Anthem, BioWare’s upcoming online loot shooter, has some cool ideas. Unfortunately, the game’s demo last weekend was so busted, it was hard to get a good feel for the game.
The problems started as soon as the demo went live on Friday, January 25. Many, myself included, were greeted by an error message that read, “We’re sorry, but the EA servers reached max capacity. Please try again later.” In some instances it was possible to get as far as selecting a male or female character in the opening menu before the game would automatically restart.
Later in the afternoon, the connection issue spread to EA’s other games and services, including people’s ability to log into and post on EA Help, the company’s official customer support site.
Those issues eventually subsided, only for a whole host of other problems to crop up. Chief among them was an infinite loading screen. Whether trying to load the game or leave Fort Tarsis, the game’s main hub area, the loading screen bar would fill up to around 95% and then stall out indefinitely. Sometimes restarting the game helped. Sometimes the same thing happened. Sometimes it happened after finishing a mission and trying to go back to Fort Tarsis, with earned loot or XP sometimes disappearing in the process.
Rubber banding, in which game sequences slow down, stutter, or even repeat, was also a problem throughout the weekend. By Saturday night, on Xbox One at least, the game was more or less impossible to play even when I managed to successfully avoid getting trapped in loading screens. Some players also experienced enemies disappearing mid-combat only to randomly re-appear later on.
Other players still had trouble accessing the demo, or never got the link for a special code that could be used to invite up to four friends to play the game with them. There were also problems with new Javelins not unlocking after players leveled up. Though BioWare eventually fixed the issue, late Sunday just before the demo was set to end, the studio decided to unlock all four Javelin classes for every player.
Despite playing very much like a beta testing session, the weekend wasn’t pitched as one. Instead, the demo was marketed as a “VIP” bonus for people who pre-ordered Anthem or were either paid EA Access or Origin Access subscribers. Everyone else would have to wait until the “open” demo is available the weekend of February 2.
Michael Gamble, the game’s lead producer, also announced that the game had gone “Gold,” meaning it had passed certification for things like bugs on both Xbox One and PS4, multiple release dates, Anthem included.
It officially launches on February 22, but is actually available on February 15, three weeks from now, for anyone who subscribes to EA Access or Origins Access.
BioWare’s head of live service, Chad Robertson, published a post on the company’s blog late Saturday apologizing for the demo’s problems, stressing that contrary to speculation on social media and the game’s subreddit, none of them stemmed from a lack of servers. “We appreciate everyone’s patience and sincerely apologise for those who have had issues getting into the game,” he wrote, calling out the overall connectivity issues, bugs preventing people from gaining access to the demo, and infinite load screens in particular.
According to Robertson, the studio had only seen the infinite load screen problem in isolated cases previously and thought the issue had been addressed. “Unfortunately, the problem is exacerbated in the real-world where differences with player’s ISPs and home networks introduce new behaviour,” he wrote, adding that it would be a “difficult one” to fix.
BioWare has also said that the demo was an older build of the game that didn’t include some of the bug fixes the team has made in recent weeks. Late Sunday night, BioWare announced on Twitter that details on improvements coming to the game in time for next weekend’s demo would be announced sometime on Monday.
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63 responses to “Anthem’s First Demo Weekend Was A Mess”
I managed to get on over the weekend. Played on my 1X. First load in did not work. Re-booted and sadly it did work. Game is nothing I will be coming back to. Suits run out of power??? Can’t fly continuously. Controls are sloppy. Run of the mill enemies are tiny – I have a 75″ 4k tv and could hardly make them out.
This reeks of Evolve all over again. A brave attempt, but probably should not have.
All ready uninstalled and the only Anthem I want to hear is by Greta Van Fleet!
The suits overheat, but there are ways to cool them down. That could mean hovering for a few seconds, or flying through water, or something like that. Done right, you can fly for a long time. Some builds are based around staying airborne, and from what I’ve seen its very effective.
