\u201cI feel like with Anthem, it heavily relies on online data that was stored in Bioware\u2019s server,\u201d Andersson added. \u201cIn my initial testing, the game couldn\u2019t load into the level without that data.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n Anthem\u2018s Fort Tarsis area loads its data from local files, rather than EA\u2019s servers.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s some hope that this crucial level data is still available and recoverable, though. Ness points out that Fort Tarsis, the game\u2019s lobby area, already runs using offline data piped through a local \u201cserver\u201d thread, meaning the rest of the game could theoretically be coerced to run similarly.<\/p>\n
Just as important, he says, \u201cas far as we have been able to discern, all the logic for the other levels, which when the game was live ran on a remote server, also exists in the client,\u201d Ness said. \u201cBy patching the game we can most likely enable the ability to host these in process as well. That\u2019s what we\u2019re exploring.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTo be honest we\u2019re not entirely sure\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
While all that local level data should be usable in theory, seemingly random differences between Anthem and other Frostbite games are getting in the way of loading the data in practice. Anthem acts like a standard Frostbite game \u201cfor the most part,\u201d Ness said, but at times will show unusual behaviors that are hard to pin down.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor example, when we try to load most maps, no NPCs spawn, but in some maps they do,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we have yet to determine why. Ness has some suspicion that the odd behavior is connected to the \u201cfairly extensive amount of player data the game keeps as part of its online RPG nature,\u201d but adds that \u201cto be honest we\u2019re not entirely sure how deep the differences go, other than that the engine didn\u2019t behave how we expected it to.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ness said he\u2019s about 75 percent confident that the team will be able to figure out how to fully leverage the Frostbite engine to power a version of the game that runs without EA\u2019s centralized servers. If that effort succeeds, he says a playable version of Anthem could be back up and running in \u201cmonths, or less even, depending on motivation.\u201d But if the efforts to pick apart Anthem\u2019s take on Frostbite hits a brick wall, Ness says \u201cthe amount of work increases fairly exponentially and I\u2019m a lot less confident that we have the motivation for that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI feel like with Anthem, it heavily relies on online data that was stored in Bioware\u2019s server,\u201d Andersson…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":256572,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[156,157,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-256571","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256571\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/256572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}