Mass Effect Andromeda first impressions?

Blazing Hero

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Casual Shinji said:
Cowabungaa said:
Casual Shinji said:
From the footage I've seen, this is one giant mess that gives Ubisoft a run for its money.

I haven't laughed this much in a while though. My face is actually tired.

It's like a thousand memes were suddenly born.
You eh, got any sources for that? I'm a bit out of the loop and I need something to laugh at.

Though I'll also get sad because I want this game.

This one got a good belly laugh out of me.
Thanks for sharing that. I ended up busting up laughing at my cubicle.
 

Aggieknight

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I just finished the storyline content in the MEA Demo last night (3.5 hrs) and I gotta say that I'm disappointed. Having just replayed ME1-3 in preparation, I'm shocked that MEA doesn't look as good as a five year old game. But I can live with those problems. My greater concerns is that once you get to a planet, it's basically DA:I with guns.

Feedback:
- Entire game is a reskinned DA:I. If you've replayed the other MEs recently this can be a bit jarring as the camera isn't close enough in to easily see if Ryder is in cover. The dev is obviously aware of this problem because they've added a symbol to the UI that makes it obviously when you are in cover. Having said that, the combat has really grown on me and is one of the highlights IMHO. But, I hope you enjoy fetch quests, mining, and driving around pointlessly.
- Plot is a mess. Huge holes. Khet are just generic sci-fi bad guys that show up and start shooting people. Old school tropes like "everything that can go wrong went wrong". The introduction of the Krogan squad-mate is so poorly done that I literally LOL'd where it was obviously intended to be impressive. And much of the actions of the people you run into don't make sense. You run into a scavenger who works at the Nexus on the first planet. Why does he get to take a shuttle and run around when they barely have enough power to keep the lights on? And if everyone is literally depending on you (for some godforsaken reason) to save them, why are they selling you guns? Wouldn't they give you guns in hopes that you succeed so they can do things like...breathe?
- The "untested Pathfinder" thing is laughably handled. One minute people are being mean to Rhyder because she just inherited the title, the next people are treating her like she's the messiah.
- The use of DA:I worlds as a mechanism for filler is a mistake. It made sense in that game because you were fighting a war across the world so when you came across standing around doing nothing they had a reason to be there, here it is jarringly bad. Why are the Khett just hanging out randomly in the world or flying in additional troops on transport ships when I attack one of their positions? Why haven't they scavenged everything from the bases lying around? Where are they hanging out that they show up 30 seconds after I attack? It doesn't make sense. They are just there as filler.
- Holy crap the new Mako handles like crap. They've only had, what, 12 years to fix that?
- Planet scanning has returned and if at all possible, it's worse than in ME2.

One can easily accuse me of being a fanboy as the original trilogy is among my favorite games of all time, but I'm seriously shocked at how bad this is. Sorry for the wall of text but I really needed to vent. +)

I've not cancelled my pre-order yet but I'm close. Going to give it another hour or so tonight.
 

CaitSeith

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oRevanchisto said:
Just because they are the authors it doesn't mean their decisions aren't above criticism. The removal of infinite ammo in ME2 was so nonsensical from narrative perspective that the developers put a joke about it in ME3. What it's nickpicking for some people is a deal-breaker to others, and usually neither of them are wrong.
 

CritialGaming

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I was very much looking forward to ME:A. I actually wanted to review the game for you guys, because I love reviewing stuff for you. But honestly if the animation work is as bad as all these montages make it look, I don't think I could handle playing the game long enough to review it (24hrs min playtime). Certainly not to pay full price for it, I would consider it if I got review code, but I'm not famous or even liked enough for that to be a pipedream.

I want to see the official reviews, and hope there is a quick patch that will fix this stuff. I mean Bioware has never been good at faces, and to be fair Horizon Zero Dawn doesn't have great dialog animations, but ME:A looks fucking horrible.

No matter how good the gameplay is, the story is a huge element in a game like this and if the animations are going to pull me out of a story in a game where the story is extremely important, then that's a deal breaker especially when there are so many games trying to eat up my life right now. Luckily I just got Nier on PC.
 

Casual Shinji

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CritialGaming said:
I want to see the official reviews, and hope there is a quick patch that will fix this stuff.
I doubt they can patch in an entirely new animation rig for the faces. Some of the glitchy walk animations they can patch up, but I think Sara Ryder's stroke face is here to stay.
 

CritialGaming

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MC1980 said:
And the animations are baaaaaaaad, like giving Bethesda a run for their money bad. Half the animations are worse than the ones in ME1! And the bugs, fuck, not since AC Unity did I see such a flaming garbage heap on that front. This is something special, alright.
I think biggest damning thing for me, is that they did better animations in the FIRST game, TEN YEARS AGO! I mean at the very least you would think they would be able to match a standard that they set a fucking decade ago. Even if their new tech isn't working, how can production go on so long with fucked animations and not do something to fix it? I mean for fuck's sake, didn't they push the release date back a few months?
 