But no, its not an infinite resource, it needs managing. You may also find that the gear you had wasn’t helping very much. Gear has perk’s and some of those enhance flying, cooldown rates, etc. They wouldn’t have a lot of high end gear in the demo so don’t write if off just yet.
Still, if the game didn’t capture your attention, so be it. It wont be for every one.
That’s perfectly fine. Stay with Fortnite.
Greta van fleet are the worst 🙁
This is, hands-down, the most concerning part about the whole fiasco. They thought they’d nailed this one (despite it also apparently affecting a number of BF V players for the last three months, unfixed).
They’re blaming customer-side networking. That’s a bad, bad, bad sign. My concern is they try to get it working for an ‘acceptable’ number of ISP/network configurations, then everyone else is shit out of luck. “Sucks to be you guys.” That’s not OK, but seems depressingly likely with these kind of disclaimer comments coming out of Bioware/EA.
They did the same blame shift with BF1 issues last year for Oceanic servers. Said it was a “downstream issue”.
Definitely not an EA hater(I play BFV daily) but I gotta say that the frostbite engine seems to display some pretty major faults. Loading has been an issue in-between BFV rounds also. It seems to me like the frostbite engines workflow/release structure are fundamentally flawed as bugs seem to reappear across different titles. The engine appears to live in isolation for each instance.
Yeah, the fact that the exact same bug would crop up in two *very* unrelated games does definitely suggest that it is something shared between both, either something in Frostbite or something in netcode that the games are sharing.
It doesn’t help that there isn’t a very well developed set of devtools out for Frostbite. Every new game needs to remake the engine to suit their game which is causing a lot of issues.
I think they’re saying the problem is made worse at the user end, not that its caused at the user end. Which means theres a problem at their end starting things off.
I cant understand why networking still causes problems like this. There have been countless games that have gone online over the past twenty plus years, and they’ve managed to get it right.
It shouldn’t be hard. Get data, send it to or from the player, repeat. You were able to do that on 28.8k dialup, getting it right today with any sort of broadband shouldn’t be hard.
There may be comparatively more to track with modern games, so comparing Quake on a 56k dialup modem (which was still painful to play!) to modern games may not be a fair comparison.
That said this does look pretty piss poor. Maybe it’s time everyone stopped jumping on the multiplayer bandwagon unless they can actually deliver something that copes with the player base. Either way it’ll probably be dead in a few months…
Oh, theres definitely more to track with modern games, but not THAT much. They aren’t sending graphical data, just location and action. Then the engine does the rest.
WoW was handing hundreds of players onscreen 14 years ago, and that game was designed with 56k connections in mind. What would Anthem be doing that would be so much more data than that? Planetside was doing real time FPS online before that. Handling player data would be far more complicated than NPC/mob data.
Destiny is a modern example to compare to. It had a lot of things wrong with it (most of which apparently sorted), but network stability wasn’t one of them. So Anthem has to be doing something else wrong. Maybe that’s not enough login servers because its just a demo, maybe its bad net code. Both of which should be reasonably easy to fix.
Just saying that this isn’t anything new.
Games have progressed mostly from a visual perspective, not really from the data. All a game needs to send is location, and action. It doesn’t need to play out those events, just what you’ve done, then let the server or computer do its job.
That’s changing as they look at proper streaming options where everything gets processed at the server end and the visuals streamed, but that aint Anthem.
There’s a huge difference in network traffic and latency expectations between a hotkey-MMO and a real-time shooter – sure the data being sent is still location and action, but the frequency is much higher, and the tolerance for data loss and is much lower. And I’m pretty sure WoW had its fair share of network issues at launch, too.
And Destiny (1 and 2) had a ton of network problems that persist to this day – enemies regaining health because your damage was lost en route to the host, enemies warping around in PvE and the infamous red-bar warriors in PvP (players with poor connections not taking damage and warping around); even in D2, new issues abound with random connection issues resulting in people getting dropped from sessions, or kicked from groups when matchmaking. It’s infrequent, sure, but these issues are still all over the place.
