Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Anthem gets a new update. The changes in the new update all look promising. Then, upon closer inspection, not all of the improvements are working as intended, and a few things that had previously been fixed are now busted again.
Anthem’s been there before and after today’s 1.04 update it’s back there again, at least temporarily. Elysian chests are the biggest addition. They now sit at the end of every Stronghold mission.
Any player that has an Elysian key, earned by completing daily challenges, gets to open one and get the special vanity items inside, including new decals, fabrics, and emotes.
Unfortunately, the introduction of this new reward also appears to have bugged the existing ones, with players, including myself, finding that completing a Stronghold mission no longer guarantees at least one Masterwork drop as it was intended to.
On Twitter the game’s community manager, Jesse Anderson, wrote that BioWare is currently investigating this issue, in addition to another strange bug: other players being able to pick up your loot for you. Normally, loot is instanced with the player and invisible to everyone else. If they walk over it, nothing happens.
As players grind through Anthem’s end-game, such as it exists, they’ve filled up on everything but the rarest loot, and now, as Kotaku covered yesterday, actively avoid picking up anything of lesser value because it’s more of a pain to deal with than it’s worth.
In a master stroke of irony, those same players are now being bombarded with notifications for useless loot as their party members accidently pick it up instead.
There are also problems with some of the new vanity items not immediately appearing in the customisation menu after missions. My first Elysian treasure was the Warning Markings decal, but I had to close out of the game and restart it, something suggested by Anderson on Twitter, before the decal would show up as an option I could select.
It doesn’t help that these issues come right after the game’s lead producer, Ben Irving, clarified over the weekend that new armour sets, something players have been desperate for since launch, wouldn’t be part of the update.
It’s a shame, especially because the patch as a whole is a step in the right direction. In addition to the new Elysian chests, 1.04 also adds the option to replay story missions on Grandmaster difficulties, helping to cut down on the monotony of spending hours in freeplay or running the same stronghold missions over and over.
It’s also now possible to access the Forge where players spec out their Javelins from anywhere in Fort Tarsis or the launch bay, and without having to go through a loading screen.
The patch also buffs a ton of abilities and Javelin components as well as adding five new ones, including Bloodlust which nearly doubles melee damage for 10 seconds after every enemy that’s killed with a melee attack. In the running for most overlooked change of all is the one BioWare lists last: making it possible to now hover underwater. It’s important to find joy in life’s little pleasures, especially for Anthem players.
Comments
13 responses to “Anthem’s New Update Adds More Loot, More Bugs”
Congrats to them for fixing an absolutely horrendous and very intentional design choice that should never have made it past the “Well how about we do this…” stage.
Just play Warframe. Issue solved.
LOL what a shitshow. Not planning on playing this anytime soon (or ever).
The bugs are super disappointing ones, too. There’s the fact that you get LESS loot now (or at the very least, worse loot), the intended increase to flight time/reduced overheating has actually had the opposite result (shorter flight time, increased overheating), colossus suits were previously glitching out into stuttering stunlocking only when hit by freeze status effects but now that behaviour has extended to more status effects and occasionally player actions like reloading or activating an ultimate, the cosmetics only showing up after reconnecting, keys sometimes not being awarded after completion of daily challenges, and bugs they said would be fixed haven’t been (eg: dialogue indicators for NPCs who refuse to talk, occasional UI/actual health decrease bugs).
This isn’t even including the design decisions such as tying the elysian chests to strongholds specifically, restricting players to that content specifically, or the limiting of keys to daily activities per player, with chests only opened by keys, meaning that with strongholds being required as part of a daily, there’s many reasons why people might not actually be able to open any chests at all at the end, and nothing to stop leechers from queueing into strongholds endlessly to continue getting the benefits of chests being opened without contributing keys themselves – defeating the purpose of trying to limit how often people can get cosmetic rewards.
I just… I don’t understand. I don’t understand how they keep fucking up on testing, how they keep failing to anticipate player behaviour, how they keep refusing to acknowledge underlying problems let alone make any attempt to solve them, or why they’re SO FUCKING STUBBORN in their refusal to learn the lessons learned MANY TIMES OVER ALREADY by the rest of the fucking industry. Why? WHY?
WHY WON’T YOU LET ME LOVE YOU, BIOWARE?
Hey I’m trying to find stuff on the lower flight time etc. Got a link? They are really dropping the ball on this whole game.
Nope, just a shitload of complaint threads flooding the subreddit.
Did see an interesting theory: it’s possible that 1.0.3 made it rain all the time, meaning constant cooled effect inflating an unrealstic flight time, but 1.0.4 fixed that, so people are noticing longer flight times than they recorded in 1.0.3, but shorter than previous patches.
(Edit: Other way around, duh. Shorter flight times in 1.0.4 than in 1.0.3, but longer than pre-1.0.3.)
Cool theory! Man I wanted this game to be so much better. It’s like they lived in a bubble for 6 years and had no idea other games existed in the similar genre the whole time.
Check out The Division 2.
It not easy for me to admit when a live-service nails it. But Ubisoft did it.
I’ve been playing Div1 for the moment, staying clear of Div2 til its teething troubles are over, but from what I’ve seen… it hasn’t had any? Some minor bugs fixed within a week of launch?
Yeah it’s been nothing short of impressive for an Ubisoft game.
The day I learnt skills were broken, it was fixed by the time I got home from work and all without an update.
Most of the problems I’ve seen have been fleeting or irrelevant to the gameplay experience.
Floating/vibrating paint cans, the loading icon stuck at 10% (but still loading) etc
The worst I’ve heard is matchmaking is apparently a little broken on PS4 (which doesn’t bother me because I gotta do the story solo like D1)
Even the setting is impressive, they’ve come along way in creating a believable modern city world since say Watchdogs.
(That shit was exactly what it looked like, someone’s first try at cities)
Pretty good so far! 😀
What a terribly bad joke this game is.
Patch has been pretty good except for the stronghold guaranteed loot drop bug. I had 3 legendaries drop today. Usually only see 1 a day. The javelin buffs all around have been fantastic as many poor components and abilities are much better.