So I had grand plans for the weekend. Friday night, EA flipped the switch on early access for Anthem, if you've got Origin Access Premier (which I do, because I'm apparently the kind of person who pays $14.99 a month for the privilege of downloading games ten days early) you could jump in starting the 15th. I cleared my Saturday. I told myself I wasn't going to touch Twitter until I'd at least gotten one javelin to max level.
Reader, I spent most of Saturday staring at a loading icon.
Not the whole day, obviously, I'm exaggerating for effect, but not by as much as I'd like. The pattern was: finish a mission, get dumped back to the social hub (it's called Fort Tarsis, which is a fine name, I guess), wait somewhere between 20 seconds and two full minutes for the world to load, walk across the fort to talk to an NPC, wait again to load back into a mission. I timed one loading screen at 1 minute 47 seconds on a wired connection. That's not a "my internet is bad" problem, that's a "something in this build is not okay" problem.
None of this is a secret, by the way; go look at the Anthem subreddit or basically any gaming outlet right now and it's the same story times a thousand. People are reporting the game booting them to the PS4 menu entirely, which is a genuinely alarming kind of bug for a console game to have. I didn't get that one myself, thankfully, just the garden-variety kind where you lose your matchmaking group because loading took so long everyone else already bailed.
Here's the thing that actually bugs me, and it's not really about Anthem specifically. It's the fourth or fifth time in about two years I've watched a big publisher ship an online-only game where the actual moment-to-moment shooting and flying feels genuinely great — and I mean that, the javelin flight in Anthem is legitimately fun, better than I expected — and then bury that under a pile of infrastructure problems that have nothing to do with the game design. Destiny did this. Mass Effect: Andromeda had its own separate pile of problems but shipped rough in a similar spirit. Fallout 76 did it so badly last November that it became its own genre of joke. You'd think somewhere in a company the size of EA there's a person whose entire job is to stand up in a meeting and say "hey, should we maybe stress test the servers at actual scale before we let people in," and I'd love to know what happens to that person's suggestion.
Full global release for Anthem isn't until the 22nd, so in theory this is exactly what early access is for: find the ugly stuff while it's a few hundred thousand people instead of a few million. I get that, genuinely, and I'd rather a studio use a staged rollout than not. But I've also been burned enough times by "early access" as a euphemism for "unfinished" that my patience for it is thin. There's a difference between rough edges and a core loop (load into mission, do mission, load out, repeat) where the loading is the least reliable part.
I'll probably keep playing. The bones are good enough that I want to see where it goes, and apparently BioWare's already talking about a hotfix for the loading times, which, fine, that's the deal you sign up for with games like this now. But I do think about how none of this would've been a story fifteen years ago. You bought a disc, you put it in, worst case it crashed and you reset the console. Now the game itself is basically a live service with a combat system attached, and half the actual experience depends on infrastructure decisions made in a data center somewhere that has nothing to do with whether the flying feels good.
Anyway. If anyone else was in the early access trenches this weekend, I want to hear your loading screen horror stories. Mine's 1:47. Beat that.