As most people who took part in Anthem's VIP demo last weekend will attest, there were a fair share of issues that occurred and kept many from taking part in the action–chief among them being the infinite loading screen problem. Now, with BioWare set to open up the demo to the public tomorrow, the studio has decided to speak up about what can be expected out of the content of the open demo, including the infinite load issue.
According to an official post from BioWare's Head of Live Service, Chad Robertson, Anthem's development team has spent this week focusing on improving the overall experience in the demo based on player feedback and the issues they encountered. However, with Robertson not making any mention of the infinite load problem in the blog post, the game's Technical Design Director, Brenon Holmes, thankfully talked about the matter on the game's subreddit to indicate that while some fixes are in place to help, there's a chance the load screen issue could crop up again.
"We identified one major problem (a resource wasn't being released under some conditions, so the level could not unload) and prepped a fix on Saturday, tested all day Sunday/Monday and it went through certification shortly after that.
"There are some other fixes that should help the game recover when there are service errors (which was also sometimes presenting as 'infinite loads').
"All that said, we reproduced and fixed some problems... though given the narrow amount of time we had to turn around a fix, we might not have caught everything."
Although there's the possibility that the infinite load issue could rear its ugly head once more during Anthem's open demo this weekend, it's at least good to see that BioWare continues to maintain an open line of communication with the player base in order to receive feedback and keep the community abreast of in-game errors. After all, with Anthem still being in it's pre-release phase, there are certain problems that will crop up during the course of rolling out the launch version.
That said, should the infinite load problem materialize at a more frequent rate during this weekend's public trial, or even as regularly as it did during the VIP demo, it's safe to presume that many looking forward to Anthem will become cautious about making the game a Day One purchase. Of course, it must be noted that Anthem is a live service, so there are bound to be issues at release and beyond. However, if the launch version includes getting stuck on a loading screen and having to reboot the title over and over again, it would likely deter many from buying the game.
Anthem is scheduled to release on February 22, 2019 for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.