Mass Effect Andromeda

I was a little surprised to see there was no topic for this already, but it's scheduled for release in but a couple of months now.  

Mass Effect was my favourite franchise over the 360/PS3 generation of hardware.  No, the games weren't perfect.  ME had a terrific story, but the gameplay was clunky and unrefined.  Planet exploration in the Mako was akin to torture at times.  ME2 was accused of dumbing down the RPG aspect of the gameplay in favour of becoming a more generic 3rd-person shootrer, but the whole thing was so utterly polished, the characters and missions were so incredibly strong, that it just didn't matter, and ME3 got some - reasonably well deserved - criticism over its ending.  Thing is, everything leading up until the last hour of that game was pretty much perfect, and there are parts that will stay with me for a very, very long time.  Heck, even the multiplayer horde mode was terrific fun.

So yes, I'm perhaps a touch biased.  I love Mass Effect in a way that is perhaps not healthy.

Andromeda then.  It's essentially a blank slate for Mass Effect, taking place in the Andromeda galaxy (as the name does kind of give away!), your crew departing the Milky Way during the events of Mass Effect 2 and arriving in Andromeda 600 years after the climax of Mass Effect 3.  Ergo, Shepard, Wrex, Garrus etc are long dead.  Liara might still be kicking around, but I'm not putting money on a cameo!

Whilst part of me doubts the new crew can ever match up to the aforementioned favourites, I'm hoping to be proven wrong.

Release date is 21st March.

2015 E3 announcement trailer


Trailer


Gameplay trailer


PS4 Pro 4K demo




Launch Trailer

SimianWonder wrote:

Whilst part of me doubts the new crew can ever match up to the aforementioned favourites, I'm hoping to be proven wrong.

I'm in this boat with you. I hope they can make a cast as varied and charismatic as what the ME trilogy totes. I also kinda hope they go back to the space opera roots of the first game - especially with the whole exploring a new galaxy thing - though the crew building of the second was definitely my favourite aspect.

I'll probably be hanging on for your review to be honest.

I played all three games after each other and I didn't get out of my room for 6 weeks as a result.

Kaio wrote:

I played all three games after each other and I didn't get out of my room for 6 weeks as a result.

They should release a remastered trilogy set for PS4. Then you can play again.

Little worrying that there's no real footage of the game this close to release, do hope they make the most of this fresh start though.

New cinematic trailer.



"I don't need an army, I have a Krogan!"

Any game lacking Garrus is inferior to its earlier games.

"My name is Garrus Vakarian, and this is now my favourite spot on the Citadel."



The feels, man. The feels.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-02-22-four-hours-with-mass-effect-andromeda

Sounds promising. Please Bioware, don't fuck this up.

Launch trailer is here.

No, it's not in the same league as ME3s, which in turn wasn't quite as good as ME2s (which still gets me so ***ing hyped for a seven year old game I've beaten half a dozen times) but does at least show off some of the new characters.

This game is kinda terrible, not sure why I bothered to give Bioware another chance after three poor releases in a row. EA is poison and my refund request is submitted.

All the shit people are talking about this game is pretty funny, so it has that going for it.

The worst part is that, in the first half hour, there are throwbacks to 'dark energy', a plot point from the first two games that was interesting and was implied to be very important, but entirely forgotten in the third game. My only regret is that I'd have to play ME:A to learn more.

I knew this game was doomed.

I don't know why, something was off about Bioware since Dragon Age 2. I would blame EA , but looking at this at a new perspective, this seems like only Bioware's fault. Doesn't help Bioware claim on multiple occasions that EA don't even bother them much, so that would make me assume all since DA:2 was all on them without EA's intervention.

The Bioware as far I am concerned that gave you KOTOR or Dragon Age Origin or even Mass Effect 1 and 2? That is long gone.

Mass Effect Andromeda is a good game.

Shocking, I know. There's been a huge witch hunt over a few of the games issues, one in particular, but the fact remains that it is a good game. First though, let's talk about the problems it has.

Chiefly, of course, is the physical representation of people in the game, humans especially. There are several reasons for this. For the most part, the "main" characters looks alright. They're more detailed and have unique features that suggest they're bespoke creations. That sounds obvious, right? You spend most of the game with a Shepard or a Geralt, you accept that random NPCs you spend sixty seconds talking to may not have quite the same level of attention paid them. Thing is, the rest of the human NPCs, including a couple of reasonably frequent recurring characters, look like someone just hit the randomise button in the create-a-character then ignored the fact that the characters looked terrible and said "fuck it, that'll do."

Their skin has a weird plastic-like sheen to it, their hair is typically just a single shapeless unmoving lump of wax and their eyes are dead - more on the eyes in a moment. As a result, it's difficult to really engage with any of the NPCs because they look weird facially, and they struggle to emote as well. Body language is really important in selling an emotion, but it doesn't matter how the NPC is meant to feel, be it angry, sad, desperate, they look at you with their dead eyes and their body position barely ever changes.