I did have a comment in there on WoW’s launch drama’s (oh, Ironforge snapshot mode, how I don’t miss you) but must have purged it.
It doesn’t change what I said. What I’m saying is that these things aren’t new. The networking code to a relative scale has happened for a long time, whether its games 15 years ago, or games 15 months ago. The coding isn’t complicated, so its not that. Its either optimization that hasn’t happened, or a hardware issue.
I think its a hardware issue, simply because they wouldn’t have a release level setup yet. A lack of servers would create a bottleneck that would cause these problems, as would not having enough ISP bandwidth in place.
Neither of which are hard to fix.
i totally agree, it seems like gaming companies are like gambling addicts all of a sudden trying to make the next fortnite, everything has to be multiplayer fallout 76 for example.
Even in the face of multiple shitshows they continue to chase the dream of making the next mega earner. at least that is how it seems to me anyway.
@grunt playing devils advocate there are enormous differences between the games in those days and now in terms of the amount of data going back and forth, if i understand how it works correctly any small errors can become huge compounded issues because the effect cascades. That is how i understood the stuff i read anyway.
Fair enough. I don’t mind the devils advocate angle, I do it myself. But WHAT has changed? From the networking side of it, the stuff being done today has ben done for 15 years and more.
We’ve increased our base connections well over 400x since 2000. That’s based on a 24 Mbps ADSL 2 connection versus a 56k dialup era. So its more if you have faster.
Data needs haven’t grown at the same rate, there simply isn’t any need for it. You have never needed much data to be sent and received, its something that was notoriously kept minimal, just to cater to as many connections as possible. And those are issues solved decades ago.
This isn’t the data transmission causing the problem, its something else.
oh no im not saying the amount of data itself is an issue just that it can compound the issue, and load testing servers internally vs the game actually going live can have completely different problems, it is entirely possible they didn’t even see some of these bugs during internal testing.
while i will wholeheartedly agree they shit the bed here and that these issues have shown up before and been dealt with but always seem to comeback somehow. The data transmission may be compounding the problem is all i’m saying, which is probably why they can get away with this escapist PR doublespeak because they technically aren’t lying.
Ah, misread you then. All good. I think its something simple myself, being overloaded hardware. They wouldn’t be near live capacity with their server farms, its a wasted cost, and with the number of reported keys that were used for the weekend, its no surprise things went south.
So created a bottleneck. At that point, yeah, I can see the problems with data transmission compounding.
Multiplayer games used to be simpler due to network implementation.
Dedicated server and clients.
Now the servers aren’t a dedicated machine but exist in a major data centre like AWS or Azure and they spawn and disappear when required.
And again, this is all nothing new. This isnt the first game to outsource its servers. Fortnite uses AWS for example. Other games have used AWS or Azure for around a decade now.
The base code for networking has been established for two decades. There really is no reason to recreate it, its incredibly solid. That doesnt mean it hasnt evolved. I’d use a car for an analogy, but someone would just argue.
Yeup, not only that their response has been lame. I am in Engineering and one of the greatest things I learnt in R&D/Testing is you can never sit back in your chair and go we fixed this it works fine here let me show you…. see.
It ONLY matters that the end user has a problem and you(them, me, etc) need to fix it.
Well despite the issues, I quite like the game. Outside of the rubberbanding and some issues unlocking the 2nd javelin my play time was pretty much bug free. Only other bug was the occasionally enemy disappearing. Controls took a little bit to get used too but once i did it was a lot of fun.
did the enemies really disappear?? maybe with your godlike strength and gaming ninja skills you simple erased them from existence =P
There were the odd issues on Saturday. Sunday was pretty painless.
Maybe they should have called it a stress test rather than a demo.
But were they testing the stress levels of their servers or their customers?
