BioWare hosted a live stream on March 20 to talk about upcoming content to the game. Anthem Update 1.0.4 is coming next week and brings six Legendary Missions, Stronghold Vanity Chests, a huge amount of bug fixes, javelin buffs across the board with a lot of components changes. The full video archive from the stream is also included at the bottom of the article.
On March 20 BioWare lead system designer Chris Schmidt and community manager Jesse Anderson hosted a 50 minutes long live stream to give us a nice and detailed preview of the next client-side update to the game.
UPDATE: Patch 1.0.4 releases on Tuesday, March 26th, 2019. Patch notes have been released as well. You can find link to them at the end of this article.
Please, note, my notes below are taken directly from the live stream. They are not official patch notes. Patch notes should be available shortly before the update is ready to be downloaded and installed. You will, of course, find them here on VULKK.com as soon as they become available.
The two hosts covered a lot of topics and revealed quite a large number of changes that the studio has stuffed into the next big patch to Anthem.First and, I believe most interesting and important – the Stronghold Vanity Chests are coming! They were announced as a new feature on the previous stream a few weeks ago. Now they coming for sure with 1.0.4.
At the end of a Stronghold, after the group has defeated the final boss, four chests will spawn. Each one will contain up to four items. The contents are available for all four players from each one of the four chests. The items can be crafting materials (embers) or vanity items (exclusive to the chests, apparently). The items you loot are unique and no duplicates can be found. This means that once you find one item, you will have it in your collection and never get it again in one of these chests.
To open the chests you will need a special key. You can get one each day from one of the Daily Challenges. When you open the Cortex, you will see which one exactly will give you the key. On the top left corner of the screen, right below the Armor and Shield bars you will see a small new blue icon showing you at any given time how many keys you have.
If each player opens one chest at the end of the Stronghold, all players can get the items from all four chest with only one key per player needed.
Speaking of Strongholds, how much do you love fighting the Monitor? BioWare has been brainstorming ideas and possible solutions to prevent that phenomenon – players leaving after the second chest in The Heart of Rage. The Vanity chests are part of the solution. The other big news is that now the boss will not have capped loot chance. This means that you can get a Legendary from the final boss of each Stronghold. The chances are not really high, but at least it is possible now. The guaranteed Masterwork in higher difficulties is still there. At the highest difficulties you will get two guaranteed Grandmaster items.
Anothet tweak the devs are introducing to Strongholds queuing is that after two minutes have passed, you cannot join a Stronghold run in progress. This should improve the “Monitor issue” even more.
Most if not all of the Fog Walls have been removed to prevent the issues they are causing, especially inside Strongholds. There might be some left, but the devs are pretty sure they fixed them all.
The chests inside Strongholds have seen a significant improvement as well. You will now get more and better loot out of them. The same rules from previous updates, such as last week’s “improved GM2 and GM3 loot” change are still 100% valid.
The Forge is one of the most important tools in the whole game. BioWare has done a wonderful job of completely removing the loading screens when you enter and exit the Forge. Not just that, but you will be able to access it from anywhere in Fort Tarsis now.
The gear preview window on the right side in the Forge now displays all of your components as well, giving you a better picture of what you current build has. This, said Chris Schmidt, is the first small step towards the promised Stats Page. The stats page is something the devs are hard at work on, but there is nothing new to share on that front since the previous live stream. BioWare is very aware of the importance and high demand for such a thing to be available in the game and want to make it right.
The salvaging from inside the Vault has been improved in terms of speed. Now it happens nearly instantly as you click the button.
Consumables can now be sorted by name and rarity tier. This is one step towards clearing up the mess that is the Consumables (Sigils) tab in your Summary screen as you prepare for your next expedition. Crafting multiple sigils at once has also been noted by the devs as a high-demand feature, but it will be eventually implemented in one way or another with a later update.
The Legendary missions are landing as well with 1.0.4. Only six of them. Each day of the week one (random) mission will be available. There is no limit to how many times you can do it, however. Just like with the Contracts – once you do your own mission, you can join your friend and help them do yours. You will always get the rewards from the chests inside.
A bit more on what the Legendary Mission are – they are a buffed and scaled up in difficulty missions from the main storyline of Anthem, or as BioWare calls it – Crit Path. The Legendary version of them offers a lot tougher encounters, a chest with loot at the end and no conversations with NPCs in Fort Tarsis before or after.
