Mass Effect Andromeda first impressions?

Redryhno

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pookie101 said:
well ive done the first mission and arrived on the nexus and not bad so far. guns seem weirdly lacking range. its odd shooting things with a weapon where you would hit them in me 2 or 3
Not a huge amount that's bad about the first mission beyond the Omni-/Medi-gel plot...I wanna say holes, but they're more like lore overlooks that just look really bad considering what happens later on.

I'm going ot tell you now, if you spent much time in the Codex of ME1-3, then there's going to be some massive overlooks and fuck-ups in regards to how things happened and the general idea of how historical events played out.

As I've watched my flatmates play through it, it's not exactly a "bad" game, but it's a really fucking mediocre Mass Effect game. Though we drink and make fun of the bad bits so I may have a more positive opinion of it than I should.
 

meiam

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As I feared, the skill system is a mess. The profiles force you down very narrow road, if you want to go biotic/soldier, most of the bonus you get are specifically to boost your melee attack, because the idea of a sniper using biotic is apparently too wild for EA. If you go engineer all bonus focus on summoning. Go infiltrator and bonus clearly focus on sniping. It's like they wanted player to freely makes there own build, but at the last second had a change of heart and just yanked the player back into narrow build. Sure you can build however you want, but you lose huge bonus doing so.
 

Kingjackl

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I hate all the little changes to things that worked fine in the previous games that only made them worse. The skill system sounded like a good idea, but only having three on hand and not being able to direct your squadmates has sacrificed a lot of what made ME3's combat good. Having access to every skill doesn't mean much when I my three slots have to be filled with a combo primer, detonator and shield-stripper now that my squaddies can't be relied upon to help me with that anymore.

Also, fuck the planet scanning in Andromeda. I'm someone who didn't mind ME2 and ME3s scanning (preferred the latter more than the former of course) because it was a nice relaxing break between missions to do some simple, repetitive tasks and get a bit of lore in the bargain. But now you don't control the navigation directly and instead of simply clicking on a planet, you have to sit through a cinematic every time you jump from one planet to another. Is that where the animation budget went? Worst of all, it lacks the sonar ping you had in ME3, so you can't just go to the one with worthwhile shit on it, you have to go through each planet individually, with a 10 second transition for each one.

ME3 I didn't have to check every planet but did it anyway because it was interesting. MEA, I have to check every planet even though I'd desperately rather not.
 

Zhukov

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Dec 29, 2009
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Well, this game is insipid garbage.

The few good things are buried by a veritable fucking avalanche of bad, boring and just plain shoddy.

Between this and Inquisition Bioware have clearly lost the capacity to make quality games. I guess they they just bled too much talent. Fortunately there are a number of developers who have already left them in the dust.

I'm ready for them to be taken out behind the shed and EA'd between the eyes. Citadel was their swan song.
 

Yarden

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Game is great so far.

I feel like most of the side quests are actually interesting and not just bland fetch quests, like in inquisition.
The vistas in the game just look stunning.
 

BloatedGuppy

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Zhukov said:
Well, this game is insipid garbage.

The few good things are buried by a veritable fucking avalanche of bad, boring and just plain shoddy.

Between this and Inquisition Bioware have clearly lost the capacity to make quality games. I guess they they just bled too much talent. Fortunately there are a number of developers who have already left them in the dust.

I'm ready for them to be taken out behind the shed and EA'd between the eyes. Citadel was their swan song.
I'll fight you on this one, Zhukov. The game is flawed, but it is miles better than Inquisition. I'd go so far as to say it's a fair shot better than a good portion of Bioware's games, including possibly the entire Dragon Age trilogy.

I think the high visibility of many of the problems has been overshadowing some pretty solid/fun core game play.
 

Casual Shinji

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Zhukov said:
Well, this game is insipid garbage.

The few good things are buried by a veritable fucking avalanche of bad, boring and just plain shoddy.

Between this and Inquisition Bioware have clearly lost the capacity to make quality games. I guess they they just bled too much talent. Fortunately there are a number of developers who have already left them in the dust.

I'm ready for them to be taken out behind the shed and EA'd between the eyes. Citadel was their swan song.
Pretty much.

It got me just a tad hopeful with the first few hours being paced quite well, but as soon as I got introduced to the Angara it suddenly struck me how utterly bored I was. Bored of not-Shepard aboard the not-Normandy, traveling back and forth to the not-Citadel, and talking to not-Garrus, not-Wrex, not-Liara, and not-Ashley.

