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CharlestonJew posted:apparently their latest patch stealth-nerfed some things like harvest drop rates Guess they figured out the true endgame and decided it was vital for the game to stall that as much as possible as well.
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Mar 11, 2019 17:02
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one theory is that they don't understand they own game, and they can't simply have a excel spreadsheet to calculate final drop rates, because thats not how the game work. So they change one variable, then wait a few hours to see the effect in drop rates.
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Mar 11, 2019 17:13
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Anthem's entire loot system is probably hacked together out of the code that makes enemy soldiers in Battlefield drop their gun when they die
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Mar 11, 2019 17:14
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Tei posted:one theory is that they don't understand they own game, and they can't simply have a excel spreadsheet to calculate final drop rates, because thats not how the game work. So they change one variable, then wait a few hours to see the effect in drop rates. that seems like a dumb way to make a looter shooter
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Mar 11, 2019 17:14
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drkeiscool posted:that seems like a dumb way to make a looter shooter Anthem.txt
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Mar 11, 2019 17:16
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drkeiscool posted:that seems like a dumb way to make a looter shooter Tech debt is real, strong, and not your friend if you're developing a game as massive as this. It's entirely possible that the actual code base used to calculate item drops was programmed by some guy who left for greener pastures, and the inner workings of it are simultaneously completely arcane to everyone except him and bound up inextricably with the rest of the game's architecture, such that trying to change it is like trying to pull a block from a Jenga tower.
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Mar 11, 2019 17:25
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Lol at working in the video game industry *huge sigh of relief*
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Mar 11, 2019 17:37
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well apparently they had the loot drop rates working pretty well for a period of time, so I think this is just stubbornness rather than incompetence
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Mar 11, 2019 17:39
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CharlestonJew posted:well apparently they had the loot drop rates working pretty well for a period of time, so I think this is just stubbornness rather than incompetence ¿Porque no los dos? Reminder that the Creative Director's response to "loot is boring" was "WELL ACTUALLY IT'S NOT"
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Mar 11, 2019 18:09
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The product isn't boring, you're boring!!! - A professional, speaking to a group of customers
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Mar 11, 2019 18:13
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That livestream with Ben Irvo is all the proof anyone should need that the problem is Bioware, not EA. Publishers have become an absurdly over used scapegoat for developer incompetence; Ben is both bad at his job in terms of game development, but also poo poo at his job in terms of the communication expected of someone at that level of management.
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Mar 11, 2019 18:26
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Chickenwalker posted:This game is bad and I hope everyone involved in making it feels bad If nothing else, the animators and sound designers did a really good job with the javelins themselves. Those people have basically nothing to do with the parts of the game that are garbage and would have had no say in those things, so I feel like they escape blame. That said all the lead designers and company leadership have hosed up royally and at some point they're gonna have to admit that.
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Mar 11, 2019 18:29
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The bare minimum for a live game these days should be communication I am shocked at how bad they are being at it right now. Like I get not being able to fix the game or being bad at making games or whatever but at least do more regular live streams to tell people what you're doing. Not live streams about telling Reddit your suggestions
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Mar 11, 2019 18:30
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Pattonesque posted:Anthem sitting strong at 2.4k viewers on Twitch right now Even if it had been really good, I imagine the crazy particle effects would make the battles annoying to watch on stream.
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Mar 11, 2019 18:32
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Harrow posted:
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Mar 11, 2019 18:32
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Wheeee posted:That livestream with Ben Irvo is all the proof anyone should need that the problem is Bioware, not EA. Shifting blame off the company that dictates who and who isn't in their developer studios is not the answer. EA manages Bioware, they could get rid of a single lovely developer but they won't because they have no clue as to how video games work. Remember that EA can split and combine their studios at will, it's how we got the Bioware "B-Team" for Andromeda. The old Bioware is gone and dead, this is EA's Bioware.
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Mar 11, 2019 18:34
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Mar 11, 2019 18:37
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It is a spiritual sequel to the launch version of Diablo 3 with a Bioware knock off Jay Wilson
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Mar 11, 2019 18:40
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Harrow posted:If nothing else, the animators and sound designers did a really good job with the javelins themselves. Those people have basically nothing to do with the parts of the game that are garbage and would have had no say in those things, so I feel like they escape blame. Some of the voice actors also do a pretty good job, imo, even though what they are reading is generally not very good. Whoever thought they should have that guy standing between two sets of large doors and saying stupid quips at you every time you walk past him... that person is a bad developer, though.
