Mass Effect: Andromeda: The Thread

[Thenomain]

@Monogram said in Mass Effect: Andromeda: The Thread:

No, it's not Witcher 3, and frankly, I doubt we'll see game in the near future coming close to how well done it was.

Every time Projekt RED says something about Cyberpunk, I feel a little funny in my pants region. For one, they say it's making Witcher 3 an easy project by comparison. Can't wait.

[Alamias]

@Thenomain I'm really, really looking forward to this. God I hope it is as good, if not better, than Witcher 3.

[Thenomain]

I've been meaning to ask this for a while: Which crew member is it who has Plants vs. Zombies dolls in their bunk?

[Tinuviel]

@Thenomain Almost definitely Suvi. That's my headcanon, and I'm sticking to it.

[Monogram]

One thing that's been eating at me is the fact that Warp was removed from biotics. Of all the abilities that I would use most in the other games, I almost always had Warp at my disposal, felt as if there wasn't anything else that tore down armor as well. Only to get replaced by a bunch of other abilities that don't really sound appealing me.

Though, they did make Singularity much better in this game, so I can't bitch too much about it.

[TNP]

The first patch is out and there'll be a number of them over the next couple months. Had I known I was going to be beta testing for them, I wouldn't have wasted my money on an unfinished game.

[Thenomain]

@Monogram said in Mass Effect: Andromeda: The Thread:

Though, they did make Singularity much better in this game, so I can't bitch too much about it.

Good lord, Singularity has saved me so many times that I don't know what to say about this. Well, I can say "different strokes" (but also possibly "whachu talkin' 'bout, Willis?" would also be appropriate ;).

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For once, I didn't mind a little fourth-wall breaking from Andromeda. Sure, the ME3 Citadel DLC was a non-stop nod to the fans, but it was so good that it is entirely forgiven. Someone on the Tempest said "I thought this was going to be the end-game". Yeah, good on the designers for making what happened feel like a climax, without over-promising.

--

Still. Not. Finished. Still. Enjoying.

[Insomnia]

@TNP It's usually why I avoid early access games.

[TNP]

@Insomnia Had I known, I would have. Except it wasn't released as an early access game from what I've read.

[Thenomain]

@Insomnia said in Mass Effect: Andromeda: The Thread:

@TNP It's usually why i avoid early access games.

Those games say "early access". I've bought three early access games and enjoyed the hell out of them, watched them grow and felt a stronger bond to the developer.

What left Andromeda buggy was EA's fault, the same issue that made Dragon Age 2 a bland and incomplete game, the same problem that plagues a lot of the games industry and what makes CD Projekt RED a stand-out.

But you know what, I can't get up in arms about things like bad lip-sinking anymore. Making the game unplayable, yes, this game needed more QA playtesting, but I'm getting fixes and the team is responding to feedback. Back in 2003, Troika released "Temple of Elemental Evil", pushed by Atari under threat of breech of contract, and was not allowed to release fixes. The game is nearly unplayable, but fans themselves rallied around the company and made a number of game patches for it. This was our lives a decade ago.

Andromeda is not unplayable. We're getting fixes and more for the bugs and several shortcomings. (A new character creation tool? Great!) This is better than most Triple-A games get. I would have rather waited and gotten a better game, but with a good game and an understanding developer, I can't get riled.

[Insomnia]

I know it wasn't an early access game, I was commenting on TNP's comment about beta testing, and that being the reason I avoid them, generally. I don't mind beta testing; I do it often, and find lots of bugs. I just don't like paying to beta. Sometimes they work, sometimes the game is permanently in early access and die. It's always a chance.

[Lithium]

I must have the luckiest system in the world, I've not encountered any real bugs in my playthrough of ME:A. So far it's been quite entertaining, if it wasn't for work... I'm sure I would have finished it already and probably be working on additional playthroughs.

That said, I do miss Warp, and Annihilate and Lance just don't seem that good to me, I miss throwing curveballs around cover to tag people with warp but I /do/ love how we can mix and match powers/abilities to our hearts content.

I've been loving the pull/throw/charge build I've been using.

