The The Anthem Public Demo is coming very soon! Starting this Friday, February 1st and running all Weekend, BioWare invites everyone to check out their upcoming action-coop shooter. The studio claims to have a lot of the issues from the VIP Demo fixed and will be able to offer a much better player experience this time.
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The VIP Demo for Anthem had a very rocky start. Many of the major issues, sadly, continued plaguing the player experience throughout the whole Weekend last week. Game refused to launch, the whole Origin service went down at one point, console players struggled with unstable FPS performance, many were getting disconnected and/or stuck on infinite loading screen. The VIP Demo felt more like a beta test than a “try the game” event.
Round 2 is this week. The two biggest differences are the fact that this time around everyone is allowed to jump in and BioWare has also prepared a lot of fixes to ensure smooth experience. In fact, you can now pre-load the demo. It should be about 43GB in size for PC and (according to Reddit) about 23GB on consoles.
HOW CAN YOU PLAY THE ANTHEM PUBLIC DEMO
This time around you don’t need any invitation from anybody. Simply go to the Origin website or the Xbox/PSN store and search for Anthem Demo. Last week the Demo was not accessible from your Origin client. It is possible that this week it will be the same. Just make sure you do a search and once you find the page for the Anthem Demo, click on the “try the game” button available on it.
Below is a table showing you when the servers will open up for players:
[table “107” not found /]Based on your time zone you might get access on an early Saturday and/or end your adventures on the morning of Monday next week.
If you have played the Anthem VIP Demo, your progress will carry over to the Public Demo. However, nothing carries over to the full game, when it launches on February 22 (15th for Early Access).
WHAT IS IN THE ANTHEM PUBLIC DEMO
The content available is very limited. You start at level 10 with the Ranger Javelin and can progress up to level 15. At level 12 you get to unlock an additional exosuit from the other three – Storm, Interceptor and Colossus.
During the demo you can complete a couple of story-driven missions (solo or in a group) given to you by Matthias. These are side-missions and will not spoil anything major for you.
One of the end-game group content features is also available for playing through – the Tyrant Mine Stronghold. This is an instanced mission, designed for a group of at least two players. It contains several objectives and ends with a boss fight, which you may have seen already on one of the Developer live streams from last year.
Fort Tarsis is partially unlocked with a few things to check out, some conversations to have with various NPCs and not much more.
Freeplay is limited to a small portion of the full map. While outside the walls of Tarsis, you can roam freely the landscape, collect crafting materials, chase monsters (don’t kill the Grabbits, BioWare gets sad). World events in Freeplay may spawn near you. They are not marked on the map, so you will have to fly around until one appears near you.
Crafting is also teased, but is rather limited for the demo. So is the amount of customization you can do to your Javelin. The in-game store is not available in the demo. You will get a ton of loot from your adventures, though. You can check out both the Appearance and Loadouts tabs in the Forge, located right next to the exit point in Fort Tarsis.
There are hints at something special happening on Sunday afternoon. None of the official faces from BioWare has step up to reveal more than the teaser “stay tuned”. Speculations vary from new end-game in-game content feature unlocked to an extended end-time for the Public Demo. You just have to be paying close attention to VULKK.com’s new posts and/or the in-game news table, I guess :)
Note, if you have played last week the VIP Demo, there will be an update for you to download before you can jump into the Public Demo this weekend. In my case I had to download ~300 MB through Origin. I expect the update to be of the same size or smaller on consoles.
WHAT FIXES HAS BIOWARE PREPARED FOR THE PUBLIC DEMO
In a blog post, following the VIP Demo ending, BioWare shared their enthusiasm and gratitude for the feedback, provided by the community. The studio acknowledged that not everything went as planned (to out it lightly).
Here is a list of a few things (among many others) that should be fixed either for the Public Demo or, if not possible, at least for the full release:
- Weapons with 0% infusions
- Weapons with bonus that applies to different Javelins
- Plot integrity / party gather issues
- Changes to Javelin unlock behavior
- Fixes for losing XP at end of some expeditions
- Performance Improvements
- Additional stability fixes
- A Social Hub: The Launch Bay
- The ability to run in Fort Tarsis
We’re doing more scale testing this week, particularly to be ready for the opening rush of players on Friday, and to verify we’ve got “infinite load” problems improved, the latter of which was a primary frustration for many players.