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Mar 11, 2019 18:41
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One might argue that this character is annoying on purpose. But from a gameplay perspective that doesn't make it better, it actually makes it worse.
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Mar 11, 2019 19:09
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I don't think this was intended to be a "looter" at all, and that's why the loot system blows. From the initial reveal to now, there are so many indications that the longevity was planned to focus on "softer" things: exploration, dynamic content, faction/story/world grinds and perhaps pilot (skill) progression. Go back to the initial E3 reveal - the focus isn't on looting, shooting and progression. It's all about the world: how it is dynamic and dangerous. Interestingly, they even mention co-op as optional, with solo play being a perfectly viable and supported playstyle. Loot and power progression is not touched upon at all. But just like how ME:A lost tons of development time finding that large amounts of procedural is difficult to make interesting, I think Anthem lost development time trying to design and implement these aforementioned aspects. So when EA forced a release, they were left with very little time to figure out any kind of actual endgame and replayability. Grinding loot is the obvious candidate (as even pilot progression had been ditched), but it's rushed and the rest of the game wasn't built around it. Unless someone spills beans they shouldn't, we'll never know if it was primarily technical or creative problems that led to the failure of executing on an endgame based around exploring and surviving a dynamic world while having elegant integration of a personal story with free-form co-op. It was probably both: - Pushing graphics to the limit doesn't mesh well with dynamic content. Too many things need to be handcrafted, precalculated and carefully laid out. - The concept of a "dynamic world" is pretty incompatible with a multi-player, shared experience. If players can't actual impact anything, it's not dynamic. If player agency changes the shared world, the average player will be a lowly pleb watching organized groups shaping the world - which isn't particularly dynamic and empowering for the individual player. See Eve Online and survival games. - Providing handcrafted story-based content that even remotely keeps up with player content consumption rates is impossible. We'll probably see a few nuggets of such content gated by time and/or grinds. - Making exploration fun and replayable is pretty difficult. - Choices with consequences tends to upset players and doesn't really work in a shared world anyway, as they need to be faux choices to not mess with future content production. Good game design (and production) is about making the most of the given technical and financial limitations and possibilities - and making the most of the available developer talent, experience and passion. If the production and creative leadership fail to recognize the parameters they're working within - or even worse, fundamentally don't understand the creative and technical tools at their disposal - the result ends up flawed at best and unsalvageable at worst. There is a difference between being overly ambitious (No Man's Sky) and failure to reconcile technical/design realities with "a vision" (Fallout 76, Star Citizen). I think Anthem is very much in the latter category, but is somewhat saved by having some elements that actually do work out well (visuals, movement, abilities). It can certainly be turned into a good game, but that requires leadership who has strong insight into the game - I am skeptical the current leadership is able to do this. TL;DR - looting and gear progression sucks in Anthem because it was never intended to be the endgame. The intended endgame was a fever dream of dynamic world content, exploration and general "wouldn't it be cool if..."
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Mar 11, 2019 19:21
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Yeah this is at least 75% Bioware's gently caress up. It's not the first time they've hosed up like this either. Mass Effect was nearly a disaster, they wasted resources chasing procedural generation and then turned around and did that again with Andromeda. Mass Effect 3 poo poo the bed because they let Hudson and Walters direct the franchise directly into an iceberg with an ill considered Butlerian Jihad plot. SWTOR lacked group finding features and end game content because the developers thought Burning Crusade was the pinnacle of MMO design. It's not clear exactly what stupid idea resulted in Anthem, but you can be damned sure there was one. The game we are playing now probably had a year of actual development, if that.
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Mar 11, 2019 19:27
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On the bright side, Division 2 plays quite well and is god drat gorgeous, and the new Destiny DLC is loving fun as hell, so it's not like Anthem mattered anyway
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Mar 11, 2019 19:33
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Pinely posted:It's not clear exactly what stupid idea resulted in Anthem, but you can be damned sure there was one. The game we are playing now probably had a year of actual development, if that. Stupid idea #1: Exploring a dangerous and dynamic world with friends is a viable and fun game design. Loot and progression is for nerds. Stupid idea #2: A personalized story with choices that have consequences integrates well with a co-op open world game. Stupid idea #3: We can make Frostbite handle dynamic open-world content.
