Bioware has released Anthem as part of early access ahead of the official launch on February 22. They have also announced a day one update that should fix many of the current issues, but there is no mention of fixing the excruciatingly long load times.
In Anthem, you will face these long load times wherever you go. Whether it is during exploration, opening the world map to travel to a region from the main hub, or just exploring out in the wild, you will face these load screens.
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This is a big problem because of how it breaks the flow of the game. It is also reminiscing of how Destiny 1 launched early in this generation. It had similar long load times that started to become a problem the more you played the game, but at least they were restricted to just the mission select screen.
The load times for Anthem so long that an early test shows that they can take as much as 15% to 25% of the game time. Granted, they are still taken from the early access trial that is available right now and with a day one update on the horizon, things can still change, but it is hard to see how Bioware can suddenly turn this issue around with a simple update.
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These load times are apparently an issue with how the game currently streams assets in and out depending on the player’s location. It can lead to a lot of data being read by the hard disk in a short amount of time, as discovered by this reddit user. According to his finding, playing the game for just two hours was enough to see the hard disk getting 610 GB of data accessed from it.
The long load times are also proving to be quite troublesome for people with early access. Kotaku’s editor Jason Schrier has shared his experience on the load times talking about how they were more than enough to stop him from attempting the game. It took more than two minutes for the game to start from the initial load and then you face multiple loading screens before and after picking a mission.
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This just shows how infuriating Anthem feels like in its current state unless you have the patience to sit through these loading screens.
Anthem will be out on February 22 and this is just early access for now, so hopefully, Bioware has a solution in place to make the experience better by the launch of the game, although it is rare to see this happen for a such a large-scale game so close to its launch. There were two different demos for the game with a closed VIP demo followed by open beta, and yet the issue has remained the same for now.
