The past weekend BioWare gave Origin/EA Access subscribers a chance to try out Anthem, and the demo had its share of issues – connection problems, odd glitches, and other problems were fairly rampant. Well, the second leg of the Anthem demo will be open to everyone this weekend, and BioWare has released an update that will hopefully address some of issues players have experienced. The update is 272MB on PC, 181MB on PS4, and around 300MB on Xbox One.
The official notes don’t provide much insight into what this update does, but BioWare technical director Brenon Holmes did pop up on Reddit to provide some extra details.
“We identified one major problem (a resource wasn't being released under some conditions, so the level could not unload) and prepped a fix on Saturday, tested all day Sunday/Monday and it went through certification shortly after that. There are some other fixes that should help the game recover when there are service errors (which was also sometimes presenting as 'infinite loads'). All that said […] given the narrow amount of time we had to turn around a fix, we might not have caught everything.”
In a new blog post, BioWare’s Chad Robertson promised the studio was prepared for the larger number of players who will be trying out Anthem this weekend.
“Our ongoing scale testing this week has gone well. We’re confident we are ready for the load we will see. Like last weekend, we will be prepared with more server capacity than we anticipate will be needed. However, predicting player numbers – particularly for a new game like Anthem in its first open public weekend – is very difficult. If more players decide to try the game than we anticipate, we also have systems in place to control entry rates of incoming players. This is to ensure players in the game are having uninterrupted fun and to give us time to increase capacity.”
Robertson also updated the list of changes coming to the full-release version of Anthem…
Further performance ImprovementsAdditional stability fixesFixes to inscriptions showing up incorrectlyFixes to inscriptions from other Javelins being chosenFixes to disappearing customization settingsFixes to XP gain behaviorAudio improvementsImprovements to PC controls, including flight and aimingA Social Hub: The Launch BayAnd a few thousand more (literally)…You can get more details on the changes coming to Anthem at launch, right here. I recently got a chance to go hands-on with Anthem at EA headquarters – make sure to check out my hands-on impressions and interview with Anthem producer Scylla Costa.
Anthem boosts onto PC, Xbox One, and PS4 on February 22, 2019. The second leg of the Anthem demo kicks off tomorrow (February 1) at 9am PT.