Author Topic: Mass Effect: Andromeda  (Read 60389 times)

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Cerberus is now a military front that has the capability to be everywhere, always with overwhelming numbers. Ridiculous.
It is even able to conquer the Citadel, a feat that required Sovereign a full Geth army. Ridiculous.

It is truly remarkable how Bioware managed with every installment to find a new characterisation of Cerberus that totally contradicted everything from the previous game.

ME: A random terrorists group, cannon fodder for side quests. More an annoyance then a real threat.
ME2: Large, complex organization with very interesting background capable of doing some good work (well... at least some cells)
ME3: Evil, indoctrinated cannon fodder. TIM immediately shifted from being a smart and calculated bastard to plain evil and stupid. We faced them so many times in such plot-critical situations that I sometimes had a feeling that they pose at least as much threat as the Reapers themselves. Sure, it was all a part of divide and conquer MO practiced by the robo squids but it felt over exaggerated. With Omega DLC and final assault on the Chronos Station (defended by an entire fleet of warships, dreadnought- sized included) as finest examples. 

 I wonder if or how the writers may bend some aspects of the lore to fit their new story. With the whole trilogy behind us, there is a lot to consider and I have a weird feeling that we won't avoid some strange explanations or plot "bypasses". Like genophage question.

Or presence of the quarians (confirmed in the last briefing) in the initiative. Which, for now at least, makes no sense to me because of the fact that by the time the AI set course for Andromeda the quarians were preparing to take Rannoch back, so they would need every amount of people and resources (not to mention what kind of a quarian would leave his own behind during such critical time?). So for now I will treat this as a gesture to please Tali fans and fanboys.

 

Offline Firesteel

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
I've banged on about ME2 nuking everything on and off for 7 years. ME3's problems are really just growths of ME2's decisions to make Shepard into space Jesus and putting off how to handle the Reapers being Robot-Space-Cthulu until ME3. Much of ME3's narrative can be seen as kowtowing narrative to gameplay. The ME1 Reapers would never lower themselves to blowing up buildings on planets but in ME3 we need mooks to shoot so enter "indoctrinated" Cerberus the Saturday morning cartoon villains and Reapers attacking Earth instead of the original plan of cutting off the galaxy from its government. Even if ME2 hadn't been an intermission and reversion in plot ME3 still might have been saddled with Cerberus or dumbass Reapers to make the third person shooting be able to hold up the gameplay by itself.
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Offline MP-Ryan

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
ArsTechnica has a very long review of ME:A up now that provides a lot more detail and is a little more positive than what we've read so far.  It concludes that ME:A is basically DA:I in space.  Given how much I enjoyed DA:I, I don't see that as a particularly bad thing.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/03/early-review-mass-effect-andromeda-is-dragon-age-inquisition-in-space/
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Offline The E

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
I've been playing the first few hours via the Origin Access trial period. It's been, well, okay so far.

The game certainly has problems ranging from the conceptual to the technical, of course. There's no denying that. For example, there is no compelling reason for why this game is set in a different galaxy offered by the game. After the opening, you spend less than an hour on a planet before you move on to a Citadel-analogue, filled with characters from all the races you presumably care about. Similarly, the second planet you move to after getting access to the Tempest presents a scenario that would not be out of place in ME1 (Hey SheppardRyder, there's this settlement we have lost contact with near a ProtheanRemnant digsite, could you go check that, kthx); there is just little in the game (beyond the obvious avoidance of the Reaper question) that justifies the change of scenery.

In terms of game flow, one thing I can already see being a tremendous timewasting mechanic is moving between planets in a solar system. In ME1-3, this was a nicely paced process that either didn't take very long (ME1) or had you engaged for short periods (ME2-3); in this game, you're sitting around watching an unskippable animation that takes up to 20 seconds to complete (or at least feels that way).

Once you get down to a planet, the game starts to be fun. The combat gameplay is awesome, taking ME3's foundation and adding in free movement across large spaces, the environments are beautiful, and unlike DA:I, looking at the map doesn't feel like being handed a miles-long To-Do-List.

In technical terms, this is probably the most demanding game I've ever had on this machine (Intel i5-6600k @ 4.2 GHz, an RX480, 16 GB RAM). Using the high preset, framerates were never quite stable until I moved a few settings (Ambient Occlusion and AA, to be precise) down a couple notches, disabled VSync and closed Chrome.