Ah yes, the eyes. I'm not sure if it was a conscious design decision or not, but even the main characters eyes are a little weird. They're always a fraction too big, too white and too bright. They look like they belong in a cartoon rather than a game attempting vaguely photo realistic representations of existing human beings. Heck, at a couple of points, the eyeballs can glitch through eyelids, so even when the character blinks their eyeballs are still clearly visible.

The final point on this particular gripe is, of course, the weird facial animations. Almost infamously now, the characters facial reactions to any given situation are sometimes laughable. Mostly, they're actually okay, but occasionally, they simply look comical and it's those moments - accounting for maybe 5% of the time at most - they has seen GIFs and memes all over the internet the past week. On an NPC it might be a little more forgivable, but on your main character it's much less so. Heck, I doubt I'll ever play as the female Ryder unless something changes; not only is she almost a monstrosity facially, but her facial movements make her look like shes either got mumps or a dislocated jaw. Maybe both. Her default facial stance is "smug grin" as well, so if she's having a conversation about with an NPC about a relative that was horribly murdered, she stands there smiling slightly at them.

A couple of these issues are glitches or bugs, but some are clearly conscious design decisions. Heck, even when the teaser trailer was released and Sara Ryder takes a gun from a merc before gurning at them, Bioware tweeted it was a facial bug and would be fixed. Quite how no one on the testing team thought to say, "Bioware, sorry, but these look really shit" I don't know.

Elsewhere graphically, it's not all rosey either. I'm not sure how it would perform on base PS4 or Xbox One as I'm playing on a PS4 Pro, but even here there are problems. The game is displayed in 1800p and then checkerboarded up to 2160p (4k). Thing is, it never looks that clean. Granted my only real comparison for pseudo-4k is Horizon Zero Dawn, which is undoubtedly the best looking console game ever made, so it's a bloody high bar to measure up to, but Andromeda doesn't get near it. The performance is variable too, targeting 30fps but suffering frequent dips below that with a side order of screen tearing as well. More over, there's no option in-game to try and run the game at 1080p to hit the 30fps more consistently. You have to go into the PS4 settings and downgrade from 4k to 1080p there, which is ludicrous.

Thankfully, some of the landscapes on the alien worlds can still look really good. Not quite Horizon Zero Dawn great -there's a lot less detail here, and draw distances are substantially reduced - but really good nonetheless.

The user interface is garbage as well, hiding key things like your quest log in menus within menus. Nothing is intuitive, it feels like opening files on a windows PC; open folder, open sub menu, open sub-sub menu, access thing you wanted. It's quick and responsive, unlike The Witcher 3s equally-shitty-for-diffent-reasons UI, but finding anything is initially confusing and thereafter just annoying. Trying to keep track of side quests is a bit of a chore, and that's a problem for an RPG.

Finally, for now at least, is how long it takes to get going. The first mission is glacially paced, putting you in a lot of combat situations at a time where you'll only have one or maybe two abilities unlocked with long cooldown times, so it's essentially just shooting things a lot. That gets very boring, very quickly. The second phase of the game is your first attempt at colonising a world, and will likely take you through until the six to ten hour mark, depending on how distracted by side quests you get. It's only at this point that the Galaxy really opens up and the game really starts to give you choices about how to proceed and at that point, the game really does pick up. Thing is, I can see a lot of people simply not giving it the time required and I'd understand why.

Frankly, if the game didn't have Mass Effect in the title, I'm not sure if I'd have stuck that out either and that should be a genuine cause for concern. The rest of the game may be stellar, but if half the player base never sees it, what's the point?

All the above looks extremely negative, but as I said, it's not a bad game.  It's actually a good game in spite of all the glaring issues, no matter how hard they may be to overlook or how distracting they can initially be.

I've put about thirty hours into the game now, and the only graphical glitch, bug or otherwise I've seen has been talking to Drack on the Tempest where he seemed to be cloned; both talking to me and yet still moving around in the background as though not engaged in coversation. Again, while the graphical anomalies are certainly present - there's too much video evidence to deny it - they aren't exactly frequent.

I mentioned previously that it was a mixed bag graphically, but some of the alien landscapes do look wonderful, even if they're perhaps playing it a little safe in some ways. Ice world? Check. Desert world? Check. You get the idea.

Mass Effect 3 (and even 2 to a degree) were criticised in some quarters for dumbing the experience down, for watering down the RPG elements in favour of a more-arcadey gunplay and inventory system. Andromeda much more closely resembles the original Mass Effect in this regard; yes, the research / devlopement system is, as with much of the Andromeda UI, needlessly comvoluted, but you have a huge selection of weapons and armour to choose from, various upgrades available to each item, modifications that can be fitted to give small bonuses and augmentations that can do very drastic things that completely change how a weapon or armour piece functions, like changing an assault rifle to fire homing plasma blasts, or an armour piece reducing your health but hugely boosting your shield.

The weapons are also pleasingly solid as well, they all feel different and there's a lot of variety, even in the same category. The avenger, for instance, is you bog standard assault rifle, whilst the mattock feels more like a scout rifle, and the P.A.W. is a beam focused weapon. Mods and augments can change them even further, so you really can take a weapon and make it utterly unique.

