Anthem Twitter Thread

I remember the old OXM and Playstation magazines that you would buy and they would come with an assortment of demos on the game disk

And you still had to buy the mag....

Both Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3 had demos. Free download, no pre-order, no magazine purchase. Just free.

May have been PC only. But I know I had both.

You still had to pay for something - a very specific mag in fact - in order to play the demo. So it’s only „free” in a sense that you were tricked info thinking that about something that was clearly a marketing gimmick that brought money to both game devs/publishers and mags.

Really, the difference between then and now is that the middleman - the magazine - was cut, while publishers now try to encourage people to use their own platforms of distribution.

Can’t say I miss how things were before. I usually bought software/game magazines for a CD but - in hindsight - the content was rarely useful (not the purpose of demos after all...) and over here such mags were pretty darn expensive anyhow. Way more than a price of a monthly sub for that matter.

You are incorrect. PSN and Xbox Live are free, PSN plus and XBox live gold are subscription services mainly for online multiplayer games. 

I think there's a possibility that we could see Tarsis reflect our play, over time, better than prior games.

Like you know how Skyhold still had a broken wall in the Map Room corridor by the end of the game...

I mentioned some time ago that if we get to see Skyhold in DA4 and, say, we see maybe that it's getting damaged in some way, I want to see a scene of some poor worker finally patching up that wall, only for the whole castle to crumble around them and leaving just that fixed wall behind

pre-order only "demos" are lame as shit

Well... no. Unless you think that one of few scattered hubs where people can survive and build some semblance of civilization in an otherwise very hostile environment is comparable to high school?

I mean... are you saying that a hero can only be a hero of the story if they're saviors of the whole world or something? Or their actions in one, but potentially crucial place can't have ramifications for world/civilization at large? I mean... by that logic the Champion of Kirkwall or even the Hero Of Ferelden are also heroes of high school, given that their actions were regional or focused mostly on one/few places.

I agree the following wording seems to limit the scope of consequences to the story hubs: But this other excerpt from the same article suggests how the scope might be extended beyond the hub: In other words, your progress on the critical path, your victories over Strongholds, your accomplishments in side missions, will feed back to the story hubs as grist for Your Story mill. At a minimum, I'd expect this to be like how NPCs in Fallout 3/4 and Skyrim react to what you did on some quest. They'll start calling you the Dragonborn or complain about how you let the ghouls take over water distribution. Perhaps they will go beyond that to actual consequences, so that if you kill some faction base out in the world that your NPC friend came from, they'll turn from friend to enemy in the story hub.

This still means consequences are limited to relationship status, or may go as far as story hub politics (you may bring down a political leader by being too merciful in a World mission), but you won't change the world from decisions you make in the story hub.

Personally, I'm fine with consequences being limited to relationships and politics. The most memorable and engaging decisions I've made in games were all about the characters, not about whether a civil war was settled, whether a Rift was sealed (as I didn't have any choice about that anyway), or about whether Megaton got nuked.