Today in Anthem

Anthem's launch was by far the worst I've seen in any game since I've been playing.  The Division's original launch was a close 2nd but doesn't compare to what I had to endure to play this mess from day 1.  Everybody knows what the issues were and it was inexcusable for a major studio to release the game in the state it was in.

The last 5-6 times I've played have been relatively issue free but I've not played since the last patch/update.

Fast forward to today where I see all types of issues that plagued the game at it's initial launch somehow reappearing.  This isn't good or acceptable either.  It's as if there's nobody at the studio testing anything prior to these updates coming out.  I know that's not true, but it certainly looks like that's the case.  BioWare gets NO pass from me, not at this stage in the game.  For people to be "ok" with the bugs/glitches/general issues, etc., just baffles me.  The deal for Anthem is that it shouldn't have been launched in the first place.  BioWare/Activision should have refunded every single person that paid for the game prior to launch, everyone one of us.  We shouldn't accept this as the "norm".  To watch them now during the live events is just embarrassing, but, I can't feel sorry for them.  They deserve ALL the backlash they're getting right now.

I don’t know, Bethesda and Obsidian have released buggy games that crashed at times and lot of their games are considered good. I guess it depends on your tolerance for bugs.

You can say that you don't trust them, but not that we don't know anything... though I don't know how many times they have to say that they are committed to the game for people to acknowledge that. Besides - why do you think I wrote my comment? At this point in time there's an already well-established precedent - large, new games that have a rocky start can take a while to get on track, and by 'a while' I mean more than people seem to believe these game can have to get back in shape and be profitable.

Heck - this isn't even the first Bioware game that was slow to pick up the pace in terms of things like revenue: yet when SWTOR started making money, it earned EA over a billion dollars.

And Austin, the studio that has this experience, is now working on Anthem. I don't know if Anthem will have the success of SWTOR, but it totally has a shot in getting things right. With the amount they test and update the game though, things are bound to get shaky and occasionally worse.
They don't have any worse record than other big publishers and they've shut studios like Visceral for more reasons than it just being slow with developing that SP Star Wars game. It was an expensive studio located in the most expensive city in US, among other things.

Also - what was the last online/live game they've pulled the plug for? Sim City 6 years ago? Battlefield franchise is still going despite many misfires. SW Battlefront II was the largest debacle EA had in recent years and the game is not only receiving regular updates, but I've heard it's not going bad for them.
MEA wasn't a live service but an experimental title made by a younger team. There was no 10 or whatever year plan for it; clearly the fate of that series hinged on initial reception of the title. Clearly, the Anthem has a different plan and financial model. It has to - it's a long-living, multiplayer game. And we already know EA has allowed Bioware time to get things right with a game in their portfolio that is most similar to Anthem: SWTOR - heck, the game is still receiving meaty updates despite people expecting that things will keep slowing down for it. And EA seems to be pleased how well Anthem is faring in their subscription model and digital sales despite missing estimated (quite highly) unit sales by what appears to be very little. 
You've just written how you don't believe them when they say that they are working on the game  And why is it weird that they'e careful what they say now? People are jumping on their heads for the tiniest thing and they need some heaspace to work on the game as well.
Okay... why are you responding to something you seem to have not read? This. Is. How. Things. Usually. Are. It. Was. No. Different. With. Other. Games. Not. Just. For. Months. But. For. Years. Save stunts like FF XIV Realm Reborn it was only after a longish period that people began noticing improvements. These things are usually very gradual and prone to hiccups.

And this meme existed loooooooong years before Anthem. 
The new stuff is 'not working properly' because they keep working on it under the hood. The game wouldn't just break on its own if they weren't tinkering with the code constantly, but given how many moving parts there are, things are bound to be unstable at times.
You mean from Edmonton to Austin? That was always the plan, AFAIK. Plus, Austin IS the studio you want to work with Anthem from now on. They're the devs who have the experience with massive online games and live service content.

Okay /offtopic on my part.

After yesterday's frustrations, today, things went smoothly in Anthem. The daily Echoes of Reality challenge was to kill 30 crystalized enemies (30 Dominion surfer dudes). Which you can only accomplish in freeplay. Typically, a Dominion-themed crystal world event spawns 10 "surfer dudes" in the match.

I expected a long and painful experience, instead I had three Dominion-themed crystal world events that went without a hitch (with non-crystal world events and non-dominion-themed crystal world events mixed in). So about 1.5 hours of game play, with all different types of world events and not a hitch. Once I got the last "surfer dude" and finished that world event, I exited freeplay.

Genuinely surprised I could play that long … in one instance … in freeplay … given how unstable things were yesterday.