The big points of criticism, however, are writing and animation quality, if the internet is to be believed. Both of these are, for most of the game I've seen so far, okay. However, there are a couple points (which have been pointed out upthread) where there are unforced errors, bad dialogue and cutscenes that feel like they're first pass material that really should have gone back for a few rounds of polish before signoff. These issues are, of course, exacerbated by the general quality level Bioware was shooting for; when your art department spends ages on making skin look good, having people look like weird aliens wearing human skins just doesn't work.

So, overall: Unless the multi is the big draw (and it might be, haven't played it yet), give this one a pass until it's on sale and patches have been made that address these things.

Parenthetically: I would really like to know what this game looked like when they extended the development time. There's bound to be a juicy post-mortem in there.
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Offline MP-Ryan

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Hey E, do you actually have an origin access account, or did you find a free trial of OA that also happens to give a shot at MEA?  I saw a promotion for a 7-day trial of OA a while ago, but I deferred it thinking I'd use it now, but I don't see it available any more.
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Offline The E

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Hey E, do you actually have an origin access account, or did you find a free trial of OA that also happens to give a shot at MEA?  I saw a promotion for a 7-day trial of OA a while ago, but I deferred it thinking I'd use it now, but I don't see it available any more.

That was still on offer here.
If I'm just aching this can't go on
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I really need lifе to touch me
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Offline Mito [PL]

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
In order to criticise ME3 even more, I want to remind you people, that there is a secondary codex entry, The Reaper War -> Desperate Measures.

This thing makes me wonder if any mass effect based drive system is even made by anyone BUT the Reapers. I get the feeling that, according to the entry, FTL drives are just black-box modules that nobody even examined closer with ships built around them.
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Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
The only reason it is not a story set in the Milky Way is that any milky way story is closed down in any larger-than-life meaningful way by the original trilogy.

Not to say you couldn't do it. Of course you could, I can scrap some sketches on the top of my head right now. The problem is that you would be in a straight jacket, and constantly worried by the existence of a previous canon material that is the size of a bible, and worse than that, very different in many places depending of what you have been doing in the trilogy, if the game was to be set up in the timeframe of the original trilogy at all. To place it before the trilogy would create another set of problems, not only storywise (there we go again with the many thread issues we've already solved in the original trilogy, the quarians, the krogan, etc.), but even more importantly for the game itself, game mechanics: how would you justify having a jetpack in this when in ME3 you didn't have one, nor saw anyone having it? If the game was set before ME1, how could you even begin to justify the existence of "bullets" (or whatever it's their name)?

If you just say "forget it, let's not deal with this whole hassle, let's just go to Andromeda", you can do two very important things:
One. Worry more about the story you can tell than the infinite threads you have to coordinate with the original trilogy;
Two. You can create a whole new interesting world around you with new mysteries, new sci fi concepts, new stories, unbounded by the necessity of having them appear or at least be mentioned in ME3 - I mean, how could you build a new race like the Angara in the milky way, set that story between ME2 and ME3 and then just claim that in ME3 they didn't show up because something something? Makes no sense.

 

Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Regarding a post ME3 mass effect game, I'd actually love to see a mass effect game called "Mass Effect Control", in which the events of the game would take place in a milky way wherein Shepard took control of the Reapers.

The title would suggest that this is not necessarily canon, that it's just a story placed in that possible future timeline. And the story could be awesome. I see something like Leto II God Emperor kind of stuff. An above-and-beyond ultra being who once was a human and now is a god, and how the next generation of whomever deals with it. A new crisis, and this shepardgod as the background. How much is he involved in this crisis, what is he doing about it, what can we do about it. Intrigue, going against a real true god - or not, I mean, so many good stuff could be written in this world.

But huh, I guess we just have millenial brats going on in a JJ Abrams' adventure-like with humanoid shaped beings with incredibly clichéd storylines.

 

Offline MP-Ryan

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
So, my burning question is:

Has anyone tried multi yet and is it worth picking up now for that alone?  I mean, I have more than enough SP games at the moment, but multi is what I was most looking forward to.
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Offline General Battuta

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
So, my burning question is:

Has anyone tried multi yet and is it worth picking up now for that alone?  I mean, I have more than enough SP games at the moment, but multi is what I was most looking forward to.