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Mar 11, 2019 19:45
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If anyone wanted more info on that GM3 not being worth it thing, the TLDR is this: enemies in GM2 have 5 times the health of GM1 so they take 5 times as long to kill, enemies in GM3 have 4 times the health of GM2 or 20 times the health of GM1. Due to all gear scaling being linear, at the moment even with full legendary gear with hypothetical perfect rolls for your build, if your after loot its still faster to just farm twice as many guys in GM2 then it is to waist time on GM3. This also means a hypothetical GM4 is currently impossible unless they make major changes not just to the maximum loot rarity but also the entire gear scaling system.
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Mar 11, 2019 20:04
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Wheeee posted:That livestream with Ben Irvo is all the proof anyone should need that the problem is Bioware, not EA. Obviously one audience wants the devs head on a stick and the other is stoked to get tons of new poo poo for free* (to grind), but the contrast was mindboggling. What i'm saying is i cant wait for the next Anthem PR stream.
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Mar 11, 2019 20:08
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Making the guy who headed EA’s Star Wars MMO as the person to head Anthem was a big mistake And this was four or so years into the game’s development
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Mar 11, 2019 20:12
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https://twitter.com/Darokaz/status/1105163954874015744
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Mar 11, 2019 20:14
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Lmao the backpedaling is real
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Mar 11, 2019 20:17
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PederP posted:Go back to the initial E3 reveal - the focus isn't on looting, shooting and progression. It's all about the world: how it is dynamic and dangerous. Interestingly, they even mention co-op as optional, with solo play being a perfectly viable and supported playstyle. Loot and power progression is not touched upon at all. This almost perfectly encapsulates my impressions of the first Destiny reveals. I thought we were gonna get to go out and explore an entire solar system. Multiple planets! Picking through the ruins of an old powerful civilization! Lonely wanderers picking up the pieces.
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Mar 11, 2019 20:19
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Happy Noodle Boy posted:Lmao the backpedaling is real Nah, I think this is an actual bug. It's notable that the billion+1 threads on Reddit about poo poo loot have zero responses from Bioware. Not even "we're looking into it," the ember thing is the only thing they've made a peep about.
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Mar 11, 2019 20:19
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RoadCrewWorker posted:It was so loving hilarious to go from the Anthem "we havent slept in a week" awkwardness stream to Warframe's "PR stream" for the last big patch, which was just the main designer streaming from his home pc wearing a beanie and telling nerdy stories about graphic bugs or Build PC upgrades or showing random development/bug screenshots while pretty much admitting that he was really mostly improv stalling so his team could get a few more hours to hit the release button. Guy was joking around with the viewers while drawing random build version graphs in MSPaint and he still gave responses to concerns in the chat that were a million times more considerate and professional than "loots not bad, it's good actually, that's not a question". And then he afterwards stuck around for an hour and took detailed bug reports and sent them in to the team immediately, thanking the people in the chat for the helpful reports and promising fixes the next day. DE_Steve is a very special Dev. And while Digital Extremes is not a perfect Dev team, they are making the game they wanted to make for a long time and it really shows. Comparing anyone to them is kind of unfair. While most people will tell you the game they are currently working on is the game they always wanted to work on, it's rarely true. This of course doesn't excuse the clusterfuck that is Anthem. I had my fun with it, it was well worth $15, but I doubt there will be a game worth playing to come back to in half a year.
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Mar 11, 2019 20:24
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ZeeBoi posted:Making the guy who headed EA’s Star Wars MMO as the person to head Anthem was a big mistake It was good for SWTOR!
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Mar 11, 2019 20:31
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Hey I don't understand how the pilot's arms and legs fit in a Colossus
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Mar 11, 2019 20:55
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Feindfeuer posted:DE_Steve is a very special Dev. And while Digital Extremes is not a perfect Dev team, they are making the game they wanted to make for a long time and it really shows. Comparing anyone to them is kind of unfair. While most people will tell you the game they are currently working on is the game they always wanted to work on, it's rarely true. This of course doesn't excuse the clusterfuck that is Anthem. I had my fun with it, it was well worth $15, but I doubt there will be a game worth playing to come back to in half a year. My favorite DE story, there was a bug in the melee system where doing a spin attack in mid air with certain weapons would catapult you at high speeds. This was eventually patched but seeing how much players were having flying through the levels at high speeds they used that bug as inspiration for the parkour 2.0 system which massively improved player mobility and lets you treat the actual terrain as more of a guideline than actual rules. Fast forward a few patches and many of the new environments actually require you to be good at the parlour systems to access optional areas and extra rewards and they're adding the ability to build custom obstacle courses in your guild hall and keep a leader board of the best times. The entire way the game was played and the levels were designed was completely changed because of how much players enjoyed a bug. Contrast this with Bioware who responded to how much people enjoyed the higher loot drops glitch by patching it out as soon as possible and introduced a new glitch that lowered the drop rate on masterwork embers in the process.
