ME: Andromeda: A Postmortem

[Redryhno]

Yes finally someone else saying nice things about the Game. It has it's flaws but I still really enjoyed it. I plan to go back to it in a bit. I really enjoyed the new characters, favs are Peebee and Drack. Who along with my sarcastic impulsive Ryder became the No Fucks squad. I really don't get where all the hate came from. I have to think that a lot of people just jumped on a bandwagon without playing. Especially on tumblr, (which I stay on for the art blogs I follow and little else.) Again the game has it's faults but it was no where near as bad as people made it out to be. I don't regret spending time or money on this game at all.

And I don't regret my time spent with it either. Granted it was because I was commenting along with my roommates as we drank about how much of the game is such a fucking piece of shit, but still, it's a game that is held together purely through the franchise name, but it's also the reason I despise it so much.

As an RPG, it's lacking in many respects, the lack of actual classes for the PC, the lack of actual dialogue and interactions that can't be summed up with a one-word emotion, the lack of actual customization of your characters personality simply because they decided to go with the dialogue wheel again(though it is slightly better than before) and you're going from logical professional one minute to screeching newbie the next.

It's missing alot from an action standpoint simply because they decided to keep timers and reloads, though the movement is a bit better. Companions have been steadily turned into exposition/one-liner spouting turret sponges that you have to routinely revive because the AI for them is so bad it makes Mario Kart team COMs look massively advanced by comparison. There is no real responsiveness to the skills you equip them with to the point that you aren't playing as a squad, you're playing kitten herder with guns. Also you run out of ammo far too quickly unless you get the special guns that are callbacks to the original that are somehow stronger and more versatile than their ammo'd counterparts through most of the game if you play on any difficulty other than "STORY MODE".

And it's missing alot in the story department because it's the same exact ground we've already covered in the universe. About the only thing that's changed is we now have slightly more impractical Quiets fighting against the NOT!Batarians with their NOT!Varren in a revolution and you're using NOT!Prothean tech that nobody else can conceive of using thanks to NOT!EDI that nobody has a problem with having an AI as involved with as much of the everyday lives of people until arund 3/4's of the way through the game at which point they're a slightly more important sidequest where it's shown that they just don't understand NOT!EDI and they're nasty mcpoopypants and their lives are made so much better once they accept [s/]Jesus[/s] NOT!EDI into their implants. Or you kill all of them because, let's face it, you are Important McBigDick and you know how to live their lives better than they do.

There's nothing wrong with liking the game, I just happen to believe anyone that does is either jonesing for an RPG to play(in which case I beg you to look outside of North America for much better experiences and bang for your buck), or they will defend pretty much every complaint DA2 and Inquisition had leveled at them. In which case, they're already lost and there is no way out of the Bioware cellar they willingly locked themselves in somewhere around hour 5 of ME3.

Also, I don't care if anyone thinks B'Sayle is a good character, I will never be able to forget her shouting "HEY RYDER, HIT THE BIG BUTTON TO TURN ON THE BRIDGE!" literally every 7 seconds in a gigantic complex with multiple loot containers with actual good loot in them that you want - as in, we started timing and counting down as we spent ten minutes going for all the loot containers - that if you do hit the Big Button to Turn on the Bridge, an unskippable cutscene starts that immediately drops you outside of the complex that you can never get back into again. She's a fucking cancer to the ears, eyes, and emotional center of the brain. Also her backstory is "T'soni, but we added in some Jack except we didn't know exactly why Jack actually had depth!"

 

[AD-Stu]

She's a fucking cancer to the ears, eyes, and emotional center of the brain. Also her backstory is "T'soni, but we added in some Jack except we didn't know exactly why Jack actually had depth!"

You lost me on that last bit about Jack sorry - the only parallel I can see with Jack is that they both have outfits that expose their belly buttons and they're both biotics, am I missing something?

Their back stories otherwise have nothing in common as far as I can see though. For better or worse Peebee is manic ALL THE TIME, whereas ME2 Jack is moody and surly ALL THE TIME (ME3 Jack evolves some, but is still nothing like Peebee). Jack is motivated by her hatred of Cerberus, Peebee by her desire to see a new galaxy / learn about the Remnant. You can have a one night stand with both of them but they're scenes that are treated very differently, both during and after.