I would've been able to put up with the crummy animations and shoddy lighting if a handful of the characters were at least fun and interesting (it's what has me stil coming back to Inquisition every so often). But Christ, are these characters just the biggest non-entities. The only one that made any sort of blip was Vetra, and that was simply because she's a turian which automatically gives her a higher coolness factor.
 

Kingjackl

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I was complaining just a few posts ago, but I've played a bit more and started to come around. Completing the first big mission on Eos was a highlight, when the story finally established a goal and I got the squad assembled. I liked finally getting the opportunity to do the "conversation lap" of the Tempest, chatting with all my crew. Those interactions had some promise.

Weirdly enough, I think my favourite so far might be Liam because all the others feel like they're trying to emulate better characters from the original trilogy, whereas Liam seems to have a combination of Jacob's backstory (except this time it makes sense) and James' personality (no complaints here, James was awesome). Not a high bar for comparison, granted, but if they have to redo old characters, better to go with ones that weren't as successful last time than just giving us another Miranda/Garrus/Liara/Wrex.

Still hate planet scanning, still frustrated with how choppy and unpolished certain aspects are, but I might be able to see myself carrying on with it. Maybe it'll be like the opposite of Inquisition, which started great but became tedious and trite by the end.
 

squid5580

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I got a ridiculous bug in my game right now. Drak is on my ship chatting it up with Lexi. The problem is I just met him and well he told me to piss off and exited stage right.

As for the game itself I am very meh on it right now. But I can't blame he game for all of it. I just finished Horizon and am feeling the sandbox fatigue. The voices don't match the characters is a big complaint right now for me. The MP is a blast when it works. It hard crashed on me 3 times last night seconds away from extraction on an apex mission.

And they deserve a special reward for somehow making planet scanning more of a chore than the rest. At least the others had some sort of gameplay not just follow the arrow derp
 

CritialGaming

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squid5580 said:
I got a ridiculous bug in my game right now. Drak is on my ship chatting it up with Lexi. The problem is I just met him and well he told me to piss off and exited stage right.

As for the game itself I am very meh on it right now. But I can't blame he game for all of it. I just finished Horizon and am feeling the sandbox fatigue. The voices don't match the characters is a big complaint right now for me. The MP is a blast when it works. It hard crashed on me 3 times last night seconds away from extraction on an apex mission.

And they deserve a special reward for somehow making planet scanning more of a chore than the rest. At least the others had some sort of gameplay not just follow the arrow derp
Man.....I can't tell you how happy I am that a lot of points I brought up in my review are also brought up by others in this thread. Makes me feel good.

Kesh's voices make no fucking sense and I hate it every time she opens her filthy Krogan mouth.
 

Zhukov

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BloatedGuppy said:
I'll fight you on this one, Zhukov.
Oh ho, buckle up Old Man Canada.

The game is flawed, but it is miles better than Inquisition.
Well yeah. Clipping one's toenails is miles better than Inquisition. It's hardly the highest of bars.

Andromeda feels to me like Inquisition with the bad bits toned down, but still present.

"Feedback indicates that players did not enjoy trekking across large inconsequential maps to perform a hundred checklist tasks while encountering aimless MMO-style clusters of hostiles."
"Very well. We shall have them drive a buggy across larger inconsequential maps to perform only a couple dozen checklist tasks while encountering aimless MMO-style clusters of hostiles!
"Brilliant!"


Yeah, it's technically an improvement. A bowlful of dogshit is preferable to a bucketful. The smaller portions don't improve the taste though.
I think the high visibility of many of the problems has been overshadowing some pretty solid/fun core game play.
Sure.

But I'm not just thinking about the facial animations (which are shit) or the graphical bugs (which are numerous).

The pacing is down the toilet because open worlds are now apparently required by law. (Fuck you Skyrim, fuuuuuuck yoooouuu!)

The characters are an insipid bunch.
Cora feels like a cross between Ashley (no-nonsense military lass) and Kaiden (oh my biotics woe is me).
Liam feels like a cross between James Vega and Jacob. God knows who thought that would be a winning combination. Apparently they couldn't decide which of Bioware's standard issue one-male-one-female-bangable initial companions to imitate so they just mashed them together.
PeeBee the oh-so-uninhibited-and-whacky-nerd-wish-fulfillment-fantasy is one stray fucking onii-chaaaaan away from making me throw up.
Drak is surface-level Wrex without any of the things that actually made Wrex compelling.
Jaal is a poor man's Javik.
Vetra is... umm... actually, Vetra's alright. 1/6. Gold star.

