As if Anthem needed any more bad news, the latest “it gets worse” craze sweeping the news is that players are getting together and realizing that they are not alone in experiencing one of Anthem’s scariest bugs. It has the potential to not just crash the game, but in doing so, shut off your entire console. And in a few specific cases, some players are reporting they can’t turn theirs back on again after.
The past few days have brought a number of reddit threads with players saying they have experienced this kind of crash-shut-off on PS4. One of the most shared threads is from a player who claims the shut-off actually “bricked” his PS4, and that story was picked up by Kotaku yesterday.
I too have experienced this shut down issue, though on my Xbox One X, not PS4. This problem seems to be far more prevalent on PS4 than Xbox, yet I’ve talked to at least a couple other Xbox owners that have seen this too, and I only know what happened to me.
Like the PS4 crash, my crashes on Xbox didn’t just restart the console, they act like someone yanked the cord out of the wall completely. My Xbox is usually on “sleep” mode as in, when it’s off, it’s not really off as you can boot it quickly to get back to what you were playing. But both times when Anthem crashed during a mission and shut off the console, it was off off, as in the entire console had to restart from scratch. Xbox does not do the disk-checking animation like PS4 does when it shuts off involuntarily, but it was a similar situation. I have literally never seen this happen with any game on Xbox before, and thought it was bizarre, but didn’t think too much of it until I saw what a widespread problem it apparently was.
Debates are currently raging about what exactly is happening here, whether it’s an overheating issue or something else. Overheating does not appear to be the case as PS4 has a special kind of warning and error for that, and something else may be at play. I am still trying to get a handle on how widespread the far more serious problem of console “bricking” might be. It does not appear to be many cases, but the fact that it could be any cases is disconcerting, and some of the players this has happened to are warning others not to play at all until this is fixed and we know what’s going on.
The first statement from BioWare/EA has just come in about this issue: “We’re aware of a crashing issue some of you have been reporting for #AnthemGame. We’re investigating and ask that you share your crash data reports when prompted. If you have, we’ll be reaching out to gather info; if not, please reply to this thread on AHQ."
While I am trying to separate fact from fiction about this issue, it does appear to be widespread enough to be a serious problem, and I have experienced it firsthand on two occasions, though thankfully it has done no permanent damage to my console. It is not severe enough to scare me away from playing the game entirely, but until more information is known, I wouldn’t blame players who wanted to wait for answers before returning.
A few fellow Xbox players tell me they’ve seen their consoles reset on occasion in other games, but across two Xbox Ones and thousands of hours of gameplay, this is genuinely the first time this has happened to me, and it’s clearly happened at an even higher frequency over on PS4 for this game specifically.
Hopefully we have more answers soon and I will update this post when we know more.
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