BioWare’s Anthem Update 1.0.4 was by far the largest of the three client-side patches in terms of new features, fixes and changes over all. But it was met with more hostility than the previous two updates combined. Why? Let’s find out! This article, as the title suggest, is based on my initial and then more in-depth experience and impressions with the game after the changes.
I have been playing Anthem on daily basis since Early Access. I have no plans to change this. Except for when real life interferes, of course. I am also an Anthem fan, as is (hopefully) clearly visible from the content you have or will be reading on VULKK.com. With that said, let’s get into the details of what I liked and disliked and why.
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The Legendary Missions are a drag, but worth it
I am not used to missions taking me 40-ish minutes to complete. The Incursion Legendary Mission we did on Tuesday night on GM3 proved quite a challenge. Mobs were spawning in dozens, from all corners and in all sizes, shapes and forms. In the final fight we kept killing Brutes and other Legendary creatures for extra loot, but when things went too far, we focused the marked/targeted one and finished the mission.
I really enjoyed the level of challenge we got from this mission. It felt like a GM2 Stronghold on steroids. The rewards, you wonder… meh! What a disappointment. The team got three Legendaries out of this mission. None for me, sadly. In fact I had an full of purple and a few blues inventory and one or two Masterworks.
I had a lot of fun in the Legendary Mission playthrough. Not so much, because I remembered bits and pieces from the story. Not at all. I actually tend not to pay attention to the story while teamed up with my friends and chatting on Discord. That’s why I played the leveling game in Anthem mostly solo. The campaign is not very interesting, but is far less boring if you at least try to focus on what is happening and get to know the characters around you.
The amount of changes is overwhelming
I have played all four javelins. Of course, I don’t know all of them equally well yet and despite my MDPS sympathies from previous RPGs and MMOs, I have the least experience with Interceptor in Anthem. In fact, I have not played it in 1.0.4 yet.
The changes to gear, abilities performance and effects and components was a bit overwhelming on first look at the patch notes. Each one of the four classes got a lot of changes. My favorite – the Ranger – got the most attention by the looks of it. That was not an accident. Since the release of the game, the Rangers have been struggling a bit to find their sweet spot. Being an all-around balanced, but also a best-in-nothing class, the Ranger has suffered from lack of consistency and synergy between some of its abilities and builds.
Not all issues have been resolved, but the nice buffs and huge changes to how the melee effects from components behave, have turned my Ranger around. Before 1.0.4 with Power Score rating of 718 it felt a bit slow and annoying at times soloing in Freeplay on GM3 compared to what I was able to do with my lower ranked Colossus and Storm. After the update I find it a lot easier to solo things and survivability is far less of an issue. The Storm may have received a little bit of a nerf, as opposed to the massive buffs to all other javelins, but this didn’t seem to alter my gameplay much.
Problems with loot, but not the kind everyone “expected”
Update 1.0.4 released bugged when it comes to the most important part of the game – the loot. I could not believe that BioWare managed to screw up the loot system for the third time around a new game update. The first two were in favor of the player with Masterworks and Legendaries raining all around us and preceded the patches. The third messed up the loot system in two major ways. In fact I was reading in the days before the update funny comments from players expecting the loot to be buffed up unintentionally again before the patch. These new ones happened after 1.0.4, not before.
First – players were able to pick up loot for everyone. When a mob drops an item, this item is for all players, but each one gets a different rarity based on RNG. If one player picked up the item, the rest also get their items in their inventories. This was a big problem for Freeplay, because you would quickly fill up on trashy blues and purples that most of us already avoid in GM2 and GM3.
Second – the Stronghold bosses did not drop a guaranteed Masterwork. It seems that this was just a bug related to the “guaranteed” part, because I did get an orange item from the Tyrant Mine and another from Scelos. One from my team got a Legendary from the Tyrant Mine boss on tuesday, if I am not mistaken.
Both of these bugs have now been fixed with a server-side quick patch. BioWare acted fast to correct these, because they created most if not all of the negativism surrounding the release of 1.0.4.
The Elysian Caches unpleasant surprise
It became known before the release of the patch that the Stronghold Vanity Chests, also known as Elysian Caches, will not contain any armor parts for us to earn. So, naturally this is not the unpleasant surprise I am referring to.
The sad news was that over three quarters of the contents were decals, a couple of emotes and some vinyls. These form the list of 167 items you can get from the chests. Very sad, if you ask me.
Even worse is the fact that this collection is only available for a limited time – 40 days. You can only open one cache each day, because you need a key for it and the keys are rewarded for completing a daily challenge – different one each day.