Maybe they get better later on. I'm not holding my breath. Besides, there's a 50/50 chance that any dramatic payoffs will be undermined when somebody turns and walks through a wall in mid conversation while Ryder directs a determined cross-eyed grimace into the middle distance.

The dialogue is often corny as fuck. God knows Bioware is no stranger to corn, ("The priiiize" etc etc) but they'd usually make up for it with charismatic characters with some solid arcs. Andromeda makes up for it by... occasionally being serviceable if I squint really, really hard. Hell, some of the dialogue feels out of place. Literally, as if someone got the lines out of order or the conversation was patched together out of recordings intended for a different purpose. The "My face is tired" exchange being the obvious example. That conversation actually made it through a multi-year development process.

Mining is back and is even more tedious than ME2. Now you get to aim probes while practicing your minibus reverse parking skills. Somewhere, someone thought that was actually a good idea.

The crafting system is simple (yay!) but somehow still requires a great deal of menu navigation (wtf?).

The galaxy map. Dear fucking God the galaxy map. Which fucking prize genius thought that people would enjoy slowly and unskippably panning between planets? Sure, it looks pretty, but I'm having trouble appreciating the space vistas while clawing at my own eyes in frustration.

Speaking of which, the interface is sluggish and the PC version is poorly ported.

Character creator is simultaneously both limited and difficult to wrestle a passable human face out of. I honestly couldn't tell how much of it was the creator itself and how much was the interface.

The weapons are a step down from the previous game. ME3 had nice, snappy guns that were, at least in my eyes, better than those in the vast majority of shooters. Andromeda has some okay guns and a massive pile of unsatisfying pew pew crap. Melee has gone from being decently satisfying to limp and clumsy.

Multiplayer is back and, to be fair, can offer some extremely repetitive fun. Right up until the host's connection lags out and I'm dumped unceremoniously back the the menu sans progress because apparently we've been transported back to fucking 2003. "Well", one might say, "Why not use the game's finely tuned matchmaking tools to find regionally compatible matches with favorable ping times?" To which I would reply, "I FUCKING WISH!"

Mics are set to open by default so I get to listen to every drooling dumbfuck on the planet yelling at their family while I fumble through the lousy interface trying to mute them.

Oh, and in five years they weren't able to come up with a single new game mode.

...

Phew.

On the plus side, the classless skills system is a boon. The planetside scenery is occasionally pretty enough to distract me from the fact that I'm going to have to slowly drive up every one of those mountains. Being able to look out the windows of your ship is really nice. The freedom of movement is nice. Combat is pretty good when enemies aren't getting frozen or phasing into the fucking grou... ahem.

Should have been a new IP. I hope it fails horribly.
 

AD-Stu

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I'm an unabashed fanboy of the original trilogy so take this with a grain of salt, but I'm about 40-odd hours / two post-Habitat 7 worlds completed and on the whole I'm loving the game. Among other things, I like that they've really managed to make the galaxy and the worlds feel BIG. And so far it feels like there's a lot to do inside all that bigness. My biggest non-ending gripe with ME3 was probably that we finally got to visit places like Thessia or Sur'kesh but we never feel like we really WENT there outside of the one building we got to visit. Get very much the opposite feeling here.

The combat is pretty decent, the whole thing is goregous to look at, no complaints about the story so far... so far so good (with a few wait-and-see caveats, see below). Plus jetpacks. They're awesome. How were they not a thing before.

There are a HEAP of minor irritations though:

- Inverting Y-axis for vehicles for some reason ALSO inverts Y-axis for map screens and scanning. Why?!?
- Codex showing the "new entry" icon when it's added new info to an existing entry... but it doesn't mark which one it's updated
- Having to manually change shoulder camera. I guess it's nice to have the option, and it doesn't come up often, but was it really necessary to MAKE us do it? It's worked fine automated in every other game in the series, and in every other cover-based shooter I've ever played
- The way enemies just stand there stupidly and ignore you until you get super close or fire at them. I get it for random wildlife but if I pull up close enough to fire at a group of kett, and they're close enough to fire at me, why were they just standing there with their thumbs up their butts?
- I quite like the Nomad, but why couldn't it have had guns? I get it might have made the combat too easy but still
- There was a human exchange program in the asari commandos?!? Why was this never mentioned before? :p
- You're going 600+ years across dark space, likely having to live in the spaceships you travelled in for quite some time... and you didn't bring a single quarian with you?!? I know, they're not a council race and I know, there's some story somewhere that a quarian ark will follow at a later stage, but come on. Keeping spaceships you live on running with limited resources is WHAT THEY DO, you'd think at least a few of them would have come in handy.

