Scaling is alright as far as i'm aware, it's the layout. It's console like not really as space efficient as you can be. But it's minor gripe i stopped noticing it by the time i was done with allocated 10 hours.CaitSeith said:
Mass Effect Andromeda first impressions?
- Thread starter DarklordKyo
- Start date
Doesn't DAII feature a smaller scale story? Sure, it sets up something fairly boringly 'big' that DA:I [kinda] dealt with, but 'The Tragedy of Hawke' wasn't exactly a saviour narrative, more of a 'hold back the tide whilst everything goes to hell' narrative.Imperioratorex Caprae said:
Biases against a BioWare game? Surely not...Xsjadoblayde said:
I've been avoiding videos and trailers for ME:A, so I'll wait for release and read some summaries. I'll get it regardless, but will hold off if it's particularly buggy. So far I've heard positive and negative feedback, so it's par for the course on all games, frankly.
I'm fairly certain you'll be disappointed (so yay for my schadenfreude, perhaps?), but you want a game to crash and burn? So you effectively want people to lose their jobs?JamesStone said:
Oh man. This looks so bad! My brother's girlfriend ran the QA for this game. I am giving her so much shit over Thanksgiving!Casual Shinji said:
Well, if they didn't do their job very well... *shrugs*Darth Rosenberg said:
At the very least a couple of animators, writers, voice acting directors, and quality control guys need to have a good talking to.
Just tried it. Character customisation is so shit they might as well not have bothered.
Closed the game 'til it's finished downloading fully and I'll just start over with Sarah Ryder.
Closed the game 'til it's finished downloading fully and I'll just start over with Sarah Ryder.
Maybe Frostbite engine is atleast partially to blame? Obviously it's able to render impressive environments and pretty lighting but when it comes to facial animations it appears no better than gamebryo. I guess with the Battlefield games no one ever really noticed since these games are all about the environments and the action and the incidence there is of character interaction they transition into cutscenes. Ofcourse that doesn't excuse the shitty dialogue and characters hit by the ugly stick in Andromeda. I also wouldn't put it beyond EA to heavily interfere with the creative process and that they put their ear to the internet to determine what ehmm..ehh particularly 'inclusive' vocal minority prefers in regard to character designs.Casual Shinji said:
If there is one thing the gameplay reminded me of it's 'generic'. You can almost hear a corporate fat cat of EA getting ADHD from his black coffee enema in front of a whiteboard shouting ''people like Dragon Age and Mass Effect and Ubisoft lootgrinds so let's combine these three and triple sales.'' After all this is the same shit company that pulled the plug on Dead Space b/c they consider every game selling below five million copies a 'failure'. It probably also explains the lack of direction, generic baddies, cliche dialogue and inoffensive character tropes; it simply tries to be all things to all people.
To be honest I'm not the biggest Bioware fan to begin with and I don't even think there is some exceptional talent working there but putting all the blame on Bioware as if they had gotten complete carte blanche to make this game is a bit unfair I think. They had to make this game both in the confines of EA and the restrictions of the engine.
This is a creative medium, so most assessments of jobs done "well" or not are purely subjective.Casual Shinji said:
Which is a very different thing to hoping a game or/and company crashes and people start to fear over their livelihood.
No, I don't think they need to be slaves to lore, but we're talking about a universe that has established rules. You're right, the ammo system may have been a gameplay upgrade(I heavily disagree if you were a class that didn't have access to autos or shotguns, half the game you end up running for more shots), but we're talking about a galaxy-wide(not just Council space) change-over. You know how long it takes for people to change-over for straight upgrades in the present, and this was more of a horizontal move than a direct upgrade in-universe. Also I think ME1's gunplay was unique and I wish we had more like it simply because the customization system was pretty deep for what it was, Insanity showed how much fun it could be in ways.oRevanchisto said:
No, I am not saying that, I'm saying that Ryder starts off at a higher tech level despite effectively taking place in the middle of Cerberus' razor-edge theoretical becoming reality technology(the secret, not so secret underground organization that can throw literal trillions of credits into resurrecting Shepard before you factor in the Normandy and recruitment costs as opposed to a few billion to launch Andromeda). Their father is badass we've never heard of that dies pretty much immediately, while baby Ryder loses a sibling and is suddenly thrust into Pathfinder(I don't complain about this, it's there to get you into the game and have some manner of goal, just wish it was a bit less "Once again, you are the chosen one" for once. Let the character be under someone else's command for longer than it takes to kill them off). Also where are you reading that I want the character to control like crap or that I want them to do less? From what I've seen, they already do...but what do you expect from someone that couldn't even get into N7?
