Anthem

[Qazimod]

I didn't go for any of the private tests but my first time attempting the open demo I got in first time and completed a mission without any hiccups. It didn't take me too long to get into another one either. The game itself? It seems like fairly standard objective based shooty gameplay, the enemies feel a bit spongey (spongy?) and not very reactive, sprinting into flight is pretty satisfying though... The graphics look good enough even on the ageing PS4, but there's some bloody aggressive motion blur going on at times and my fan was getting loud after a while. The objectives are standard fare - go here, talk to this guy, go there, shoot that. It's fun, but I might just wait for full game impressions as it's probably the kind of thing that gets better after weeks of play.

[Illyria]

Errr, so, got two connection errors already, and it runs worse for me than last week. Thanks EA  

[RubberJohnny]

Had a crash that wiped my progress, and this really doesn't handle alt-tabbing out well, aside from that surprisingly smooth sailing. 

 

Played the mission and the Stronghold - impressions wise, I'm not going to say anything that people haven't said before tbh: looks good, love the verticality in the world, flying is proper satisfying, shooting is "fine", powers are better, UI is baffling and horrid, hub has bad performance and feels dead, low expectations for writing and quest design. I think I'd have fun with this game and wouldn't regret my pre-order, if I had one, but I doubt it'll have much longevity as a live service thing, especially given how bad EA are with their post-launch support these days. 

[jonamok]

Vindaloo by Fat Les was a better anthem than this.

[Flub]

I'm concerned about freeroam play to be honest. Even with the small slice of world we have available everyone is off doing their own thing. Imagine when the entire map is open. Also world events need to really let you know when they're kicking off. Rather than when you just get close to them. I flew around the map for 10 minutes without finding anything to do. That's a pretty piss poor way to sell the game to someone.

 

At least in Destiny there are more people per area and it's very dynamic. This system is more like Warframe and in Warframe's open world if you're not going in there to do a specific bounty you're just gathering and have switched it to solo anyway so the four player limit doesn't matter.

 

I'm betting a common complaint after launch is that random freeroam groups never have enough people in the same place to do events.

[MDY]

Crashed out twice so far in the first mission..  (Standard PS4) Frame rate feels all over the place..

[Shimmyhill]

1 hour ago, Qazimod said:

I didn't go for any of the private tests but my first time attempting the open demo I got in first time and completed a mission without any hiccups. It didn't take me too long to get into another one either. The game itself? It seems like fairly standard objective based shooty gameplay, the enemies feel a bit spongey (spongy?) and not very reactive, sprinting into flight is pretty satisfying though... The graphics look good enough even on the ageing PS4, but there's some bloody aggressive motion blur going on at times and my fan was getting loud after a while. The objectives are standard fare - go here, talk to this guy, go there, shoot that. It's fun, but I might just wait for full game impressions as it's probably the kind of thing that gets better after weeks of play.

 

Turn off the motion blur, it’s hideous. 

[MDY]

Erm.. Just had to quit after joining a quickplay mission.. Got to the Manifold room with 3 colored symbols on the gates.. One of the gates was missing the prompt to let you cycle through the colours.. 

[Qazimod]

Aaaah, thankyou @Shimmyhill - I didn't know I had a choice.

 

Also re. "infinite loading screens" - I just tried running the Elgato capture through this and it turns out that the progress bar at the top of the loading screen is out of view on my TV  Is there a display option I'm missing (PS4)?

[Fusty Gusset]

No huge issues on PC so far, I’ve missed this all week.

[moosegrinder]

It's solid as fuck but there just isn't much to do in the free roam. I've had more fun with the Colossus tonight than I did all last weekend. It's got so much potential but I think it's going to suffer like Battlefield suffered and needs more time. I guess we'll see when the reviews hit.

[Dave White]

Massive improvement since last week. The giant spider crab boss was actually giving a bit of what for back and the amount of enemies was quite impressive.  And we really had to work well together to finish it on hard. 

 

Sniper rifles are a tad more useful with a much nicer bang and impact. Not Destiny levels of oomph but better. 

 

I only seem seem to be able to select one mission? Anyone else got that?

 

the loot award acceptance is stupid, it takes half an hour to grab everything into your inventory at the end. 

 

Im kind of intrigued and a lot warmer to this than last weekend.  I can see the promise but it’s still a tad underdone somewhat but have enjoyed it. 

 

Pre order back on....... maybe 

 

 

[MDY]

Crashed or kicked for a 4th time now.. Done. 

[dreamylittledream]

Hmmmm so the absence of any form of tutorial and the frankly baffling UI doesnt make the best impression. 