Jury is still out for me on the overall story elements cause I'm not finished yet and don't know where they're going with it all. Nexus = Citadel I'm broadly speaking OK with, it makes sense in universe. Tempest = Normandy is fine, you were always gonna have a spaceship. The Scourge? Interesting idea so far, wondering where they'll go with it. Alien tech lying around that nobody understands though... that one worries me as a retread of the previous games that maybe didn't need to happen. Again, interested to see where they go with it.
 

meiam

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Zhukov said:
Maybe they get better later on. I'm not holding my breath. Besides, there's a 50/50 chance that any dramatic payoffs will be undermined when somebody turns and walks through a wall in mid conversation while Ryder directs a determined cross-eyed grimace into the middle distance.
At the start of the game, Ryder Sr. is making a big speech about how he choose everyone "cause there dreamer" and Cora is actually standing facing away from him, I'm thinking "oh cool, that's going to come up later, maybe some sort of animosity between the two, or she didn't like his selection method" and then a random NPC walk trough her, and everyone get on the shuttle and leave while she's still standing there, immobile... yeah, it'll happen.

Oh and I'll double down on the galaxy map, having the constant animation between planet is just... and blowing, really can't believe no one pointed out how it would get old exactly after 1 time, yet you have to do hundreds of times... One of those "I hope someone lost there job for that" moment.
 

pookie101

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played it a bit more and its missing something.. like it doesnt feel like a mass effect game with so much removed
 

BloatedGuppy

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Zhukov said:
Oh ho, buckle up Old Man Canada.
All this is largely true (if occasionally hyperbolic). I disagree on character quality to some degree...a handful of the characters are solid, a handful weak. Animations, bugs and weird design decisions cannot be debated...the truth of those problems is evident.

Pacing is nowhere near as bad as Inquisition, for the simple fact that there is no baked-in urgency in the primary narrative. Pacing has fallen apart in EVERY SINGLE BIOWARE GAME since ME1 due to that urgency with the possible exception of DA2, because DA2 had no content to disturb pacing with. This is the first game I can recall of this nature where dorking around on planets, exploring, hob nobbing with random aliens and earning their trust, etc, etc, is actually your job and what you're meant to be doing. Whether this is intentional design or a happy accident, the ludonarrative dissonance that normally haunts open world games or overstuffed RPGs is absent here. I've been relatively completionist with it, and at no point have I ever stopped and thought "it is absolutely ridiculous that my character is agreeing to do this with X hanging over their head".

Unlike Inquisition the actual GAMEPLAY is good. Quite fun, even. Combat is kinetic and pacey, responsive, and has satisfying feedback in the form of sounds and animations. "Driving a buggy around" is only pointless and tedious if the actual act of driving the buggy is pointless and tedious, and the buggy is actually kind of fun. There are entire genres designed around the simple act of driving vehicles around. The only real rotten pillar here is the dialogue/conversations, and that's largely down to animations. The dialogue is pedestrian and occasionally awful, but it's closer to "CRPG-standard drivel" than anything particularly noteworthy at either end of the quality scale. I'd argue, perhaps uncharitably to Bioware, that this is not that far from their usual form and actually a significant upgrade on the bizarre tonal mishap that was DA:I.

I don't have any sluggishness or performance issues (and with my PC I shouldn't). The game likely underperforms for its age and engine though.

There is NO QUESTION the game is unfinished, underbaked, and presents a litany of small-moderate annoyances and bugs. These distort and damage a fundamentally sound core experience. It is EASILY the most ambitious game Bioware ever made from a technical standpoint (if not a narrative one) and had it been given 8-16 months of pre-release polishing including passes on their animation/shading and storyboarding would likely be an extremely well received game. As it stands, it's an ambitious/rickety mess, and (IMO) bears a lot in common with games like FO:NV and Alpha Protocol...games that were derided as bug infested disasters at launch and...through time, polish and hindsight...came to be admired/elevated to the position of cult classics. I'd much rather an ambitious/messy disaster than a safe turd. Yes, they went the open world route, which has become exasperatingly commonplace, but the scope of this thing is hilarious. I feel like there was a genuine swing for the fences at play, but an inexperienced studio came up short.