The Liara comparison is much fairer IMO. Feels to me a lot more like the writers settled on "what if we just make a Liara who's also a Manic Pixie Dreamgirl?"

 

[Redryhno]

She's a fucking cancer to the ears, eyes, and emotional center of the brain. Also her backstory is "T'soni, but we added in some Jack except we didn't know exactly why Jack actually had depth!"

You lost me on that last bit about Jack sorry - the only parallel I can see with Jack is that they both have outfits that expose their belly buttons and they're both biotics, am I missing something?

Their back stories otherwise have nothing in common as far as I can see though. For better or worse Peebee is manic ALL THE TIME, whereas ME2 Jack is moody and surly ALL THE TIME (ME3 Jack evolves some, but is still nothing like Peebee). Jack is motivated by her hatred of Cerberus, Peebee by her desire to see a new galaxy / learn about the Remnant. You can have a one night stand with both of them but they're scenes that are treated very differently, both during and after.

The Liara comparison is much fairer IMO. Feels to me a lot more like the writers settled on "what if we just make a Liara who's also a Manic Pixie Dreamgirl?"

Just the basic "I'm a rebel because I was betrayed in the past" bits more than anything combined with her route essentially just being a rehash with the "sex before suicide mission equals failed relationship". I just despise so many characters in Andromeda, but she just takes the cake from having the most annoying personality that is "just a cover because I'm sooooo scared of letting anyone in". Jack I can take, she actually has massive backstory explanations for why she is the way she is that date back to childhood. B'Sayle is just...your basic high school/early college girl story more than anything, and it's so fucking boring when it's done as lazily as everything in Andromeda feels. Also the ten minute "HEY RYDER" crap we went through made us want to kill her.

I mean, I didn't particularly like Liara to begin with, but that was sorta how her route just feels wrong to begin with considering she's effectively a 17 year old and Shepard is - mentally/emotionally - 12 years her senior(why people forgive her when I know most of the same people that say it's fine and dandy because she's really 117 have massive problems with thousand-year old lolis I don't know). But she grew on me later when you could regulate her to a "good through hell" type friend and she actually came into her own as more than just the naive bookworm. B'Sayle largely stays annoying throughout the entire game and I don't really see myself warming up to her. Liara at least had that younger sister/cousin vibe going for her from the start.

Which also sorta leads into my other big complaint with Andromeda in that pretty much every character is just a rehash of previous ME characters. It's one thing to keep long-standing archetypes/personalities across multiple franchises, but this is the same damn franchise.

 

[CaitSeith]

Gotta love the use of the word "postmortem" for a game that still is getting full support from the developers and the publisher.

 

[pookie101]

Gotta love the use of the word "postmortem" for a game that still is getting full support from the developers and the publisher.

im still wondering if that full support will include story dlc or hell any dlc at all

 

[hermes]

Sorry dude but it was.

I don't buy it. Watching this video [http://au.ign.com/videos/2017/03/21/mass-effect-2007-vs-2017] there's just so many minor details in Andromeda that aren't in ME1. Admittedly that likely has more to do with technology than skill, but people aren't saying ME1 was better for it's time, but matter of factly ME1 animations > Andromeda animations which just isn't true.

I don't understand why people insist the animation was acceptable.

I suppose it depends on ones definition of acceptable. For me it's a Bioware game, so awful character models and animations are to be expected.

While obviously the first game had outdated tech such as texture rendering, the minor animation and facial quirks were more refined than ME:A

If by refined you mean out of existence.

Even without going into comparisons between which one is better animated (the original trilogy is), it is undeniable that they are different. ME: Andromeda was not build on top of ME 3 tools, they rebuild it from the ground up. It all comes down to them having to use an entirely new engine, with a different architecture and algorithms, by a new team. Funnily enough, that was a matter of great pride to them:

"We're pushing the boundaries of what Frostbite can do and what Mass Effect can do. The quality of the character animations is at an all-time high for us, and that's great because it means expressiveness, emotion and a connection with the player." Mac Walters, BioWare Creative Director, Jul, 2016

So, after being publicly sold as a differentiating factor of the new engine and the new game, we find stuff like this regularly:

Spoiler

...and I am meant to take it as a step forward?