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Mar 11, 2019 21:01
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doingitwrong posted:This almost perfectly encapsulates my impressions of the first Destiny reveals. I thought we were gonna get to go out and explore an entire solar system. Multiple planets! Picking through the ruins of an old powerful civilization! Lonely wanderers picking up the pieces. I really want a game like that. Sure, after some time it'd probably become routine, because there's only so much content you can create, but a game where the players are these wanderers scavenging old ruins and finding/using ancient tech sounds fantastic. I'd want it to use phasing tech so you run into other players sometimes, but not often enough that the world doesn't feel lonely if you're on your own. Maybe add in some interesting traversal-focused gameplay so it isn't all about combat and finding random loot. Hell, it could even go the Warframe route, where you don't actually focus much on finding random loot but instead use materials that you find to research and craft things based on reverse-engineering ancient tech, things like that, just to keep the focus away from farming for randomly-rolled items. I guess I'm picturing something with the atmosphere of something like Journey, with enough quiet exploration that the world has this beautiful, quiet ruin atmosphere, but that's also online and focuses on being part of a society that's rebuilding. Something like that, I dunno.
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Mar 11, 2019 21:11
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The ember (accidental?) nerf was pretty bad. I ran my harvest route a bunch of times and was getting 2 drops avg, compared to probably 8 or 10 drops average before.
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Mar 11, 2019 21:37
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Harrow posted:I guess I'm picturing something with the atmosphere of something like Journey, with enough quiet exploration that the world has this beautiful, quiet ruin atmosphere, but that's also online and focuses on being part of a society that's rebuilding. Something like that, I dunno. I think I want this game too, and I keep catching glimpses of it in other games. Metroid Prime. Dark Souls. Zelda BoTW. Conan Exiles. Skyrim. No Man's Sky. Eve Online. But it's easier to make things with slightly different combinations of numbers than to generate environments that aren't too samey, and we don't have great systems for that kind of stuff where we have decades of practice making and balancing stat & combat systems.
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Mar 11, 2019 22:10
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doingitwrong posted:I think I want this game too, and I keep catching glimpses of it in other games. Metroid Prime. Dark Souls. Zelda BoTW. Conan Exiles. Skyrim. No Man's Sky. Eve Online. But it's easier to make things with slightly different combinations of numbers than to generate environments that aren't too samey, and we don't have great systems for that kind of stuff where we have decades of practice making and balancing stat & combat systems. BotW is one of the games I keep coming to when I imagine this game, especially given that it has combat (unlike Journey). I keep envisioning a progression system that's more about building up your base of operations than XP and leveling (almost like a "beautiful post-apocalypse" version of Division 1's base of operations progression), so it's all about you being one of the wanderers out there being willing to go to dangerous places and bring back the tech and resources that this society needs to continue to build a safe home. Given the more quiet world and gameplay that focuses on both exploration and combat being fun, the occasional big boss fight would be extra exciting because it'd be special. It'd be pretty rad, but it's one of those things that just isn't all that feasible, and probably represents a huge game design challenge if you also want it to be the kind of online game people keep coming back to as it expands. Eventually some content would need to be repeatable if you want people to stick around and while I'm sure there are fun ways to do that without destroying the atmosphere (Division 2's idea of previous mission areas being taken over by a different faction is a good way, for example), it'd be a really thin line to walk. Plus, people tend to expect plot in games like this, which I kind of think just can't really work. A focus on smaller stories instead of trying to have an overarching plot the way Destiny and Anthem do would be a lot stronger, and might even help avoid the whole "this game has no story!" complaint that both of those games ran into, but that's just not an easy sell right now.
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Mar 11, 2019 22:29
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Feindfeuer posted:Comparing anyone to them is kind of unfair. Apparently Warframe was pretty messed up for years. I don't know if Anthem will keep afloat for long enough to go through sufficient iterations for them to learn similar lessons, but i hope someone is at least taking notes and learning something from his trainwreck, even if the current devs are apparently in way over their head.
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Mar 11, 2019 22:29
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