Anthem Wishlist

Anthem Wishlist

Yesterday’s post and the follow up reactions that continue to flow through the twitter thread that I started a few days ago have been interesting.  Firstly I have no problem if someone simply checks out of the game because it isn’t for them.  This emerging genre of “MMO Lite” games just isn’t for everyone.  If you didn’t like Destiny, Division, Warframe or even Monster Hunter World in the way its interaction worked…  then you are not likely going to like Anthem either.  Of those I am not a fan of Warframe at all really, and was luke warm towards Division…  but Destiny and Monster Hunter World were strongly in my wheelhouse.  My commentary in general has been about folks going out of their way to express their anger over the game.  The thing is… the game has flaws.  They are not big enough flaws to keep me from enjoying it, but there are definitely flaws there.

This morning I thought I would take a bit and go through some of the things that I wish the game did differently.  As such this post is more or less going to be my wish list for Anthem.  Be warned this is likely going to be a train of thought post with little organization.  As is often the case with unorganized content…  this is going to be in a bullet list form.  May god have mercy on your souls.

  • Mini Map – The world of Anthem is very intricate with full usage of lots of different levels of verticality…  as such flying from point A to point B is never that clear and as such I find myself opening my map often trying to figure out where the hell I am going.  One of two things happens… either I overheat and go crashing down wherever I happen to be hovering because I could not be bothered to get to safety before doing so…  or I get sniped by a Scar.  I would love some form of a mini map that we can toggle on and use for navigation purposes.
  • Waypoints – In a similar vein…  the game does a good job of giving you waypoints on missions to reach the objective with icons that show where you should turn next to get there.  I want the ability to set my own waypoint in the world and have this same advisement system turned on to direct me there.
  • World Events Markers – I want to see all active world events at all times.  The world is too big for me to efficiently stumble across an event, and god forbid if you are doing it on harder difficulty modes with randomly matched people…  that you will get any help in doing said event you magically stumbled across.  Guidance towards events would be beneficial.
  • Strider Redeploy – There are many different Striders out in the wilds…  there should be the ability to redeploy at a Strider closer to the action.  I mean it happens if you die, but there should be a more formal system that allows you to pick a new strider and respawn closer to wherever a World Event is happening.
  • Corpse Waypoint – One of the most frustrating experiences I have had is you are working on a World Event…  and then you die…  and you have no clue where the World Event was happening in relation to the Strider that you just spawned in on.  Would be cool if you got a bonus of some sort for going back to the point of your death and taking down whatever mob killed you.
  • Larger Freeplay – I ultimately expected Freeplay to be more like Patrols in Destiny, where you are randomly matched with whoever else happens to be in that area and as you move between sub zones…  you get a different population of players.  The problem is right now when you go into Freeplay, you are matched with 3 other players…  who are often times on completely different ends of the map making the challenge of actually completing anything very difficult unless you bring your own four player team.  Essentially Freeplay needs two modes…  matched with 4 players and a subzone matching system like Destiny Patrols.
  • Better Hit Advisement – right now there are often times when I am being hit by something but I have no clue by what.  Last night there was a moment when I thought I was being hit by something in front of me… but in reality a shotgunner had snuck up behind me and was hitting me in the back.  I would like to see them implement a sort of “your damage came from this direction” system.
  • Better Quickplay Incentivization – Quickplay should be something that is incentivized better than it actually is.  Right now there are problems with about half of the Quickplay sessions being in some form of a bugged state, and that is something I am sure they are working on.  I’ve seen reddit commentary from Devs stating as much.  What concerns me more however is that after you have finished leveling… there really doesn’t seem to be much of a reason for playing Quickplay especially once you are completely decked out in level 36 purples.  At the end of a match for Quickplaying in… you are pretty much guaranteed two pieces of loot and I have NEVER seen these be a Masterwork.  Joining Quickplay should be considered a positive thing for the community given that you are filling a slot in a group that was otherwise empty…  more often than not because someone abandoned a mission.  There should be some reasonable reward for doing this thing that helps out the community as a whole.