 

The performance on a stock Xbox is frankly awful, Christ knows what the frame rate is on the first person hub section but it was kind of reminding me of Freescape games

 

Shooting seems kind of okay, and once I figured out how to fly that works alright.

 

But god, it’s pretty dire so far

[Kiwi Cake]

Had a good night on this and I've decided I like it.

[amc]

It's definitely fun and absolutely beautiful. Although my lowly 1060 seems to be struggling even after lowering all settings to high. I was playing on ultra last week with very acceptable performance that seemed to be close to 60fps (but in reality was probably lower but freesync was giving me the smoother and higher impression). What's the One X like? I'd much rather play this on the big screen than my PC monitor but have the PC all nice and snug hooked up in the other room and can't be arsed to unplug it. So yeah I might actually go for this, especially if it doesn't run like ass on the One X (or the Pro if it weirdly runs better)

 

*EDIT Something's not right here, just plonked it back to Ultra and it's smooth as butter, a definite 60fps or close to...but the graphical fidelity looks to be too rough for Ultra, maybe that's what was going on last week and how a 1060 6gb i5 was able to get high frames on Ultra..the dash was/is lying. It looks to be more of a medium setting but everything is set to Ultra, even have HBAO on full. Off to scour the web. 

[Curtis]

I played enough last week (solo, private) to know i'd enjoy the full product. Tonight i tried all the other Javelins, and already i can see some wonderful synergy cracking off if you have a decent team and the right mix-up. Problem is, everyone on my friends list (aka the fence) has been reading the stories about this shit-show of a demo, and its only putting them off even more. 

I see it like this; i'll play it non-stop for 3 weeks, by then the end-game grind will have revealed itself. If it feels worthwhile, i'll continue, but The Division 2 will be upon us, and i cannot believe after all the turmoil the OG Division went through, they'll release a sequel and do a Destiny 2 (i.e. do a full reset and forget every lesson learnt).

So yeah, this will be an entertaining stop-gap, which i imagine they'll expand over time, and if the core gameplay is still satisfying in the long term, i can see it being a regular insertion to my dusty, noisy, jet-engine PS4 Pro. 

[Kiwi Cake]

7 hours ago, amc said:

It's definitely fun and absolutely beautiful. Although my lowly 1060 seems to be struggling even after lowering all settings to high. I was playing on ultra last week with very acceptable performance that seemed to be close to 60fps (but in reality was probably lower but freesync was giving me the smoother and higher impression). What's the One X like? I'd much rather play this on the big screen than my PC monitor but have the PC all nice and snug hooked up in the other room and can't be arsed to unplug it. So yeah I might actually go for this, especially if it doesn't run like ass on the One X (or the Pro if it weirdly runs better)

 

*EDIT Something's not right here, just plonked it back to Ultra and it's smooth as butter, a definite 60fps or close to...but the graphical fidelity looks to be too rough for Ultra, maybe that's what was going on last week and how a 1060 6gb i5 was able to get high frames on Ultra..the dash was/is lying. It looks to be more of a medium setting but everything is set to Ultra, even have HBAO on full. Off to scour the web. 

 

Not sure if this demo has improved anything but performance was noticeably worse for me on the X last week. Unfortunately I didn't get to play much on account of the loading bug, but when it worked the inconsistent framerate made the game feel a lot worse to play. PC wise I'm also on a 1060/i5 and have had surprisingly solid performance on "Ultra", which also made me suspicious!

 

 

[Kayin Amoh]

This certainly has the makings of a fun looter shooter, but the bugs are phenomenally frequent. I've been to the tyrant boss several times and found ourselves suddenly doing much worse in the latter half of the fight. This is because - ha ha! - it's warped our team members outside the boss arena for some reason and they can't get back in. 

 

It's amazing how quickly you can go from 'I'm having a fun time!' to 'this is one of the most broken things I've ever seen'.

[Mega CD]

When the game works, it's brilliant, when the bugs and frame rate hits kick in, it is bad. Hope that the final code is more stable.

This is a cracker of a game when it works Its like Lost Planet II meets Destiny 

[wretcherd]

I've had a few crashes, one of them was getting stuck in a weapon-changing animation loop, which was fine until I tried firing my gun.

 

Flying about is fun, especially aiming straight at the ground in the waterfall area.

 

I like that enemy shields are no joke, you need a concerted effort to take them down, and threading in the hovering and boosting about to get out of trouble makes combat kinetic.

 

Apart from the times I was playing it like any third person shooter and suddenly remembered "oh yeah I can fly!".

[moosegrinder]

I like how the weakspots aren't massively telegraphed with a neon sign. That's something I totally missed last weekend and was probably the bullet sponge effect I was hating. 