The closed alpha a few weeks ago was the stress test and that performed smoother than the demo based on reports.
They flubbed it hard. Should have been a public stress / network test, then VIP early access to the game, rather than a preorder-only demo followed by an open demo followed by release, that was always a completely backward way to do a MMO release.
But the basics are still there.
A ‘small’ scale stress test followed by a larger stress test and then finally VIP early access.
Only people with EA’s daft subscription system get early access.
I got a lot of infinite loads, which was frustrating, but I was able to play through the three story missions presented, explore quite a bit of the freeplay mode and get a party together for world events.
I’m looking forward to next weekend when Bioware should hopefully have their act together on the technical side, but lets not pretend that this sort of thing doesn’t happen to every online-heavy game on first release.
the blog / recap post is live at https://www.ea.com/games/anthem/news/anthem-vip-demo-recap
to BW’s credit, they are maintaining an open dialogue with the community rather then hunkering down and going radio silent but we’ll see what happens when open beta roll around this weekend
yeah but notice what is missing from that, beyond the glossy PR speak, not a single mention of paying customers not getting access to the demo. Not a single explanation of the issues that were encountered, it is like they are completely failing to acknowledge some of their players had access to the demo at all. (personally I only ended up with three hours at the most in three days), two of my friends had ZERO. And they preordered to be part of the demo.
/shrug, maybe I’ve set my bar way low for EA / game companies in general but the fact they are actually talking is a positive for me even if it’s not what everybody wants to hear.
but like I said, talk is just talk. if they don’t deliver this weekend, I can’t see Anthem getting off to a good launch
RIP blakes friends.
I don’t think it’s possible on the time frame to give everyone another crack at the demo, assuming they could make it bugless etc but surely they could think of some way to pay the consumers back for this shitfit. maybe everyone gets some in game cosmetics a disappearing helmet or something that replaces your helmet with the symbol for infinity??
I will give it to you, that was the best laugh I have had today.
First bullet point: “entitlement bugs”. Ie. People not getting access to things they’re entitled to, such as the demo, friend invite links/codes, etc.
yes It just states it, where is them talking about what went wrong and what were they planning to do about making up to those who were disadvantaged and never got access to what they paid for.
Anyone can just make a list but what some people want is details. Real acknowledgment.
I had problems logging in on Saturday (on an Xbox One X), but was able to play Saturday night, Sunday and Monday morning. I had some issues with the infinite load screen, but it was always fixed by closing the game and reopening it. Also had some issues with randomly vanishing enemies.
Having said that, I had a lot of fun playing Anthem. Once the extra Javelin suits were unlocked, it was great exploring all their different abilities. The story missions were good, and the Stronghold was bonkers. The whole world looks beautiful as well. I’m really looking forward to the full release.
The problem with the stronghold was that people kept trying to kill infinitely spawning enemies rather than trying to get the echoes/relics.
If they did end up picking up an echo, they then spent the next 15 minutes killing mobs before realising that they kept spawning and then took the echo back to the point :\
Wait, we were supposed to get codes to invite friends in? I definitely didn’t any of those 🙁
Just from incidental reading of support tweets, I think they had to be accessed via the Origin site – they apparently weren’t emailed, but could be requested or showed on an account page or something when you either accessed the relevant section in Origin, or linked your Origin account to your Xbone/PSn.
Well that’s fucking stupid.
And also sounds completely typical for this whole shitshow.
it was buried on their website, the Anthem one. When you hit the demo tab, there was second tab to the right. I must have visited the site a handful of times, only then did I see it and it gave a link that your friends then had to follow, then they had to login to their EA account, then get the code, yep it was a ‘Complete EA bureaucratic clusterf-‘
Not gonna lie, the only reason I heard about it was there was a large amount of noise around it on the subreddit. Saw a couple of tweets about it from devs, but nothing on the official feed. It was a great idea that was extremely poorly publicised.
