Bioware's "Anthem"

Mist not a buy at full price. Will be on sale within a month.

For PC: Origin Premiere for $14.99 and you will get your month out of it.
For Xbox One(X) $4.99 for EA Access and you will most likely burn out in 10 hours within the trial period.

Mission design is about as stale as it gets within 4 hours. Bugs galore. Give it a couple months and buy it on sale for 19 bucks or rental on GF.

1) They need to generate better mission variety. Quickly.
2) Fix (If they can) the incredibly retarded UI. Jesus whoever designed that piece of shit should be banned from working in the industry.
3) Needs about 6 patches to fix all the bugs.
4) Needs a shit ton more itemization and specialized high end hand crafted loot and carrots to chase.
5) Needs to figure out a way to get more than 3 other players other than yourself in their entire damn world.
6) Run speed needs to increase in Tarsis by about 600%.
7) Needs more than 10 hours of content. At what pace remains to be seen at how fast they can add it. It needs to come quickly.
8) Allow players to continue more than 3 quests while in free roam before, oh guess what, you no longer get XP. (Why the fuck was that a design choice?) Leaving you to have to load into Tarsis and load back into freeroam. Shit show.
9) If it is even possible at this point, fix ALL the mundane and absolutely useless needs for loading for the most basic of shit. I should be able to load into a world, and go into a damn cave without hitting another load screen.
10) Ability to change your load outs on the fly without having to visit the forge. I mean, come on.
11) Fix their retarded tethering system. It shouldn't even exist in the first place. But wait, there's more... If you need to be roped back to your group you get treated with another 25 second load screen.

It's just one big ball of blah at the moment.

So, having played it for a few hours now, part of me says, "This is really cool" the combat is really good. This is what it seems like they were working towards with ME:A. The rest of the game, the parts of the game built around getting to the combat, are by themselves not terrible but the way they fit together collectively is tragically awful. Who the fuck played this and thought "this is a great game/this game is ready to ship?" When I saw that this was getting comparable reviews to Fallout 76, I at first guffawed, but having played it myself, I can see where that might be the case for some people. EDIT: and that isn't even counting on things like the above, where you can't do more than 3 missions in "freeplay" etc. Destiny came out in 2014: How can you not even by that good? Why do my daughter and I have to do missions with people we don't know? I mean, not a big thing but given the level of voice comms I have heard before, why can't I choose not to? So many baffling and stupid design decisions. They seem baked deep in the cake though, so I don't know how they get this is made right at this point. This is a launch driven by the Fiscal Quarter end and this project's need to make money, and be rid of the dumpster fire, I think. I really do believe that they are giving this game a viking funeral, cutting their losses, and probably the studio with it.

Whomever up thread said it seems like all of the parts were built by different teams and then brought together too late in the project is right. The load times are completely unacceptable in 2019. There is a kernel of good lore but it seems so half-assed it wastes the good ideas but making it all seem so shallow. The whole effort to make the world seem lived in cheapens the whole enterprise. Cities are destroyed, factions rise and fall but if you don't anchor the characters and ground the story before you turn on the blender, its all word salad. If everyone's been everywhere, there why does any place matter? There is no sense of setting at this point at all.

So, I am not going to stop playing but I don't see how Bioware pulls this out of a nosedive. Hopefully I am wrong, and it gets better, and sells a bazillion copies, and I learn to love Big Anthem Brother. There are some really great nuggets here that I have seen, and obviously people like it enough to play it through to level 30+. In the end, I think this is going to be far more like the Division than like Destiny, and the Bioware name going into the pile of studios out behind EA's house.

Got my Ranger up to 488 ilvl and the MW's and legendary's ain't dropping like they were the past 2 days. Think I'm about done, as I'm getting a ton more bugs today than the past week and I don't really have a carrot to chase (no exotic tier loot, no fancy schmancy armor to chase etc). What a disappointment, Mass Effect did not die for this =(

The most disappointing aspect of Anthem is that the actual combat in stronghold scenarios is really good, and very fun.

It's just the rest of the game is lacking the polish seemingly put into the 4 man combat system.