  • Better Grandmaster+ Incentivization – Right now Grandmaster rank doesn’t necessarily feel like it is respectful of my time.  There is a big jump from Hard to Grandmaster and while I am struggling along…  I am also feeling like I don’t have an awful lot to show for my effort.  Other than weapons… which you can get in Hard mode and below I have 1 Component and 4 abilities that are all from the same slot…  none of which really help me to be more efficient in Grandmaster so that I have a hope in hell of moving at some point to Grandmaster 2.  I also feel like I have a better shot at loot in running World Events than doing QuickPlay or Strongholds, given that anything that drops other than orange gear is largely useless to a player once they have reached Grandmaster.  I hope that the Anthem team takes the post to heart that Travis Day from Diablo 3 loot 2.0 fame made on the Reddit.
  • Mass Dismantle System – This goes hand in hand with a comment I made above… that once you reach a certain point in the game any drops that are below purple are completely useless to the player… and honestly MOST purple drops are completely useless.  The current dismantling system is cumbersome and what we really need is a version of the Diablo 3 Smith system where you can say “dismantle all of a specific color” so I could grind all whites, greens, blues…  sift through the purples manually…  or once I am fully orange grind them as well.  This needs to exist in all three places where you can do this functionality…  on the post mission screen, the vault screen and the forge screen.  Similarly there needs to be a way to flag items as “Do Not Dismantle” and then let you grind everything else without that status.
  • General UI Tweaks – Anthem is a game without a great UI.  Many things are cumbersome or obtuse.  I think there just needs to be a general pass rethinking how the players interact with the UI and improving its responsiveness.  Additionally especially when Dismantling there are times when the UI just bugs out and you have to exit and get all the way back into the menu structure to get it responding again.  UI/UX needs a lot of love here,  because as a long time developer myself… I can look past it, but it will stop a lot of users straight in their tracks.
  • Ease Transition Between Hard and Grandmaster – This is mostly important because of the stinginess of the loot system right now…  means I feel like I am struggling transitioning between Hard and Grandmaster and that there is nothing much that I can do to ease that transition.  The feeling I get is like when you can first step into Torment 1 in a Diablo Season… and you can kill stuff…  but you aren’t doing it efficiently and nowhere near fast enough to push through a Greater Rift in time.  This gets eased a bit as you get better loot to drop, but in Diablo… you can always drop down a tier to make it more efficient while still getting the same loot.  There is a barrier between Hard and Grandmaster in that you simply cannot get the items you actually need to progress…  namely components and abilities to drop at a Masterwork level in anything below Grandmaster 1.  So I feel stuck, in that I have limited ways for me to actually better my situation.  I will grind through this barrier, but a lot of people will not and will get hung up here.  Essentially the only difference between the itemization of these tiers should be the frequency of drops.  So Hard…  Masterworks should be super infrequent but you do have the ability to get anything from the pool… just super rarely.  Grandmaster 1… Masterworks should be more plentiful, on a similar loot timer to Diablo 3… if one has not dropped in X minutes then drop one while Legendaries should be super rare.  Grandmaster 2…  timer to Masterwork lowers and the frequency of Legendaries increases as well.  Grandmaster 3…  hot and cold Masterworks running out of the Tap and again ratcheting up that chance of seeing a Legendary.  I don’t think you ever want Legendaries to feel common…  because I can see them like Diablo to continue adding tiers of difficulty on top of GM3.

I am certain the second I stop this list I will think of another dozen items that should have gone on it.  I may add those throughout the course of the day as I am off doing other things.  However like I said…  I am more than happy to admit that Anthem is not a game without flaws.  However I view it as a work in progress as ALL MMOs are…  since they have a live patching cycle that comes along and tweaks things.  I am sure all of the systems that are in the game now were put in with the best of intentions, but seeing how users interact with your creation often times makes you view it in a completely different light.  I learned this as a developer years ago, and you have to be willing to react to the situation post release and be willing to admit you were wrong about some of those cool features that you really liked in the development cycle.