When it worked, I loved the raw gameplay. But I thoroughly dislike the Fort, not only was it lifeless, it doest make sense. The way our Javelin is presented we alone are at the centre of the tower, yet the whole game is about groups of Javelins savings the world.
In Destiny we are THE guardian, but we are not the only Guardian, yet here it seems like we are the only Javelin. Its really weird.
Bugs I can get over, server issues I can get over. But after three days of choosing to pay this I got three hours in and the only reason I got to see the interceptor was because (thankfully) I had another platform to try it on. I am a long time gamer, so troubl on beta/demo weekends is to be expected but this was next level in term of badness, and quite frankly Bioware did nothing to make me feel like a valuable customer, especially when their post today, which was all we had issues, but yay it was good, not a single mention of paying customers not being able to play what they paid for.
THAT is my only real concern for the game, the lack of respect. But hey its EA and Bioware, so I am not holding my breath
I want to be clear when it worked, I had HEAPS of fun. Credit where it is due.
I wish it had worked properly 100% for everyone, not only because I’m sure the collective rage quotient of the population increased by a degree or two, but because the focus being on how the servers shit the bed means that we’re not getting as much talk about the flaws in the game – of which there are several, which need some serious attention.
From how they handle match-making, leashing, and freeplay (and the absence of solo/private freeplay), to how they handle loot distribution, the numerous and tediously extended load screens for so many actions, the balancing of enemies (in particular, shielded snipers), the issues around boredom when waiting for a rez, the numerous issues with griefing (unintentional or otherwise – eg: not turning in cores to progress the mission, choosing the wrong colours, not being at the door, not rezzing downed team-mates and continuing the mission without them DOESN’T respawn the team-mate when they’re out of ‘leash’ range, etc, etc, etc), the pointlessness of Tarsis and the frustration of navigating it, etc, etc.
There’s a lot of problems with the game, but instead of examining any of that, my biggest concern is that the thing’s not even going to fucking work 95% of the time.
Exactly to all of that.
So many times when I was finally playing, I was thinking ‘even as attempted good guy in gaming, who never goes out of my way to upset others play, if I can see how many of these systems can be used by the bored or by griefers, how could the devs allowed them’ did they no hire some people to ‘play nasty’ to highlight these things?!
And there’s so much more. Like their “Do you guys not have
phonesVOIP?” answer to anything related to woeful inadequecies in communicating between players, whether it’s poor UI cues of status/location, the inability to communicate ANY intentions whatsoever without VOIP (no text chat, intensely limited emotes, no map/target/location-pinging)… all this shit should be the top 20 posts on the subreddit, subject of dev tweets, youtube video headlines, etc… but it’s connection issues.I mean, fuck it feels good to jetpack around and shoot stuff, but Destiny showed us that it’s not enough. I’m 100% in it for that fun, repeatable mechanic, but in all the ways they’re loading up on bullshit that gets in the way of me repeating that fun mechanic, I’m gonna get turned off.
So true, I was just thinking today how much I hate how disjointed the UI is, not being able to see my inventory and set up when I am out and about. Yes I get the realistic idea that if I want to change the hardware on my Javelin I need to be back at the shop, but as a gamer, I want to see that sort of stuff at all times, I want to be able to mix things up when on on patrol.
Also I have to believe that Freeroam is going to actually have, you know, things to do. Are few harvests, a few mobs and an odd events, does not cut it.
Honestly with everything you have said, and with my thoughts today, I would rather wait six months, What is there is interesting but it all needs to cook more. The core gameplay is (somewhat) unique and there is a player based for it, but if the systems surrounding it are ill-conceived they do a disservice to themselves, and their idea.
@blakeavon @transientmind
it is an early build of the game so we don’t know if some of these things have already been addressed. But i assume the point of the demo was to gather information on what is working and what is not working so they can make changes before final release. pity the bugs and errors shit on the whole parade hopefully they are committed to fixing the bugs and therefore are ignoring the bug related media storm and sifting through it for more beneficial feedback like your last few posts here.
