After garnering mixed reviews and the game experiencing a few technical issues around its launch, BioWare and EA's Anthem has a rather significant problem on its hands. It seems that for a number of players on PlayStation 4 the game is hard-crashing the console. Which means a full power-cycle is required, and due to the system's own design this means sitting through a scan to ensure storage hasn't been corrupted or damaged.

It's what happens when you accidentally unplug a PS4 when it's in sleep mode, something that we've done before and then took note of the console's dislike for that sort of thing. Playing Anthem on PC and Xbox One we've experience crashes, but only to desktop or to the dashboard. And never in the sort of frequency that made us feel like the game was broken. During our two week review period where we played a lot of Anthem on PC, it crashed maybe two or three times.

With reports of the PS4 hard-crashes appearing over the past few days on Reddit - with players contacting Sony directly - EA is now gathering info to try and figure out the source of the issue. With a new post that reads,

We are currently in process of gathering information about the PS4 issues so we can determine the root cause. If you are experiencing hard crashes of your console please reply with the following information:

PlayStation Console: (PS4, Slim, Pro)

PSN ID:

Crash Info:When does the crash take place? Are you having to take specific steps to get your PlayStation going again?

Have you reported your crash data when prompted? (Y/N)

Since going up there have been numerous replies with examples from Anthem players on PS4. Even if this represents a small slice of the total player-base, having the game cause a hard system crash is definitely a problem. Anthem isn't alone, as we've been made aware that the recent release of Ace Combat 7 has caused both PS4 and Xbox One X consoles to crash due to overheating.