[Megathread] Mass Effect Andromeda

[Lahis]

she probably would have died in Harbs lazer without being half cyborg.

Half cyborg? Any amount of cybernetic parts is enough to classify as a cyborg, you don't need to go full Borg

[Edge-]

ME A was that teams first project on that engine there will be growing pains

This shouldn't be the case. Especially since they've had one game under their belt with that engine already (DA:I, I know it's not all the same folks, but there's plenty of overlap) in addition to having access to DICE for support. That excuse doesn't fly in the slightest.

Not to mention, shit like the image you linked isn't an engine issue. That's a production issue. 100% within the control of the team, and something they could have easily fixed if they gave a shit.

[Jastall]

Did anyone order through GmG? Have we got our keys emailed to us yet because I have nothing.

Same, and I don't have them yet. It's supposed to be about 48 hours before the game releases, so I'm waiting until Sunday before worrying. GmG is as legit as key selling websites go, I doubt they will fuck this up.

As for the story discussion, while it has some really awesome character stories that carried the writing (Mordin, Legion, Jack in particular), ME2's main plot was pretty bad. From the moment you are resurrected (by Project Lazarus no less, real subtle) to being forced to be TIM's errand boy who can never bring up Akuze, to the Coucil going ''Ah yes, Reapers'', to the Virmire Survivor raging at a plot the player is railroaded in, to the stupidity of the Collector Ship mission, or Shepard just happening to bring all 12 squadmates with him on a missions (??) just so the crew can get captured.

So far in Andromeda, I haven't seen anything that made me facepalm as hard as the Lazarus Project, the Cerberus Empire in ME3 or the ending, so I won't call it bad writing yet.

And it really doesn't help that ME2's story did nothing for the story of the trilogy at large. Ooooh boy, we know the Reapers make slushies out of us, that's cool and all but they're still absent from the plot in favor of a glorified side-mission (an awesome one, but still). Then ME3 arrives and they barge in immediately, forcing the writers to conjure stuff like the Crucible out of their collective bums. That could easily have been set up as something we found on the Collector Base, or designed using tech from there.

[-aiko-]

How am I going to survive until the 23rd to play this amazing game now ?

I've been trying to ration out my 10 hours, limiting myself to 1-2 hours a day. I've got 7 hours left but the urge to play it is almost overwhelming me at this point and since I don't work on the weekends I'm pretty sure I'll be out of time by tomorrow. D=

Wish I hadn't beaten Horizon so quickly. Not sure what I'll play to pass the time.

[Derah]

This video proves its entirely possible to make really cute female Ryders.

Mild Spoilers: Fem Ryder flirting with Cora and getting rejected.

[Tankitbetter]

Uhh i had the exact opposite experience, i though the voice acting was far better than the trilogy. Scotts voice actor blows (especially Me1) M sheps voice actor out of the water, Cora and liam are excellent, dadryder has the most godlike voice in any bioware game ever, the only voice i diden't really like was one of the salarians, either the pilot or the director on the nexus, it was too nasily imo but it's a salarian i get what they were trying to do.

I think a lot of people got whipped up in the reddit circle jerk, its over now even reddit realized they were being silliy look at the subreddits hot topics today

This has been my experience as well.

[Ilikegreenfire]

So just how strong is Cora? in one of her first dialogues she states she ripped a APC/tank in half and that's what got her sent to the Asari, thats some Jack level shit.

[May90]

There are rules to writing you know, you can't just introduce a villain to a story, then have him barely mentioned during the game and then suddenly you fight him at the end. That's objectively bad writing, because it's a rushed story and there's no build up to the final encounter.

DA:Origins and the original ME trilogy are examples of good writing, because the threat was built up during the entirety of the games, the places felt connected to the main plot and the pacing was just right.

As someone who has done quite a bit of writing and read a few books on it... Let me just throw it right there that you have no clue what you are talking about. There are no "rules" to writing, and "objectively bad" is an oxymoron. The story is as good as it captivates the reader/watcher/listener/player. I enjoyed DAI story a lot, I thought it was the strongest in the series, so the writers achieved their goal. Everything else is just your attempt to justify your inability to accept that not everyone has the same preferences as you.

DAO story, on the other hand, is weak in my eyes, it is a pretty generic "assemble an army by doing tasks in 4 random places and kick the big bad guy in the nuts". DAO is still a stellar game, and I understand that not everybody has the same opinion on the story as me. It is just that, an opinion.

Really, the only Bioware game which, I thought, had a poor writing overall was SWTOR, but it had to sacrifice a lot of usual RPG elements for the sake of fitting in the MMO format. When you expect multiple impatient people to see every cutscene, you have to shorten them, to make the dialogue lines less intricate, so even people not caring about the story still understood what was going on.

[Asrialol]

I find your condescending post to mean you're missing the point. For what reason is it acceptable to have the first 10 hours of your game be slow, dull, uninteresting, and full of major problems? That's not minutes by the way. Hours. That is a long time. And that can turn a lot of people off. But who gives a shit right? Anyone who shares my opinion must be a fucking retard "boy".

Opinions, son. I enjoyed the first 10 hours.

The game has flaws though. But I don't find it to be a bad game at all.

[Aoewy]

For those who play the trial on pc, whats your control of choice? I never tough I'd say that, but I prefer my xbox360 controller over the kb&m this time around, how do you feel about the kb&m?

[Edge-]

When you expect multiple impatient people to see every cutscene, you have to shorten them, to make the dialogue lines less intricate, so even people not caring about the story still understood what was going on.

Wut. You can spacebar through cutscenes dude. The poor writing was a reflection of BioWares decline and them trying to shoehorn their usual format into WoW in space (which they bragged about how they were copying so much from WoW, so it's not even a slight against them), not because they didn't think MMO gamers would watch cutscenes.

