The loading times of the anthem are a real problem

Saturday night, I connected to the new BioWare game Anthem and loaded what I thought was a mission called Finding Old Friends. Instead, I had to play a totally different mission: find old friends on Facebook asking me if Anthem Will never really charge.

Anthem, which was released early February 15 and was launched February 22, is full of bugs and problems, some of which can be fixed in the day-one fix (read: seven days). The most common problem is perhaps the loading times, which have been absurd long for many players, including myself.

After spending a number of painful loading screens on previous missions, I finally released a stopwatch for Finding Old Friends. The time between the moment you pressed the play button and the start of the game took two minutes and 24 seconds. But that was not all. By the time I entered the match, my other three teammates were already well ahead of me, so I had to look at another loading screen, the game screaming at me to lag behind and teleport me to catch up.

Then, after firing at extraterrestrials and watching a mission cinematic, I watched a loading screen appear for about three minutes before Anthem decided that I had enough and started me completely. It was about the time I decided to turn off my PC and go get some guns at Martyr Logarius.

This is a problem that BioWare says set in Friday's update, which is not very comforting for anyone offering an extra fee to access any of the subscription services. # 39; EA. Anthem a week earlier. It also makes me think of a funny anecdote.

Last January, in an article on the strong pressure that BioWare felt on Anthemand how the studio restarted and stopped Dragon Age 4 As a result, I reported that the game had been delayed from the autumn of 2018 to the beginning of 2019. I wrote that, as I had told BioWare sources, the window from autumn 2018 was "never realistic" because of AnthemRock development. Shortly after, EA confirmed this delay in an unusual way. Andrew Wilson, CEO of EA, said at a quarterly earnings call in February 2018 that it was not a "delay" because Actually, the game would have been ready – they just wanted to move it away from Battlefield V.

"No matter how it is described, we do not see it as a delay," Wilson told investors. "The date is chosen according to the balance of the portfolio, not the product readiness". the Wall Street newspaper: "The company refuses a report on the video game site" Kotaku Earlier this month, saying the change is due to the delay in development … "It's not a delay," Blade Jorgensen, EA's chief financial officer, told WSJ. "People are trying to create a story."

Now that we are in February 2019 and Anthem players have to wait for a fix on the first day to solve critical problems, these comments from the EA executive are fascinating.