Mass Effect:Andromeda [SPOILERS]

[PREDATOR490]

Forward Stations should have let the player research and develop by default. Instead, you can only R & D at specific points.

Do the forward stations have any use beyond "we ignored the lore of how our weapons work and now need to leave ammo lying around everywhere" ?

That was actually a trend started with the second game, when it added "thermal clips" that made ammo limited. It would have been both more logical and more interesting if you could either wait for the weapon to cool naturally as in ME1, but it would have also been a great deal more work.

In any case, there is nothing new about this in Andromeda.

Actually, I think this game took it a step further into being stupid.

Ammo is lying around everywhere but they literally built guns that use the cooldown function and a augment for ammo regeneration. Remnant tech is uses overheating exclusively when Mass Effect had that technology in the first game.

Seems like it would have been simpler to just make every gun have ammo regeneration and / or cooldowns.


Forward Stations basically exist as a means to allow a player to change their loadout and party selection in the field. They also act as 'safe points' to resupply the consumables and top up life support. Incidentally, I find the life support function tedious and another addition that is a pointless annoyance.

I get that it is meant to convey the planets have hostile environments but even the goddamn vehicle you drive has it's life support drain. Kinda destroys immersion when your driving around in an environment that kills you within miniutes but somehow all the enemies have no issues.
Even more hilarious the NOMAD does not replenish the individual life support very quickly. You end up having to run to a Forward Station to top off your personal life support AND the vehicle. Just adds yet another time consuming task for no real benefit.

[TheFeniX]

So, supposedly the lead dev for this game was on twitter bitching about how white people sucked which caused some blow-back. He supposedly got fired, but I can't find any links I would consider neutral, so this seems like GG just stirring up shit. What I could find is that there won't be any animation fixes in the pipe, which makes sense since you really can't patch what they did here.

Cooper describes how RPG designers, not necessarily 'animators,' can work like DJs, mixing pre-made animations to complete important scenes, and letting algorithms take care of scenes that are less-likely to be seen—at least unless there's time to touch them up. According to his theory, BioWare "underestimated" the time required to hand-design every dialogue sequence, leaving some at a low, algorithmic level of quality.

This is kind of what I talked about: this isn't specifically the animators fault. When you're creating scenes these days, you almost always have a hodge-podge of facial and body animations you can pick from and change on the fly as dialog flows through the system. You could see it almost perfectly in the older style games where, in between dialog choices, your character would go back to a default stance and idle.

From what little I played, ME2 and 3 cleaned this up quite a bit, though it was far from the level of something like the Witcher series, by having someone go back over and just make it flow better. Maybe dial back the strength of some facial animations, or mix different ones. A lot of what I see with Andromeda hilarity seems tied specifically to using something like "smile: strength 100" on a facial morph that really can't support it or just having a string of conflicting facial animations run in a row.

Also of note, in just a few scenes, these guys could really learn to use animated objects and/or animation that support multiple characters. Or just learn smart camera work, but why try at all?

From what I can tell, this game was split across 3 teams of which they brought on seemingly sub-par talent, then fired them right after: they probably didn't even bother to attempt to clean things up: it runs, ship it.

They probably still made considerable bank on this game. And since it's run it's course, they could just dumpster it like they tried to do with DragonAge, and would have succeeded if there wasn't a large enough following to buy their heaps.

[FaxModem1]

Apparently there's a huge patch coming:

Kotaku

BioWare Promises Big Changes For Mass Effect: Andromeda, Starting Thursday

Patricia Hernandez
Today 12:06pmFiled to: MASS EFFECT: ANDROMEDA
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Mass Effect: Andromeda had a couple of rough weeks thanks to high-profile technical issues, animation wonkiness, and general fan disappointment. In response to that feedback, BioWare has announced improvements to Andromeda that will start easing out the visual kinks, while also teasing some major changes yet to come.