I mean, I don't think it is a BAAAD game, just disappointing for a AAA game in a series that set the bar pretty high. You might be the kind of person that is not put off by unpolished stuff like that, or can forgive them a lot, or even find it expectable for a game given its pedigree (even considering it was 10 years newer, had a lot more development time and over 15 times the budget of ME 1) but lets not lie to ourselves: Andromeda's animations are not of AAA quality.

 

[TheVampwizimp_v1legacy]

Gotta love the use of the word "postmortem" for a game that still is getting full support from the developers and the publisher.

Well, considering I made the thread minutes after reading the news article reporting that Mass Effect has been put on indefinite hold (read: dead), it sounded appropriate to me. It seems we may just be attending an extended wake for the franchise.









Though I truly hope I'm wrong.

 

[CaitSeith]

Gotta love the use of the word "postmortem" for a game that still is getting full support from the developers and the publisher.

Well, considering I made the thread minutes after reading the news article reporting that Mass Effect has been put on indefinite hold (read: dead), it sounded appropriate to me. It seems we may just be attending an extended wake for the franchise.









Though I truly hope I'm wrong.

However they will still be patching and supporting ME: Andromeda. The series may have been put in ice, but they are continually polishing the game as we speak.

 

[immortalfrieza]

The indefinite hold comes down to highly unrealistic and unreasonable sales expectations (a million copies in the first week should be more than enough as it is) and leftover bile from the ME3 ending tainting people's perception of the game before it was even released. People went in hating it and expecting it to suck and so they went out hating it, Andromeda never really had a real chance of being treated and judged fairly by the Mass Effect fanbase.

Me, I was wary of the whole idea of a Mass Effect game moving to another galaxy even though I knew that was the only way they could continue the series at that point, but as it got closer and closer to release I heard so much about it that seemed tailor made to fit me. The open world planets, the faster and more fluid combat, the removal of classes in favor of the ability to customize as one wished, the abandoning of the renegade/paragon system, personality based dialog options, the works, all of it just clicked, and when I got the game it didn't disappoint in any of these areas. These days I'm lucky if I see maybe one or 2 games a year come out that give me that obsessive "GOT TO SEE AND DO EVERYTHING" feeling, but Andromeda managed to do that, though I haven't finished it yet. It probably helps too that despite getting Andromeda not long after release I never experienced any of those animation issues or any other bugs.

 

[AD-Stu]

Just the basic "I'm a rebel because I was betrayed in the past" bits more than anything combined with her route essentially just being a rehash with the "sex before suicide mission equals failed relationship". I just despise so many characters in Andromeda, but she just takes the cake from having the most annoying personality that is "just a cover because I'm sooooo scared of letting anyone in". Jack I can take, she actually has massive backstory explanations for why she is the way she is that date back to childhood. B'Sayle is just...your basic high school/early college girl story more than anything, and it's so fucking boring when it's done as lazily as everything in Andromeda feels. Also the ten minute "HEY RYDER" crap we went through made us want to kill her.

So I didn't do it, but I'm reliably informed having the one-night stand with Peebee doesn't result in a failed relationship - with her, or any other love interest. So, y'know, completely different to Jack who won't even talk to you afterwards if you do the one night stand (which you could initiate almost by accident too, IIRC). But that's just one little detail.

The trouble I have with writing these characters off in comparison to the ones in the OT is that we're doing it after just one game, that was clearly intended to be the start of a new multi-game run. Who these characters are now isn't necessarily who they'll be at the end of their arc and you said it yourself, you disliked Liara at first but she grew on you later.

Anywho, mileage will obviously vary and different characters will appeal to different people. Peebee didn't particularly bother me, for example, but I couldn't stand Liam and other people seem to like him. As for the characters being direct rehashes of previous characters, IMO you've gotta take employ a pretty wide lens to make that work (if the Peebee-Jack comparison is the kind of thing you're talking about). But again, mileage will vary.

