“We can’t emphasize enough how much we appreciate you staying with us. ”
BioWare general manager Casey Hudson admits that Anthem had a “rougher launch than expected,” though he’s excited for the next stage of the game.
In a frank blog post, Hudson says “It’s been a wild ride these last few weeks. On the one hand it’s been a rougher launch than expected. But then as I think back we also knew that big new online games tend to hit some kind of problem once they go live, so as much as we tested and prepared to make sure everything was ready, we were also ready for the possibility that unexpected issues might arise at launch. And we continue to be committed to responding to them.”
Hudson acknowledges that Anthem had “a degree of issues that did not reveal themselves until we were operating at the scale of millions of players,” but claims in the first few weeks following release, BioWare delivered over 200 improvements to the game through patches and live updates across stability, loot and progression.
“This is all a learning experience for us, and as we work to make sure the game is improved and perfected, we can’t emphasize enough how much we appreciate you staying with us,” said Hudson. “Especially because the next stage is where things really get exciting.” This next stage is set to include a series of world events, new story content, and new features that build towards “the Cataclysm” later this spring.
In February, BioWare released a patch that made small changes to the loot system, though players remained unhappy with the state of Anthem’s loot. Following this, BioWare revealed it would be making incremental changes to loot systems prior to bigger changes that will occur in the coming months. Most recently, BioWare adjusted Grandmaster loot drops.
Beyond loot, Anthem received a fix for issues causing PS4s to crash along with several other stability updates. Still, there are other issues with the game we’d like BioWare to fix ASAP.
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Colin Stevens is a news writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.