Below are the full patch notes for version 1.05, per the BioWare blog. Most notable are the “improved lip-sync and facial acting during conversations,” though we don’t know to what degree they will make conversations feel more human:

Improved tutorial placement

Single player balance changes: Ammo crates, armor, weapons, nomad, profiles, attacks, and progression

Multiplayer balance changes: Weapons, cover, and enemies (check back for detailed notes on balance changes)

Added option to skip autopilot sequences in the galaxy map

Improved logic, timing, and continuity for relationships and story arcs

Improved lip-sync and facial acting during conversations, including localized VO

Fixed various collision issues

Fixed bugs where music or VO wouldn’t play or wasn’t correct

Fixed issue where global squad mate banter sometimes wasn’t firing on UNCs

Fixed issue where player was unable to access the Remnant Console Interface after failing decryption multiple times

Fixed issue where fast travel is sometimes disabled after recruiting Drack until the player reloads a save

Fixed issue where Ryder can become stuck in the start of Biotic Charge Pose

Fixes issues related to some saves

Fixed issue where objective sometimes becomes un-interactable for players in multiplayer

Streaming and stability improvements
These tweaks will go live on Thursday. Beyond that, Bioware teased major changes coming down the line, including, vaguely, “Improvements to male romance options for Scott Ryder.” As we reported last month, BioWare was criticized for having disappointing gay romances that did not match the quality of the game’s straight romances, though it seems that BioWare is going to address that shortcoming somehow. We have reached out to inquire about specific details. Here are some of the other proposed changes.


More options and variety in the character creator
Improvements to hair and general appearance for characters
Ongoing improvements to cinematic scenes and animations
Improving the appearance of eyes for humans and asari characters
Improvements to male romance options for Scott Ryder
Adjustments to conversations with Hainly Abrams
Hainly Abrams, for those who don’t know, is a trans character that previously told the player about her pre-transition name almost immediately after meeting her. It was a jarring piece of dialogue that some fans felt did not accurately portray the realities of being trans, as real people do not always tell strangers something as personal as a “dead name.”

Bioware’s announcement comes after an ugly and unfair fan campaign waged against a single developer who was blamed for the entirety of Andromeda’s faults. Hopefully the upcoming changes can do some work in changing the narrative around a game that is actually pretty decent despite all the controversy surrounding it.

[TheFeniX]

Hainly Abrams, for those who don’t know, is a trans character that previously told the player about her pre-transition name almost immediately after meeting her. It was a jarring piece of dialogue that some fans felt did not accurately portray the realities of being trans, as real people do not always tell strangers something as personal as a “dead name.”

I had to google this dialog and wow that was pretty jarring. I've only been friendly with one trans-person (that I know of, which is kind of the point) so my experience is extremely limited but she didn't drop anything in that vein until we had met more than a few times and I still don't know her birth name. I have more experience with gay and lesbian persons and they also don't just up and drop the "I'm gay" line 5 seconds into introductions. Of course, being Texas you HAVE to be a bit more careful about that around here.

This being Mass Effect where genetic and medical technology is off the charts, you run into the opposite "problem:" you'd be able to forget your past-self so completely it's unlikely it would ever come up. Especially since it would be hard to believe you'd face persecution for it considering what goes on it the galaxy at large.

[PREDATOR490]

73 Hours - Game main story completed

Did I get my moneys worth on time played - I suppose

Was that time worth playing - I consider this game extremely disappointing and medicore. This is supposed to be a A+ game, is being charged at that price and built on a franchise of A+ games. In the current state, it is not an A+ game in many areas.

The game is extremely combat heavy which is on par with Mass Effect 3. That combat has been made even more dumb with the inability to really control your companions and the AI being pretty awful. They use their abilities when they feel like it and those abilities are heavily limited anyway. You get no real option to customise them except with allocating their skill points between the last 3 skill branches. Not that it makes much of a difference anyway.

The majority of the combat power is fixed on the player character with the companions being little more than cannon fodder to attract fire so you can get shit done. On insanity, this becomes tedious because naturally the enemy AI has a pre-disposition for targeting the player and your companions are stupid enough to stand in the open and be slaughtered leaving you really fucked.

