Anything Could Go Wrong
The VIP demo for BioWare an EA’s Anthem gathered its fair share of attention, and not for good reasons. Some unforeseen issues left the devs scrambling as a multitude of players struggled just to get a foot in the sci-fi world. Thus, the team has rallied in preparation for the open demo due to arrive tomorrow.
Over on the BioWare blog, Chad Robertson delivered a state-of-the-demo address for any and everyone to peruse. In it, he highlights the changes and tweaks made in anticipation of an Anthem player influx. First off, the pesky bugs of last weekend have been removed. This was accomplished by the end of the weekend. In addition, the servers have been updated to handle more than the projected player influx. Nevertheless, Robertson mentions the flimsy nature of online demos.
“We’re hard at work to be ready for our public demo weekend, starting tomorrow, 2/1. This week has been focused on improving the player experience in the demo – that focus was based on our learnings and your feedback. For those of you that played last weekend, you should see significant improvement in multiple areas over last week.
“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. If you encounter this situation, we hope you’ll be patient with us and try again later. We’ll have messaging on our servers on our server status page.”
While any number of gameplay issues can crop up, as they already have, better they get addressed now than at launch. Right? The previous VIP session left a bad taste in many people’s mouths, so BioWare has one more chance to build the hype before launch. Expect updates leading up to then.
Happy gaming.
SOURCE: BioWare