hi！ Do you remember this February, a sci-fi style shooter created by Ea's most prestigious studio as Ea's last salvation hope? No, no, no, this time I want to talk about the "apex heroes" music, or want to talk about, 3 months after the release, "Anthem" original update promise has been realized how much?
Players for the "Anthem" complex feelings, with "the dialectical unity of love and hate" to describe very appropriately, since the release, bugs, dark correction rate, employee exposure of various internal problems, a few days ago there were major producers left the team of the news, negative news can be said to carry the "Anthem" The first three months of growth.
But don't look at the current negative evaluation of "Hymn" in the player group, these are the people who only had "I can't play "Holy Song" and I will die" when I saw the demo, if one day "Hymn" becomes fun, I believe they will definitely become the most loyal "Holy Sect Army".
The good news is that now we can finally see a little bit of "The Anthem is so fragrant!" ", but under the cover of disparaging "Anthem" is still the trend of the times, this praise is not at all insignificant. In order to look more objectively at the efforts made in the past 3 months of raw softness, I have also been rewarded with a long-lost pilot mech to Reward Tacitus, and the following is my summary of the months of "Anthem" and a little vision of how it will be reversed in the embarrassing situation after that.
First of all, debunk a rumor, the stronghold battle and open world exploration in the game can be done in seconds, and many foreign friends can be arranged, and the game has been completely cold, and the reader friends who want to see jokes can also retreat.
Entering the game, fighting monsters, researching new equipment, and as a gear-driven brushing network tour, the simple framework of "Anthem" allowed me to spend 1 afternoon and one night to roughly figure out where I had spent my energy in the past few months.
The optimization of the frame number of the picture is good!
Optimization, continuous optimization, function optimization, experience optimization, with these 4 optimizations to describe the efforts of the past 3 months is very objective and reasonable. In fact, I am personally very satisfied with the optimization results of "Anthem" so far, and how to solve the problem of slowing down the game rhythm due to the long reading disk:
1. There is no need to read the plate in and out of the furnace.
2. Start the mission directly from anywhere in Tacitus.
3. You can directly collect the commission on the exploration interface
4. The task settlement interface can enter the exploration interface without reading the disk to start a new task
5. In Exploration/Stronghold Battle/Free mode, you can access the Furnace to change equipment at any time
The above 5 points of update bring the biggest feeling is that the pace of the game is faster, before from entering the game to starting the task at least to go through the login reading disk once - the furnace to change equipment in and out of the reading disk twice - into the task reading disk once, these 4 reading disks basically cost the player nearly 10 minutes of time, not to mention that after playing a task to repeat the above process once, if you change the wrong equipment it takes longer. Now you only need to enter the task reading disk once - the task settlement read the disk once - enter the cycle of the task reading disk once to complete multiple tasks, but the efficiency of the reading disk, the current "Anthem" should have reached the limit of optimization.
Although this has been exchanged for the complete abandonment of the functions of Tassburg as the main city, basically limited to the main line, the players who have completed the main line of clearance can completely eliminate any interaction with NPCs in Tacitus, and log on to the game every day to directly immerse themselves in a ruthless brushing machine.
Before the release, the official for the subsequent development of this service-oriented game has released an expected 90-day update preview, a better open world composition, a new plot, a more difficult copy, and of course, the optimization of the game's minutiae experience. Unfortunately, this update plan is no longer visible on the official website.
At that time, the cake was no longer found, and now only the repair patch documentation for subsequent updates can be found
After all, according to this update plan, we are now about to see the development of a new plot "Heavenly Disaster", but the fact is that a few days ago, The Soft opened a new stronghold battle "Collapse Land", of course, in the past 3 months, the only one that can be called a completely substantive update "Collapse Land" experience is naturally a very critical part of this time.
In fact, for a major function is to let players brush better equipment and then challenge higher difficulty dungeons, "Collapsed Lands" can only be considered decent. The decryption challenge at the beginning is easy to disgust the player at first sight; there are no new monsters except for the boss; most of the time it is just a turn of the game, the level design and the boss do not make people feel a bright place, the low difficulty is all the way flat, the high difficulty is basically no difficulty in carefully walking; the only thing that can be praised is the final boss battle, the sea is divided into a circular battlefield, and the amazing scenery of the decisive battle place is opened up on the bottom of the sea, although it is quickly replaced by the aesthetic fatigue of repeated brushing.