This all means that if one hopes to collect all items from the collection, it would take a lot of active and serious farming on daily basis to be able to finish before the timer runs out. The positive is that no duplicates can drop. Once you obtain an item from the Elysian Caches, it will never drop for you again.
Lead Producer Ben Irving said on one of the live streams that after this collection of vanity items, there will be another one. So, if armor is what you are looking for, you can still hope to see at least some of it in the next installment of the Elysian Caches.
The Caches have a positive side. Somehow it makes me feel a little better, seeing these four things after the defeat of the boss. You know what used to bug me the most – the fact that after the Stronghold boss is dead, I didn’t get to pick up my loot manually. Especially if there’s a Legendary in it. Now that the caches are in the game, the Strongholds don’t end immediately after the boss is down and the loot stays. I never waited the timer out, so I can’t tell if it gets mailed to you in the Forge after the mission or it gets lost. Might be based on the rarity.
The Field of View is weird
What is strange is that I have used field of view in other games for years. In SWTOR I have my camera way up and away from my character. Being able to see more of the environment is a blessing. Here in Anthem we have no PvP, so it has less of an impact, but I cannot deny the usefulness of this tool.
PC players got several Field of View tools to tinker with. I tried several combinations and always ended up returning the settings to default. One of these next few days I will surely make a more serious attempt to start using the FoV. For now, though, I seem to be used to the standard camera angle and the wider ones do not much more than distort the beautiful view. I too am sad that Anthem received a gigantic graphics quality nerf compared to what we saw at E3 2017, but the game is still one if not the best looking I have ever played on a PC.
A few weird bugs I have not yet seen massively reported
On Tuesday I played fine. I used my Geforce Experience to record the gameplay and might even convert it for a video at some point, to show you what a GM3 Legendary Mission plays like, if you don’t want to check it out for yourself.
On Wednesday I had the same old bug where Anthem did not exit properly when I wanted to quit the game. I had to once again to and shut it off from the End Task panel in Windows. The weirdest thing happened earlier that same day when I launched the game. Huge areas of my screen were blurry.
The blurriness seemed to appear and disappear every few seconds and based on where I turn my camera to or where in the game I am. Turns out, the issue was caused by the same Geforce Experience In_Game overlay tool I had no problems with the previous evening for over three hours.
I did not change any parts of my hardware or software, no updates, no new drivers. The issue just decided to appear. Awesome, eh! :)
I have seen and heard many players, some friends of mine too, report that the improved thrusters life (longer flight time) and the shorter overheat duration are working in reverse for them. For me the flight time felt significantly longer than in 1.0.3. I try not to overheat much, so it was hard to tell if this part worked correctly for me. I didn’t test it much before, nor do I plan to do so now.
A weird issue I noticed with Interceptors. They seem to proc their Combos one after another in a row like mad now. Since I had not yet played mine in 1.0.4, my overview is from having an Interceptor in the team.
And… in conclusion, your Honor?
It was annoying as hell having someone else pick up my loot. It was frustrating to learn that the Elysian caches will not contain armor and are available for a very limited time.
Despite these tons of bugs and the crazy negativity steaming from all corners of the internet towards Anthem, I am enjoying the gameplay so much that it somehow covers up the many screw-ups from BioWare. It covers them well-enough for now. I am not sure if a complete close-down and reboot in the style of FF14 would be something I want. I don’t like the lack of content in Anthem. I am not a fan of the crazy high RNG factor in pretty much every aspect of the game, most of all in the gearing process. I am at the same time looking forward to spending time in Bastion each day when I get home. I work a regular job, for those of you who may not be aware of that fact. :)
If I didn’t have a great group of friends and old guildies from other games, I might not have stuck to Anthem, but we play together, we flame and trash each other, we enjoy the game together. Anthem truly is designed to be experienced as a team. Not just four random people. A team that communicates and works together. This is where the game shines the most and this is why GM3 exists. Not to prove how much of an Iron Man we all are, but to do help each other instead of having to empty a magazine on the weakest bullet-spongy mob in front of you. If you haven’t tried Anthem with friends, find some and do it. This wont change the fact that the game is struggling on pretty much every front, but it will make it so much more fun to spend time hunting your Legendaries and builds!
If you remember, I said once or twice (more like 5-6 times :P) that 1.0.4 shapes up to be the biggest update for the game so far. This 100% proved true. The size of the patch notes alone proves it. If you don’t think so and are willing to share why, I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter.
How has your experience been with Anthem after Update 1.0.4? Did it improve something for you or broke more things than it fixed?
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