Anthem: 10 MASSIVE Fan Complaints Bioware Can't Ignore

Oh Bioware, where did it all go wrong? Once one of the industry's most beloved developers, the Mass Effect creator has quickly become renowned for disappointments and incurring internet wrath.

Such was the case with Mass Effect 3, Mass Effect Andromeda, and now Anthem. Minus the critically acclaimed Dragon Age: Inquisition, it's been a solid seven years of the see-saw tipping from the good side to the bad, and now Bioware is the internet's favourite punching bag.

Often such anger is misdirected and unwarranted, but in the case of Anthem, it's mostly deserved. Bioware and EA blatantly misrepresented Anthem prior to launch, both in E3 trailers and subsequent developer diaries.

After years, Anthem launched to fans hungry for the successor to Destiny 2. What they got, however, was a head-scratching mess of bugs, missing content, and bizarre design choices. Anthem certainly has been the biggest talking point of 2019 (thus far), but as quickly as Bioware fixes one issue, two new ones pop up, and the state of the game since launch has simply not been good enough. Bioware can turn the ship around, but it needs an answer for these problems first.

One of the biggest problems surrounding Anthem post-launch was the unfortunate news that it was allegedly bricking PS4s.

The issue began with posts across Reddit, Twitter, and the Anthem forum page, with a number of users claiming that the game crashed their consoles. Not just knocking you back to the "Send A Report" page on PS4 either - it was actually shutting the console down the hard way. Then came reports from that Anthem had actually bricked consoles. Crashed them to the point where they wouldn't even turn back on. Dead.

A few days after the reports of bricked consoles surfaced, EA and Bioware released a statement saying that, based on internal investigations, there was no evidence that Anthem had actually broken any machines. It went on to release a patch that seemingly fixed the issue of PS4s crashing, but there have been plenty of subsequent connection problems.

Things have been a lot smoother on the Xbox One side of things. There have been no reports of consoles being bricked or hard-crashing, however there remains the persistent issue of rest mode. While rest-mode on PS4 works just fine, on Xbox One the stand-by mode fundamentally fails, and anytime players attempt to boot the game up from this state, they're kicked back to connection screens and menus.

It's clear that Bioware needs to continue working on Anthem on PS4 and Xbox One, improving basic system functionality, stability, and operation. An AAA $60 game in 2019 cannot run this poorly.