bjj hero said:
Didnt Morrowind do that? Drop you in a completely different part of the world?
Each TES game is set in one of the different countries of Tamriel. Daggerfall was set in both High Rock (home of the Bretons) and Hammerfell (Redguards). Morrowind was set on Vvardenfell, home of the Dunmer. Oblivion was in Cyrodil, Imperial homeland and Skyrim in its namesake, home of the Nords. There are decades or centuries between each title, feature different protagonists and since the stories are linear (ie. there's no good/bad choices/endings), the events of prequels can be taken as a given in the lore. The continent was the same one but the only "cross-over" of which I'm aware was being able to visit Solstheim in TESIII: Bloodmoon and TESV: Dragonborn, which I thought was quite a nice touch.
pookie101 said:
seems to be alot more freedom to experiment with characters and skills from what i just saw
I'm not convinced I really like that. It seems to have the same issue as Skyrim, where they've simply removed the individuality of different classes entirely, and with it, part of the role-playing. Being able to learn and master everything means there's no real choice, our characters aren't even slightly individual or different from any other. I always resented the ME3 cutscenes, where Shepard fires an Avenger or pistol *my* Shepard wasn't carrying and never used his/her biotics, despite how integral they were.
pookie101 said:
i do want to see crafting in action it seems interesting
Crafting does have a place in video games but is this game one of them? We see in the official video [https://youtu.be/NOIzH6UcoW4?t=205] the PC picking up flowers/materials and what not, not unlike in Far Cry games. How much does that really add to gameplay? Is it better or does it add more depth than simply finding/buying gear as we did in prior titles? I appreciate "exploration" but running around an open world picking up flowers doesn't really qualify. I'm not passing judgement here, just asking the question. We'll have to wait and see. The system does use "blueprints" which I believe are found or bought, and they will result in items of different levels and rarities.
pookie101 said:
if you wanted to make a game in the existing universe you could easily set it between the introduction and main start of ME2. its what? 12 months or something
Do you mean specifically in the time-frame Shepard is "dead"? The issue comes back to what I mentioned above, one of telling the most interesting story and the expectation. If it was set in that timeframe, who would the protagonist be? One of the Normandy crew? It specifically couldn't be about the Reapers, Collectors, Normandy, Shepard, Miranda/Cerberus, etc. There would likely be an expectation that we'd see the ME1 Normandy crew. The only story that happened in that timeframe was told in comic books [http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Mass_Effect:_Redemption], on Liara and Feron saving Shepard's remains for Cerberus.
I think any story in the Milky Way would have issues. Prior to ME, it wouldn't be about a Human SPECTRE saving the galaxy. During we already have and post ME3, they wrote themselves into a corner. If they removed it from the trilogy far enough chronologically, then at that point, does it matter if it's in a new galaxy or not? Nice as it would be to see our galaxy post Reapers, I don't trust BW writers to handle it anymore.
Phoenixmgs said:
I've very reserved about the game and waiting for feedback.
I hope the game is like previous Mass Effects with quality over quantity quests (DA:I). How good the core game is and having only elements that improve that core are what I look for most in games. I don't want to waste time on lackluster content or busywork.
I'm not sure how this whole storyline is going to work or make sense. What's the point of going to another galaxy? To get away from the Reapers? It wouldn't make sense the Reapers are just a thing for our galaxy as then the whole organics vs synthetics with the synthetics winning and killing off all organic life would happen in all other galaxies then. Of course, those winning super powerful synthetics would make it to the Milky Way at some point. I always figured when the Reapers were gone from the Milky Way, they were tending to all the other galaxies because that's really the only thing that makes sense.
ME3 had a lot of "quantity over quality" to paraphrase you. Fetching Obelisks, Banners and Books for 5 War Assets or whatever. On the subject of the storyline, I can explain it in a spoiler-free way (since I don't know the game's story).
There was a conversation with Admiral Hackett quite early in ME3, that I cannot find a video for, but I believe it was one of the dialogues relating to the Mars Archive/Crucible plans. In it, he references "other plans in motion" or something to that effect; this is now taken to mean the Arks featured in ME: Andromeda. The story goes something like: ME1 happened, Sovereign was defeated. Council races decided to build "Arks" to ship many of their species away from the Milky Way, as a contingency in case the Reapers return and succeed in wiping them out. That way the civilisations would continue. There were many Arks, of which the four belonging to the Humans, Asari, Salarians and Turians arrived in the Heleus Cluster after 600 years of space travel with the crew in cryostasis. We don't know about other Arks that may have been sent, this may be a part of the game's story. The Arks were completed, populated and sent off *after* the events of ME2 but prior to ME2: Arrival. Thus the last anyone on the Arks new, the Reapers were still not an imminent threat and despite 600 years passing in transit, they have no way to know what fate befell the Milky Way. With them, the Arks carried parts of the "Nexus", a pseudo-Citadel structure that would serve the same function in Andromeda as the Reaper-made original did in the milky way.
TBH it's a rather absurd retcon (or is it a plothole?)...ME2 already established in a huge retcon of its own, that the Council did not believe in the Reapers, despite Sovereign's attack. So despite that ME2 established this, the races still had the notion of creating these Arks that would ensure their civilisations lived on in another galaxy just in-case the Reapers they didn't believe existed did in fact win. And that apart from an off-the-cuff remark by Hackett that has only post-Andromeda announcement been taken to be a foreshadowing, no one in the galaxy knew to mention the Arks in either ME2 or 3. You'd think *someone* would have noticed it.
We also don't know how interstellar travel will work. In the Milky Way we have/had the mass relays that used the "mass effect" to send ships to a relay's twin instantaneously. We thought they were prothean in origin, but they were left by the reapers. How does the Tempest travel between star systems in the Heleus Cluster? Do they have their own version of mass relays?
I'm with you on the waiting for feedback. I'm long since done with pre-ordering any AAA game because of too many broken promises, shady practises and the rest. And after DA2, ME3 and more significantly, DA:I, BW doesn't have the track record they used to have. The hands-on videos I linked to offer some hope tho with generally positive feedback and I'll credit EA for the simple act of allowing the press to discuss the game a month prior to release, unlike Ubisoft and their embargo policies. But yeah, the jury is out till after reviews start coming in.