So, dear ME3MPers, anyone played that ANTHEM demo and wanna report ?

I honestly don't think they will sell that much in the 1st quarter if the game launches in the current state (which is not necessarily the state of the demo as they always try to tell us). Should have done a proper beta, then a good demo that is actually representative of the final game, skip the crap with different launch dates/early access (which I think will bite them in the ass big time) and it's still a new IP - not a big name like Battlefield or Star Wars. We'll see but I'm pessimistic and I wonder if this might be the end of Bioware if the game doesn't meet sales expectations and maybe gets torn apart by reviewers.

Quite an interesting video about some of the problems of the game as of now

OK, I'll give you guys a genuine ME3MPlayer feedback and that was that I totally missed ragdoll effects like melee bashes and the famous lash, that could account to such hilarious hatesurfing and ridiculous off-map chucking.

Also sound cues were severely lacking. Now the engagement distances are fairly farther, the enemies seemed not very varied, but all the sounds contributed greatly to ME3, imo.

Weapons are kinda uniform, hard to tell differences from look. The shooting was shit for me with uncontrollable screenshake - that might be due to my rig being to bad to handle it properly but I saw at least two others stating this problem, too. Maybe they too had shitty frames?

Enemy shields seem to insta regenerate. Mostly while you reload.

Flying isn't that bad. The verticality makes for different gameplay altogether than ME3. Not sure about the autobracketing of powers, enemy seemed to bracket under cursor fairly far but with all the different height levels it may be hard to target sometimes.

Just two active powers. The third is gear related special ability that gives buff or debuff, puts up temp shield in place, no damage abilities from there it seems.
4th ability is "ultimate" castable after filling a progression bar (by killing stuff or so etc.). Different javelins can propagate different combo effects - this one is an interesting feature. e.g. one can aoe spread status effects which may or may not be detonatable in turn. I couldn't check that, tho. nother javelin spreads status effect as aura on itself with maybe similar possibilities.

Overall, I found the abilities not as unique as in ME3, but I did only play 2 archetypes without having unlocked every of their slottable (abilities are now equippable) gear and abilities.

Another thing:
Solo play was not only limited in the demo, it is apparently not in the release for Stronghold nor freeplay. I don't know what to say.

Yeah. That pretty much moved me to a no buy. I’m not saying I wouldn’t ever use mp. I just wouldn’t want it forced on me even if only in section of the game.

I'm really interested to see what state the game will be in next week when the Origin Premier Access starts for some people. And which problems they have fixed and will fix during the week until the official launch on 22nd. Because the Interceptor as well as the flying mechanics really might win me over if some issues have been taken care of and the content is good. I guess I looked at this mostly from a perspective of someone who likes to use weapons a lot and the gunplay was kinda disappointing. But if I look at it from the perspective of a game that mainly utilizes powers and combos and might even require more teamwork and synergy between builds it might be a different story. Might even try playing the Interceptor with my Xbox controller if I find myself mostly flying, dashing and meleeing instead of aiming weapons at heads...

The free play doesn’t bother me much as I figured you could ignore them. It’s why i can play mmos as long as it isn’t pvp most of the game I can ignore everyone. Like mmos the big important stuff is resolved in a pretty much team only area. I mean technically in a mmo you can run into a dungeon or raid solo but unless you out level it to a crazy extent you fail. The difference is mmos have hundreds of hours of content outside the dungeons and raids. This will have what 20-30 hours?

This is the running theme with bioware's issues over the last six years or so. They built their reputation on executing well on projects of a manageable scope (ME2, ME3MP, DAO, KOTOR). But over the last however many years, they've been focused on making The Next Big Thing and have botched the execution horribly because the scope of the project was too large (SWTOR, MEA, the open world elements of DAI).

Anthem is most certainly in the latter camp. The core vision is excellent, but the project scope is just too large for them to handle, and the game suffers deeply as a result (alarmingly, with many of Andromeda's issues still present). When Bioware bites off more than it can chew, my experience is that the game will never recover. We'll see, but I'm not optimistic.

well guys, tell us if it has been polished a bit ?

I have now played the game for about 40-50 hours I'd say. Origin says 30 but that's not correct and after an evening and night of gameplay I still had it at 0 hours, so my estimate of 40-50 is more like it. Maybe Origin doesn't count the loading screens, because there is tons of them as you might have already heard or experienced yourself in the demo. I have the game installed on my SSD but that doesn't make it any less annoying. On top of the fact that you have to stare at a loading screen so often it doesn't even do its job properly - if you decide to go to the launch bay after a mission for example you might be asking yourself why your Javelin looks different. That's because despite a loading screen your Javelin is first portrayed with the default look and shortly afterwards the customization you did will load. 