 

[Idsertian]

Having recently finished Andromeda, this is how I sum it up:

Mass Effect: Andromeda is like Mass Effect, but better. It's everything that ME1 wanted to, but couldn't, be due to time and technical limitations (inb4 Mordin talking about limitations).

It is the vast, open planet exploration that ME1 aspired to be.

It is the huge, sprawling space opera that ME1 wanted to be.

It is the intuitive, seamless combat system that ME1 needed to have.

On top of that, it has incredible graphics thanks to the Frostbite engine, an amazing soundscape (seriously, just take a moment to stop and listen to the game) and is stuffed fuller than a Christmas turkey with quests to follow. Does it have glitches? Well duh, it's an open world game with a massive scope. Yes, it has glitches. Do they render the game completely unplayable? Not at all. The three worst ones I encountered were:

1. Two minor side-quests that were broken and unable to be completed. One has since been fixed in patch 1.06.
2. A random audio bug that silenced the game and required it to be restarted. It occurred maybe twice in over 130 hours of play.
3. "Pathfinder, you have new email at your terminal." (My fellow players know what I'm talking about)

These are only minor annoyances, and frankly, trivial to put up with.

I think, though, that Mass Effect: Andromeda is actually best summed up as being a do-over.

And I love it.

 

[Seanfall]

Having recently finished Andromeda, this is how I sum it up:

Mass Effect: Andromeda is like Mass Effect, but better. It's everything that ME1 wanted to, but couldn't, be due to time and technical limitations (inb4 Mordin talking about limitations).

It is the vast, open planet exploration that ME1 aspired to be.

It is the huge, sprawling space opera that ME1 wanted to be.

It is the intuitive, seamless combat system that ME1 needed to have.

On top of that, it has incredible graphics thanks to the Frostbite engine, an amazing soundscape (seriously, just take a moment to stop and listen to the game) and is stuffed fuller than a Christmas turkey with quests to follow. Does it have glitches? Well duh, it's an open world game with a massive scope. Yes, it has glitches. Do they render the game completely unplayable? Not at all. The three worst ones I encountered were:

1. Two minor side-quests that were broken and unable to be completed. One has since been fixed in patch 1.06.
2. A random audio bug that silenced the game and required it to be restarted. It occurred maybe twice in over 130 hours of play.
3. "Pathfinder, you have new email at your terminal." (My fellow players know what I'm talking about)

These are only minor annoyances, and frankly, trivial to put up with.

I think, though, that Mass Effect: Andromeda is actually best summed up as being a do-over.

And I love it.

Yes this is how I've heard others describe it. It's what ME1 could/would have been had they had the time and money to put in everything they wanted. And yes SAM does need to shut the fuck up.

Yes finally someone else saying nice things about the Game. It has it's flaws but I still really enjoyed it. I plan to go back to it in a bit. I really enjoyed the new characters, favs are Peebee and Drack. Who along with my sarcastic impulsive Ryder became the No Fucks squad. I really don't get where all the hate came from. I have to think that a lot of people just jumped on a bandwagon without playing. Especially on tumblr, (which I stay on for the art blogs I follow and little else.) Again the game has it's faults but it was no where near as bad as people made it out to be. I don't regret spending time or money on this game at all.

There's nothing wrong with liking the game, I just happen to believe anyone that does is either jonesing for an RPG to play(in which case I beg you to look outside of North America for much better experiences and bang for your buck), or they will defend pretty much every complaint DA2 and Inquisition had leveled at them. In which case, they're already lost and there is no way out of the Bioware cellar they willingly locked themselves in somewhere around hour 5 of ME3.

So their's nothing wrong with me liking it. Your just going to assume my reason for doing it is one you pulled out of thin air. DA2 had shit design but I liked the characters. I also liked Inqusition. You get I can find parts of a game annoying but still enjoy it overall? Right you get people do that. It's not just one thing that can make or break a game. I find dying and losing part of my HP bar in Dark Souls annoying but I still love the game for it's visual style, tight combat, lore and world. I can love Inquisition despite the shit MMO side quests. 'They're already lost' Oh man...'they like a game I KNOW is shit therefore their lost'. Really? This again? REALLY?