My complaint is mainly with the implants and SAM. SAM literally shouldn't have been allowed to be developed in the open as he was. He's an actual AI, something that is closely monitored by Council Space to the point that VI's are flushed every once in a while to make sure they don't develop sentience because of how much of a threat and cautionary tale the Geth are(you remember the Moon mission in ME1, that was just a VI that was upgraded slightly too much), and Cerberus was only able to develop EDI because of how largely un-trackable they are. And even then, you're told to just act like EDI's a routine ship VI by anyone not on-board, and even then, Joker still doesn't completely trust her until ME3, however much he enjoys just bantering with her. The implants are more of a grey area since it's implied through some of the Noveria sidequests and pickups that L3's are skirting that line of abuse and illegal alteration,and that's just a series of wires hooked up to a brain stem port, much less the stuff everyone has that hooks up to SAM going through their organs, bones, muscles, veins, and nervous system.
Also don't throw that "GOTY" crap at me. Inquisition was largely panned at launch by everyone but the critics, and even they had alot to say about its flaws. Not to mention I don't personally think any game launched within literal weeks of the year ending should've been considered at all considering how massive the game was. It's like saying an MMO is the GOTY because you reached 20 in your week of review when there's still another 40 levels before you reach the stuff that requires you to actually know how to do more than press random buttons on cooldown because the pixel art is pretty or knowing what your BIS gear is for your level range. And another 80 before you reach endgame and raiding. You had people spend ten hours in the starting area because of how much inane bullshit they put in there instead of encouraging people to get on with the game.
And I'm happy you think it's worth it, ignorance is bliss, faith is uplifting, take your pick, but my take away is that it's Bioware's C-team of fanboys designing the game under EA. And excuse me for holding a game that's been in development for five years to look better and play more smoothly than something that came out TEN YEARS AGO. The gameplay is somehow prettier, but I don't really feel has any 'oomph' behind it. The dialogue I've seen so far hasn't been better than a bad YA novel, and that's shitty, even for a Bioware game.
I think ME1 was less that it looked better(it's difficult to say that as on a technical level, Andromeda is better) and more that characters had more "life" to them. Hand gestures and shoulder movement as you're talking instead of face close-ups and the odd animation loop do SO much in bringing life to a character. They may have been sorta expressionless there too, but it wasn't just lip flaps and fisheyes.josemlopes said:
Can we stop with this guilt-tripping bullshit? Nobody wants anyone to lose their jobs, but if it's an unfortunate side effect for a job poorly done, so be it.Darth Rosenberg said:
I'm sorry, but I do not have the patience for the "starving artist" schtick anymore. Yes, I have no doubt that more than a few people that are passionate about game design and are good at what they do would lose their jobs in this hypothetical, but how many people in there are there because they don't feel they have anywhere else to go and are largely just clogging the pipes? How many of them got a degree for game design and realized that the better jobs in tech think they're a joke and are just coasting along? Nothing wrong with coasting in and of itself, but we're talking about a medium and a job that is constantly being told, requested, and demanded to push beyond their current boundaries by critics and audience alike. If you're just coasting, then you don't really belong from where I stand.
It isn't. This is just a typical problem of "Bioware faces". It looks worse than before because the graphics are more realistic which makes weird faces look even worse. This is obviously an art design problem. They just didn't bother handcrafting the animations like CDPR did with The Witcher 3. Every single facial expression in that game was handcrafted by the artists. That's why in TW3 you get this level of qualitystroopwafel said:
While in a typical Bioware game you get this
You don't even have to see these in motion to tell that the difference is day and night. Facial animations don't even look as good as they did in Dragon Age Inquisition.
And this is just hilarious
I've been enjoying it. Part that pissed me off the most was I had to leave to a couple on minutes and turned off my Xbox. Came back and SP trial is over. 7 hours of multi, which I don't really care too much about.
