and boring. Destiny also raises enemy health and damage at higher difficulties but it also significantly changes enemy AI. Destiny's AI and raids or gambit are like playing a different game than the campaign. In the easier activities destiny's enemies almost never use their special abilities. They don't dodge, they don't take cover and they have terrible aim and gambit enemies constantly use their abilities, they flank and dive for cover, they coordinate fire and are very accurate. It's a much more interesting way to up difficulty because it feels different to play on a moment-to-moment basis. Destiny also changes unit types and spawns based upon difficulty setting and even on the harder difficulties destiny's enemies don't solely rely on hit scan weapons so using the mobility systems are more effective at mitigating damage than is possible on Anthem and that's not the only thing that makes what could have been an amazing combat system only kind of good in practice. While the particle effects are fantastic and the world of Anthem is quite nice looking though nowhere near as nice as the early footage would have had you believe surprise surprise enemy animations are not great they're bad this isn't a critique only of the visual presentation of the game the enemies look natural enough it's a combat feel critique and i know i'm not supposed to compare this game to destiny even though the game is clearly a purposeful competitor and its health is reliant on taking at least some of destiny's player base away but let me show a clip from destiny here see if you can notice a difference see how the enemies respond to damage that spectacularly good visual feedback is one of destiny's greatest strengths and the artistry of the animations go a long way to making the combat look and feel visceral and real and they serve an important mechanical function by allowing players to control how much damage they take by staggering enemies strategically anthems enemies do not seem to mind being shot if you melee them or if you do a shitload of damage they will occasionally fall very awkwardly and woodenly to the ground but for the most part almost every enemy just stands there soaking up your bullets as if nothing is happening and then they die if you remove the health bars and numbers from destiny's enemies you would still get all of the visual feedback you need to know how you are doing if you remove the numbers and health and shield bars from the enemies and anthems you would have no way of knowing if they were even taking damage at all this combination of very poor ai and very weak animations makes the combat feel kind of hollow at times it makes the encounters stale and more importantly it makes the fights feel like you're fighting target dummies who are holding guns little things like this are all over anthem the game's actual moment to moment combat is surprisingly unpolished and poorly balanced enemies and encounters are extremely spongy and wave after wave after wave of enemies spawn until a little blip comes up to let you know it's time to fly for 30 seconds to the next arena there are a lot of things to like about anthems combat a lot but it's not spectacular in any way it's much closer to good than it is to great i think one of the best ways to explain this is to say that the very best thing in the beta was when you were fighting spiders and the spider boss because they aren't hitting you with hit scan weapons you have total control over the fight dodging and flying suddenly becomes a dynamic way to actually control the pace of combat tactical decisions feel more important and everything just flows better and hitting spiders with combos and watching the blow up is super fun but whenever you're fighting the humanoid enemies the game just slaps you in the face every time you try to actually use the game's commendable mobility systems playing on normal or above requires you to be far too careful to really dive into those systems that make traversal and combat feel at its best and that's a shame really it's something that could be fixed with better enemy animations that made them stagger every so often or at the very least by toning down health quite a bit as for the other aspects of the game while there wasn't much actual story on offer here what was there made clear that this game has little to nothing to offer people who are fans of bioware games facial animations aren't disastrously nightmarishly meme worthy but they aren't all that good actually voice acting is okay in places and tiresome in most others the conversations you have range from boring to annoying the dialogue options seem completely meaningless like choosing between yes i'd like a sandwich and actually i already ate this morning the story of the game might very well be okay although i'm getting a bad feeling about it but it's pretty obvious that bioware has gone from deep branching rpg dialogue to a dialogue wheel to a simplified dialogue wheel to a meaningless dialogue choice they've confirmed there will be no branching paths of any time so this system exists only to insulate them from criticism and maybe trick some fans into believing that this game might kind of resemble their previous games it doesn't this game is almost entirely centered around improving mass effect and drama as combat system that's obviously been the central focus and again i actually really loved the combat and mass effect and drama but i just don't think there's anything here for fans of their previous games and the combat and moment to moment gameplay while quite good and fun simply is not on the same level of quality as destiny or perhaps even warframe which means this game is in a strange in between state it's a more casual and simplified version of warframe or destiny with the potential to have a decent story but it has nothing to offer fans of bioware's older games and it doesn't offer combat good enough to poach very many players of warframe or destiny which brings me to the very concept of this past weekend's quote-unquote demo bioware got a bunch of goodwill and adaboys from people myself included for admitting that early access only a couple weeks from release isn't actually a beta but when a customer hears that something is a try before you buy demo they have a reasonable expectation that what they are trying is the finished product instead bioware announced only after the first demo was a total catastrophe that this was a week's old build with quote significant differences in balance economy and bug fixes unquote i'm confused as to why you would release something that you are calling a demo and not put out a more current build or if they knew that they were putting out something that had significant issues why wouldn't they call it a beta or stress test what possible reasons could there be for that at best this was a very bad business and marketing decision from a developer and a publisher whose most recent releases have been varying shades of disastrous and considering how shockingly bad the performance was it seems that this game is not ready for release at all if the game was going to be a week's old build with significant bugs and totally different balance why would you tell everyone this was a demo of the finished game that was meant to convince you to buy it it's a troubling gaff and is a bad sign about how things are going with a final release very very close less than two weeks close i'm going to buy and play the game i liked the combat enough to give it a try and i still hope the story is at least engaging but i just do not think this is going to end up being a great game now i think it's far more likely this ends up being a pretty good game from what i've experienced between the alpha and demos it's feeling kind of like mass effect andromeda with slightly better combat competent facial animations and somehow an even worse dialogue system a good but not great game a game that falls in between and doesn't offer enough of anything to find a huge audience it confuses me that bio where who became a titan of gaming for complex rpg's and then for deep branching mature stories with think they need to tone down everything that made them successful to be more successful it never fails to amaze me when companies fail to understand what it was about their games that players loved in the first place it simply doesn't make sense to me manji became an industry leader by making top-notch fbs combat and then they went and made destiny which focuses almost completely on providing top-notch fbs combat bio where became an industry leader making mature complex rpg's with engaging stories and important dialogue choices and then began making less and less complex rpg's with less and less dialogue mass effect andromeda had the best combat bioware had ever made by a mile and the game was a flop people just don't buy bioware games for combat mechanics if mass effect two had had the mass effect andromeda combat it might have been the best game ever and obviously the more fun the combat the better but it's not what made the studio successful and anthems combat while very good isn't good enough to compete with studios who have spent their entire careers perfecting shooting combat if ea and bioware were hoping to sell 15 million units and have a huge hit i think a big disappointment is coming anthems looking like it'll be pretty good if it works at launch i can see myself playing it through the campaign and thinking it was worth my time but i have a feeling pretty good isn't what they were hoping for i am a bit less excited to play the game now than i was before i played the demos and i've got a feeling the game isn't going to be much better than what i've already played it'll just be more of it frankly i hope i am proven wrong because bioware closing would be a terrible thing but in all honesty can anyone give me even one example of a games beta that was significantly different than its release can we finally admit that these betas slash demos are basically representative slices of exactly what you will get at launch this might have been one of the very worst beta demos i have ever played performance wise for a triple a game bioware should thank their lucky stars that fallout 76 is still shitting the bed on a daily basis and is still fresh in everyone's mind because if fallout 76 hadn't happened and redefined what a total mess a beta can be this would be a much bigger and much worse story for bioware than it is all right see you in a few days thanks for coming bye