Dornedas

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MC1980 said:
I am wondering where all this 'good writing' is. From all the hours of previews and streams I saw, dialogue and story are both exceptionally terrible.

Hilarously so, in certain instances!


I guess this game will be a good barometer to tell who is capable of distinguishing good writing from dogshit.

And the animations are baaaaaaaad, like giving Bethesda a run for their money bad. Half the animations are worse than the ones in ME1! And the bugs, fuck, not since AC Unity did I see such a flaming garbage heap on that front. This is something special, alright.
See there you have it: an in-universe explanation as too why the animations are so bad.
They are just tired. I don't wanna know what your walk-cycle looks like after you've been awake for 60 hours.
This is all an extremely intelligent satire about modern work-attitudes.
But I guess a wage-slave like you isn't sophisticated enough to understand it.
/s
 

Diablo2000

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MC1980 said:
And the animations are baaaaaaaad, like giving Bethesda a run for their money bad. Half the animations are worse than the ones in ME1! And the bugs, fuck, not since AC Unity did I see such a flaming garbage heap on that front. This is something special, alright.
That's not fair. Bethesda animations haven't been this bad since Oblivion... In 2006. Even Mass Effect 1 had better facial animations, that's pretty much unexcusable to be worse than it's first game and to be on par on game from 2006 who's notorious for it's awful animations and bugs.
 

Cowabungaa

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Casual Shinji said:
Holy shit I laughed so hard I actually got tired. What the hell is with those walks?! How did this get through quality control?! What is this??

I think I need this game now, but for purely comedic reasons. Oh shit that's special alright.
 

Gatlank

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Cowabungaa said:
Casual Shinji said:
Holy shit I laughed so hard I actually got tired. What the hell is with those walks?! How did this get through quality control?! What is this??

I think I need this game now, but for purely comedic reasons. Oh shit that's special alright.
You should see it with laugh tracks.
 

meiam

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Gatlank said:
You should see it with laugh tracks.
Okay that's golden, great use of the really awkward silence, in the middle of a conversation!

What gets me is that this is basic femstryder face, not some random face player made purposefully to screw up the engine. This is the default! The default option is shit!

ps, love that everyone just accepted that mass effect game are played with fem character, I don't even know what malestryder look like.
 

josemlopes

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oRevanchisto said:
(weird, no one made gifs of Horizon's awful stiff animations)
Yes they did, the part with the black guy dying in a bed, the part with the terrible voice acting of some dude screaming in a cliff, the final boss death scene, these were all terrible. And Andromeda looks terrible too. ME1 did look better
 

CritialGaming

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Casual Shinji said:
Gatlank said:
You should see it with laugh tracks.
God, that poor woman's face. I guess that's what 600+ years of cryo will do to you.
I Lol'd.

The voice acting isn't as bad as I thought. Except for that robot chick. "Alex.....is dead." flaty delivered. My god. It must be more than her face that's tired.
 

sanquin

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Been playing original mass effect games recently again and the facial animations aren't necessarily better in those most of the time. They're more expressionless if anything. But that's where the problem lies, imo. ME 1/2/3 had less expressive faces overall, but that kept it a bit more on the good side of the uncanny valley. In MEA they for some reason almost skipped eye/brow animation all together (wide-eyed, blank upper faces) and purely focused on the mouth animations being more expressive. Which wholly put them into the bad side of the uncanny valley.
 

JamesStone

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MC1980 said:
I am wondering where all this 'good writing' is. From all the hours of previews and streams I saw, dialogue and story are both exceptionally terrible.

Hilarously so, in certain instances!


I guess this game will be a good barometer to tell who is capable of distinguishing good writing from dogshit.

And the animations are baaaaaaaad, like giving Bethesda a run for their money bad. Half the animations are worse than the ones in ME1! And the bugs, fuck, not since AC Unity did I see such a flaming garbage heap on that front. This is something special, alright.
Is that real? That is real, isn't it?

Oh god my smugness is reaching levels so high my brain is confusing it with joy. Ever since the ME3 ending and the pisspoor way they handled that I've been hoping for a Bioware game to crash and burn and I think this'll be it. I'm not exactly proud of the schadenfreude I'm deriving from this, but holy hell it is delicious!
 

Casual Shinji

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josemlopes said:
oRevanchisto said:
(weird, no one made gifs of Horizon's awful stiff animations)
Yes they did, the part with the black guy dying in a bed, the part with the terrible voice acting of some dude screaming in a cliff, the final boss death scene, these were all terrible. And Andromeda looks terrible too. ME1 did look better
And then remember that this was Guerilla Games' first attempt at this type of storytelling, while it's Bioware's seventh atleast.