[Three-Eyed Crow]

@Insomnia said in Mass Effect: Andromeda: The Thread:

I know it wasn't an early access game, I was commenting on TNP's comment about beta testing, and that being the reason I avoid them, generally.

ME:A is the first game I've ever pre-ordered. This was after not pre-ordering DA:I and feeling like I got no benefit from waiting a handful of months to play it.

...

I don't know if I regret it, exactly. I don't feel like I'm playing a broken game, so much as one that won't be optimized for another six months. But I won't be pre-ordering again.

Really glad you can skip those fucking planet animations now. That, more than anything, was making me just want to quit.

[Killer Klown]

So, the more I play this game the more I get the feeling that 10,000 years from now, a civilization that is only just at present time discovering fire and learning how nifty shoes are, will find the ruins of some ancient technology buried on a deserted planet in their star system. This will kickstart their interstellar travel capabilities, they will find a long-abandoned space station and learn about these mysterious 'Prothea...' er. 'Forerunners' that spread out and brought peace and civilization to the galaxy, and...
Uh. See where I'm going with this?

[Sparks]

@Thenomain said in Mass Effect: Andromeda: The Thread:

What left Andromeda buggy was EA's fault, the same issue that made Dragon Age 2 a bland and incomplete game, the same problem that plagues a lot of the games industry and what makes CD Projekt RED a stand-out.

I'm actually not entirely willing to point the finger at EA on this one.

This was supposed to be Bioware Montreal's chance to shine, Montreal being the B-team who usually did side-quests and stuff for previous games. But Edmonton—what we think of as 'Bioware'—was supposed to be there to pick up the slack if needed, as the more experienced team. But rumor is Edmonton pretty much left them to their own devices instead, in order to focus on Sekrit Unannounced New IP (whatever that is).

As a result, I'm guessing Montreal got into the weeds as they tried to handle making a giant sweeping game. Worse, none of the old ME code, written for the Unreal engine, could be brought over to EA's own in-house Frostbite engine; they had to build for this game from scratch.

Rumor has it EA had to sweep in to bail folks out by ordering Edmonton to actually help Montreal get the game to launch, bringing on the team from DICE to flesh out multiplayer, and bringing on the Frostbite engine team themselves to make things run smoothly.

I do wish it had been more polished at launch, but I still find the game perfectly playable—moreso now that, for instance, the colony administrator doesn't look like a soulless sociopathic android due to those cold, dead, staring eyes. And, you know, not spending half my lifetime watching the animations flying from planet to planet.

(As for Dragon Age 2 being "bland and incomplete", I was told a trick that makes it so much more playable: just assume everything is due to the fact that Varric is narrating the game, and he's a wildly unreliable narrator. Enemies dropping randomly from roofs? That's Varric telling Cassandra, "And then we faced 5... no, wait, 10... or was it 20 enemies?" Every cave being the same? Varric doesn't care what the caves looked like, so he just hand-waves it by describing them more or less identically. Etc. My second playthrough was so much more fun that way.)

[Monogram]

@Sparks said in Mass Effect: Andromeda: The Thread:

(As for Dragon Age 2 being "bland and incomplete", I was told a trick that makes it so much more playable: just assume everything is due to the fact that Varric is narrating the game, and he's a wildly unreliable narrator. Enemies dropping randomly from roofs? That's Varric telling Cassandra, "And then we faced 5... no, wait, 10... or was it 20 enemies?" Every cave being the same? Varric doesn't care what the caves looked like, so he just hand-waves it by describing them more or less identically. Etc. My second playthrough was so much more fun that way.)

Many people forget that the beloved ME 1(which is still my favorite in the first trilogy)was the exact same way. Exact same looking caves, or bases or hideouts. Recycled the same three or four layouts that looked exactly the same. Enemies popping in? Happened. But people are so quick to harp on DA2 for it but completely ignore the fact the fact that ME1 did the exact same thing. It wasn't anything new.

It had always been a BioWare thing. KOTOR did it, Jade Empire did it. It wasn't really until ME2 and DA:I is where they started to stray away from that habit. Granted, ME2 was much more linear and DA:I couldn't ever strive to be what Witcher 3 had already mastered.

