So I bought Anthem for like, $10 - wanted to see what all the fuss was about since the trailers looked so incredibly rad, but the press seemed to be so very bad. I'm not really one for any kind of multiplayer, but figured the sale price was worth it just to check things out.
First takeaway: Flying around the tutorial level was worth the money all on it's own! The trailers did not lie! BioWare really made the experience of jumping off a mountain, free-falling for a few seconds before firing your jetpack to fly through a canyon, and then diving underwater to explore a network of sunken tunnels leading to ancient ruins - all over the course of ten seconds - so viscerally satisfying that it was worth building a game around. As much as I prefer a story-driven single-player campaign with a big helping of world exploration, it turns-out that Anthem's third-person four-player online raid shooter is also an impressively well-written and well-acted story-driven campaign that takes place over a reasonably large map and can be played almost entirely solo! 25~30 hours later and I'm sitting at level 20 after having saved the world (after completing a bunch of side-quests) and I only had to tackle one multiplayer Stronghold and one quick multiplayer Freeplay session to advance the story. It was kind of annoying that the game kept encouraging me to play with other people, but it was only a mild inconvenience. I also tried a Cataclysm and a Storm Gate just to see what I was missing, and they were fine; still not into multiplayer though.
I hear the game was buggy at launch, the loot was terrible, and the load-times were excruciating - but that all seems to have been remedied at this point. I only experienced two crashes and didn't lose anything; loot kept me consistently competitive and I even ended-up with a couple of Masterwork and Legendary weapons that made life much easier; and load-times were long but bearable from my spinning HDD - felt about the same as DOOM (2016). I did consider buying a bigger SSD for Anthem, just to see how much it would help load-times though; performance too, since streaming the world seemed to have my frame-rates dipping from 60FPS down to 45FPS... But then I kinda finished the game and moved-on to others. I would come back for some more world-building though! Also, did Fort Tarsis remind anyone else of Deus Ex: Invisible War? I actually liked Invisible War... Maybe I'm broken.
Before moving-on to the other games I've been playing, I'd like to talk about my recent EA support experience. For context, I created a Hotmail address in the '90s with a stupid username because I was a teenager, and I still have it. I graduated to a non-Hotmail address maybe a few years later, and used that one to create my Steam and Origin accounts - the latter also with a silly username. I've been pretty settled on Gmail for a while now, but I keep the other ones going for back-ups, old accounts, and the like.
Anyway, I decided that with Anthem being multiplayer and all, I wanted to change that silly Origin username. My Origin account was hacked and sold a few years ago - I don't think two-factor authentication was an option when I signed-up, and I neglected to enable it after EA recovered my account... My bad. Trying to edit any account details, however, sent a verification e-mail to my old e-mail address, which it turns-out had been deleted due to inactivity and the provider was unable to recover the address - it looks like they no longer offer the domain I was using... Cool. Again, my bad. So I contacted EA and asked them to change the e-mail address associated with my account to my Gmail address. They said they couldn't because an account already existed for that e-mail address. Turns-out I created a separate Origin account for an XBOX 360 game some 15 years ago. Third strike against me; way to go, me. For convenience, I asked them to change it to my Hotmail address so that I could just verify the codes and clear-up all the confusion myself, but it turns-out someone else had associated that Hotmail address with a PSN account that isn't mine. Great. The best part about all of this is that the EA support chat was only working in Internet Explorer. Not sure what that was about, but it works in Chrome now even though I changed nothing on my end.
Regardless, I reclaimed both the Gmail- and Hotmail-associated Origin accounts by using the verification codes - proving that they work with these addresses - and had EA change the main account over to my old University alumni e-mail address for the time being... But the alumni address wasn't receiving the verification codes either. Neither the university's nor the alumni office's support team could help me. It's hosted by Gmail. EA told me to take it up with Gmail. Finally, after nearly four weeks of e-mails directing me to chats and chats directing me to e-mails that were not monitored (EA support actually sent me an e-mail saying nobody was checking the address I was directed to), one support technician offering to make the changes for me instead of fixing the verification issue, and EA asking me for even more e-mail addresses (five over four providers isn't enough!?), I got my main Gmail address associated with my main Origin account. The process up to this point was so ridiculous... And it's still not receiving the verification codes; the same address that was receiving them when it was associated with my other Origin account. It really looks like the primary e-mail address field of the Origin account is the problem, but EA refuses to acknowledge that. Coool! Anyway, we added the alumni address as the secondary address and it's suddenly receiving the verification codes it couldn't before! Still can't enable two-factor authentication because it only e-mails the primary e-mail address, but at least I can change my settings all by myself again!
*phew*
I finally got around to Quantum Break, and it's pretty and well-made and fun and the story's cool and one scene toward the end kind of almost ruins all of it and the interactive movie thing was alright even thought didn't really elevate the experience. By the time the game was over, I was satisfied but just didn't feel as engaged as I did with Max Payne or Alan Wake.
Wolfenstein II was fun, but I lost interest once I finished the main campaign; no huntung for collectibles, no Uberkommandant missions, no secret ending, no DLC... Maybe one day, but yeah, I think I might be over that franchise. The story was pretty fucking insane though, and it kinda worked. Still, not touching Youngblood or Cyberpilot any time soon.
Starting Dishonored 2; immediately more engaging, though going for a no-kill run right off the bat does have me save-scumming a little ;)
Also, GTX card prices seem to have dropped and a 1660 Super is hanging-around $380 CDN after taxes... So I'm still pretty happy with my $260 1070 :)