You can only have 3 powers despite the game literally allowing you to have EVERY skill in the game from Tech, Combat and Biotics. The 'Classes' are turned into profiles which can be switched on the fly.
I.E Infiltrator profile gives you a passive boost towards the tech powers and better headshots with the ability to see enemies through obstacles.

The powers themselves seem underwhelming and some are situational to the point that I simply cannot be fucking bothered getting stuck in menus switching powers while in combat. That is both irritating from a gameplay aspect and ruins immersion.

It is kinda interesting to remove classes and allow players to be able to do everything but I feel the story implications are sorely missed.
I.E. The player can essentially become a super soldier, super infiltrator, super biotic, super engineer, super vangard, super sentinel or the super explorer profile which is a jack-of-all-trades profile that gives a small boost to everything.
So when the story has a situation where biotic powers come into play... the NPCs take the heavy lifting when Ryder could do it himself.


Another aspect I think this game poorly realised - Ryder has a sibling with a similar implant which logically means both of them can become these 'god' characters. It seems like a wasted opportunity to turn the sibling into a companion. That way the player could end up with two characters to customise into the complimentary team. Especially relevant when this game has further expanded on the combo system of mixing powers.

Multiplayer - Fuck off and die.
The micro transaction stuff and simply go to hell and it is basically a lazy copy of ME3 with no innovation. Do endless missions of killing enemies to earn points so you can buy chance packs to unlock equipment so you can do it again ?
At least in ME3 it had a tangible effect on improving the Single Player score for the 'best' ending.

I have not seen any relevance the MP has to the SP beyond maybe giving you a few resources.

Inventory / Crafting - The idea was good, the implementation is abysmal.
Limited inventory space even when you are outside missions. If only Ryder had a gigantic ship that could store equipment or is this game seriously saying a ship can only hold 50 guns as default ?
The crafting system is very clumsy and difficult to follow. The guide is useless and even the 'quality' system in the game seems wildly erratic.
Higher Quality / rarity for armor changes nothing but for weapons it adds more slots.


Equipment - The weapons are by far the major failing of this games. It seems like a lot of them were just added because they wanted to bring back weapons from the old series because naturally fans would clamor to get the old gear back. Unfortunately, they really fucked that system up by making a lot of the old gear less quality so if you want to run around with classic weapons you get screwed for it.
The augment system is extremely clumsy when it comes to the mods that change the fundamentals of the weapon and how some of the mods are restricted to what you can put them on.

I like the look of the Remnant beam weapon but it is forced to be a overheat cooldown weapon - No option to change it to use ammo

Oh but it is a beam weapon so ammo would make no sense - Except you can get a mod that turns any gun into a beam weapon that still uses regular ammo ??

Ultimately, the game looks like it is giving more customisation options but does not mention that doing so can easily penalise you or the erratic denying of some options.


Story - Christ, this is awful.
This game exists exclusively to distance itself away from Shepard and pretty much sets the ground work for a new franchise. The only issue is that it is predictable and boring as fuck in doing so.
The major villain is not interesting at all and things that could easily have been seen coming occur because plot requires everyone to be stupid.


Overall,

4 / 10

Fixing bugs will improve things but the story is set and I fully expect they would not change it even if they could.
This game exists exclusively as a poor vehicle to pull on brand recognition while setting up so they MIGHT actually produce something more interesting for the next game.

Evidently that is very likely to end up involving the Quarians and the Remnant.

[Mr Bean]

Beat the game this morning my god I need to get my thoughts together on this game. It went from wrong to shitshow to holy shit where was author X on every other mission.

Example Jaal has a random mission towards endgame where you go home and meet his family. It's lovely time no combat or anything just hey Ryder this is my family, this was my room growing up, want to see my cool thing? Thanks for coming by back to the mission now.

