Many players do not remember the demo of Anthem very well. However, for the developers of Anthem, it was a “considerable success,” as it is now said.
This is how the demos of Anthem went: Especially the first demo of Anthem, the “VIP” demo from January 25 to 27, was a mixed experience for many players:
- there were difficulties logging in.
- some could not play for hours
- some couldn’t play for the entire weekend.
- others could log in but were regularly kicked out.
Frustration spread.
Some even feared that the negative mood in the first hours of the demo could endanger the sales success of Anthem.
Players were especially annoyed that BioWare labeled the test a “demo” and thus raised high expectations for the quality, which were then disappointed.
“Many of the bugs have already been fixed”
This is how BioWare sees the demo: From the perspective of producer Mike Gamble, the demo was a success for BioWare. Gamble says this in an interview with BusinessInsider.
Gamble states that the demo was a valuable opportunity for Anthem to gather a lot of data and review feedback.
However, Gamble admits that many players had only mixed reactions to their experience in the demo of Anthem.
Most of the people who participated in the Anthem demo liked what they could play. However, bugs interfered with their enjoyment.
The main statement of most players was something like: “The game has potential. The core of the game, the moment-to-moment gameplay feels really good, but I worry about the bugs.”
This is what BioWare says about the bugs: They sent teams of employees to the forums to comb through player reactions. They extracted quality feedback such as “This could be better” or “I want more of this.”
And BioWare sent people to look at the bug reports to ensure that the errors would be fixed. BioWare is calm about the bugs:
- Most bugs have already been fixed
- others could not be reproduced and only became evident through the mass of players in the beta, which led them to notice the bugs and fix them
“We had enough servers”
This is why the demo was so challenging: Gamble says the problem was not that there were too few servers. They had enough servers up. However, network problems occurred in the client that caused many difficulties.
Such problems only become apparent when a really large test is conducted, and the demo was such a large test.
A lot of people played the demo of Anthem. Therefore, BioWare was able to see the bugs and then fix them so they wouldn’t appear at launch.
Overall, it was a pretty positive thing, says Gamble. The demo was quite a success in many respects.
More info from the interview:
