Anthem Gripes and Complaints

re: fire effect - I thiiiink it's a boost to status strength?

re: 5% or 35% - looks like the Masterwork is its own thing, and not just a masterwork version of the epic (looks like a Colossus-only version of the general use "Ammo Compartment", wtf). As to the effect... no clue, lol. No buff showing up on the left side of the screen when playing with it?

Here's my theory about how this abomination came about:

Person A: Hey, look at what I've been working on - I've built a prototype for this really cool flying mechanic!
Person B: We need to do something with that. How about - some sort of co-op MP?
Person C: I know! A looter-shooter! Online only, GaaS, there's big bux to be had in that space.

And they were off and running.

Level designers and artists started building maps.

A team of writers was assigned to come up with some world lore, characters, and a storyline - but all of those elements were confined to the spaces reserved for SP. When they started writing actual story missions, they realized some additional narrative during the mission was needed, so they wrote some to be read over the comm. The matchmaking system hadn't yet been realized, so it didn't occur to anyone that there would actually be multiple players on those missions and they might not all arrive (or leave) at the same time.

Another team came up with the matchmaking system and prioritized putting players into missions ASAP, with no regard for mission progress.

Etc.

So they ended up with this amalgamation of parts, each of which may have been well designed and built, but they just don't make a cohesive whole.

I guess I've always figured traditional BioWare Magic^TM starts with a world concept and ideas about some of the types of stories that could be told in that world. Then all of the systems - including combat - are designed to support telling those stories in that world.  Thus the story, characters, and gameplay are all woven together.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Man the contract and world event mission design is honestly the laziest, shittiest game design from an ostensible AAA release I've ever goddamn seen, it's mind-boggling.

World events are essentially "go to a place, kill the enemies there, and [guard area/place goober in doohickey/kill big bad]" Fine, whatever. Kinda lame for world events but I could live because hey, it's Freeplay, so I don't expect a lot put into it although the Destiny model at a minimum would have been nice. But then the Contracts are the same fucking thing, just chained together 3 times over. With literally nothing tying them together except SAM your contact telling you "oh, while you're out there, can you take care of this other thing too?"

It is truly, honestly, stunningly lazy.

Yeah. I'm all for enjoying a good game bashing, but keep that shit to one thread.

Here's a bug I run into about 50% of the time I do a contract mission. The first stage completes and the second stage activates, but the tether mechanic forgets to update to the new area so we can't leave the part we're in and get to the next objective. Here's a gif of me watching my teammates get zooped back to the first area on the map, even though the mission is telling us to go to the next spot.

Spoiler alert - they don't. I mean, they're exactly the same weapon from Common up through Epic tier, the only difference being the number of inscriptions it can have. The inscription stat ranges on Uncommon through Epic are so low as to be pretty much worthless, and then you get the opposite problem once you get into Masterwork and Legendary - the stat rolls can be so gamebreaking (yet so varied) that you end up with completely garbo weapons or weapons that essentially trivialize GM1 and GM2.

I've played a good bit now to where I have around 10 MW weapons and another dozen or so scattered MW components and gear and almost all of them are pretty much throwaway. There's an LMG that has a stability perk that activates on the last round fired. I'll repeat that for emphasis - you have to get down to the last round in the magazine of an LMG to get its bonus effect. 

i.imgur.com/LJin0YP.gif

Well, it's not really a problem *I* have, it's a problem the game has. I'd be fine playing this as a space magic game with guns there only to supplement - that doesn't jive with shit like me getting +machine pistol ammo on my Colossus components. Colossus can't use Machine Pistols.

WTF is wrong, Bioware????? Is Anthem really a project started by Casey Hudson?? And executed by Mark Darrah?? And designed by Preston Watamaniuk??
The quest/mission design is the most uninspired I've ever seen in Bioware games. The background/lore is ... just too similar as DAI/MEA. The Anthem, the gods, the factions, and the boss... All feel like unexperienced designers' work. There's a conversation with two dialogue options: 1) Nope. 2) No. Can you believe that is written by Bioware?

Short answer: No. Long answer: Nope.

When I got to that dialogue option I knew Bioware was trying to be funny, but ironically were revealing how shallow and meaningless all "choices" are.

That NPC also throws spoilers at you. But you may not realize it until the story goes further. Of course he also has useless info.

I wanted to log on for a few minutes just to check out a rendering scale secret setting and I noticed a news item on the startup screen about there being 4 named Titans roaming around in Freeplay for a limited time challenge. I said sure why not, and loaded into Freeplay. Then it just hit me - why fucking bother? One, there's no pointer where anything might be in the map, leading to aimlessly flying around for minutes upon minutes. Two, even if I wanted to search every area systematically, I can't set any waypoints to help myself along. Three, the map UI interface is such dogshit, you can't even zoom it all the way out and panning with M/KB is a chore. Four, even if I found them my teammates wouldn't know to join because they won't have a map marker and there's no way for me to rally them with a flare or ping. Five, even if I managed to kill them after hours of whittling down their health, they wouldn't give any interesting loot that I couldn't get from a 15 minute stronghold run on GM1.

I think I might be done with this game? I have a few weeks left of Premiere, but I'm struggling to even give a shit about booting it up again for any reason.

I can't quite believe that a game promoted with "play with others" slogans and had big emphasis how you should do it on the "huge" open world map, doesn't give you any tool to actually do that. Yeah, you can grab friends in your Private group. But that works for probably 5% of the players (WMG number). Ping system? Mark the map when a player does an event? Anything? The stupid text chat?