Anthem is a shooter focused on loot, which means your effectiveness increases as you pick up more and more weapons with increasing damage ratings. The whole concept pretty much breaks if your starting weapon is more powerful than anything you pick up later, and yet that’s exactly what’s happening in Anthem.
The level one common Defender rifle you get when you create a new loadout does more damage than high level masterwork weapons of similar types – effectively making it the best Anthem weapon. According to a post from Redditor YeetLordSupreme, even as the damage numbers show way higher values from the high-level weapon, it actually takes fewer bullets from the level one gun to take down the same type of enemies.
That post rocketed to the top of the Anthem subreddit, prompting some investigation and a direct response from BioWare. “This is in fact a bug related specifically to the default items on a loadout in combination with higher level gear you have equipped. It’s not functioning as intended and the team is working on it for an upcoming fix.”
Exactly when it’ll be fixed remains to be seen, though BioWare has generally been good about quickly bringing fixes to the game so far.
Now we’re left to wonder how long this issue has been going on.
Related: Join your friends in the best co-op games on PC
The first steps on the Anthem roadmap begin sometime this month, though there’s plenty in the way of tech troubles and balance issues to fix alongside the new content rollout.