One thing seems pretty clear though, and this is that Bioware can no longer be considered a good "Writing" developer. They're Ubisoft level now. They might accidentally deliver some strong characters or an interesting sidequest, but one should approach them with appropriately moderated expectations.
 

Zhukov

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BloatedGuppy said:
Pacing is nowhere near as bad as Inquisition, for the simple fact that there is no baked-in urgency in the primary narrative. [...] I've been relatively completionist with it, and at no point have I ever stopped and thought "it is absolutely ridiculous that my character is agreeing to do this with X hanging over their head".
It seems we each mean different things when we say "pacing".

I'm talking about the pattern of tension/engagement and relaxation/introspection that most stories follow. I'm sure you're familiar with it.

A graph for MEA (or virtually any open world game) would have the initial spike, then a long, loooong flatline with the occasional bump when a localized plot point is resolved or Ryder falls through the floor and, I presume, a climax of some sort at the end. Too many low points, so many in fact that "points" ceases to be an accurate term, and no sense of escalation.

BloatedGuppy said:
"Driving a buggy around" is only pointless and tedious if the actual act of driving the buggy is pointless and tedious, and the buggy is actually kind of fun.
Agree to disagree I guess. To me it just feels like commuting between objectives.

The only real rotten pillar here is the dialogue/conversations, and that's largely down to animations. The dialogue is pedestrian and occasionally awful, but it's closer to "CRPG-standard drivel" than anything particularly noteworthy at either end of the quality scale. I'd argue, perhaps uncharitably to Bioware, that this is not that far from their usual form and actually a significant upgrade on the bizarre tonal mishap that was DA:I.
If this were Doom then that wouldn't bother me but in a game with as much dialogue as Andromeda I find that to be unforgivable.

Sure, Bioware could churn out some drivel in the past but there would reliably be some solid gold to make for it. (Presumably due to their method of separate writers working on the various arcs.) I am yet to stumble across any such gold in Andromeda.

I'd much rather an ambitious/messy disaster than a safe turd. Yes, they went the open world route, which has become exasperatingly commonplace, but the scope of this thing is hilarious. I feel like there was a genuine swing for the fences at play, but an inexperienced studio came up short.
I sympathize with that perspective but I don't think this game was in a baseline retail-worthy state.

If a chef were to serve you raw meat, unwashed vegetables and gooey pastries would you be inclined to praise their ambitious culinary vision?

One thing seems pretty clear though, and this is that Bioware can no longer be considered a good "Writing" developer. They're Ubisoft level now. They might accidentally deliver some strong characters or an interesting sidequest, but one should approach them with appropriately moderated expectations.
I agree with that judgement and comparison, but I suspect that you and I think slightly different things when we hear the word "Ubisoft".

I think, "Makers of painfully dull, open world dross drastically favouring content quantity over quality in whom the occasional hint of a soul is glimpsed for a few precious moments before it is immediately smothered by an avalanche of map icons." If that is indeed where Bioware is at then I for one would not mourn their demise.
 

BloatedGuppy

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Zhukov said:
It seems we each mean different things when we say "pacing".

I'm talking about the pattern of tension/engagement and relaxation/introspection that most stories follow. I'm sure you're familiar with it.

A graph for MEA (or virtually any open world game) would have the initial spike, then a long, loooong flatline with the occasional bump when a localized plot point is resolved or Ryder falls through the floor and, I presume, a climax of some sort at the end. Too many low points, so many in fact that "points" ceases to be an accurate term, and no sense of escalation.
Comparing any game, period, to a direct narrative arc (outside of completely narrative games, such as Telltale) is doing a disservice to the game in question. In an XCOM campaign I might play very similar seeming missions for 100 hours. Does that mean the game is utterly devoid of interest or pacing? CRPGs are more "story based", but the story has been a veneer draped over the game play since Richard Garriott pulled on his tights and birthed Akalabeth. The moment games even begin to eschew their chewy gaming center in the service of an actually functional narrative with (drumroll) pacing, they are met with a legion of braying young men in pony t-shirts shouting that they "aren't real games".

