Anthem can be pre-loaded on PC and Xbox One, ahead of tomorrow's initial launch reserved to Origin Access and EA Access subscribers, with servers opening at 9 AM Central Time.
Speaking this week with Business Insider, BioWare Lead Producer Michael Gamble revealed that feedback on the recent Anthem demo was 'nearly universally' positive with the exception of the bugs, and most of those have been fixed anyway for the launch build, which is why the developers are optimistic.
In looking and editing all the data together, the demo was pretty successful for us on a couple things. One: The people who played the demo, more often than not, nearly universally, liked what they played. The bugs got in the way in a big way. And I think when you see the mixed sentiment coming out of people, it was usually, "Hey this game has legs, the foundation, the core, moment-to-moment gameplay feels solid, but I'm concerned about the bugs." So we got that a lot.
And the other thing is, yes I know it was called a demo and that is what it is, but it did give us the ability to stress test a lot of the things that we otherwise would've seen at launch.
There was commentary that we didn't have enough servers up. We had enough servers up, it was just there were some networking issues built into the client of the game which caused a lot of the bugs that you saw. That stuff doesn't really showcase itself unless you give a proper at-scale test, and the demo was certainly at scale. There were a lot of people playing it. So when you have a lot of people, you start to see those bugs come out and you can fix them so you don't have them on launch.
So, overall, it was a pretty positive thing. And a lot of the bugs that we did see, we felt good about because they were either, A) Already fixed, or B) Things that we had not reproduced consistently on our side and now we have a pretty good reproduction case for, and then we can fix it.
So I think overall it felt pretty good for us.
Are you going to pre-order Anthem after playing the demo or will you wait for reviews? In other Anthem news, the live action short made by Neill Blomkamp has been released and you can find it here.