Anyways... I have played the storyline and have done basically all sidequests along the way. I mostly played in a group, every mission with different strangers. Hard mode usually felt way too easy when playing in a group and sometimes not so good when solo-ing because even though I experimented with different setups you can't be equipped properly for every situation. I have also completed 2 strongholds on Grandmaster difficulty 1 last night and the difference compared to "hard" is noticable but unfortunately the only thing they did is increase the health of enemies and their damage output. Pretty lazy and not well designed. Grandmatser difficulty 2 was not possible for me at this time with my current gear and playing with randos. It should also be noted that I only played 1 Javelin (the Interceptor) all the time and I played it very aggressively which results in a lot of onscreen chaos (and deaths if you are too careless).

All that being said I will now try to give you some of my opinions about the game although I feel like much of the stuff that bothers me a lot has been said already by gaming sites and content creators. I can recommend taking a look at this ARTICLE RIGHT HERE as well as the following Youtube video which bioth highlight some of the main flaws in my opinion:



I will probably not mention everything that is wrong, broken or could be much better because it is a lot. But I will start with the positive things about the game:
- The gameplay can be really entertaining at times (if you are into these kind of games that is) and if they had developed this in dialogue with players it could have been amazing
- The world really is beautiful and it's a joy to fly around. It is not that big but so far this didn't bother me and I still enjoy just traversing through it
- Stronghold mission are an example for what I would have liked to see all the time for story missions and sidequests. They still use the same repetitive mechanics (collecting things or defending an area) but the narrative overall is better and there is a boss waiting at the end. One of the stronghold missions is actually just the final mission of the game.
- I really like the Interceptor and it's also the only Javelin that really appeals to me due to its agility, movement, no-cooldown melee as well as overall looks. I can see myself maybe playing a Storm Javelin but to be honest I feel like 50-60% of players are playing this kit. I have hardly run into any Ranger Javelins, seems to be the least popular.

