Last week when Bioware and EA rolled out the VIP Anthem demo for many of us, it wasn’t a smooth experience. From the now infamous infinite load bug to the PC controls being very janky, low framerate issues and ever server connection issues. It definitely wasn’t the best way to convince many people that Anthem was in a good place. However, with the open demo starting up tomorrow, Bioware has acknowledged their mistakes with the VIP demo and have made strides to make sure the open demo won’t be a repeat.
As posted over on the official Bioware blog, another of fixes have been made, as well as a statement about the state of the demo.
Hello Anthem Community!
Thanks for being here!
We’re hard at work to be ready for our public demo weekend, starting tomorrow, 2/1. This week has been focused on improving the player experience in the demo – that focus was based on our learnings and your feedback. For those of you that played last weekend, you should see significant improvement in multiple areas over last week.
While we are confident that these changes will improve this weekend’s experience for players, we’re also cognizant that we may see recurring and new issues. Our team will again be working around the clock to deal with any problems that arise so that all players can enjoy the game. As always, you can use Answers HQ for help.
Our ongoing scale testing this week has gone well. We’re confident we are ready for the load we will see. Like last weekend, we will be prepared with more server capacity than we anticipate will be needed. However, predicting player numbers – particularly for a new game like Anthem in its first open public weekend – is very difficult. If more players decide to try the game than we anticipate, we also have systems in place to control entry rates of incoming players. This is to ensure players in the game are having uninterrupted fun and to give us time to increase capacity. If you encounter this situation, we hope you’ll be patient with us and try again later. We’ll have messaging on our servers on our server status page.
I mentioned earlier in the week that 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 did not make our demo weekends. It includes:
- Further performance Improvements
- Additional stability fixes
- Fixes to inscriptions showing up incorrectly
- Fixes to inscriptions from other Javelins being chosen
- Fixes to disappearing customization settings
- Fixes to XP gain behavior
- Audio improvements
- Improvements to PC controls, including flight and aiming
- A Social Hub: The Launch Bay
- And a few thousand more (literally)…
One addition I didn’t see was that they will let players run into the town now. I don’t know about you, but walking instead of being able to run was a pain. Glad this was reverted and now we can run with reckless abandonment.
So it would seem that they’ve taken most if not all of the feedback collected from the VIP demo. Hopefully, this means that this weekend’s demo will be a better experience. Which I really hope it will be, especially with many already writing off the full game thanks to VIP demo performing poorly. Honestly, it wasn’t that bad or at least I didn’t it was. Sure, I encountered many of issues I listed previously. Especially the PC performance – OMG, that was terrible. However, when I was able to get into the game, I enjoyed it. So much that I’ll be checking it out this weekend as well on both the PC and Xbox One. I’m looking forward to seeing many of you around!
Lastly, if you did check out the VIP demo, your progression will carry over to the open beta. All your weapons, gear and levels you previously earned. The open demo runs from February 1st to Sunday, February 3rd. It will be available for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. PlayStation Plus and Xbox Live Gold subscriptions will be required as well.
Source: Bioware
