Yes, Anthem’s day one patch has indeed addressed many of the performance issues and oddities found in the console versions of the game, but despite undeniable improvements and optimisations, there’s the sense that BioWare’s latest epic still requires work. Meanwhile, if you’re playing on PC, be prepared for an experience that really pushes your hardware, but undeniably provides impressive enhancements over the console experience. But does Anthem on any system deliver an experience anything like that E3 reveal? The answer is no, but it’s still a visually arresting game.
Our first port of call after our demo testing was the Xbox build, which arrived in the hands of users ahead of its PlayStation counterpart courtesy of EA Access. We started looking at this as soon as it was available, but quickly decided to hold fire on publishing any conclusions – not only was the experience highly buggy, but in some respects, performance was actually worse than the VIP demo. The experience wasn’t really improved much from what we’d sampled before, screen-tearing was introduced (unseen in our VIP demo tests) and for some baffling reason, BioWare unlocked the frame-rate on base Xbox models, which combined with constant tearing, produced an ugly experience.
On Thursday last week, the day one patch dropped, offering significant improvements. Occasional screen-tearing remains (limited to the top portion of the screen – a latency saving measure that gives a little bit of extra per-frame rendering budget), but the 30fps cap seen in the demo was thankfully re-introduced. Xbox One X spends much more of the time at its target frame-rate now – which is a relief – but the overall improvement to vanilla and S consoles is minimal. Too much of the game operates in the mid to low 20s, with only internal stages set in the cave system showing anything like a target 30 frames per second.