Was there anything I should have put on this list?  Chime in with comments to let me know what I missed.

Anthem Hatred

Anthem Hatred

The last week or so have been really weird for me personally, because of the current climate surrounding Anthem.  It is making me realize how apparently vastly different my tastes in games are from that of the zeitgeist. I mean I have known for years that I am not even vaguely close to the norm for society as a whole.  However I didn’t realize that I was apparently so out of band for how the rest of my chosen community… gamers… felt about games.

See the problem at hand is I love Anthem.  It delivers on a player fantasy of controlling a mech suit and going through interesting combat with anime missiles while allowing me to roam around through this meticulously detailed and rich world with my friends while doing it.  That is a strong player fantasy for me… someone who grew up loving Robotech with all of my heart. Enough that I convinced my parents to take me to a Robotech convention as a kid.

However right now this game is reaping a heap of negative sentiments everywhere I turn.  The worst seem to be coming from YouTubers who are practically branding the game a serial killer and known toddler juggler.  I may be more on the defensive than I should be, because I do love this game… and I also loved another game that these so called “Influencers” completely destroyed.

Now we go back to the whole… my tastes seem to be out of band with the rest of society commentary.  I LOVED Mass Effect Andromeda. I thought it was a great game, and one that did not warrant the ton of bullshit memes that were dropped upon it.  Within a few days of the launch of the game a series of patches came through and fixed most of the issues that were so heavily meme’d on the internet.

However the influencer crew make their money by getting those early clicks within the first few days of the launch of a game.  If you listen to any major YouTuber that is willing to talk shop, they will tell you that they make the majority of their money in the two weeks surrounding the launch of a game.  This is so much the case that often times if a copyright flag happens after that two weeks… they don’t even bother contesting it because the potential money has already been made.

So in order to get those eyeballs they rely the human nature that we are way more likely to watch something that aligns to our hatred of something…  than we are to watch something that either goes against our feelings or aligns to the joy of a thing. This outrage economy has lead us to have people like Angry Joe…  that make a string of videos about them being angry about video games. That is the thing he does… he gets pissed off about things and dresses up in costumes while being pissed off about things.  If you want to be pissed off about something, then bam he has an entire channel full of it.

I’ve been engaging in this on Twitter over the last few days and I feel like…  this isn’t even about Anthem itself. There is a ball of rage about how things are working right now in the video game industry and it seems to have perched on top of this title.  People hate Electronic Arts with the deep burning hatred of a million suns. People are mad at Bioware and feeling wronged by Mass Effect 3’s ending, Mass Effect Andromeda and daring to make a game that is different from the traditional Bioware fare.  People are angry at the live services model and games being released in an incremental drip rather than one big single player epic for that $60… not to mention that the actual price of buying all of the content in most games tends to be something closer to $150 rather than that $60 price point we have stuck in our mind.

People are angry about the perceived lack of value in games right now, however… that $60 we paid in 2000 was worth just shy of 90 of our 2019 dollars.  Because we seem completely affixed with religious fervor to never paying more than 60 dollars for a product or preferably paying significantly less than that…  what we get as a result is missing features or in the case of Anthem a game that is being delivered incrementally as a live service throughout the course of the year.

Over the course of the last 10 days I have spent right at 80 hours playing Anthem and have loved the time spent.  The weekends skew those numbers… but I have legitimately put in almost 8 hours a day in this game. I loved the story and the characters I encountered.  I loved all of the little nuance and detail to the world and the moment to moment feel of the player fantasy of controlling a mech suit in a way that no other game has really delivered on.  So as a result it is hard to watch this thing that I have spent so much time enjoying being ripped asunder by the same people who did a similar hit job on Andromeda.

