According to BioWare, the response to the recent Anthem demo has been very positive. Speaking with Business Insider, BioWare Lead Producer Michael Gamble talked about the feedback to the recent demo for the game, noting that it had been overwhelmingly positive, noting that the criticisms were more for technical issues that have been addressed and smoothed out in the launch build anyway.
Those issues include bugs, which attracted a lot of negative attention, as well as the server issues, which Gamble notes were diagnosed by this “at-scale test”, and have been addressed and will be absent from the launch build of the game.
“In looking and editing all the data together, the demo was pretty successful for us on a couple things,” he said. “One: The people who played the demo, more often than not, nearly universally, liked what they played. The bugs got in the way in a big way. And I think when you see the mixed sentiment coming out of people, it was usually, ‘Hey this game has legs, the foundation, the core, moment-to-moment gameplay feels solid, but I’m concerned about the bugs.’ So we got that a lot.
“And the other thing is, yes I know it was called a demo and that is what it is, but it did give us the ability to stress test a lot of the things that we otherwise would’ve seen at launch.
“There was commentary that we didn’t have enough servers up. We had enough servers up, it was just there were some networking issues built into the client of the game which caused a lot of the bugs that you saw. That stuff doesn’t really showcase itself unless you give a proper at-scale test, and the demo was certainly at scale. There were a lot of people playing it. So when you have a lot of people, you start to see those bugs come out and you can fix them so you don’t have them on launch. So, overall, it was a pretty positive thing.”
It remains to be seen how much the game’s reception after launch will be similar to the positive reception it appears to have received in the beta period, but it’s a good and encouraging indication that people seem to like the moment-to-moment gameplay loop. Hopefully, Anthem is something BioWare is actually able to pull off.
