Anthem Twitter Thread

Alain Baxter @alainbaxter
I've noticed the crew here at BioWare have all be getting dangerously thin lately... as a problem solver, I think I've found the solution! Thanks to my daughter for making this piece de resistance! #breakfastofchampions

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With all the food they've shown, I'm more impressed they're able to keep their weight down to be honest.

Well you know its not gonna be as good as me3mp

But yes, one of the chars had locked its walking alltogether, but thats how it is... bugs.

DementedMistahJ @dementedmistahj
Happy Early #Grabbit-O-Ween! My entry for the @freelancercodex #AnthemGame Pumpkin Carving Contest. I call it "All Hallows Steve" It didn't come out quite as nice as I had hoped.. but it was made with love for @anthempetg and Grabbits everywhere! #HappyHalloween !!

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Michael Gamble @gamblemike
Grabbit!



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For those interested, EA released their Q2 FY19 Financial Results today.
ir.ea.com/press-releases/press-release-details/2018/Electronic-Arts-Reports-Q2-FY19-Financial-Results/default.aspx
ir.ea.com/home/default.aspx


From the Prepared Remarks: s22.q4cdn.com/894350492/files/doc_financials/2019/q2/Q2-FY19-Prepared-Remarks.pdf

Looking ahead, our focus continues to be on connecting more players to more great experiences. On February 22, BioWare will launch their stunning and ambitious shared-world game, Anthem. The team has done an outstanding job executing against their vision for a game with amazing levels of complexity, scale and innovation. Anthem has won more than 90 awards, including recognition as one of the most anticipated games of the year, and player feedback continues to be highly positive through our pre-launch testing. We can’t wait to see this game come alive for fans at launch and through the long-term live service to come.

Net bookings from full-game downloads are expected to grow 20% to 25%. This is significantly above our original expectations, primarily driven by the strength we are seeing in Anthem, which we expect to skew strongly digital, plus the digital shifts for our other titles. We continue to model an underlying shift of around five percentage points a year to digital.

The fourth quarter will be stronger than we had originally forecast, driven by higher expectations for Anthem and Command and Conquer Rivals.

They're basically the "Nugs" equivalent for Anthem (context: Nugs are rabbit/pig like creatures in Dragon Age). 

I was thinking more in terms of the mascot animal for Anthem, rather than how they behave.

Pish posh. Colossus nuke solves any situation you're having.

So the decision to 'not-delay' Anthem to February turns out to be a genius decision for a whole bunch of reasons.
(The live stream suggests it wasn't quite ready for a November launch)

Sales achievements by Red Dead Redemption 2:

• Biggest opening weekend in retail sell-through across all entertainment releases;
• Second biggest launch (three days) in retail sell-through across all entertainment releases;
• Biggest entertainment launch of 2018;
• Most pre-ordered full game ever on PlayStation Network;
• Biggest day one full game sales ever on PlayStation Network;
• Biggest first three days full game sales ever on PlayStation Network.

Various tweets link to articles:

rockstarintel.com/red-dead-redemption-2/
www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181030005459/en/Red-Dead-Redemption-2-Achieves-Entertainment%E2%80%99s-Biggest
www.dexerto.com/red-dead-redemption/red-dead-redemption-2-sales-achieve-single-biggest-opening-weekend-in-entertainment-history-204880

And RDR2 comes on the heels of big launches for Spiderman and RPG-like Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

I maintain that a lot of the complaining about Anthem, and Andromeda, is from people seeking to damage BioWare. I don't know why the hell BioWare is under such a microscope when Bethesda remains king of the bugs. Fallout 76 will do well. There is no reason some animation issues should hold Anthem back.

Everyone laughed at PeeBee holding her gun backwards in a trailer. In Fallout 4 while Piper was my companion she had her pistol upside down, and wore a joker like smile on her face. She followed me like this until I just reset the game.

I'm not worried about Anthem having graphics issues or animation hiccups. It won't affect my enjoyment. Just like with Red Dead 2, which apparently has plenty of it's own issues, I see success of a game can depend on how peoples opinion of a developer is shaped, usually by other people.

Oh, I agree.  There seems to be a mentality towards BioWare games that comes across as "its not designed for me, therefore any fault proves its a broken game".  I think people have gotten over Assassin's Creed: Unity faster then Andromeda and there were people that didn't have silly expressions, they just didn't have faces.  Heck I was playing a friends copy near launch and I got stuck in a haypile that was an optional requirement to jump in during the tutorial.

I personally can live with games with graphical issues for in modern games there are patches and updates to games to address those issues.  Its core design issues that cannot be fixed easily are areas where I will start to dislike a game.  I look at Destiny 2 for that, it took until the third expansion (the first major one) to really fix the problems people had with the release version of the game.  Even Diablo 3, it required Reaper of Souls to fix the engagement factor of the game with the removal of the Auction House and completely overhauling how drops worked.

I don't think that's a fair assessment of BioWare though, because they've made multiplayer-focused games in the past as well, and there wasn't anywhere near as much fervor against them as there is now. I'm not sure why people forget games like Neverwinter Knights and SW:TOR, but those weren't centered around a single-player story either. Andromeda wasn't lambasted because it wasn't a singleplayer, story driven game. It was criticized because of how weak its narrative elements were, as well as the technical bugs. Considering that the three previous games (prior to Anthem) have been singleplayer focused (ME:A, ME3, DA:I), I'm not sure where there's this shift. The next two games are expected to be Dragon Age and another Mass Effect, and those will most definitely have a singleplayer focus as well. If this wasn't the case, and BioWare was shifting to a multiplayer, gameplay focus, they would have went the Fallout 76 route and just announce the next Dragon Age as being an online only MMORPG or something.

I think your main issue is that the caliber of their role playing and story elements - in recent years - hasn't been up to snuff versus their earlier titles. That to me is a more valid criticism, and one I'd actually agree on to some extent. This statement isn't directed at you, but I've found that ever since Blake Jorgenson made those comments about that Star Wars game that got reworked, people have now coalesced around this ideology that single player games were somehow on their deathbed; when that was far from the case.