Anthem

Yeah, I will be playing for the rest of the night. Having loads of fun so I’mma keep trucking :wink:

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Ok, gonna hop back on now. Hopefully the network stuff decides to play nice :joy:

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Happy that I got a bit used to the Collossus at the end. Was a fun demo.

Once I have my PS4, then I’ll be able to play Anthem. I can wait.

The most impressive aspect in Anthem to me is movement. Really fluid and responsive.
I’m impressed.

Hope that the game does well enough so that there will be a solid number of players to play with in online matchmaking.

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Played the demo yesterday. The mechanics are satisfying to use and the style of movement really helps the game stand out, but it definitely needs another round of polish. The hub area navigation and inputs in menus are too slow, and I was getting a lot of choppiness during combat.

Yeah, the movement is definitely the biggest “secret sauce” I think for the core gameplay loop. Other games have done its primer/detonator ability combos, other games have satisfying gunplay, and other games do class differences and loot well. I genuinely can’t think of another title that has movement like Anthem’s however, and it’s such a core component of engagements and how you approach them that it makes the game feel very unique. The differences in how each javelin handles further hammers this home, with your playstyle legitimately changing based on the “weight” of your suit and how it handles.

And you can see now why I pick the Interceptor - that sucker can move! :joy:

Played a little bit of the game. Early on, Destiny and The Divison are better games.

Yeah, Interceptor rocks. I like the melee stuff, so I would be torn between Storm Javelin and Interceptor.

The weight you feel when you bump into a wall or drop from a high place is just so impressive. Never played Titanfall but the suits feel very responsive despite the weight.

As for Colossus, I did not get a chance to try out his shield (B button) to move into groups of enemies or use as a melee tool. Also, the loadout is something I need to put more thought into. Certain missions I walked around with acid bombs but those are only useful in certain situations or missions/enemies of course.

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Yeah, loadouts can be really significant as well. When the Ash Titan event was going on last night I went with a specialized build that was completely different than what I ran for most of the weekend - most of the Interceptor abilities are virtually useless against the blasted things :-p

Hm. While Destiny I think is very strong as soon as you get your basic abilities (the game has immaculate gunplay :ok_hand:t5:), I think I like Anthem more than Division. Division is a weird one for me…I liked the setting and the idea of it, but the actual gameplay was only ever so-so. Something about the way it scaled (with Guy In Red Hoodie sprinting through a hail of gunfire and grenades to maul you with a baseball bat) really rubbed me the wrong way and pulled me out of its otherwise very immersive atmosphere. I played it with friends for a few weeks, but dropped it almost instantly when I went traveling for a week and got underleveled relative to my group. The game just wasn’t fun enough for me to play it on my own.

JMy brother’s been playing it for awhile no (The beta) He’s having fun with it too.

Question @STORM179 how do support gears, support seals, support systems, etc. work? Are these passive abilities or do you need to activate them with button presses? It is possible that things (activation) work differently across Javelins but maybe you know if there is a common mechanic to activate them. I only found very generic controller layout guides online but a more detailed explanation of support activation is not specifically mentioned…

Colossus has a battle cry ( focuses enemies’ attention on him)that butdon’t think I ever used it. Even if I did, I probably didn’t realize it.
Being slow, I don’t want to attract enemies ALL the time lol

They’re active abilities, and on controller are done with LB+RB. The Colossus’ battle cry pulls aggro, but also debuffs the enemies so that they take more damage. I believe his other support option is a field that grants increased damage resistance.

Two stupid questions inbound:

This game doesn’t require any monthly fees like Final Fantasy XIV or anything like that, does it?

Were you playing alone or with friends or with strangers? The game looks interesting and I really dug the Mass Effect games, but I’m not huge on playing games with others, so while I’ve read that you technically CAN solo the entire game, it’s not overly recommended. Curious what you think if you were just playing alone or what your perspective would be.

I can only answer your second question from my own perspective.