Which again leads me back to the original statement.  My tastes are apparently completely out of band for the tastes of gamers in general.  So not only am I not representative of the population as a whole, which I learned over and over growing up.  I am also not apparently representative of this adopted community of gamers. So basically.. Like often is the case I feel alone in a crowd of folks who feel massively different than I do.  So in the end… I am going to keep enjoying the game and hoping for the best… and putting on blinders to the people who are hating on it.

This week has been a weird one…  but I will move past it because I have a game that I am enjoying playing.  The folks that are bashing Anthem just have some hatred for something they are apparently not enjoying.  I will gladly take a game I am having fun with over being told I shouldn’t be enjoying it. Maybe at some point in the future my tastes will once again align to the Zeitgeist but for the time being I am going to latch onto Anthem with both arms and hold tight because this game takes me back to running around the living room with a Cyclone and an Invid Fighter having elaborate mech battles.

Normal Masterworks

This morning I thought I would do something a little different and try some show and tell.  One of the data sets that I have been thus far unable to find is a list of all of the Masterworks that can drop in the sub Grandmaster 1 modes.  The devs talked about this during one of the streams but there is a partial loot pool available before you enter the Grandmaster difficulty levels.  There are a few Masterwork weapons that can drop in Easy, Normal and Hard difficulties as a sort of way to help ease your progression into the Grandmaster tiers.  However no one specifically calls out what these Masterworks actually are.  Seeing that GM1 drops you off the deep end into a pool that includes all of the the rest of the weapons, components and inscriptions…  if you are wanting a specific weapon that CAN drop at lower tiers…  it will be by virtue of a smaller loot pool much easier to get in a lower mode.

I apparently have been extremely lucky, combined with the fact that I have been running content with friends nowhere near my level range…  which means we are choosing Normal difficulty instead of something more difficult.  I am still seeing a significant number of Masterworks dropping for me personally, and as such have pieces together most of the weapons available in this loot pool.  I have a sneaking feeling that there is an Auto Cannon and a Grenade Launcher available as well… but seeing as I do not main Colossus I have yet to see either of these.  I have however been spending a lot more time on the Colossus in an attempt to get one of them to drop so I can complete the list.  Additionally this will let you see what I mean by there is some Diablo DNA in the way this loot works.

Assault Rifle – Elemental Rage

Normal Masterworks

I got my first masterworks to drop sub level cap… and this combined with the next one that I will talk about dropped at the same time.  Unfortunately I have not earned a higher light version of this weapon, but I have been working on unlocking the pattern so I can craft one.  The perk of this weapon is Veteran’s Furor which cause a buff to stack anytime you hit an elite enemy.  When you gain a stack of 20 there is a audible sound queue to let you know that your buff is completely primed…  at which point your next elemental damage ability deals 5% bonus damage per stack so more than likely you are going to use this for 100% bonus damage when you hit a full stack.  Other than that it is based off the Defender Assault Rifle which is my favorite of the available options and full auto with manageable recoil.

Heavy Pistol – Avenging Herald

Normal Masterworks

This was the second weapon I got and ever since have gotten a lot more of them.  This is considered to be one of the stronger early Masterworks because of the fact that its perk can stack.  The perk Raptor’s Deadeye gives you 200% increased weapon damage while hovering, and this is a suit level ability and not specific to this weapon.  So that means you can throw this is your second slot and utilize it with whatever primary weapon you have equipped.  Additionally the buff stacks if you are dual wielding these, which could be extremely brutal for storm builds given that the weapon has a shockingly long effective range for a pistol.

Light Machine Gun -Artinia’s Gambit

Normal Masterworks

This was the third weapon that I got to drop, and honestly end up using it more than pretty much anything else because I tend to favor LMG/Assault Rifles greatly.  If I spent the time to earn the Elemental Rage pattern, this would probably get tossed in the vault because it is not necessarily particularly good.  The perk doesn’t have a name…  but it causes a detonation to occur when you reload the weapon.  However it specifically calls out “immediate area” which should instead be read as point blank range.  This is useful if I am feeling froggy and decide to melee something as a ranger which primes the target… and gives me a fast way of detonating said target while I am still up close and personal.  However for other uses it isn’t terribly effective.  If it would detonate the whatever I was targetting…  then it would be a really great option for detonatorless builds.

