The issues with BioWare’s Anthem continue: one player couldn’t pick up a legendary drop item they earned after 80 hours of grinding for it. The ambitious MMORPG released earlier this year with a premise that seemed promising: players take on the role of Freelancers who must stop the evil Dominion from getting its hands on an item called the Anthem of Creation.
Anthem released to a lot of negative player feedback, as well as bad reviews, making it the worst-reviewed game in BioWare’s history. Players continue to report bugs and game-breaking glitches, with new issues seeming to pop up every day since the game’s release. While Updates have been steadily streamed out by BioWare, they often introduce new bugs as often as they fix pre-existing ones, a source of frustration for players that is beginning to boil over.
Related: Users Are Shredding Anthem on Reddit And Game Updates Aren’t Helping
The bugs don’t seem to be going away anytime soon, though. According to a post on Reddit by Darthchrisshaw, another problem has emerged: after 80 hours of gameplay, he could not pick up a legendary drop earned within the game. The item was trapped behind a force field, preventing him from picking it up, as seen in the following video:
Anthem lead producer Ben Irving apologized explained that BioWare will release a patch to address the problem. He also told players what to do if it happens again before the patch comes out:
“Until the patch lands, if you end up in this situation bring up your map and hold down LS (Left Stick) on the controller or Y on your keyboard, this will respawn you and should put you on the correct side of the fog wall. I have yet to see this fail to respawn you in the correct location.
Again I want to reinforce none of this is an excuse and I truly do apologize that we weren’t able to correct this prior to launch or until now. I can only promise we will do better by you and the community in the future and try to win your trust back.”
What isn’t clear is if Darthchrisshaw will ever actually receive the item he earned. On top of players not getting items they have earned, there were also reports of Anthem crashing PlayStation 4 consoles, forcing the systems to restart. The issue became so prevalent that some of the PS4 players who complained ended up getting refunds from Sony. Although BioWare did fix the problem, it’s unlikely that those players who received refunds would be willing to purchase the game again.
It does seem like BioWare is taking player feedback seriously and wants to make things right by Anthem, but it also appears that publisher EA rushed the title through and forced BioWare to release it too early before it was completely ready. This is the kind of behavior the publisher is known for, and many players would even go so far as to say that they believe EA has ruined BioWare’s reputation as a highly-respected game developer. Although BioWare released a heartfelt letter to fans, the damage continues to be done as the studio takes more criticism from Anthem players who expected better from it.
