Watch: Mass Effect Andromeda Gameplay Trailer

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

I hope the quests are still of high quality and the game is not all open world with 100s of sidequests. I want that really solid 30-40hr Mass Effect experience. I'm fine with the worlds being more explorable but hopefully they don't go overboard. I also hope for a smaller scale and more intimate story. Lastly, if this is a new galaxy, why does it have all the same races? Shouldn't thetre be all new and different races? Unless the Mass Effects linked to other galaxies but why didn't the reapers then attack other galaxies or everyone from the other Mass Effect games could've just went to another galaxy and let the Reapers have that galaxy?

Looks like it went full shooter I remember when Mass Effect was an RPG

Combat has no baring on whether a game is an RPG or not. An RPG could have completely stat-based, turned-based combat or full-on real-time action combat, neither side of the spectrum makes a game more RPG than the other. Mass Effect is one of the few games where you actually spend the most of you game time role-playing, that's what makes it an RPG. The problem with most RPGs is the focus on combat and the combat is usually shit thus making for a not so enjoyable game. I shouldn't be spending most of my time fighting in an RPG because it then is no longer an RPG and is instead a combat focused game. And other combat focused games that aren't pretending to be RPGs have better combat so I'm really just suffering through worse gameplay with most RPGs.

 

[Hawki]

What's wrong with a prequel? Does every Bioware game have to revolve around you being the chosen one to save everyone from every threat in existence? They could have made a game with much smaller, personal stakes. They could have made a game about a smuggler, C-Sec officer, assassin, thief etc. There's infinite possibilities and an infinite amount of prequels that could take place anywhere between any of the three games.

Nothing's wrong with a prequel inherently, but it would limit what could be done within the setting. Also, given how the world works, I guarantee you that if a prequel WAS made instead of Andromeda, people would be asking why a sequel wasn't being made, and if prequels were made ad infinitum, then the old "milking" argument would come up.

Course it's down to personal preference, but if Andromeda absolutely had to be a Mass Effect game, and not a new IP, I prefer the idea of it being in the Andromeda galaxy rather than a prequel. There's not really any holes in Mass Effect history that need filling in, and if they were, we'd know from the start how things would or wouldn't go. At the least, Andromeda gives BioWare carte blanche for a story.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

Looks alright. Hope you can scan alien creatures though, instead of just murder them all. But other than that, the expected slightly off bioware conversations and animations remain, which - like all previous games - tend to endear themselves as the world building grows. They never were a good first impression, that is why it's not usually good to woo a stranger in with a snippet of their conversation dialogue; people get confused and scared and distrustful of why you are showing them this as you lock the bolts on your 6 inch lead door trapping them inside your dark abode, ready for scrumptious feasting.

 

[Imre Csete]

Feel it's a bit telling that they're showing far more combat than dialogue,

They release a dialog trailer, people accuse them of hiding gameplay/combat. They release a gameplay/combat trailer they're accused of hiding dialog.

Peeps can't win yo

They used to do developer streams/Q&A way earlier than this. ME2 had whole level sections played through by Christina Norman (the lead gameplay designer) this time from release, so you had a very good idea what you were getting into.

But since those devs left BioWare and their forums are closed aswell.

This is just an EA brand recognition cash in without the soul BioWare was known for.

 

[Cowabungaa]

On the one hand; fuck yes.

On the other hand; what'll actually be the gameplay elements?

The action looks good, but I want a lot more from a Mass Effect game. The scanning stuff somehow makes me hope that it'll have a wee bit of a Metroid Prime feel, but that's probably too much to hope for. The resource gathering (also, the idea is stupid, it's an entire galaxy) doesn't sound all that appealing though.

It actually looks worse because the graphics are more realistic. Vapid expressions could have been forgiven last gen but this is a whole new level of uncanny valley. It's so bizarre.

It's odd, right? I still hold up Half Life 2 as a hallmark in this regard, one I feel isn't even trumped by the otherwise vastly graphically impressive game The Witcher 3. I still feel like Alyx's smile when she picks you up after beating up some Combine carries more genuine human warmth than almost any newer realistic-looking videogame character to date. Only recently I sometimes see a cutscene that comes close but that's it and those are just cutscenes.

 

[Zhukov]

Oh look.. its garrus 2.0... and wrex 2.0...

That is not a fair criticism.

We saw A Turian and A Krogan. There was nothing to indicate they have anything in common with previous characters beyond sharing a species.

That's not to say they definitely won't be retreads. They might be. I don't know any more than you. But let's try to keep the criticism to the things we actually have evidence for. There are plenty of other things to be worried about in that trailer.

