The new online game Anthem launched its alpha yesterday. There are some issues. But the boss warns: Talking about it already violates the NDA. There are reports about an unfortunate person who streamed Anthem and lost their Origin library for it.
On December 8th, the alpha of Anthem started and players have a strong desire to talk about it.
In the reddit for Anthem and also at our site MeinMMO, there was talk about the tests all day long. But apparently, BioWare does not want that. Actually, the conversation was supposed to take place in a secret forum, but it is buggy.
This is how the alpha went yesterday: Especially at the beginning of the testing phase, there were major technical issues getting into the servers and getting Anthem to run.
Since the alpha was online only twice for three hours yesterday, many players were trying to access the Anthem servers. They wanted to get into a javelin for the first time. And the servers had problems.
These “connection difficulties” dominated the first part of the day.
This caused trouble: Many comments say they experienced a “black screen” after which nothing further happened. A workaround circulated on MeinMMO to delete the save game. That apparently helped many.
Then it got better: By the evening, things improved and comments started coming in about how much fun Anthem is.
Then there was talk about the game, although that is actually forbidden. Because a NDA, a non-disclosure agreement, is still hanging over Anthem.
BioWare does not want public talk about Anthem
This is what BioWare says: The executive producer of Anthem, Mark Darrah, is active on Twitter and serves as a primary source of information for many details about Anthem. However, Darrah was strict yesterday.
He tweeted: “I see complaints about the connection to our servers. I want to say 2 things about that:
- This is exactly the reason for the test
- You are violating the non-disclosure agreement if you publicly talk about these issues.
There are other forums to give feedback about the alpha, Darrah warned afterwards. But apparently, this “secret forum” was also experiencing issues and was buggy.
On reddit, Darrah’s colleagues were also active. They expressed understanding to the players. They thanked the players for testing the alpha and for their patience with the problems. These very problems are the reason for conducting such tests, to analyze and work on them beforehand.
Furthermore, it is said that the alpha is designed for controllers; they are still working on the mouse and keyboard controls.
Streamer breaks NDA, gets punished
The incident occupies the players: How seriously Anthem takes the NDA can be seen in an incident that has been circulating since yesterday.
A streamer apparently streamed the alpha of Anthem despite the express prohibition and was then supposedly kicked out of the game live on camera and lost their entire Origin library. It cannot be determined from the clip whether it was actually well-stocked before.
The clip itself is causing a lot of attention. It has already over 140,000 views.
Today continues with the next alpha, more about that and the totally forbidden comments from MeinMMO readers about Anthem can be found here:
