Author Topic: Mass Effect: Andromeda  (Read 60419 times)

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Offline NGTM-1R

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
One thing I will say for ME2: the guns were actually different and there were reasons beyond raw damage output to pay attention. ME1 didn't have that.

Of course, mechanically there were some awkward bits. The pistols/SMGs were straight upgrades for the most part. (The Locust was head and shoulders above every other weapon its class, too.) I completed the game for the first time using the Avenger, because my first experiences with the Vindicator showed it didn't have the ammo capacity to play. Actually, the Vindie needs you to have gotten some AR damage upgrades before it generates enough death per shot for its low ammo capacity to balance out. You get it before you have the upgrades to make it good.

There's an actual choice between the three baseline ARs. (And the this-is-your-infinity+1-gun AR is actually a bit lacking, I usually complete with one of the others. That cannot be said of the high-end Sniper Rifle or Shotgun, of course.) You have to adapt your tactics to what you've got, but none of them are objectively not worth it, something that cannot be said about the majority of ME1's guns.

There'll be Voyager-type of shenanigans between surviving Krogan and Salarians / Turians, because doh.

You mean no shenanigans? (One of Voyager's great failings was that the supposed divide of the crew never really counted for much. I think the best use they ever made of it was when the crew wrote a fanfic about it that got out of control on the holodeck in "Worst Case Scenario".)
« Last Edit: June 24, 2015, 01:24:57 pm by NGTM-1R »
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Offline MP-Ryan

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
More ME1 expansiveness and depth.  More ME3 combat.  There, I designed the perfect next Mass Effect game.

I kind of hope the jump-off is the middle of the Reaper war.  I'd rather they didn't pull a Deus Ex Invisible War and try to write ending canon for ME3... though all the endings were ultimately such garbage that it likely wouldn't matter.

I maintain that the perfect ending to ME3 would have been ONE ending.  The trilogy should have been conceptualized as an "eye" shape story - one beginning state, very diverse middles, but a single end state.  It would have enabled a tighter and much-less nonsensical story, and your choice would have mattered in the details but would not have necessarily shaped the entire galaxies' future.  It's one of the things that always annoys me about writers of expansive stories who are too willing to take the butterfly effect / chaos theory too seriously.  Sometimes, a minor change may have large effects.  The majority of the time, it likely has none at all.

At any rate, say what we will about BioWare, the studio has produced some incredible writing, characters, and games over the years.  I am looking forward to the next ME installment, though I'd better get to work on my bloody backlog if I ever want to play it.
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Offline Colonol Dekker

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Should've done endings KOTOR style.

One paragon,  one renegade,  left it at that.
Campaigns I've added my distinctiveness to-
- Blue Planet: Battle Captains
-Battle of Neptune
-Between the Ashes 2
-Blue planet: Age of Aquarius
-FOTG?
-Inferno R1
-Ribos: The aftermath / -Retreat from Deneb
-Sol: A History
-TBP EACW teaser
-Earth Brakiri war
-TBP Fortune Hunters (I think?)
-TBP Relic
-Trancsend (Possibly?)
-Uncharted Territory
-Vassagos Dirge
-War Machine
(Others lost to the mists of time and no discernible audit trail)

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That one time I got permabanned and got to read who was being bitxhy about me :p....
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Offline The E

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
They did. Then the internet exploded over it.
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Offline Colonol Dekker

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
I don't remember the original endings being quite so dipolar as KOTOR.
Campaigns I've added my distinctiveness to-
- Blue Planet: Battle Captains
-Battle of Neptune
-Between the Ashes 2
-Blue planet: Age of Aquarius
-FOTG?
-Inferno R1
-Ribos: The aftermath / -Retreat from Deneb
-Sol: A History
-TBP EACW teaser
-Earth Brakiri war
-TBP Fortune Hunters (I think?)
-TBP Relic
-Trancsend (Possibly?)
-Uncharted Territory
-Vassagos Dirge
-War Machine
(Others lost to the mists of time and no discernible audit trail)

Your friendly Orestes tactical controller.

Secret bomb God.
That one time I got permabanned and got to read who was being bitxhy about me :p....
GO GO DEKKER RANGERSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
President of the Scooby Doo Model Appreciation Society
The only good Zod is a dead Zod
NEWGROUNDS COMEDY GOLD, UPDATED DAILY
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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
To me the endings in extended cut were just fine. I don't care about that Indoctrination theory stuff, it's garbage to me. The only problem I had with them were the details. I mean that a lot of our decisions turned out to be irrelevant in the end (like the fate of Collector base in ME2). One day I realised that there are plenty if small choices that should affect the ending somehow, for example if we save some people or find some artefacts they could affect the work of the Crucible. In my opinion that would be very rewarding for the player to see that the more you explore and obtain, the better the results can be in the end. The whole EMS stuff was very limited and I hate it. That was the only problem with ME3 for me.

We can only hope that developers of the Andromeda won't make the same mistake :P. But I'm rather calm about it because the Internet is flooded with sh*****rm about ME3's ending till today.

 

Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
They did. Then the internet exploded over it.

tbf, it really wasn't. The "renegade option" was ... Anderson's choice, while the paragon option was... TIM's choice? Control is paragon now? I thought TLoTR had demonstrated that it very much wasn't. Then, a third ridiculous choice that came out of nowhere? And because it's in the middle and you can only get it if you have enough points, does that mean that's the preferred choice by the story-tellers? I mean, these visual and gaming systems seem to give it prominence?

Now we even have a fourth, which is probably the saddest one, but at least it's the most coherent one. Then of course all the shenanigans about the relays being wrecked (does that mean star systems explode? Well we know they didn't, but those were some moments of confusion...), and what the **** was the Normandy doing between relays? .... it was a mess.

Now, it might be a different experience with the new endings DLC, and that's one of the reasons I'm playing it, to see if it feels different.

 
Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Destruction as a renegade ending  :wtf:? For me the most renegade option are the Rejection and Control. Destruction and Synthesis goes for paragon, depending on your beliefs. I had no regrets sacrificing the synthetics. The Reaper question is solved.

I also didn't like the way the developers changed the Reaper over time. In the first game they were so mysterious, god-like, mighty. And later it turns out that they are just controlled tools. Arrogant, pathetic hypocrites. Destruction was like a showing a middle finger to the Harbinger, Sovereign and their friends which was very satisfying :D

 

Offline Mongoose

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
I just would have gone for the ROW ROW FIGHT DA POWAH ending where Shepherd uses his massive Spiral Energy to reshape the very fabric of the galaxy and kick Reaper ass.

 

Offline StarSlayer

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
If people start throwing galaxies around, I'm outta here.

 

Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
If people start throwing galaxies around, I'm outta here.

New Asari power, Galaxy Thrower. Use it right after Singularity, coz it's just fun to create a bunch of black holes everywhere.

 

Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
SO just wanted to post this small comment to at least get something on record so I can go back and see how much I got wrong on hindsight when more things leak from the game (probably only on december when a new trailer comes up on the VGAs, or perhaps only next year around E3).

I imagine that Bioware will absolutely fail to provide good answers to the many questions that were either directly or indirectly made in the previous trilogy.

The first of these is about the Fermi paradox, to which Bioware answers with a very good answer arc in Mass Effect 1: First, you are made to believe that Fermi was somewhat right, the aliens are indeed everywhere, and they even have a central hub in the galaxy where the main issues are dealt with. This is taken a bit in a kind of a campy tone at first, where we just shut down our brains a little, pretend that this is a kind of satisfactory answer ala "Star Trek", that it's just a matter of certain hegemonies rising and falling through the eons (Protheans, etc.). Then we know the truth, the Reapers are actually harvesting every single intelligent species that crop up every 50k years, and that's why billions of years have passed without Earth being bothered that much by anyone else.

That is a fine answer. It is, at least, consistent, whole. We might have huge issues how it was dealt with afterwards, but it poses a very striking question: What is the Fermi Paradox situation in Andromeda? If we are to be consistent, there are only two possible answers here. Either an hegemony was enacted in Andromeda that prevents the Singularity horror (that the Reapers were designed to prevent here), or the Singularity horror has already occurred and we are arriving in a post-Singularity galaxy. The second is somewhat obscure, difficult to write and almost impossible to get away with and still have a "western like" exploration theme in it. At its simplest, everywhere you went, small machines would detect you, analyse you, render you still and turn you into computranion before you made any trouble. So I'm guessing the former. There's something that should be behaving in a similar sense to the Reapers in Andromeda galaxy that maintained it in a somewhat pristine manner. Never forget, Andromeda is bigger than the Milky Way.

But what is it, and how it functions? More to the point, will the writers be brave enough to write another massive antagonists that are like the Reapers but not quite?


And, what would happen if a rogue Reaper agent went "hidden" within our "Arc" to the Andromeda Galaxy, instalinked with the Reapers back home and tried to enact similar strategies in Andromeda, building its own Reaper here, and even confront the present hegemonic power? Clash of titans kinda theme. Imagine nu-Shepard making an Alliance with a Reaper against Andromeda's hegemon. Anything's possible here. No one wants to contribute with ever more crazy scenarios?

Sorry, I just like to brainstorm about silly things like these.

 

Offline NGTM-1R

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
You're missing a third alternative: the conditions for the Fermi Equation are somehow different in Andromeda than they are in the Milky Way. There's a lot we don't know about the specific pathways towards intelligent life still and one could BS up that something just isn't there, or not in sufficient amounts.
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Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
You could definitely BS up something. However, it flies in the face of the rest of the trilogy, for no case was ever made for the extraordinay situation in the MW, and this difference would need explanation.

Also we do know it's not a desert. We will find intelligence in there. Even if it's just one race, they had billions of years to colonize everything. Or are we to just accept the amazing coincidence of us going there right at the moment where this (or these) civilizations were beggining this colonization just like in the first trilogy? What a bullseye that is, a few hundreds of years of being on target within billions of years of possibilities.

 
Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Small detail update.

Our ship will be named "Tempest"

And the action will take place long after ME3 :)

I bet my money on a special expedition to Andromeda as some kind of contingency to maintain the survival of human race in case we fail against Reapers. Alliance can launch an Arc which will arrive to another galaxy hundreds years later. That would be a good move to avoid touching any part of the story related to Shepard. 

 

Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Gotta source for that?

 
Re: Mass Effect: Andromeda
http://overmental.com/content/mass-effect-4-story-leak-speculation-and-details-15677

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-04-20-probing-the-new-mass-effect-4-leak

Nothing official yet but they say that this stuff was leaked via some polls. Similar thing happened with the new dragon Age and turned out to be true in the end.

 
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« Last Edit: November 07, 2015, 12:33:42 pm by Col.Hornet »