>Can't change any graphic settings wihtout changing the preset as a whole
>Loads game with Medium settings
>Game crashes, takes Origin and Firefox with it
>Loads game with Medium settings
>Game crashes, takes Origin and Firefox with it
Again, you're nitpicking to EXTREME lentghs to the point where I don't even know where to begin. First, however, let me just swat aside your Inquisition hatred. You can hate DAI all you want it doesn't change the fact that a majority of gamers and critics loved the game. It sold very well and won damn near ever GOTY award that year, including DICE GOTY, you know the awards show where actual developers and industry insiders vote. Inquisition was good, just because you didn't like it doesn't change that. But again, you're just nitpicking lore details in Mass Effect for no reason especially when all these "breaking lore" details aren't broken but actually explained. The heatsink swap in ME2 was explained in the game, you can complain all you like about the ass combat system that was ME1 being within lore but they weren't going to let "lore" get in the way of good gameplay mechanics. Also, it's a weird thing to complain about since the old ME1 system is back in Andromeda via weapon mods.Redryhno said:
You also complain about how SAM, as an AI, shouldn't be allowed to exist as if it's some big plot hole when if you paid attention for two seconds in Andromeda you'd know that SAM is likely a big part of the plot especially with relation to your dad. Dad Ryder was specifically kicked out of the Alliance for his obsession with AI research in violation of the Council's directive concerning AI's. Clearly, SAM was built in knowing violation of Citadel law, much like EDI, and it's development will be a key component of the plot of Andromeda. You keep complaining about the "lore" as if changing somethings up so that they can tell a new story somehow makes the entire game terrible. The whole world is fictional, it's asking you to suspend your disbelief, and you're upset that their fictional history isn't exactly the same as it was before. It's one thing if they were just putting crazy lore-breaking crap in the game with zero explanation or context but literally every "inconsistency" or "new" aspect of the game is provided with a perfect explanation that fits within the lore and that's just in the couple starting hours of the game. I wouldn't be surprised to learn further on that the Council helped secretly fund the Andromeda Initiative over secret fears of the Reapers.
Stop trying to force the lore to remain as it always was, embrace these new changes and you'll have a better time.
That patch is included in the access trial.008Zulu said:
https://twitter.com/tibermoon/status/842497096607563776
You see that, I see empathy and perspective.Redryhno said:
Again, who gets to decide that in a subjective artform? You? A test group of 100 or 1000?
If animation quality is under assessment, how many actual players of units bought would whine enough to see that as some kind of objective failing worthy of job losses? Ditto for writing. Gaming's arguably a far more subjective and tricky thing to assess than any other medium, given gameplay or other elements can make up the shortfall, so to speak, and result in a positive or great experience.
Push boundaries in what sense? Technical? If so, I'd wager very few end-users care, especially with mainstream games on console. I've been gaming since the mid '80's, and frankly I've never seen a mass market thirst - of audiences or review bodies - for boundaries to be pushed. If that were the case we wouldn't have had the XB1 and PS4 requiring major-yet-half-arsed hardware upgrades, nor would we have 30fps or under be a broadly acceptable performance benchmark.
As an example of an objectively successful project (judged from sales and general critical reception/averaged scores): Fallout 4's facial animations are rather dicey (Mama Murphy's dead eyes and weird fish-mouth trump ghouls for horror value), and the framerates on consoles could buckle easily (particularly on Xbox with some of the landscape and/or weather mod overhauls the system clearly isn't spec'd for). The textures aren't exactly great, either. Hell, though it is ultimately subjective, I feel most would agree the main story was poorly implemented (or just plain badly written and structured[footnote]Pile on the criticism if you feel a game calling itself an RPG fails if it doesn't actually cater to role-playing. That's admittedly an even harder thing to judge, though, given 'RPG' clearly means bugger all these days.[/footnote]).
Was anyone "coasting" on Fallout 4? If audiences and critics "demand" boundaries to be pushed, can it be said that Fallout 4 met those demands?
Once more with feeling: who gets to decide who's "coasting"?
So, from what I've played.
It's... Ok?
The story so far seems pretty poor. Obviously the facial animations and general ugliness of characters has been gone over, so, I'll just say "Yes, that's a thing".
Multiplayer is pretty similar to ME3. Which is to say, kinda basic and the cash shop elements are already present. Which... Nah, no thanks.
Overall, I'm just disappointed. It's nothing like the quality we're used to the series. It's clearly very much a case of Bioware's B-team, or I guess, the fact that most of the people who could make Mass Effect a good game have left over the years.
Certainly changed my mind about buying the game after having played it. I was on the fence, and if it'd been on the same level as one of the original ME series, I'd have gone along with it. But, as it stands, it's like a 5-6/10.
It's... Ok?
The story so far seems pretty poor. Obviously the facial animations and general ugliness of characters has been gone over, so, I'll just say "Yes, that's a thing".
Multiplayer is pretty similar to ME3. Which is to say, kinda basic and the cash shop elements are already present. Which... Nah, no thanks.
Overall, I'm just disappointed. It's nothing like the quality we're used to the series. It's clearly very much a case of Bioware's B-team, or I guess, the fact that most of the people who could make Mass Effect a good game have left over the years.
Certainly changed my mind about buying the game after having played it. I was on the fence, and if it'd been on the same level as one of the original ME series, I'd have gone along with it. But, as it stands, it's like a 5-6/10.