Anthem came out eleven days ago and so far I’ve managed to play about 8 hours of it. It’s honestly the game I most want to play right now and I try multiple times a day. Most of the time when I attempt to play I simply can’t log on. Sometimes it will act like it connected and start loading but it’s actually loading a screen that tells me I have lost my connection to the EA servers. Fun! When I do manage to get into the game, every load screen is a 50/50 chance I’ll get disconnected. If I survive the loading screens I’ve never managed to play the game for more than half an hour without a hard lock that makes me restart my entire computer. I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled 5 times. I tried playing in French because someone said that fixed their connection issues. I turned graphics settings down and updated drivers for every device I own. No matter what I do Anthem still crashes, freezes, and shits itself every time I load it up. A quick glance at the games subreddit tells me I’m not alone either.
Still, I have still managed to play 8 hours of it.
The reason I keep trying to play Anthem is because buried under all the garbage is an incredibly good action game. Flying around these stunning environments blasting monsters feels fucking awesome. After three more attempts to play last night and no luck, I have decided I’m done until I hear about a major patch though. I’m not talking about tuning the loot either, I mean a patch that fixes the underlying foundation of the game which for many people is currently busted. I have no idea if that is days, weeks or even months away.
Before I played it on PC I intended to play Anthem on PS4 but that was also impossible. If anything the PS4 version seems even less stable and I’m not surprised to see stories about people seeking refunds. Anthem is not finished yet but someone decided to sell it. I do not blame the devs, who as far as I can tell are on their way to making something really great. This is the fault of a group of business people somewhere looking at spreadsheets and deciding that Anthem needed to release now. These are the people who should lose their jobs. These are the people who should be fired by the hundreds form the games industry. Sadly this is never how it works. I’m sure the same group of business fucks will look at the red numbers on their spreadsheets and then fire another hundred creators. Anthem is what you get when a publisher is more concerned with quarterly goals, than making good games and it's too bad because this could have been a good one.
-Gabe out