Hell, they thought it would take people 3-5 months to hit level 50 in SWTOR on a single character. No, I'm not joking. They literally talked about it at GDC a few years back.

[Ilikegreenfire]

For those who play the trial on pc, whats your control of choice? I never tough I'd say that, but I prefer my xbox360 controller over the kb&m this time around, how do you feel about the kb&m?

I don't think i could live without hotkeys for favorites. Mouse aim is also awesome for making sure you get head shots.

[-aiko-]

For those who play the trial on pc, whats your control of choice? I never tough I'd say that, but I prefer my xbox360 controller over the kb&m this time around, how do you feel about the kb&m?

If it has a reticle, KB&M always and forever. I feel like the faster paced gameplay also lends itself to KB&M.

[May90]

Wut. You can spacebar through cutscenes dude. The poor writing was a reflection of BioWares decline and them trying to shoehorn their usual format into WoW in space (which they bragged about how they were copying so much from WoW, so it's not even a slight against them), not because they didn't think MMO gamers would watch cutscenes.

Hell, they thought it would take people 3-5 months to hit level 50 in SWTOR on a single character. No, I'm not joking. They literally talked about it at GDC a few years back.

Now imagine playing with a friend (as leveling was supposed to be played) who is interested in a story, while you are not. If the cutscenes are as long as they are in Mass Effect, are you going to play for long, or are you more likely to ragequit at some point? It just doesn't work for the MMO genre, knowing what MMO players tend to be like. Hell, I had problems playing Vanilla WoW with a friend, because she didn't want to wait for me to read the quest text - and that is much shorter than your typical single player dialogue cutscenes.

[Ilikegreenfire]

Also i do not recommend starting with the Leader background on insanity, its the Sentinel profile but they give you energy drain as your skill, when everything on the first planet is pretty much unsheilded organic. Fighting till the first levelup wasn't fun, i think i ran out of ammo at one point and had to hunt them down with the omni blade, ok that was fun but i wish i had a better starting power.

[Aoewy]

If it has a reticle, KB&M always and forever. I feel like the faster paced gameplay also lends itself to KB&M.

I think its because I spent so much time replaying Witcher3 with a controller, than Horizon on the ps4, that going back to kb&m felt weird to me. But yeah, also what greenfire said about favorite, think I'll force myself to get used to kb&m.

[Derah]

Also i do not recommend starting with the Leader background on insanity, its the Sentinel profile but they give you energy drain as your skill, when everything on the first planet is pretty much unsheilded organic. Fighting till the first levelup wasn't fun, i think i ran out of ammo at one point and had to hunt them down with the omni blade, ok that was fun but i wish i had a better starting power.

I can't think of a situation where Scrapper isn't the best option. Charge deals good damage, primes combos set up by team members, and recharges half of your shields to boot.

Of course, I've not played the game, so I'm not sure how viable it is to fight at close range at that difficulty. I'll know in 6 more days. Just have to keep myself sane until then......... *twitch*

[May90]

I have to ask: since the game is somewhat similar to DAI, is there any replenishable resource that limits the amount of things you can do before having to go back? In DAI you had 8 potions, and once they were out, due to no healing, you had to go back to the base to avoid dying. Does something like this exist in MEA?

[Edge-]

Now imagine playing with a friend (as leveling was supposed to be played) who is interested in a story, while you are not. If the cutscenes are as long as they are in Mass Effect, are you going to play for long, or are you more likely to ragequit at some point? It just doesn't work for the MMO genre, knowing what MMO players tend to be like. Hell, I had problems playing Vanilla WoW with a friend, because she didn't want to wait for me to read the quest text - and that is much shorter than your typical single player dialogue cutscenes.

I mean, if it bothers you that much, drop group before cutscenes. But this was not something done intentionally on the part of BioWare to counteract such an event, they've literally never talked about keeping the cutscenes short for any reason remotely related to this, or at all. At least not that I've read anywhere. And considering how long a lot of them already are, it's pretty clear that they weren't looking to keep the short for any reason.

And considering how much they shit the bed at launch, they weren't really too in-touch with what MMO players tend to like/want, hence why the game saw such a dramatic player loss and had to go F2P within a year.

I get the point you're trying to make, but there's literally zero evidence that BioWare even considered it during SWTOR development, at least as far as I've seen. And given a lot of their other comments, I would honestly be more surprised if they'd considered it at all.

Though I'll leave it at that for now before we go too off-topic. Happy to continue this via PM's if you'd like : )

[Deleted]

ok after burning through my 10 hours i find 2 things disturbing :

1. pressing m for map opens the map. pressing m again to close the map doesnt work, i have to click or press esc to close the map (edit: twice !!!!). this is shit that makes me mad after opening map a hundred times over.......

2. regarding graphics and models, what really started to bother me after a while is that for example on nexus i see all these humans and they are all the same height, weight all proportions are the same more or less. no chick with extremely slim hips or extremely wide hips, smaller tits or just huge ones, nobody is like 2.15 or 1.60, nobody is obese, etc etc. i dont mind if i cannot have a model, i dont know, an old granny with a purse that runs around and beats aliens with that purse with a catchy line "bad alien !" and that purse is upgradeable and shoots lasers pew pew and so on, but they could have thrown some variety into the game. this just looks lazy, on a lvl of some indy game developer that doesnt have the budget to deliver diversity but bioware and EA 100% had that and still im standing on nexus and im looking over a bunch of clones. or does bioware expect humanity do sort of drift into some "one species" thing, part asian, part black, part caucasian , all the same height weight hips shoulders everything and anything ? i really dont care about weird eyes or running or whatever, but a really fat chick that waddles around nexus would have been a refreshment every now and then.......