The enemies can overwhelm you because of their large numbers and they usually require a range of tactics to be defeated. Your Javelin might not have all the answers in terms of weapons and strategies that you can apply. Therefore, I feel that I would not have been able to complete most missions without help.

Doing missions alone is still fun. At times I got separated from others and you can still overcome enemies while having a good time fighting them. But completing missions and making sure you get loot and XP is heavily tied to multiplayer, I believe.

I don’t know about the game too much, so I wouldn’t know if single player modes will exist in the final version.

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No monthly fees. And apparently all future story and content DLC will be free.

I played a mix of both. My preference is to play story stuff on my own, since if you’re grouped with randoms they’ll tend to just rush through objectives and not give you a chance to appreciate anything. For the most part (at least in the demo) everything was doable solo, even on hard.

The way Anthem handles solo play is kind of interesting though, since the default is you launch a mission and then the game matchmakes and drops others into your instance. It doesn’t drop them all the time (and in freeplay people often just go off in different directions so you’re functionally alone), but it’s enough that you should probably expect someone to be in your story mission. The final game will have a “Play Solo” option that locks your game to outside people though, and for myself I think I’ll end up using it for story content.

The game does handle the variable party numbers pretty well in my experience. If you’re by yourself then it drops the number of enemies in an engagement, and all the javelins are pretty able to take care of themselves if you know what you’re doing (I found the Ranger to be the toughest class for solo play). You can’t realistically solo a stronghold, but I was able to do everything else in the demo by myself.

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That is good to know about single player. I was keen to know how the game handles the single player experience. Got me excited.

@Iago407 the weapons in ME I always found interesting. I am happy that certain things/ ideas from ME transferred over well to Anthem.

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Yeah this all sounds really encouraging! Thanks, @STORM179 and @BoJima404. Much appreciated. I like that the enemies scale in numbers. I wonder if they’ll scale in level as well? Like if you’ve played a good long while, would you be able to solo any of the earlier strongholds, or maybe that’s not how it works…

Am pretty sure they don’t scale individual enemies’ levels within a group. If you fight two elite enemies on Normal, that group will have two elites on Hard as well. As more players get added though you might run into 3 or 4 elites though, and the group itself will be larger or there’ll be more waves. On the stronghold question I think if you were highly geared it’d maybe be possible to solo one if you played it on Normal or Easy, but the enemies seem to match your level to a certain extent so I don’t believe you’d just be one-shotting everything.

More to the point though, I don’t actually think solo’ing a stronghold would be super fun. The engagements have huge packs of enemies clearly designed for multiple players, and while you can clear areas with less than a full team (had to two-man some of the opening sections once or twice), it’s time consuming and can be frustrating. I had a lot of doubt about the devs’ mantra of “fun to play by yourself, more fun with others”, but I do actually think they’re more right than wrong on that. It’s fun to crash through enemies on your own (again, I did it a lot during the demo), but it legitimately is more entertaining to have some other people backing you up. Even with randoms, the combo system is simple and powerful enough that there’s a lot of synergy and teamwork, and it’s a lot of fun having that interplay between different javelins and sets of abilities.

I ran into this one Colossus during freeplay who had a flamethrower and was really great about following me around, and it was an absolute blast burning through a bunch of different world events. I’d start the engagement by getting my freeze aura up and locking down a bunch of mobs and the resident elite, and then this guy would come in behind me with mortars and taunts. We’d mop the weaker enemies in a flash, and then he’d start torching the higher tier enemies and I’d come behind and detonate everything with melees and my other abilities. There’s a lot of synergy between the different detonation powers, and even without mics or messaging at all I felt l like we were this unstoppable duo. :slight_smile:

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I checked out the YT channel of the guy who made the Javelin abilities’ chart you posted earlier. He has breakdown vids for each class. Probably I was least interested in Ranger but now that I’ve seen certain abilities and actual gameplay, I am actually a lot more interested to give Ranger a fair try. His Ultimate won me over :sweat_smile:

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