 

[Redryhno]

So their's nothing wrong with me liking it. Your just going to assume my reason for doing it is one you pulled out of thin air. DA2 had shit design but I liked the characters. I also liked Inqusition. You get I can find parts of a game annoying but still enjoy it overall? Right you get people do that. It's not just one thing that can make or break a game. I find dying and losing part of my HP bar in Dark Souls annoying but I still love the game for it's visual style, tight combat, lore and world. I can love Inquisition despite the shit MMO side quests. 'They're already lost' Oh man...'they like a game I KNOW is shit therefore their lost'. Really? This again? REALLY?

And you get that someone can use hyperbole to get their dislike of a game across without being completely serious right? But yes, you are indeed lost because I do indeed know that the game is a shiny turd because I am the smartest asshole in any chatroom I log my Important McBigDick self into.

Also, you go into Dark Souls 2(The only Souls game to do that as far as I know) knowing that your hp bar decreases each time you fuck up and die. You don't go into a ME game and expect to run into a rehash of previous games. A rehash of previous sci-fi ideas and storylines, sure. But once again, we're talking about a franchise that was uprooted and thrown across the universe to get away from the red-hot-spiked-holes they wrote themselves into with ME3 and they still end up just doing a poorly done remake that's chock full of mechanics and gameplay that people have been screaming bloody murder about Ubisoft and Bethesda doing over and over again that got old about 5 years ago but is, again, somehow forgiven because "BIOWARE".

Andromeda, to me, is a game that could've been good if the C-team had had either any substantial amount of passion(for something other than how the OT made them feel) or competency scattered between them all. Also, because I have learned from my numerous discussions/arguments over this game, I do not wish the devs harm or to lose their jobs from a personal standpoint. I just very much believe that Andromeda is not up to snuff, even for post 2010 Bioware.

 

[pearcinator]

I've put 15 hours into single-player so far but the story isn't gripping me (not nearly as much as the original trilogy). I'm also not a fan of the open-world design (especially since almost every game now needs an 'open-world' and frankly, I'm over them).

I do think the combat system is the best in the series so far and the latest patch has made multiplayer more fun (still not as much fun as ME3 but after a few more maps and additions it could be).

I'll give it another try, in a few months when they patch it up some more and I feel like exploring another open-world.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I played through Andromeda post-launch, when it was still rife with all its animation issues and QOL niggles.

The actual shooting/driving is decent to fun. Maybe even "above average" in some respects. It's a surprisingly zippy little games at times, and performed nicely on my machine. Gorgeous environmental graphics too, and some lovely combat animations.

Outside of combat...hoo brother.

Characterization ranged from "okay" to "extremely bad".
Dialogue ranged from "passable" to "atrocious", and was heavily weighted towards the latter.
Story pacing was garbage.
Broad plot strokes were extremely dull, and many if not most of the smaller stories were as well. A lot of it felt like radiant questing, it was so wildly generic. Breathless promises to take lessons from the Witcher 3 were revealed as a lot of hot air.
Production quality in the cinematic/conversation sequences was largely terrible. The game had little to no direction. Watch a simple conversational cut scene from TW3 and notice how they angle the camera, the reactions they capture, etc, etc. Most of Andromeda is simple shot/reverse shot with weird facial tics or flat dialogue. It was clearly in need of at least 8 months if not closer to 16 in polish passes just to bring it up to being launch ready, let alone competitive.

I don't think it's a terrible game. I think it can be quite fun. I think, however, that it's an extraordinarily disappointing game, and quite possibly a franchise killer (if not a developer killer, Bioware Montreal seems to be relegated to bench warmer status). Kind of hard to hang a lot of garlands around it.

 

[TheVampwizimp_v1legacy]

I'm interested in the wide range of responses I'm seeing in this thread. Even the things everyone agrees on can be things to disagree on.

