Anthem Bug Makes This Starter Weapon Absurdly Powerful

Anthem players have found another bug, but this time it's not crashing systems or other such inconveniences. Instead it's making a starter weapon overpowered--in fact, it's currently the most powerful weapon in the game.

A player on the Anthem subreddit found the bug. The user said that when experimenting with different loadouts, they found that the level 1 common Defender Rifle is actually stronger than their level 45 masterwork Ralner's Blaze rifle. This is despite the listed damage output for the level 1 weapon being much lower than for the Ralner. They claim they've gone on to try the Defender against other weapons and received similar results.

In response, a BioWare community manager stepped in and confirmed that this is a bug, stemming from how the default loadout items interact with higher-level gear. That would seem to imply that the level 1 Defender won't be as powerful for a brand-new player as it is for an experienced Freelancer with high-level gear. Still, it's definitely not working as intended, and the team is working on fixing it in an upcoming patch to hit on March 12.

In the meantime, though, you can feel free to wreak havoc on the battlefield with the low-level weapon. And this bug is at least much less problematic than the one that's crashing PS4 consoles, and has forced Sony to issue refunds to some users.

Anthem has had a bad history with bugs, following a buggy VIP demo and an update that broke the game. This came among mediocre reviews, but hasn't seemed to slow EA's plans for an extensive post-launch roadmap.