Tried a stronghold and some LCs … as expected, those were stable and I didn't note any teammate swap outs in the stronghold mission.

What I experienced today should be the norm … a stable game, where missions launch, don't bug out and can be completed without incident.

Yeah, but Dying (Light) is apex (of zombie bashing)

It's the "Today in Anthem we who play the game still experience annoying Freeplay crashes" thread.

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(Edit cuz I already got two posts in sequence)

"Surfer dude"? Oh hell, how am I supposed to murder these clowns now?

Not that i heard, no.

Have you even played and/or followed those two games? Because if so, you would know that the things are not as bright as you try to make them seem.

TLDR: BF2 and SWTOR don't have regular big updates, player populations keep shrinking and the dev teams are skeleton crews for years, bringing money and surviving mostly on the popularity of the Star Wars tag.

Edit: As addendum - I believe Anthem can only be turned around by a pretty large investment in it, not by tiny (or even mediocre) updates at every 3-6 months. Something I doubt EA will do based on the company's track record.

BF2 sold at least twice as much as Anthem, maybe even close to three times more if we judge by the estimation numbers. And it's not even close to the content promised for like the first 10 months of it's initial Road maps and developer pinky promises. EA shrinked the dev team to almost nothing after the loot box fiasco and the updates are small and always buggy. The promised Conquest mode the game was getting in mid 2018? Yeah, lol, they are not even talking about that anymore. There are known launch bugs that are not fixed yet. 

The game is a ghost town on PC, a couple of modes are the only thing where you can reliably get games going in prime time, for the rest you may have to wait 30+ minutes and may not even get a game going at all. The game is kept alive because it still has an almost stable console population.

Everyone agrees the game is better compared to launch, but only because they reworked the reward system and the almost 2 years of small updates add up, but are not even near the half of what the game was promised to be after Year 1. Half the game modes are abandoned and haven't received updates in more than a year. The game is not healthy, it's limping since it's launch. The "regular" updates are either bug fixes or adding a new hero, which is a pretty small improvement. Not to mention it takes at least a month or two to fix the introduced new hero in order to not be OP or to even be playable. The latest Capital Supremacy update (supposed to be a big update that was hyped for almost 6 months) turned out to contain a lot less features than what was promised/hinted. As a lesson from that - the developers don't advertise that much anymore and talk about new updates almost just before they introduce them. The game is getting a PvE update in August, but nobody even knows what it is yet

And let's say it again - it's a game that sold at least twice as much as Anthem and is a way more popular franchise than Anthem. I'd go as far to say the Star Wars tag alone helped to keep it somewhat popular (top 50 list) on consoles since launch. It's the only reason the skeleton crew is still funded.

As for SWTOR... "Meaty updates" you say? Wtf? Look at SWTOR's updates in it's first year, hell, look at it's updates in it's first six months and compare it to what was released for the past 3 years. Everything released after October 2015 is the leftovers from the work of the large team that created content for KOTFE/KOTET in 2015. Then the MEA emergency happened (Anthem emergency after it too) and SWTOR was left with a skeleton crew as well. I do give props to those people for sticking with it and trying to push updates out, but it was obvious they don't have enough manpower/talent. KOTET was shrinked to 9 Chapters and some of them are utter nonsense, especially the vehicle sections. New Flashpoints were buggy and unoptimized as hell, bordering on unplayable for many players. Just about all of the "choice-consequence" promises from KOTFE were abandoned. The schedule for at least 1 main companion returning each month never happened (it was promised all will return at the time of KOTET...we still wait). Not to mention each companion was supposed to return with a story mission on their own. Now it's down to "hi, I am back and will be silent from now on". Well, the Cartel Market gets updates, if that is considered "meaty"  

And up to today SWTOR is being kept alive thanks in no small part to it's launch content. Yes, it's launch content. Eight class stories, companions, romances - the classic Bioware in a MMO format. People keep coming back, making new toons to replay their favorite stories. And it's the only Star Wars MMO around, so again, the franchise keeps it floating too. And for the very little effort/resources EA gives it, the game keeps bringing back a nice profit. It's almost a shame. If the game stopped receiving content, it will still be profitable for a few years. Frankly, we barely had any content in the past 3 years and it's still going.

I guess most of this should be moved to the Skepticism thread, yeah. But if we look at it, people that play in the past week or so mostly complain about the experience

It's worse. We don't know what is causing the crashes - it could be just a memory leak or bounds check that causes the game to end, or the s/w might be misbehaving on the h/w until the OS kills it, and the repeated Freeplay game crashes could potentially be degrading the Xbox hardware. To not address it publicly is the height of irresponsibility.

I swear, you hate-play this game