Does ME:A drown its pedestrian storyline in gobs and gobs of gameplay? Yes, it does. Is that gameplay fun? Obviously mileage varies, but I argue that it largely is. This isn't DA:I, where you might literally spend 25 minutes hitting rocks to get enough iron together to make a shitty sword for one of your weird, gormless companions. "Pacing" in a game of this nature is how much guff you're made to endure between actually moving around and interacting with things. I've played for hours on end where all I've done is shoot and drive and do stupid little quests that service the part of my brain that likes filling out checklists in MMOs. There are senseless timesinks like the beautiful but absurd galaxy map, but very little relative time is spent there.

I don't really think the game HAS a "pacing" problem. The narrative is immune to it, and it does a reasonably good job just pitching you from activity to activity.

Zhukov said:
If this were Doom then that wouldn't bother me but in a game with as much dialogue as Andromeda I find that to be unforgivable.
I dunno. I set the bar lower for "unforgivable". Maybe I've just played a lot of REALLY terribly written games to pretend that *this* is some atypical transgression. I honestly don't even know what most gamers think a GOOD story even is. Almost every story I can remember got thrown under the bus by someone. It's amateurish, but in a really excitable wide-eyed way.

Zhukov said:
I sympathize with that perspective but I don't think this game was in a baseline retail-worthy state.
It's baseline retail-worthy in that it's playable. It was not remotely polished the way it SHOULD have been for such a high priced launch, and the fact it needed intensive pre-launch attention is achingly evident. But EA lost patience with the protracted development and for once I'm having trouble blaming them. 5 years is a long goddam time.

My main debate over whether or not I enjoy a game is "how enjoyable is this". I've enjoyed some pretty fucking unpolished games in my time. Mount and Blade is hardly even A GAME in stretches, and I played that shit for 200 hours. This isn't Ultima IX. It didn't launch with 500 play killing bugs.

Zhukov said:
I agree with that judgement and comparison, but I suspect that you and I think slightly different things when we hear the word "Ubisoft".
You are correct. I liked Far Cry 3.

I do think Bioware needs to settle down with the open world shit though. I think they're starting to get a handle on how you need to do it if you're going to bother to do it, but I don't think it can co-exist with their more narrative focused outings. One or both suffer. Try to do too much, and you run out of time. If they were an independent developer and could take as long as they wanted on this shit, fine, but they have a publicly traded corporate master.

I just don't see the soulless, cynical cash in some people do. I saw an attempt to return to series roots with an expansive game celebrating exploration and alien coalition building that clearly had a bunch of inexperienced cooks knocking heads over design elements whose ambition clearly exceeded their grasp. DA:I seemed like a game designed by a developer who had taken all leave of their senses. ME:A seems like an overshoot that fell on its face. I know which one I prefer. The latter, at least, can be salvaged.
 

sanquin

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Zhukov said:
---SNIP---
I agree with this review 100%. And yet, I'm still enjoying the game.

-I just turn on youtube on my second screen and watch a video or two while planet scanning and such. And I intentionally don't pay too much attention to the facial animations during dialogue.
-I also skip whenever I encounter those incredibly corny or out of place voice lines.
-Normal melee has no weight behind it whatsoever, and the auto-turn-towards-enemy while using it is REALLY annoying at times as it doesn't work that well. Though the jump melee is pretty fun.
-The guns...in every mass effect I generally just found 1 or 2 guns I liked and stuck with them through the rest of the game anyway, so eh.
-The multiplayer is just as repetitive as ME3's. Though I've already put a lot more hours into it than I initially thought I would. The boost jumps and dodges add that bit of extra mobility ME3 multiplayer sorely needed, and overall it feels a bit more fast paced than ME3's as well. Plus it's a bit more challenging as you get messed up pretty quickly by the big guys or if you get caught in a larger group. So it always keeps you on your toes. I personally like my melee specced vanguard a lot. As while melee is dull on it's own, using it against the big guys requires quite a bit of dodging and paying attention to their movements. But the pay off is that you do a LOT of damage with it.

Overall I'd say only die-hard mass effect fans should get this game. As in, the type that just wants more mass effect. (Like me) Otherwise...yea, all the (non rage-fest) complaints are completely valid.