 

[fix-the-spade]

Well that could have been interesting, BWAAARRRMMMMM but there was something BWAAARRRMMMMM about the trailer that made me BWAAARRRMMMMM think they've double down on action and lost the big BWAAARRRMMMMM ideas.

Couldn't quite put my finger on what it was, it could have been the narrator.

I'm not sure what's going on with the art style of Mass Effect either. The original and second game had a very strong 70's sci-fi look (or what 70's sci-fi would have looked like with the proper tools). It seems to be moving towards a more lumpy Gears of War look, which I'm not sure I like, I liked my weird and spindly Jim Henson looking creatures.

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

This makes me want to reinstall all 3 of my Mass Effect games on my PC, DLC included

 

[Zhukov]

Mixed feelings.

Liking the premise, liking the look, liking the voice acting (although that last is no surprise, Bioware seem to make a point of hiring the best).

Kinda liking the combat, especially all the new abilities and a few old favourites (hooray for biotic charge).

Not liking the open world stuff. As far as I'm concerned "open world" is practically a dirty term at this point. When someone narrating a trailer says "these planets are big so were going to skip some stuff" that isn't promising. Reminds me of that MGSV preview.

The combat looks a bit Borderlands-ish healthbar-em-up. I hope I'm wrong about that. Hopefully they kept the punchy weapons from ME3.

Poor Bioware are really being left behind in the facial animation department. "Bioware face" has been a thing for years now but as other games look better and better it becomes more painful. I realize it's a side effect of them having dialogue options (they can't just motion-capture a continuous conversation like most developers do) but that doesn't make it look any better.

Lastly, I have some misgivings about the plot. An arc of space refugees trying to get a foothold in a new galaxy is an awesome premise, ton of potential. There could be tensions and factions among the colonists as things get desperate and conflict and allegiances with whatever locals you run into. But you just know Bioware are going to Ancient Evil all over it.

The first part of this video sums it up nicely:

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

I still hold up Half Life 2 as a hallmark in this regard, one I feel isn't even trumped by the otherwise vastly graphically impressive game The Witcher 3.

I disagree. In fact I think you're just plain wrong there. The Witcher 3 easily has the best facial animations in gaming. They seem to be handcrafted to perfection. They're even better than Ubisoft's motion captured animations from Unity or LA Noire's "revolutionary" animations. Because unlike those games, The Witcher 3 animations are filled with subtle details.

There's not really any holes in Mass Effect history that need filling in, and if they were, we'd know from the start how things would or wouldn't go. At the least, Andromeda gives BioWare carte blanche for a story.

This doesn't matter. Mass Effect doesn't have to be about a continuous story on a grand scale. It could be something like a futuristic galactic GTA. Each installment could be about a different character and his or her own personal problems. I think that most people, including a lot of Bioware employees don't realize how absolutely enormous the galaxy is. There's room for an infinite amount of completely original stories with completely new characters that could all be set in the same week.

 

[meiam]

Okay, I hate to be "that guy," but how the heck can an entire galaxy be short on resources? I mean, the Milky Way is big, like, really big, and the Andromeda galaxy is even bigger.

Actually that part I can sorta defend, without the Reapers to push the reset button every few millions years the galaxy would get overpopulated pretty quick and would quite literally run out of planet very soon. But this is going to make a few things weird, essentially technology should be so advanced in andromeda that they would surely have discovered a way to cross to other galaxy (since the milky way find a way even though they were reseted by the reaper) so there's no explanation why they weren't colonizing other galaxy to alleviate the problem.

 

[Darth Rosenberg]

Erm... Meh, I suppose?

I hear the makers talking about it, and it seems like they're heading in the right direction, but nothing they ever show gives me any confidence. DA:I was a love/hate game, but even its voice acting was superb - up to BioWare's standard. But this? Maybe they picked clips poorly, but removed of context barely any line seemed convincing.

Clearly I'm in a meaningless minority, but I want slower, more tactical combat - not bullshit arcadey dodge spamming.

...and if all their games are now going to have bullshit harvesting, could we just, y'know, have an auto-harvest toggle or some kind of harvesting drone? Because fuck harvesting for crafting.

Is this just going to be the thing with Bioware now? Big empty worlds with nothing in them just to pad the run time?

God damn it, I loved the Mass Effect Series, and liked Dragon Age and even Dragon Age 2, but Inquisition was absolute garbage. You're not Assassins creed, you're not Far Cry, I don't want to be doing somebody elses chores in your world. Stop with the exploration garbage Bioware, you're not good at it.

As I said above, DA:I was love/hate for me - and most of the hate was for the risible implementation of worldspaces; gorgeously created areas, with almost always bugger all to do in them (see also: mostly rubbish 'story', and shite combat).