There is no special equipment output, the process is not short, and there will always be teammates who will not be decrypted to slow down the time, so after experiencing a few "collapsed places", I returned to the "Furious Heart" of the stronghold battle that was brainlessly cut all the way, to see if the equipment explosion rate that has been changed overtly and covertly can make me, an African, more gold.
Unfortunately, although the major forums are filled with a treasure chest of 3-4 gold, and then ecstatic "burst rate has really been changed" seals are shipped, but I am a mech full of auxiliary luck, brushed the Grandmaster 2 difficulty "Furious Heart" for almost a day, stunned that I have not seen a gold, most of the equipment affixes brushed are not even as good as the old one 2 months ago.
People are up to 3 gold for any time, why don't I have anything!?
The results of a day of hard work to brush zero improvement should be very deadly for an equipment-driven game, maybe continue to brush and eventually everyone can graduate with a strong affix in gold, but if it is not idle egg pain or true love, why should I consume the few hours of game time left every day as a social animal in "Anthem"?
Soon I said goodbye to Tacitus Again, closed the game, and as a player who had been livery for 200 hours, helped Sheng Soft think about the future of "Anthem". Unless some of the existing core systems are almost completely torn down and redone, the subsequent updates will not be able to play a role in the snow, which is my final conclusion.
Obviously, if an equipment-driven game doesn't even satisfy the player with equipment and values, other efforts may only become useless. To take a very simple example, the damage bonus of the mech in the Anthem is determined by the average armor of the equipment, in order to open up the gap between the gold, orange and ordinary equipment, the soft even greatly increased the value of the gold and orange suits in the subsequent modifications.
Auxiliary equipment does not carry less skills, and the damage will become lower, which makes the player choose?
But the problem is here, the current version of the auxiliary equipment column, the highest grade is only 38 purple clothes, that is to say, with a purple suit to pull down the average load, etc. will lead to damage or even not to wear, from the current soft update situation, they also do not feel that there is anything wrong with this, before the appearance of the gold suit of auxiliary equipment, players are destined to eat a lot of on this small mechanism.
So why is it that the soft is not willing to use the knife on any kind of numerical system that can see that something is wrong with any person with normal logical thinking? Maybe it's not unwillingness, but it's really not possible. This pot should be distributed to Ea's ancestral "Frost Engine", as the engine developed by Ea's studio Dice specifically for the "Battlefield" series, frost engine's performance on the Battlefield series can be described as a god optimization, but why is the effect so poor in other games?
In the battlefield, it is not only possible to eat the configuration but also solves the "face control" problem of many players, why the Frost Engine is not suitable for "Anthem"
Compared with the rich and malleable engines like Unreal 4, Frost's functionality is much more limited, essentially developed for small and medium-sized battlefield FPS such as battlefield. In the case of "Hymn", the art material and sound source naturally have to be completely reproduced; the complex equipment system and numerical calculations must also be rewritten to implement, and even the function of changing equipment from the main city of Tacitus into the furnace needs to be done from scratch, which is why the first version of the furnace has to read the progress; not to mention that the chant has a huge open world waiting to be built.
In the past 3 months, the soft employees involved in the exposure have complained more than once about the difficulty of the "Frost Engine", and the equipment and numerical system in "Anthem" have been written into the deepest part of the game as the underlying code, and the difficulty of modification is no less than demolishing and rebuilding the first floor of a completed building.
However, the "Anthem" game experience has been greatly optimized, and now that it has received some praise, the adjustment of the equipment system is imminent. The next few months may be the beginning of the real challenge of "Anthem" and raw softness, not because I bought a game for a lot of money so that I want to force it to be fun to "get back the ticket price", I just think that a game that is so good at first glance should have a better ending, rather than becoming a victim of the businessman's pursuit of profit and the company's internal factional struggle.