BloatedGuppy said:
I just don't see the soulless, cynical cash in some people do. I saw an attempt to return to series roots with an expansive game celebrating exploration and alien coalition building that clearly had a bunch of inexperienced cooks knocking heads over design elements whose ambition clearly exceeded their grasp. DA:I seemed like a game designed by a developer who had taken all leave of their senses. ME:A seems like an overshoot that fell on its face. I know which one I prefer. The latter, at least, can be salvaged.
Exactly... It's pretty damn noticeable that the only real thing this development team did before this was the ME3 multiplayer. (Or did they do more?) Either way, this project was too ambitious for such an inexperienced team. (And the very noticeable feminist/sjw undertones in the game don't help either for me...but I can mostly look past that part.)
 

Zhukov

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BloatedGuppy said:
Comparing any game, period, to a direct narrative arc (outside of completely narrative games, such as Telltale) is doing a disservice to the game in question. In an XCOM campaign I might play very similar seeming missions for 100 hours. Does that mean the game is utterly devoid of interest or pacing?
That's... a very odd choice of example. If this were the catty, confrontational kind of internet argument I would be licking my lips in anticipation of my devastating counterpoint.

Yes, I would say XCOM's story is rather devoid of interest or pacing. Of course, it isn't trying to deliver a story. However, the gameplay does follow that pattern of escalation. It just uses gameplay challenge instead of story tension. (Minus the initial spike since hitting the player with a difficult opening mission would obviously be a bad idea.) The spikes are the missions where things can get hairy. The valleys are the periods where you sit back in safety to build you base and do research.

In fact, one of XCOM's big problems occurs when it slips off the graph (I'm assuming we're talking the new XCOMs here, unmodded). In the late game the difficulty plateaus, the escalation ceases and player engagement flatlines as you curbstomp your way to the final challenge. I've seen you yourself complain about this very thing.

CRPGs are more "story based", but the story has been a veneer draped over the game play since Richard Garriott pulled on his tights and birthed Akalabeth. The moment games even begin to eschew their chewy gaming center in the service of an actually functional narrative with (drumroll) pacing, they are met with a legion of braying young men in pony t-shirts shouting that they "aren't real games".
Indeed. But, well, fuck those guys.

I would like to think there's a happy medium to be found. I may well be wrong to think so.

Does ME:A drown its pedestrian storyline in gobs and gobs of gameplay? Yes, it does. Is that gameplay fun? Obviously mileage varies, but I argue that it largely is. This isn't DA:I, where you might literally spend 25 minutes hitting rocks to get enough iron together to make a shitty sword for one of your weird, gormless companions. "Pacing" in a game of this nature is how much guff you're made to endure between actually moving around and interacting with things. I've played for hours on end where all I've done is shoot and drive and do stupid little quests that service the part of my brain that likes filling out checklists in MMOs. There are senseless timesinks like the beautiful but absurd galaxy map, but very little relative time is spent there.
Mileage does indeed vary because my brain categorizes filling out checklists in the same column as hitting rocks for iron for 25 minutes.

I don't really think the game HAS a "pacing" problem. The narrative is immune to it, and it does a reasonably good job just pitching you from activity to activity.
We're back to conflating pacing with ludanarrative dissonance. I do not accuse the game of having a problem with the latter.


I dunno. I set the bar lower for "unforgivable". Maybe I've just played a lot of REALLY terribly written games to pretend that *this* is some atypical transgression. I honestly don't even know what most gamers think a GOOD story even is. Almost every story I can remember got thrown under the bus by someone. It's amateurish, but in a really excitable wide-eyed way.
I try to hold games to a similar standard of storytelling that I do other mediums. Mild frustration frequently ensues.

That's not to say I expect a Tolstoy around every corner, but it would be nice if a few more developers could raise their sights above Back Door Sluts 9.

It's baseline retail-worthy in that it's playable.
The Slaughtering Grounds was "playable". Playable is a mighty low bar.

I just don't see the soulless, cynical cash in some people do. I saw an attempt to return to series roots with an expansive game celebrating exploration and alien coalition building that clearly had a bunch of inexperienced cooks knocking heads over design elements whose ambition clearly exceeded their grasp. DA:I seemed like a game designed by a developer who had taken all leave of their senses. ME:A seems like an overshoot that fell on its face. I know which one I prefer. The latter, at least, can be salvaged.
Oh, I don't see it as soulless or a cash in. (Well, perhaps the use of the Mass Effect brand was a bit of both. I think it would have been better as a new IP spiritual successor sort of deal. Oh well.) I just think it's shoddily made and laden with some baffling design decisions.

"Excitable, wide eyed" chef, raw meat.