Machine Pistol – Unending Battle

Normal Masterworks

Prior to getting this weapon I had never really used a Machine Pistol in part because it didn’t seem like an archetype that I really was super interested in.  However this is effectively a submachinegun from any other game… up close melt machine that does nonsensical damage but you have to pretty much be at point blank range.  The perk is called Gladiator’s Wrath and feeds into this role for the weapon because hitting an enemy in point-blank range increases weapon and melee damage by 110% for 5 seconds.  It would have been better if it was some sort of a stacking buff, but I will take it and it really does make this weapon helpful for clearing anything that runs up on you.

Sniper Rifle – Wyvern Blitz

Normal Masterworks

This is the weapon I have used the absolute least, but pairs nicely with the whole hovering makes weapons awesome trope.  Snipers are just not my thing, but having used this a little bit it seems perfectly reasonable.  Pending you can hit a weak point…  doing so while hovering increases the damage by 40%…  and if you have an Avenging Herald in the second slot…  it gains another 200%.  I really can’t say much since I don’t use this style of weapon much… it seemed adequate for sniping things.

Shotgun – Papa Pump

Normal Masterworks

Papa Pump has probably the best name of any of the weapons I have encountered and is an upgraded version of the Scattershot…  which is a weapon that really wants to be fired in close range.  One of the interesting things about this weapon is that reloading gives it a 100% boost in damage… and this stacks to 2.  What this means in practice is if you are in a situation where you can pump this twice in a row as it were you can get a 200% boost for 15 seconds which is probably more than enough time to unload one entire round of shots.  I have not been able to use it much but this seems like it is going to be a boss melt weapon, or at the very least taking out elite and legendary mobs.  It helps that it looks as cool as it sounds.

Marskman Rifle – Thunderbolt of Yvenia

Normal Masterworks

While the “Scout” is not exactly my favorite of the Marksman Rifles it does a reasonable job of representing the closest thing we have to the Destiny Scout rifle in Anthem.  The unnamed perk is that the weapon has a 33% chance to strike the mob with electrical damage…  that does way more than the actual shot.  In practice this just nukes whatever you are targeting whenever the proc occurs, and it also has a side effect of completely wrecking mob shields.  This was the very last weapon that I saw drop in the list I am showing off today, but it has immediately become my secondary weapon because my preferred build out for Ranger is a LMG/Assault in slot one and a Marksman in slot two giving me a lot of flexibility of engagement range.  So far I am super happy with how this weapon feels.

Just to summarize what I said before.  All seven of these weapons can drop in any of the game modes, including Easy if you get lucky enough to see a Masterwork drop there.  I am not really sure if there is any rhyme or reason about how Masterworks drop, but I have tended to see them most off from boss encounters and treasure chests at the end of world events.  My first pair of Masterworks dropped from the encounter that asks you to fight three titans at the same time… and each one dropped from a different titan.  I’ve been fairly lucky in that I am getting a couple a night regardless of what I happen to be doing.  Where I am less lucky is in actually getting components and abilities to drop while doing Grandmaster 1 content.  Regardless I thought I would give the players who might be reading my blog and have yet to hit the level cap a preview of what they can get from the lower level modes of the game.

AggroChat #241 – Sexy Bad Choices

Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra and Thalen

aggrochat241

This week we are still down a Grace but also down a Tamrielo because work travel happens.  Tonight we start the show with a discussion of Civilization VI and its new Gathering Storm expansion.  This introduces the fearful Hockey Rink building and Mountie fielding Canadian Army… and also natural disasters.  Then we get into a discussion about Anthem and our feelings about the release. I think as a whole we are largely enjoying it, but even at that we talk a bit about the problems the game is having.

Topics Discussed:

  • Civilization VI
    • Gathering Storm Expansion
  • Anthem
    • What we are enjoying
    • What we problems exist