A lot of people don't appreciate that it's kind of a rehash of ME1, but Idsertian above really likes that it's a "better version" of ME1, with the scope and gameplay the original didn't have the budget for.

A lot of people really appreciate the enormous amount of content and vast quantity of sidequests to complete, and some people hate that the sidequests are shallow, or as Guppy put it, almost "radiant questing."

Everyone has encountered bugs and everyone has seen the wonky facial animations, but no one can agree on how common or how bad the glitches are. Some people call it unforgivable and others say it's barely a drawback.

I think a whole lot of the evaluations of Andromeda are based on the particular expectations going in. People expecting a game with the mirror polish and massive storyline of a AAA RPG with the long development and huge budget of this game were disappointed in the rough edges and generic plot. People who expected a radically different game because it was in a different galaxy were unimpressed with the similarity to previous games. People infuriated by the Trilogy or the decision to continue a completed story had opinions colored by the series' past.

I went in with lower expectations and they were exceeded, which makes me want to give the game the benefit of the doubt in a lot of areas. I didn't need a totally different set of character archetypes, so it doesn't bother me that some of them have old traits from past companions. I never needed a deep combat system in Mass Effect, so the fact that combat is so much improved was a great bonus for me. I am not at all bothered by the fact that some of the side quests are meaningless MMO fluff because so many others are much meatier, and it's easy to differentiate them.

My particular preferences and the specific things about Mass Effect that make it my favorite series are the same things this game achieved, so I can forgive nearly all other flaws.

 

[AD-Stu]

I think a whole lot of the evaluations of Andromeda are based on the particular expectations going in. People expecting a game with the mirror polish and massive storyline of a AAA RPG with the long development and huge budget of this game were disappointed in the rough edges and generic plot. People who expected a radically different game because it was in a different galaxy were unimpressed with the similarity to previous games. People infuriated by the Trilogy or the decision to continue a completed story had opinions colored by the series' past.

I think there's probably something to this - I deliberately avoided pretty much all coverage of the game leading up to its launch, but like everyone heard the stories about the "hideous game-breaking animation bugs" in the week or so prior to launch.

Going in with that expectation, the bugs that I noticed didn't seem anywhere near as bad as I'd been lead to believe they'd be. Conversation animation on the whole certainly didn't seem to be any worse than, say, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, which was the game I was still playing just prior to ME:A coming out. Plus this is a Bioware / Mass Effect game, a certain level of that stuff is just to be expected. This is the game series where M8 Avengers appear in people's hands out of thin air in cut scenes and disembodied krogan eyeballs float in front of the camera from time to time.

Other stuff that I wasn't expecting probably bothered me more though. The little UI bugs like the quest log telling you there's a new quest when there plainly isn't. The damn new email notification. Liam's writing being largely non-sensical. And so on.

 

[pookie101]

Having recently finished Andromeda, this is how I sum it up:

Mass Effect: Andromeda is like Mass Effect, but better. It's everything that ME1 wanted to, but couldn't, be due to time and technical limitations (inb4 Mordin talking about limitations).

It is the vast, open planet exploration that ME1 aspired to be.

It is the huge, sprawling space opera that ME1 wanted to be.

It is the intuitive, seamless combat system that ME1 needed to have.

On top of that, it has incredible graphics thanks to the Frostbite engine, an amazing soundscape (seriously, just take a moment to stop and listen to the game) and is stuffed fuller than a Christmas turkey with quests to follow. Does it have glitches? Well duh, it's an open world game with a massive scope. Yes, it has glitches. Do they render the game completely unplayable? Not at all. The three worst ones I encountered were:

1. Two minor side-quests that were broken and unable to be completed. One has since been fixed in patch 1.06.
2. A random audio bug that silenced the game and required it to be restarted. It occurred maybe twice in over 130 hours of play.
3. "Pathfinder, you have new email at your terminal." (My fellow players know what I'm talking about)

These are only minor annoyances, and frankly, trivial to put up with.

I think, though, that Mass Effect: Andromeda is actually best summed up as being a do-over.

And I love it.

actually when i finished it i was thinking something similar but my head went to a remake with andromeda gameplay