Another day, another Anthem embarrassment. BioWare’s co-op shooter is crashing PS4s and devs are scrambling to make excuses for missing content, and now players have discovered the game’s core weapon system may be completely broken. One of the primary goals of Anthem is to collect ever-rarer guns in order to boost your alien-killing abilities, but it turns out the game's most basic level 1 weapon may be your best bet.
This was discovered by Redditor YeetLordSupreme – he decided to see how some of his weapons compared, by testing them out on the same enemies. Surprisingly, he found one of his level 45 Masterwork rifles actually took more shots to kill a basic Scar trooper than the level 1 defender rifle you get at the beginning of the game. The Masterwork rifle produced higher damage numbers, around 1180 per shot compared to the level 1 gun’s 286 damage, but the high-level weapon took six shots to kill the trooper, while the starter gun took only four. Various other posters in the thread have reported the same holds true for other high-level weapons. You can check out a .GIF of the phenomenon, below.
So, what the heck could be going on here? There would seem to be two possibilities – a) this is just a weird bug, or b) Anthem’s enemy scaling is tied to the level of weapon you’re using, making collecting better guns meaningless. The latter would be an absolutely baffling oversight for an RPG studio like BioWare to make.
A couple BioWare employees did weigh in on the Reddit thread, confirming the damage issue is real. Technical design director Brenon Holmes indicated it may be a problem with the balancing system Anthem uses to let low and high-level players team up together.
“We'll need to investigate this, scaling systems are supposed to allow low level players to play with high level players to be effective against high level enemies. This is not intended, something ain't right there.”
Meanwhile, Anthem community manager Andrew Johnson chalked it up to a bug specifically affecting the default gun…
“I have confirmed with the team that this is in fact a bug related specifically to the default items on a loadout in combination with higher level gear you have equipped. It’s not functioning as intended and the team is working on it for an upcoming fix.”
So yeah, this is probably just a glitch, and not BioWare completely forgetting how RPGs work. Still, it’s yet another indication Anthem was rushed out the door way too early. Wccftech’s own Alessio Palumbo took issue with Anthem’s lack of polish and content in his review of the game.
Anthem is available now on PC, Xbox One, and PS4.