We’ve also been preparing for many weeks for our full launch. That version of the game already has a long list of things that are already fixed that won’t make the public demo weekend.
Source ► Chad Robertson – BioWare head of Live Service
Out of all these I want to single out the ability to run in Fort Tarsis. BioWare made us walk inside the protective walls, because the studio wanted to make things feel more humane there for the player. Outside we are a super-hero, an iron-man in a very powerful suit, able to fly and shoot all kinds of weapons and stuff. Inside, however, they wanted to give us the impression that we are a human after all. Moving slow (wlaking) was, apparently, the way they thought this would happen.
They were wrong. The community was very disappointed at the slow pace of movement in the main base. Fort Tarsis may at some point serve as a social hub, but in the demo it was mostly locked, conversations, stores and NPCs were not available or not willing to talk to us. This made it nothing more than a mission hub – go in, pick up next mission, go out.The devs have taken a note and although it may not be available in the public demo, the full release of the game will allow you to run/sprint (move faster) inside Fort Tarsis, which is a great quality of life improvement, in my opinion.
TIPS FOR HOW TO HAVE FUN IN THE ANTHEM PUBLIC DEMO
These are not tips of how to play the game. It is too early for me to make this type of content. Instead I will give you a few hints and suggestions of what to do and how to pace your time with the demo, so you get to check out everything and have fun!
- Lower the sensitivity of your mouse through the in-game menus for flight, turning and swimming. I personally found my sweet spot to be 11%.
- Do the story missions from Matthias solo. Set the difficulty as low as you need to. Experience the world and lore of Anthem through them. Then jump into groups.
- You cannot reset your progress with the demo and start over. Or at least I haven’t found a way. D’OH!
- If you are new to these kinds of games (multiplayer, co-op, shooter, looter etc), run The Tyrant Mine in Easy mode the first time, then ramp up the difficulty. The Stronghold is about 40-ish minutes long (based on the experience of the players.
- If you get low FPS spikes on PC, try switching from Full Screen to Windowed and back. It helped me when my game would start at 25 FPS and refuse to play properly.
- Get to know the Appearance and Loadouts tabs. Spend some money on altering your outfit. Not much is available in the demo, but will make you stand out from the rest of your team.
- Get out on Freeplay and learn how to fly. It may seem very awkward at first, but gets real easy and real fun fast!
If you have troubles launching or playing the game, head over to my Anthem Demo: Problems and Fixes post to find if your issue has a solution or a workaround.
Anthem is available for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox Pro. It comes in two editions – Standard and Legion of Dawn. The game’s official launch is on February 22 with an early start and a trial 10-hour test coming a week earlier.
Are you considering Anthem? Have you tried it last week? What did you think? Let me know in the comments below this article! :)
WHAT ARE THE ANTHEM PC SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
The game is built on the third edition of DICE’s famous Frostbite engine. The VIP Demo had some troubles with FPS drops and constant low FPS on consoles, but BioWare is expected to have a fix for that for the Public Demo and full release.
Below you can find the official minimum and recommended PC System requirements
Anthem minimum requirements
- OS: 64-bit Windows 10
- CPU: Intel Core i5 3570 or AMD FX-6350
- RAM: 8 GB System Memory
- GPU: NVIDIA GTX 760, AMD Radeon 7970 / R9280X
- GPU RAM: 2 GB Video Memory
- HARD DRIVE: At least 50 GB of free space
- DIRECTX: DirectX 11
Anthem Recommended Requirements
- OS: 64-bit Windows 10
- CPU: Intel Core i7-4790 3.6GHz or AMD Ryzen 3 1300X 3.5 GHz
- RAM: 16 GB System Memory
- GPU: NVIDIA GTX 1060/ RTX 2060, AMD RX 480
- GPU RAM: 4 GB Video Memory
- HARD DRIVE: At least 50 GB of free space
- DIRECTX: DirectX 11