Okay, now for some of the bad stuff:
- The main story is short and totally generic in my opinion. You hardly even get to know or even see the main villain(s). Like seriously, they talk about these guys and you see some pictures but it's not like you do quite a lot of missions that really get you involved in all of that. As I did not read all the diary entries it felt like there was a lot missing. I still don't know a lot about what's actually going on in this world which is sad because the overall setting seems interesting. But the story really is so bland, the characters are totally not interesting or are even annoying and it feels like such a hassle to go talk to them all the time in Fort Tarsis, especially since that place is no fun at all. The "choices" you make in dialogues are totally meaningless. So if you are playing this for the story you will be disappointed big time in my opinion. If you ask me they could have gone 2 different routes: either make a great narrative-driven game that also has strong multiplayer components. Or get completely rid of the story and focus on making a really great multiplayer game that can compete with Warframe. I would have preferred this obviously. Now you have something that tries to do both but ultimately fails at both. With the story even more so than with the multiplayer part which has a solid base that could be further improved and developed with the community if this was actually free to play and had 6-12 months of open beta ahead of it instead of being put out there as a finished product (which it is not at all) they want to charge you 60 bucks for.
- The game still has a lot of technical issues. It's a bit better than in the demo but it still feels like a beta build just purely from a technical point of view. I had around 6 or so hard crashes or freezes. Hard crashes meaning out of nowhere my whole computer shut down and rebooted. And with freezes I mean everything froze, there was an annoying sound raping my ears and I had to reboot manually. And no, I don't have that with any other game. On top of that there are some details floating around the forums about how much data this game loads all the time. Which results in a) a lot of loading screens and in an unusal stress on your hdd/ssd. The old "sound is gone until game is restarted" bug is also present apparently although I only had it once when I was switching from High to Ultra settings for testing. The game is not optimized very well at all. Yes, it looks good and therefore is obviously demanding when it comes to hardware but it's just more demanding than it should be I think. Fort Tarsis really does a number on you and you can expect the fps to drop significantly there which makes it even more annoying.
- There are also bugs in quests. For example the game tasks you to kill all remaining enemies and even though there are none left it won't progress the quest so you have to restart that mission. Or another time we got separated from another player and a big wall kept us from joining him. You get these "transporting to mission area" notifications all the time, sometimes even when the other guys are literally just a few meters ahead of you but in this particular case nothing happened. You don't get transported to the mission area and we all stood in front of that stupid wall until we left and restarted the mission. Happened to me another 2 times there, super annoying. There is also no function to teleport to another player. Instead the game constantly teleports you someplace if you are not moving along fast enough with the others. So if you want to explore, go into freeplay or play missions solo. Then again you might run into some problems because you might not be equipped properly for every situation. Playing with friends and being in Discord togeher or something might be the best option in that case.
- Oh yeah... communication. Well, there is voice chat, which I disabled instantly. Not sure if I should hear others speak but I'm glad I don't. But there is no text chat, no ping system (like the amazing one in Apex) or any other form of communication. They improved the UI a bit but sometimes you still wait for an eternity until someone revives you or you actually see that someone is down. And I'm not talking about the situations where you died in a super ugly spot. And you can't even leave... because when you are down, you can't open the menu. You can wait and hope for the best or if you want to go, you'll have to use Alt+F4. Why am I mentioning little things like this? Because it is a perfect example of how one might come to think that the devs never actually played this game. These are basic functions!
- You mainly get gear for the Javelin you are playing. This might sound great at first... BUT I'm a Level 30 pilot now and aside from 4 or 5 universal compontents and 1 or 2 lucky drops I have no gear at all for the other kits. Meaning: if I decide to start playing the Storm Javelin, I start with the most basic stuff which is obviously not something I want to do because I want to hop into the same content and difficulty I have been playing before with my other Javelin. And because there is no option to trade items with other players you are stuck with what you have (which is very little to nothing) for the other kits. Oh an on the topic of that... the stats on your gear are all totally random I think. Some are good, some are bad/useless. I even ended up with an item that had 3 times the same affix/inscription or whatever they call it. And you can get gear specifically suited for your Javelin and then have something on it that you can't even use (like having +x% damage with grenade launcher even though the Colossus is the only Javelin that can actually use grenade launchers. Why have stuff like that in one big pool of possible dice rolls instead of having several different pools that make more sense? Overall the system is lacking in my opinion. There is no real depth to the loot and customization features of the game. I also think it would have been better to go a more traditional route of having skills you can put points into and then have all kinds of items that enhance you character. Also weapon mods and ammo types and so on. Unfortunately you also don't simply have 3 "power slots" that you can freely assign powers to - you can only choose from a certain pool for a certain each of the slots. While I can see how they want to balance things with this approach it's just sad because personally I'd like to have a build with 3 powers that unfortunately all use the same slot. So instead of going with my dream build I can only use 1 of these powers at a time. I don't think my build would be OP to be honest, just more versatile for all kinds of situations. 
- Ok, what else...? Basically you only get "fetch x of this" or "defend that position" quests. Like all the time. It's what I meant earlier when I said they should have made a lot more missions that are like the stronghold missions. The limitation for your jetpacks is also just stupid. There are sometimes forced "no flight zones" so if they don't want you to use them in some places they do it like that. But why limit it while travelling to a location. It just breaks the fun time you have just flying around and exploring the world. Must be even more annoying for the other Javelins that can't jump and dash as much as the Interceptor. You can't set your own waypoints on the map either which is another one of these no-brainer things that basically every other game has. Apparently there are some hardcoded keybindings as well. Tried to use my mousewheel for some stuff and even though I can bind it in the settings it did not work since switching weapons seemed to be hardcoded to it. The UI is still bad, some things are really not that easy to find. And when you start a mission you don't get a list of all your Javelins and loadouts... you actually have to visit the Forge (loading screen included), switch to the Javelin and loadout you want, leave the Forge, start the game... The list of minor things like this goes on and on and I can't even remember them all, nor should I...

There are many minor flaws that could well be fixed and which are not gamebreaking. Some things like the crashes are though. And to be honest: you should not be buying a game that could potentially end up being good at some point. This has EA's "we need to get this out in the last quarter of our fiscal year" all over it. Like I said before: this needs 6 or more months of beta-testing and communicating with players. Should be free to play and improved upon accordingly. That would not change the generic and bland story, but I'm mostly looking at this from a "I want loot-shooter multiplayer action" perspective. I'm actually glad that I did not buy the game and instead only spent 15 bucks for Premier Access. In terms of hours played I sure did get something in return. And I might even pick this up during a sale. For now I will keep on playing a bit until I get bored to make full use of that Origin Premier Access but personally I would not buy this game at launch for the full price. Not even for a discounted price at a key-seller. Maybe the game will be better (from a technical point of view as well as in regards to (endgame) content) in 6-12 months and it might be a good idea to pick it up then - if the game is still around by then and Bioware actually still exists. Because I think the gaming press will once again tear them a new one just as they did with MEA. It's really sad because at it's core there is something that's actually fun, especially for us ME3MP'ers and that kept me hooked all these hours and that has me continue playing for a bit. Just wish they would have taken a better look at Warframe and what that game has gone through over the years and learned from their mistakes as well as from the things that keep this game around and apparently profitable even after 6 years. To be honest I also have no idea what exactly they have been working on for so long. It's not the story, that's for sure. So they worked like 6 oder so years on that game but it feels like a rushed and unpolished game with a boring story you never get invested in and characters you don't really care about.