[The Grim Squeaker]

I tried playing it. After a few hours (and the ice planet), I stopped wasting my time, and ended up starting a replay of the Witcher 3

[Mr Bean]

Okay sixty odd hours to beat the game. Going full spoilers on this because it's been long enough and I asked the thread title to be changed.

Mass Effect Andromeda is not a bad game per shame, same it's really look like two separate games and has what seems like six different main writers. The main writer who was cursed with a massive lack of imagination. So we got to an new galaxy (To be fair a cluster off the main galaxy) which has thousand on thousands of worlds and apparently they only aliens in the entire cluster were the Angarian? The Kett are from the Andromeda not the cluster meaning the only intelligent life are the Angarian and we found out end game they are a designed race not even native themselves meaning the entire Helius cluster was void of intelligent life. One could argue that the reason for this is because of the Remnant or something else compare this to the old games which feature 15! separate intelligent races not counting things like Reapers or the Geth. Two races when the first game had nine (Asari, Elcor, Hanar, Humans, Salarians, Turians, Volus, Quarians, and the Krogan). Despite the entire game being about pathfinder and exploration we don't find all that much compared to the first Mass effect

Everywhere you can seem the MMO influence running head long into story elements. No matter how many Kett I kill if I go back to Eos there are dozen of places a Kett drop ship will come out of nowhere to pop fresh enemies for me to kill. Why? You don't need to farm kills or rare drops as the best stuff is all researched.


And speaking of research I by level 52 and games end had earned about 4000-5000 research in each catagorphy which was exactly enough to research up about five guns and one suit of armor of which three of the guns I researched felt like pea shooters to me so I ended up using the Ushior mixed with whatever guns grabbed my fancy since I slapped vintage heatsinks on that gun and as much larger clip enhancements I could get on it resulting in a gun I could fire four times before it overheated and could one shot any low level grunt instantly, when it was cooling off I swapped over to whatever garbage assault rifle I liked then or if close swapped to a shotgun or threw in an Isharay shot (I kept that thing for Ascendant because of 1.5k burst damage). Point being my research was mostly worthless because I found the one gun I liked then was stuck using whatever I found because I lacked the 1.2k research it takes to get a level 50 gun.

And then comes the ending, holy shit is this a Dyson sphere? Nope to small, it's a small moon perhaps a space station and the humans took it which Angarian are totally cool with... never mind I fought out all Remanent tech is basically theirs unless we are running off finders keepers rules. Speaking off what happen to all those Meridian Remanent spaceships I summoned up by pure nonsense, they failed to so much as even wink at the Kett despite all the build up to the Remanent making me think I had just gotten a decisive military edge on the Kett. You spent the entire game talking up the Remanent's advance tech and the fact the things we are fighting are mostly servitor bots with only one or two real military models types being encountered. The Assembler is a local repair droid, the Nullifier is a mining model, the observer is a cleaner and administrative bot while only the Remnant Destroyer being what looks like a purpose built defend robot but instead I don't attack the Archon with a dozen Destroyers or something equally nasty at my back instead the Archon gets those.

But at the end of the day I did feel like I got my 60$ because I'll be honest the little interpersonal crew things except Gil (Go fuck yourself engineer dochebag Kallo is always right) where very heart warming and the little side stories toward the end game were fun times.

Which to be blunt is my main issue, the main story line was okay, the side stories were great and the rest of the missions were mostly trash, heaven forbid you be sent to check on someone or track someone down because 99% of the time they are dead and have been the instant the quest giver turned his or her back.

[Imperial528]

Bean, the Remnant ships in the finale got rapidly destroyed by the scourge, and IIRC you spend the mission with SAM more or less out of action due to the Archon so there's no safe way for the Pathfinder to control the remnant.

Meridian is a shellworld, from the looks of it it's about the size of the Moon, but I don't know how well the cinematics were scaled.

I think you're right about the game overall though, the little bits were done to higher quality. I liked the main story myself, but it wouldn't have had any impact if it weren't for the side stories making me care about those involved.