That's if you even wish to use your weaponry in the first place. Combat in Andromeda is undoubtedly the best it has ever been in the series, the much vaunted jump / hover / dash functions adding some much needed verticality to the combat and opens up a host of new options. I'm currently focused mainly on using biotics, with the ever-faithful vanguard charge as terrifingly effective as it has ever been, the added mobility of the new system making it even more satisfying than ever to throw out a singularity, incinerate or overload then charge in headfirst, detonate the singularity and use your shotgun or melee to gut your target.

You'll likely have noticed that I mentioned singularity, incinerate and overload in the same sentence then. Well, something else Andromeda gets absolutely right is not tying you to a specific class. You can pick and choose between any abilities from any of the traditional classes (engineer, soldier, adept, vanguard) and combine them in any way you see fit, selecting from different profiles (which are essentially the aforementioned ME2/3 classes) in the main menu that provide unique bonuses dependant on how many points you've invested in each skill tree. What's more, you can select four loadouts as your favourite and switch them on the fly, meaning Ryder can switch from full biotic, to gun toting soldier, to computer hacking engineer all within the space of a few seconds. It's a tremendously flexible system, and makes the combat a real joy.

The characters are a pretty decent bunch too. Drack, your token Krogan, feels very like ME1's Wrex, he's grumpy, he wants to shoot things in the face. He's lacking some of ME2 Wrex's maturity, but with his dry wit he's always good for a laugh. Jaal initially seems like a condescending jackass, reminiscent of ME3s Javik, but eventually he drops the mask and reveals someone merely trying to prove himself, not just to Ryder and his team, but to his own people as well. Peebee, an asari, is something new for her species, the opposite of the po-faced Liara or the matriarchal Samara in that she's much happier investigating some of the new tech in the galaxy, or throwing out snappy put downs. And yes, the human characters are once again sadly the least interesting of the bunch.

In another ME1 throwback, you also get another Mako, this time called the Nomad, in order to traverse the huge alien worlds. Thankfully, the Nomad is a much friendlier thing than the Mako. No, it's not built for combat, there are no weapons at all, but it can boost forward, jump upwards, switch to six wheel drive for hugely increased traction at the cost of outright speed, switch to agility mode to navigate tighter turns and has a number of other upgrades available that I've yet to unlock. It's much, much more fun that the godawful Mako that inspired it.

So, how's the story? Ok, I've been avoiding spoilers for my first play through so I'm not sure how far into it I am - maybe a third? - but the main story has been pretty good so far. I won't spoil anything here either, but suffice to to say it feels suitably Mass Effect-y, and the squad loyalty missions that I've attempted have both been fantastic. Pity the sidequests are a bit of a let down, frequently asking you to run to a location just for one line of dialogue or to scan one item before moving on to another system. This can often entail a minute or so of loading screens, which, while pretty for the first few times as you get a 1st person view as the Tempest navigates the galaxy, do get a little tiresome after the first few dozen.

Honestly, it reminds me of ME1 in a lot of ways, though I doubt it shall be remembered quite so fondly, there are a lot of good ideas here even if the execution is less than stellar in parts. So yes, it's a good game. Flawed, yes. But still a good game.

SimianWonder wrote:

All the above looks extremely negative, but as I said, it's not a bad game.  It's actually a good game in spite of all the glaring issues, no matter how hard they may be to overlook or how distracting they can be.

MORE TO FOLLOW

I mean, you've said it's a good game, but then spent quite a long time illustrating the exact opposite. I am interested to hear why it's worth your time, I assume the more to follow will be exploring just this?

No, he just got started on the negatives. The positives will be placed in a bonus paragraph at the bottom.

did you see the Naughty Dog guy explaining why the animations were so bad? Actually made sense. I'd repeat it but I'm afraid I can't put it as well as he did.

Can't for the life of my find it again currently.

Yeah, I saw it a few days back. The reaction to it is as petulant and self-righteous as one can expect. Gamers have become more toxic than ever, and it's kinda made gaming sucky now. Obviously not the video games themselves, but this whole community being utter filth and impossible to socialize with has brought the general experience and joy of gaming down a lot. Back then, our vitriol was saved solely for the products we were disappointed in, but now it's all been twisted into hate-filled attacks, with everyone acting like the people who worked on these games shat on their yards. The line between criticism and disparaging douchebaggery has been blurred. A bad game isn't just a bad game anymore. Everything associated with it must also be bad and despised too. The reasons why something turned out as poorly as it did is never really taken into consideration (be it budgetary issues, deadlines, or just simply making mistakes and bad decisions here and there). To the average gamer's mind, it's simply because the developers are evil and intentionally try to hurt their customers. People have become that delusional and spiteful. I blame the Star Wars prequels for this. Fuck you, Jar Jar. You Sith Lord cunt.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/ex-mass-effect-animator-explains-andromedas-issues/1100-6448944/

Not sure why this is so huge, sorry.

I hope my body can take it.

Way too many spoilers in that video.

Always love me a CrowBCat video. The Ouya one is his magnum opus still (either that or Evolve)