I can't believe a company would do the same thing again, or worse, but the inclusion of the Nomad may even suggest it potentially could get worse; here's an even bigger fancy area with bugger all to do - it's just spread out more, because 'derp, exploration!'.

Oh, it's unfair to say DA:I had 'exploration', because it clearly didn't. It had plenty of inessential SP MMO zones with mostly identical content. ME1 tried to do exploration, and I felt that was hamfisted and a waste of resources, albeit back in the day it was a novelty. This return to exploration got me nervy the moment they said it about ME:A.

Still, nothing they say and nothing they show can really mean anything right now. It's under a year till release, and then we'll--- actually, first impressions on release aren't much use, either, if DA:I's flurry of 8 and 9/10 reviews (surely a mass dereliction of duty on behalf of reviewers... ) are anything to go by.

/edit - okay, one positive: a lot of the art design looks quite good.

And having watched it again - rewinding sections and thumbing the space bar a lot - I think the main, currently unavoidable reason it provokes a 'meh' from me is that to me action in these games is quite literally completely meaningless unless I know why they're fighting, or what they're fighting for. I don't play BioWare games for their gameplay... I play them for their character narratives, dialogue choices and worlds/lore. Until I actually get to know some of the characters and more of the contexts, I just don't care. So really the only ways I can tell whether I'm going to give a damn about ME:A is if I play the thing, or watch a hefty chunk of a good LP.

 

[Cowabungaa]

I still hold up Half Life 2 as a hallmark in this regard, one I feel isn't even trumped by the otherwise vastly graphically impressive game The Witcher 3.

I disagree. In fact I think you're just plain wrong there. The Witcher 3 easily has the best facial animations in gaming. They seem to be handcrafted to perfection. They're even better than Ubisoft's motion captured animations from Unity or LA Noire's "revolutionary" animations. Because unlike those games, The Witcher 3 animations are filled with subtle details.

Y'see that's the thing; they're all subtle animations and none of the plasticity that faces also carry. I have yet to see a character in there crack a wide smile, look genuinely distraught or enraged or anything other than small smirks or stern frowning. It's better in The Witcher 3 than in most games (and definitely miles above the infamous BioWare Face Syndrome), but I still miss a lot of what makes human faces human in that game, more so than in Half Life 2. I should know, I had to study human faces to understand them. Wretched Asperger's...

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Y'see that's the thing; they're all subtle animations and none of the plasticity that faces also carry. I have yet to see a character in there crack a wide smile, look genuinely distraught or enraged or anything other than small smirks or stern frowning.

Really? Because there's plenty of that too. Just not from every character. They all have unique expressions that fit their personalities.

 

[Erttheking]

I guess I'm one of the few that think it looks ok. Although I do have my concerns, particularly after the ending to Mass Effect 3. Cautiously optimistic here.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

This did nothing to alleviate my fears that Bioware didn't learn from DA:I. DA:I was a game that was so occupied with being "open world" and "open ended" that it became actively detrimental to my enjoyment of the game. The story was decent but got lost in all the inane open world stuff, whether it was MMO-style side quests, resource gathering or just exploration. The combat was pretty engaging, but also got lost in the fact that it ended up feeling like an MMO grind, where you just walked from mob to mob and cleared them out, with very little sense of place or reason.

For now ME:A seems to be squarely on my "wait for sale"-list, which is a shame because it is a game that ticks so many of the boxes for what I want in a sci-fi game. But I am not doing the DA:I quasi-MMO grind in another singleplayer game again.

 

[meiam]

Okay, I hate to be "that guy," but how the heck can an entire galaxy be short on resources? I mean, the Milky Way is big, like, really big, and the Andromeda galaxy is even bigger.

Actually that part I can sorta defend, without the Reapers to push the reset button every few millions years the galaxy would get overpopulated pretty quick and would quite literally run out of planet very soon. But this is going to make a few things weird, essentially technology should be so advanced in andromeda that they would surely have discovered a way to cross to other galaxy (since the milky way find a way even though they were reseted by the reaper) so there's no explanation why they weren't colonizing other galaxy to alleviate the problem.

Maybe they have the technology to travel to the milky way, but they also have the technology to see that giant robot squids from dark space murder everyone every 50000 years and they just don't want to deal with that.

They would still be able to colonize other galaxy and such, unless the resource drought literally extend to the entire universe. Actually that could make for some cool storytelling, because of the Reaper presence in the milky way every other advanced galaxy have been staying clear of it, and now there's a pan universe confederation that the milky way has just been excluded from, the remnant in the arc then have to convince them to kick the reaper ass and free the milky way, the ending would be going back to the milky way and taking out the reaper, invalidating ME 3 ending on its way !