Just on changing the hardware ‘out in the field’, Warframe has it locked down in a very similar way. Its not as bad as it seems. You end up having a preferred build, like a lot of other games, and have it as your go to.
Doesn’t mean you don’t change it up, levelling in Warframe is based around trying out new suits and gear (and levelling them up as well), but you do still end up with a favourite build or two.
And Warframes mods work very similarly to Anthem’s perk’s on gear. Main difference being you can build out different mods on the same weapon, rather than be a little at the mercy of RNGesus.
Its a close enough comparison though that its worth giving a try if you haven’t. I haven’t found I miss not being able to change things up mid-mission.
I think a lot of people are comparing the game to Destiny, but from what I saw, that’s just a veneer – Warframe seems to have been a bigger influence on them.
More people have played Destiny than Warframe, so its understandable. Having played both, it felt somewhere in the middle of them to me, but was leaning towards Warframe if only for the mods v perk’s similarity.
Destiny has that as well, with Exotics synergising with skills and tactics, to create builds but it didnt feel anywhere near the setup of Warframe. And from what I’ve seen of Anthem’s gear, its not AS varied as Warframe, just as its not AS limited as Destiny.
Having said that, Warframe is very much designed to scoot through a mission as fast as possible, with very few maps designed as open world. One per planet isnt many. Destiny was the opposite, with the main game in open world, and a few ‘on rails’ areas like Lost Sectors or a couple of ships with corridors.
From that angle, Anthem felt more Destiny like to me. Which might just be the veneer as you say, but it meant it felt somewhere in between the two. I think its the best of both worlds, I just hope the gameplay is as good as both when the game launches.
@grunt: I think that’s a fair comparison. I’ve also played both and when the demo worked and I was able to play the first mission, it did feel like it was kind of a combination of both games. The loadout and everything was more Warframe, but the area design was more Destiny. And the addition of flying felt something else entirely.
I didn’t enjoy what I played of the demo that much – it wasn’t very interesting at all IMO – but at this point I don’t know if that’s because it’s not the game for me, or if it was simply not a good demo.
Actually if anything, it made me feel slightly sad that no one’s done a game in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight setting. For some reason (maybe the flight?) it kind of made me think of that.
Freeroam had the mobs, the harvesting, exploring the little towns/camps for codex stuff. Then the two bigger parts being the world events (which there were a few different types and by flying around you could basically do one every 5mins) and the dungeon/cave POI places that you went into and cleared out some enemy or helped save some good guys.
i think its a pretty good amount of things to do in freeroam. Though that will also depend on the variety of world events and mobs there are in other parts of the map, plus in general how big the map actually is (so how many dungeons and event spots there are).
Pretty sure destiny showed us that IS enough. destiny feeling so good to play is pretty much the only reason its survived its shittier times.
I don’t agree the communication issue is a fair criticism of this game alone. xbone and ps4 both come with the means to do voip and if your on PC then you probably have a few headsets lying around the house that are compatible. People just don’t want to talk to each other, which if fucking frustrating, but is more a problem with the community than the game itself. I experienced this nearly every session with Destiny when it’s ABSOLUTELY essential for raids, but even with tools like Destiny LFG posting for players with bold ‘MUST HAVE HEADSET’ you would still get jerks that cause numerous wipes by not communicating. Coordinating team play combo’s/puzzles, whatever the mechanic, in these kind of games is not going to happen via text mid battle. If you’re not prepared to VOIP in these game for strongholds/raids/whatever then pissoff to SP.
Can’t say I’ve had an issue with the UI knowing the objective or where to go. I also like the general direction and distance o meter that you get in game when trying to find items rather that just being told exactly where something is.
Agree the fort needs some work, the slow walk to get anywhere is bloody annoying and seems like a backward step from lessons learned in games like destiny i.e. being able to go to orbit(mission menu) from anywhere at any time.
