BioWare has deployed a fairly large patch for Anthem over the weekend, adding some much-needed quality-of-life features.
The biggest change in this patch is the addition of respawn timers to every kind of mission. Before, regular missions had short respawn timers after which players would return to the battlefield, but other kinds of missions, like strongholds and legendary contracts, prevented players from returning to battle unless they were revived by other players. Now, every kind of mission lets you respawn, with strongholds, legendary contracts, and endgame missions now having 30-second timers, while every other kind lets you respawn after 10 seconds. Speaking of strongholds, those have been added back into the quickplay rotation.
A host of other changes should improve the overall experience for dedicated players. Common and uncommon gear, which becomes useless long before you finish the initial campaign, no longer drop for level-30 players, which means less clutter when managing gear. The game should also be more stable, since the patch includes “fixes for a number of issues that were causing crashes or connection problems,” as well as for a glitch that caused the sound to drop out completely under certain conditions. The notes don’t specifically call out an issue that was crashing PS4s, however, though it’s possible that issue has been fixed.
There has also been some balance tweaking. Titans, the most powerful regular enemies in the game, are now much easier to defeat. Melee, combo, ultimate, and other types of non-elemental and gun damage now scale better with your javelin’s power, making them more useful on higher difficulties. Additionally, all items have had the power numbers tweaked based on their rarity. “Players will see the power of their items go up,” the patch notes explain. Several masterwork weapons have also had their damage increased.
For the full patch notes, as well as notes on what else BioWare is looking at for its patch and beyond, make sure to read the full Reddit post from the developer.