A couple of the missions have cutscenes in the middle of the action. Those are the same scenes you have already watched when you were leveling up. The bad news – these scenes cannot be skipped. The good news – they are not too long and only a couple of the Legendary Missions have them.
If the normal version of that mission had a named boss at the end, the Legendary mission will feature a special creature like a Fury, Titan, Luminari – an Apex type of a (legendary tier) creature. Those, as you might remember, have higher chances for Masterwork and Legendary items to drop.
Suport for Nvidia’s DLSS technology is coming with Update 1.0.4 as well. I am thinking… could this be the answer to the question why the E3 2017 demo looked so much better than the Anthem game we are playing today? Probably not, but RTX and the newest models of video cards from Nvidia will sure buff up the already beautiful visuals of Anthem’s world, no doubt.
SLi is still marked as “coming”. They have not forgotten about it, but it is not a part of next week’s update.
A whole new exclusive to PC players Field of View tab is now available in the settings menu. From there you would be able to tweak the distance between you and the camera in several aspects – ground, under water, flying etc. If you have different settings for swimming and flying, for example, there will be a nice smooth transition that will zoom in and out of your Javelin as you go from one environment to the other.
While on the topic of swimming – the transition effect of diving into deep water and getting out of it is now much shorter and smoother. In general – a big visual improvement there for sure.
Several performance tweaks have been made. The “improved performance” is a part of each patch in each game, basically. Herein 1.0.4 you can expect to see better effects like weather, time of day changes and so on. The UI should have less of an impact on the FPS as well. D’OH!?
A large number of changes and tweaks have been made to pretty much all javelins. A few new Universal Components have been introduced in 1.0.4. Mostly the changes are buffs with only one or two nerfs to certain abilities. Jesse Anderson could not name where exactly the nerfs are located. From the words of the hosts it seems that this update will bring quite a bit of re-balancing with mostly making the Javelins stronger and better.
Oh, another improvement to your javelin (to all four of them!) is the flight time. BioWare buffed the thrusters of your javelin with about 20%. This means that you now get to fly 20% more. Also the overheat process should take approximately 20% less.
The issues with Quickplay missions have also been resolved, at least most of them. You are now less likely to join a dead mission or get stuck in an endless loop of a mission ending notification. One of the measures taken to prevent bugs like that in Quickplay is the introduction of a timer – you cannot join a mission that is in progress for over 15 minutes.
Have you noticed how when you are down and someone attempts to resurrect you, but cancels it suddenly, your Cooldown timer reverts back to the full 30 seconds? This bug is also fixed and should no longer happen.
One of the mos popular questions from the community – when will we get waypoints in Freeplay – still remains hanging, unfortunately. The devs confirmed they are aware of the requests and are looking into possibilities to increase the non-verbal communication between players, but waypoints are eventually coming later, not in 1.0.4.
A great improvement for the Interceptors would most likely be the possibility to simply keep the melee button pressed and simply turn around to smash things. This feature is not active for the Interceptor’s Ultimate ability, though. BioWare is waiting to see how this change is being accepted by the community before they apply it to the Ultimate as well.
One of the most annoying problems in the game is the HP Bug. Unfortunately, there is no confirmation that all of the reasons causing this to happen have been discovered and fixed. The team has investigated it thoroughly and are hoping to have lowered the chances for this bug to appear to a minimum, but the issue was quite complex, it seems, and they are not certain it has been 100% fixed.
The random disconnects with a failed attempt to load pilot data shortly after you start an expedition have also received a lot of attention and this bug should be happening a lot less now.
The Luck discussion is still going on. Luck remains the same stat with the same value in Update 1.0.4, but there are active discussions within the dev team what can and should be done to this stat.
Masterwork Support abilities are coming soon, but not in 1.0.4.
As it can be seen, there are quite a lot of changes planned for this next update to Anthem. The devs mentioned on the stream that the patch notes they have collected so far are spread on a 13-pages long word doc.
I did my best to recap if not everything, at least the more important changes that were talked about and previewed on tonight’s live stream. Help me out by adding more that I may have missed if you have seen the stream yourself. More notes and info will probably become available in the coming days. I will always do my best to keep myself and you up to date with what’s happening in Anthem. To make sure you aren’t missing anything, sign up to receive new posts notifications!
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