Not being able to change your equipment/abilities mid mission is pretty shit as well. I found a couple times i got stuck trying different weapons and skills that they weren’t what I was expecting or didn’t suit my play style, and had to struggle to get through the rest of the mission with a crap build. Again another backwards step from common tried and tested looter mechanics. I get the idea of the forge and what they’re going for, but it’s not fun playing through a whole mission just to test a build that sucks.
I don’t get the network issues either, which don’t make sense with upnp in this day and age, this should not be a problem client side but I’m no expert by any means. Many people including myself had more success joining a group with quickplay which makes me think there is a problem syncing players from mission start, I dunno.
Apart from the above I really had quite a lot of fun playing the game, especially with the interceptor, the hook mainly being the mobility and combo mechanics. Given this was quite an early build I’m optimistic these problems will be fixed before release, if not already. But I’m pretty confused as to why they decided to release this version in the state it was, given it was labelled as a ‘demo’ and has only served to generate criticism and uncertainty. I would have preferred them to say ‘it’s not ready’ and release something that was playable a week later, but the arsehole heads of EA are probably holding them to this schedule regardless. Pretty common assumption/occurrence with releases these days. They keep shooting themselves in the feet and ignoring it’s happened.
Yeah. That Tarsis place is really pointless since it’s where most of the story takes place.
The game is really designed to be played by 4 friends who will communicate. Granted, that design falls apart when you get grouped with 3 potatoes.
You can’t blame the loading screens on Anthem. They’ve been horrible since BF3.
Never got the infinite load screens, but I did have a bit of an issue with unlocking my second javelin – got the prompt at level 11, but there was nothing at the Forge; got the prompt again at level 13, after which it actually showed up in the Forge.
Have to say, the demo confirmed for me that the game would be mechanically sound – the Storm is a lot of fun to play – but I’m seriously concerned about potential lack of endgame content. I still have no idea what to expect in terms of mission count, but the minimalist mission variety displayed in the demo combined with the idea that there’ll only be three strongholds at launch leaves me very concerned about longevity.
Totally agree with the snipers there shield regeneration was way op, as for the “griefing” people can be dicks I will play with friends or only randoms that communicate.
I did find they colour puzzle perplexing as did others I played with, but as soon as seeing the first hint it was easy.
I saw one poor ranger got so shitty with team-mates not figuring it out that he stood in one place, firing a round every second and launching abilities on cooldown into the ‘hint’ marker that shows you how to tell which colour to use.
This is EXACTLY the kind of shit you need a ping option or text chat to solve when no-one else is using VOIP.
It’s also kind of why I’m so annoyed by their insistence that VOIP is the only way to play. Because so very, very many people will not, can not, should not have to, for a variety of very valid reasons. Whether it’s lacking the hardware, disability, social anxiety, avoiding harrassment, courtesy towards co-habitants of the IRL play space, etc, etc… having the experience be unnavigable without VOIP is pretty unacceptable.
Lol I litteraly did the same thing with the colour hints, I was trying to chat but no one had a mic and they were continually changing the colours around trying to figure it out (or troll).
That’s another reason I will play with friends or find a group from the beginning, I’m on Xbox and LFG is really handy, I’ve used it a few times.
The rubber banding brought on by the lag was outlandishly terrible. To top it of once i got a few quests deep the cut scene where the dude who’s split in the 3 is about to presumably be rejoined just hard locks.
100% skipping the launch window for this thing at the very least.
I don’t want to sound smug but I knew this would happen. What is it with these studios who think it’s a good idea to do their first public load test only a month out from when the game is due to launch? What happened to running in beta for months, scaling up slowly, to ensure things like network performance/reliability and server scaling are going to work (as well as fixing other bugs of course)?
Bungie, Bethesda, Instinct (Ark/Atlas) are all guilty and have had their own sh*tshow launches in recent times.
Going to sit this one out for a few months and see what the game looks like when the dust settles.