EA recently released Anthem into the world a few weeks ago and the reception has been, uh, not too nice.
The latest big-budget game to come from BioWare, the studio best known for making the critically-acclaimed Mass Effect games, Anthem ended up getting middling reviews at best, criticism that there’s not really much to do despite such a beautiful world, loot balance issues that would stump an Olympic gymnast, and more glitches and bugs than the Amazon rainforest.
Time to add another big problem to Anthem‘s increasingly long to-fix list because PlayStation 4 users are now demanding refunds after reporting that the game has been killing their consoles.
Not good at all.
Anthem players have been reporting on Reddit that the game has been causing their console to crash to the main menu. Some have reported more serious crashes, such as their PS4 switching completely off and causing problems akin to yanking the power cable straight out of the wall socket while the console is still running.
I’m no tech wizard or anything but these crashes don’t sound particularly good for a console’s health.
Rather than risk bricking their PS4, owners of digital copies of Anthem have started asking Sony for refunds. While the company has a pretty strict return policy (don’t wanna lose that sweet moolah after all), users have reported that the refund process has been relatively simple and pain-free.
That being said, other users are reporting that Sony won’t give them a refund and are recommending people to simply stop playing the game while EA fixes it.
So if you’re a PS4 owner and you bought a digital copy of Anthem, you have a choice of going for a refund or going back for another go of Red Dead Redemption 2 while they fix everything, which could honestly take a while given the scale of the problems BioWare are facing.
What’s happening behind-the-scenes for Anthem right now.
While Anthem‘s problematic launch is been less than ideal for EA and BioWare, it is sadly par for the coarse when it comes to launching big-budget, large-scale online multiplayer games.
A combination of meeting deadlines, artistic compromises, extremely difficult tech hurdles, and high public expectations mean that flawed video game launches are becoming increasingly common. Even the relatively-smooth launch of the critically-acclaimed Apex Legends last month had its share of problems.
Launching a broken game and having developers craft it into a decent playable experience in the following months is the norm these days and it’s something that needs to change. But that’s a topic for another day.
EA and BioWare has yet to issue a statement regarding these PS4 crashes and refunds, but I imagine there won’t be one since the time spent crafting that message would be better spent fixing Anthem‘s many problems instead.