[RubberJohnny]

I found consistently if you're backing up and melee attack, instead of attacking the enemy in front of you, you do a melee attack behind you, which wastes it and feels weird.

[Uncle Mike]

I think my findings so far are:

• Having massive loading screens separating areas of the open world is bad.
• Having missions load you into one side of a loading screen, only to immediately have to go to the other side of the load, then back again, is bad.
• Not being able to do anything during the loading screen is bad (this is probably more a Destiny comparison, where you can do all your dismantling, tweaking of loadout, slotting in your new gear during loading, which really helps to mask it.)
• When you're down, you can't spectate others, which is bad and boring.
• A lack of minimap and no clear "player down" indicator mean it's harder to co-ordinate than it could be.
• Although it's pretty clear when someone's setup a Freeze primer (mostly) a lot of the combo system doesn't have clear visual indicators, which brings me to:
• Having everything matchmade is good, but randoms don't always know what they're doing, or they quit, or they grief. Clearer visual and audio cues would really help co-ordinate with people not on comms.
• The enemy AI is pretty minimal.
• The UI is awful.
• Only being able to change your gear at the base is very limiting.
• The Ranger Ultimate feels weak.

 

Having said all that, the world is pretty. I don't know if it's placebo or not, but performance seemed better. Flying round is cool. When it does come together, the prime/detonate combo system is pretty cool for taking down bigger enemies quickly. I quite want to try a different Javelin out, as I only put time into the Ranger so far.

 

You obviously can't judge the single player story stuff from this demo, so I'll leave that out. And it's impossible to know if the weedy guns are just a function of low-level loot, or because they're not really the primary tools. But then, if they're not, I don't quite understand what I'm grinding them for.

 

In summary, unconvinced so far.

[Sumire]

I only just tried this on the Xbox One X, and although I think it has potential, it just runs really badly unfortunately.

[moosegrinder]

1 minute ago, Sumire said:

I only just tried this on the Xbox One X, and although I think it has potential, it just runs really badly unfortunately.

 

Yeah it runs shockingly.

[Gorf King]

In the full game, I think enemies who've been primed have a little icon over their heads to indicate this. And there are indicators on the left side of the screen telling you which direction you team mates are. So there are already a fair few changes to the in-combat UI/HUD, though I don't expect the general menu system to be any better at launch than it is here.

 

On the weapons thing, obviously getting better weapons helps, as does knowing the right tool for the job (and Javelin) and supporting it with mods, when you get them. I have some decent ones now, and I'd say the game is more or less 50/50 abilities and weapons. It's just that abilities (and combos) are the key, with weapons being used strategically (like a weakspot snipe when a boss is vulnerable) or in a supportive role (like the shottie on an Interceptor after the initial melee strike detonator's been done). It's just juggling between the two damage systems really. Which is kind of what you do in Mass Effect as well.

 

I'm still quite hopeful it'll be a decent game, if you like this sort of game. I think my main concern is to hit the harder content you'll really need a four, because randos really don't tend to synchronise well - one weak member not on comms and the game becomes vastly harder at high levels because you need everyone doing the right thing at the right time in the right place. Well, that and the terrible networking and loading screen bollocks interrupting gameplay.

[Dave White]

Is it just me or is there only one mission on this demo and free roam?

 

Thats all I can see and select

[Garibaldi]

Dipped into this last night and not too impressed. I’m not big on these sorts of games, but enjoyed the Division because the atmosphere/locale was enough to draw me in, so I assumed getting to be Iron Man might do the same here. Having access to only one javelin from the off is a big mistake in a two day demo, and after roaming about a bit I think harsh language would’ve been more effective than my default weapon. There were other, secondary weapons I could’ve chosen too, but I had no idea until later, despite having looked over the forge, because the game explains nothing. It doesn’t even explain the fucking controls! Flew about a bit, which was fun, but the more interesting looking areas have been labelled out of bounds, which just gave me a pretty bland hub to explore. Didn’t try any of the primary missions, as I was playing solo. Had disconnect errors and quit after the third one. 

 

Was watching a YouTube stream where someone else was freeroaming, and they were commenting on how empty the world seems next to that exciting E3 slice where you had animals fighting animals, enemies engaging you from a greater range, etc. I’m getting rather a Fallout 76 feel from it in turns of ‘fuck, not really done but we have to hit this date. Put it out!’ 

 

 

[Janski]

Not had any loading problems this weekend and had a go of the Tyrant mine Stronghold. After a few false starts it seemed to be into clicking place; I like that the combat seems more about skills than weapons.

 

Did a few encounters, got some rare gear and got to the Spider Boss but  then it crashed back to PS dashboard. It doesn't seem to have saved the loot or XP either