It's hard to explain, but the weapons have zero impact and it was like this in the alpha.
I managed to get a green shotgun. The damage was nice, but zero impact feeling. Kinda kills the immersion for me.
Anyone else think the same?
Can confirm: 100% more oomph added in release.
Any talk in terms of graphics? I am not seeing anything on PC that representative of E3's demo. I wouldn't be asking since I know how development goes, but you guys did say no downgrade would occur.
Do you mean in tarsis specifically or out in the world? We captured from in game for E3, I know tarsis was the most challenging to optimize though.
Especially melee. It's so quiet on interceptor
Yeah that was a bug in mixing. Basically it was ducking itself :(
Fixed.
Tarsus. Don’t get us wrong, the graphic is still stunning and best I term of open world rpg. However, I checked the E3 demo again and compared it from the market to the forge. It’s different, there’s less people, less props, less smoke effects. It just felt more empty and silent than E3. E3 one felt like a crowded Marketplace, but the demo doesn’t.
Ah yes. Well it does get busier throughout the narrative. Maybe that will help?
Hey man, great job. Seriously. I love the shaper-related sounds, especially. Really cool stuff. Thanks for all your hard work!
Thank you!
Gonna need a lot more than that if you're trying to compete with Destiny.
Make you a deal: you keep a/b-ing the two, and we will keep turning up the oomph til you're happy :)
I am referring specifically to Tarsis so it makes sense that you guys found it challenging to optimise. Additionally I feel some elements are lacking from out in the world too.
When standing on the platform in your E3 showcase, it really looked like the world was open and you could go anywhere. Personally, in the demo I feel this sense of open space has been contracted down a more linear path. Maybe this is because the demo has limited exploration, but it does feel smaller. Some textures, lighting and other elements seem to be toned down a bit too. This is especially seen when flying through the forest in your E3 demo.
I am not going to speculate on why this has occurred, and I am sure you have seen many people voice their concerns about this exact topic, but any light that could be shed on this would help in understanding what has happened. We only know as much as you share.
There are multiple comparison videos floating around that aid my explanation. I will leave them linked if you are interested.
Edit: wording
That's a super hard to quantify thing.
First off I would probably take the hundreds of thousands of design decisions, art decisions and multiply them by all of the optimizations that were made over the past year.
So many people making so many changes, the average rate was something like a change every 3 or 4 minutes in our perforce depot.
I guess that's a crap answer, but it's my best guess.
Sure, put me on the payroll and I'd be glad to.
Well played :)
In all seriousness, since you're the audio director and I have your attention and that is pretty cool for me as an audio guy and avid gamer, I've got some comments. I'm gonna be blunt, don't mean to be rude, and I do respect the work you've put into this game. That said, FWIW from a rando on reddit:
I think there's some music in the game? Kinda bland. The title screen has a pretty cool motif that isn't being abused, far as I can tell. Have the music guy abuse it. Works for John Williams. And a certain other game in this genre. Maybe too late for release, but moving forward with new content.
Okay, I was referring to Destiny in the previous bullet point. That game represents the gold standard for sound design and mixing in this genre, as far as I'm concerned. I'm gonna use it as an example moving forward, and if there's any a/b-ing to be done, it's in your studio between Anthem and Destiny. Or in my apartment, if you decide to take me up on my offer. :)
Destiny's sound effects do have more oomph, but what really makes the sound so great to me in that game is how it gives each weapon, class, enemy, and ability such a unique character. In fact, sometimes a lack of oomph is what makes a weapon feel unique (MIDA Multitool, for instance). In Anthem, I can barely tell the difference between an SMG and an LMG, much less between an SMG and another SMG. It's possible that we simply aren't able to access in the demo (or I haven't played enough to unlock) the tier of weapons that really got your TLC and got special treatment to make their sounds stand out. It's also possible that I am making an unfair comparison as the sound design, particularly for the weapons themselves, has evolved quite a bit over the course of Destiny and the sounds became more varied over time. That said, the game is known for having weapons that feel like an extension of your character, and a large part of that, in my opinion, comes from the sound effects. Go nuts with that shit, give the arsenal a soul. That's one of the things that's gonna make or break Anthem.
There's some obvious issues with the mix and with resource allocation and prioritization. It's possible you are working with less resources than Bungie gives their sound team as my understanding is they prioritize sound more than the average studio. Maybe you have less voices to work with, fine, but you gotta do better than what's in this build, because in this build it's shit. Sounds that are a direct result of my inputs should never cut out at all and certainly not so abruptly and jarringly as they do in this demo. I'm assuming you know this already and this is being fixed or has been fixed during your final optimizations, but gonna throw it out there because it's really important. It makes the game feel really unpolished.
There's lots of people in this subreddit complaining about how quickly you overheat when flying. Of course, we'd all be able to fly around a lot more if we could monitor our heat gauge better and prevent overheating. That's on you, give us a much more clear audio cue when we are nearing that point.
Same goes for our shields.
Shooting or stepping on different surfaces doesn't seem to have much bearing on the sound effects. This is also true of different acoustic environments. Stepping on a dirt patch in a wide clearing should not sound the same as stepping on a stone in a cave. Why does a gigantic mecha tank suit running through water sound the same as Geralt of Rivia wading through the swamps of Velen? There's a tangible disconnect there for the player.
I think that's enough for now, sorry to be an ass.
Wow, what a great round of feedback.
Honestly, you're right on most points. Let me try to address each one, with a giant caveat that the build you're playing is old, and yes, I know you've heard that before, but the amount of work the audio team does on any project in the final months is pretty much required to consider this build as competitive to an existing title.
For the music, we have done a lot of work not only on the implementation but also the mix. It was not really cutting through in the demo build. I think this point has been addressed. And we abuse the crap out of a few motifs, you'll see later :)
I fully agree about character, and your further point about these being the 'stock' weapons so we need to leave room for more unique weapons is true. We have saved some of the more badass treatments for the hard to get weapons, they need to feel better. There is also a big difference in the design of the game though, and we need to make that 'character' unique with the upstream teams, so that guns have unique models, visual effects, behaviours AND sound. We will always try to support the design of the thing we are sound designing, and at least for these weapons, they are pretty similar.
Another note to add is that we are the creators of Mass Effect, and we wanted Anthem to feel closer to Battlefield than Destiny, and we need to save the super sci fi for any Mass Effect games, should they become real: both franchises need a clear separation in vision.
Audio optimization is sh*t in the build, you're 100% right. We had a few days to to do it while taking on a monumental amount of work in another branch to ship the main game. It's much better now, and we are still working on console optimization for our first few patches to make it even better.
For the overheats, shields, foot falls etc, those are all very quick mix issues. I can't actually remember where we landed on these, but they have changed since the demo so make sure to keep in touch if you find them lacking. I sincerely mean it when I say we want to keep working with the community (even self described asses :)), especially if they give a damn about audio.
So, thanks for the post - it was actually very spot on and well worded. Please check out the release build and let us know what you think!
There are some points that really stand out, like this
The difference in quality of facial animations and acting is immediately noticeable. Is there anything of that level of quality even still in the game? Matthias was about halfway in between the two extremes shown in the video which was passable but it really looks like that trailer was overselling it
Yeah there are the complete performance capture scenes, which are pretty much on par with the demo, and then the semi procedurally animated scenes, which don't have the same fidelity as performance capture (or cost/time investment).
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