Apparently it looks fantastic on paper but has crippling connection and rubberbanding issues that kill 4 out of 5 rounds.

 

Offline MP-Ryan

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
EDIT: I found a 20% off sale on GreenManGaming and apparently I'm a sucker.  *hangs head*  I see all my ME3 multiplayer buddies bought it first, though :P

If anyone else is interested, here's the link via the coupon: https://www.dealzon.com/buy/mass-effect-andromeda?drc=siliconera2
« Last Edit: March 22, 2017, 09:23:43 pm by MP-Ryan »
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Offline The E

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Finished the main campaign.

Overall, I think this is a good game (with caveats), just like DA:I was a good game with caveats. One thing that stood out to me was how, in many ways, this game is essentially a remake of Mass Effect 1: The overarching plotline, with its emphasis on finding new locations and trying to uncover the mysteries of the world (and stopping a bad guy on the way) feels very familiar here. Just like ME1, this game does a lot of buildup of greater scope arcs that will be resolved in future installments of the series.

What faults this game has lie mostly on the technical execution side of things (Another ME1 parallel!). Animations, as discussed. The engine stalling during loading screens, scripted events not firing correctly, NPCs being spawned very visibly in thin air, these are all things that can and will happen here. Oh, and this game also is wildly inconsistent in its performance, so much so that VSync is basically unusable on my machine (Framerates will flutter between anything from 20-something to 60 without apparent cause; this causes noticeable hitching and stuttering all over the place). Disabling it means I am in for the worst tearing imaginable in places, the transitional animation for going between star systems is a particularly egregious offender that is basically unwatchable without inviting severe eye strain.

Design-wise, this game feels old-fashioned in ways that it really didn't need to be. The game has an inventory and crafting system, for no particular reason other than to have one, it has a credits-based economy because apparently a colony in its founding stages really does need free-market capitalism in order to allocate its resources, there are transitional animations between places that take around 20 seconds to run each time, the worlds are filled with quests that consistently fail to provide a good reason why the player character has to do them and noone else.... These are all things that, when comparing this game with more recent titles (like Horizon Zero Dawn or Witcher 3), stand out as Bioware Montreal just being sort of careless. Where HZD, for example, is a culmination of best practices in open world game design, MEA feels as if someone just took the design docs for ME1, made a few random alterations, and called it good without understanding why ME1 hasn't aged all that well.

As to the writing: On a macro level, the writing is fine. The overall plot is decent enough, the progression of how you uncover mysteries is nicely paced out, and the companion quests are the usual Bioware fare (However, it should be obvious that, when comparing the MEA crew to Shep's Dirty Dozen, the MEA crew comes up feeling a bit flat, but I am going to call this a result of Shep's guys and gals getting three games to develop and these being new characters). It's on a sentence-by-sentence level that things occasionally break down and where a bit more editing is needed; That arguably the worst line in the game is uttered in a conversation you can't not have that happens very early into the game's run is probably doing a lot to sour impressions here. Overall, it's quite decent.
If I'm just aching this can't go on
I came from chasing dreams to feel alone
There must be changes, miss to feel strong
I really need lifе to touch me
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Offline Snarks

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
You've finished the campaign already? How many hours did it take?

 

Offline The E

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
I am about 40 hours in.
If I'm just aching this can't go on
I came from chasing dreams to feel alone
There must be changes, miss to feel strong
I really need lifе to touch me
--Evergrey, Where August Mourns

 
  

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Urutorahappī!!

[02:42] <@Axem> spoon somethings wrong
[02:42] <@Axem> critically wrong
[02:42] <@Axem> im happy with these missions now
[02:44] <@Axem> well
[02:44] <@Axem> with 2 of them

 
Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
It really reads like they're dancing around the obvious white elephant of "the animation team was incredibly overworked and rushed and, inevitably, churned out ****", though.
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Offline Firesteel

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
I'd agree that it's highly likely the animation team was overworked but most of the animations I've seen probably worked fine when they were originally authored but algorithmic interpolation between animation playbacks are likely the culprit of most of the walking and movement glitches. Some of the weird face expressions like Sara's grimace/yawn thing are squarely on the animators. It also wouldn't surprise me to hear that Andromeda was not actually in development for the five years between ME3 and its release.
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