[Thenomain]

@Monogram said in Mass Effect: Andromeda: The Thread:

Many people forget that the beloved ME 1(which is still my favorite in the first trilogy)was the exact same way. Exact same looking caves, or bases or hideouts.

Having played ME1 about 5 times, I have to say this isn't the same. The repetitiveness is there and it can be distracting, but the universe is huge, the situations are varied, and there are more little cut-scenes that let the scenario designers put in new camera angles and close-ups. Sure this is Floating Transport #2, but battling rebellious biotics leading up to a question of how I ultimately deal with them went a far way from keeping it from being more than Floating Transport #2. And I can't think of a single time where enemies in ME1 spawned out of nowhere; appeared around rocks with a Shepherd commentary of "oh no, ambush!", sure, but the set pieces were thought-out, and that made all the difference.

--

@Sparks

It's good to hear something more concrete than what the industry had done in the past, and even better to hear a Triple-A publisher coming in to save a game than to let it flounder.

--

I'm done with ME:A, now, and I've decided I liked it. Nowhere as much as The Shepherd Trilogy, but quite a lot.

Except for one thing. Just one. All the rest are little annoyances, some of them still being flags triggering the wrong comments (I still killed that person, thanks):

The gigantic building mystery surrounding the Nexus.

Nnnnnnnggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Thanks for that, guys. Really. Maybe we'll get some DLC about this, but if that was the plan then they shouldn't have broached it this far to begin with. Nnnngh.

[Sparks]

@Monogram said in Mass Effect: Andromeda: The Thread:

@Sparks said in Mass Effect: Andromeda: The Thread:

(As for Dragon Age 2 being "bland and incomplete", I was told a trick that makes it so much more playable: just assume everything is due to the fact that Varric is narrating the game, and he's a wildly unreliable narrator. Enemies dropping randomly from roofs? That's Varric telling Cassandra, "And then we faced 5... no, wait, 10... or was it 20 enemies?" Every cave being the same? Varric doesn't care what the caves looked like, so he just hand-waves it by describing them more or less identically. Etc. My second playthrough was so much more fun that way.)

Many people forget that the beloved ME 1(which is still my favorite in the first trilogy)was the exact same way. Exact same looking caves, or bases or hideouts. Recycled the same three or four layouts that looked exactly the same. Enemies popping in? Happened. But people are so quick to harp on DA2 for it but completely ignore the fact the fact that ME1 did the exact same thing. It wasn't anything new.

I think for me DA2 was more jarring than ME1; a mass-produced modular structure plopped down on some alien world made more sense than a supposedly-natural cave having an identical layout to every single other cave ever.

I mean, even in MEA, half of the buildings in outposts look more or less identical, but given that people are basically slapping down the construction equivalent of shipping containers, stacking them on each other, and connecting the rooms...

[Monogram]

Not arguing any of that, I'm just saying this isn't anything new for BioWare. They've been doing it for a long time.

As for ME:A, I've on my third playthrough of it now, and I have to say there are aspects of it I like more than the original trilogy, but it's lacking in certain areas where I would call it an improvement over the first three. There are aspects where it has in some and fallen backward in others. In terms of story, I think it's the most engaging since the first one(ME3 would've had the best story until it was all botched in the end, thus ruining it).

So for now, I'm going to rate how I personally set all four games thus far.

Story:
ME1
MEA
ME3
ME2

Combat: This is sort of a no brainer. Your combat should improve as series progresses.
MEA
ME3
ME2
ME1

Squadmates:
ME2(ignoring bland man Jacob)
MEA
ME3
ME1

Vehicle
Mako
Nomad
Hammerhead(really, who cared about this thing)

Armor/Weapon customization
ME3
MEA
ME2
ME1

Villian
ME1
ME3
MEA
ME2

DLC
ME2
ME3
ME1(Pinnacle Station lol)
MEA TBD

[Killer Klown]

I suppose the only thing I have to interject into this list is, when it comes to favorite squadmates, for me the list is less about which game had the best as it goes something like
#1> The Krogan
#2> The Turian

It really didn't matter which game they were in, whichever squadmate was one of those races was, inevitably, awesome. Though that being said, my favorite squadmate of the entire series in terms of personality and personal story still has got to be Legion. Legion was freaking awesome.