[Megathread] Mass Effect Andromeda

[Lorianus]

http://i.4cdn.org/v/1489762734638.jpg
Snip

Im curious you are the first guy who claims to know the whole plot of Andromeda on like 8 popular gaming boards i frequent including the unofficial BSN forums and neogaf who are usually my frequent sources for leaks bar 4 chan, care to give me a source link ? if you dont want to post it here in a reply just give me a private message, thanks in advance.

I hope its not that reddit post from a year ago about that survey with some rudimentary plot points because thats hardly "i have read the plot".

[Deleted]

"Insulting Garbage"......

You and him sound an awful lot like victims of the dreaded Skyrim Syndrome that hit so many gamers in 2011.

Back in 2011, Skyrim was such a big hit, that for several months after it was out, every game released was immediately compared to Skyrim, and if the game wasn't as good as Skyrim, it was immediately regarded as unplayable garbage.

"Ohh what's that? Kingdoms of Amalur? Huh, sounds interesting. Tell me, is it as good as Skyrim? is it? come on, tell me, I wanna know, is it?!?!?!"

"Well, no...... not quite, but its still a pretty fun game to-"

"ITS NOT AS GOOD AS SKYRIM? THEN ITS A FUCKING GARGABE GAME, FOR FUCKING GARBAGE GAMERS. SKYRIM SET THE BAR FOR WHAT QUALITY IS, AND ANYTHING THAT FAILS TO MEET THIS BAR IS AUTOMATICALLY UNWORTHY OF BEING PLAYED."

That's how you, and the idiot in that video sound like.

And by posting this you just proved what kind of an idiot you are. Did you even listened to everything? Did you get the point? It's garbage compared to previous ME titles and Witcher 3 is just here for the reference of how an RPG should be made. No one is comparing ME to W3. From a company that used to produce top quality RPG games we get this insulting slap in the face that pretty much drops a giant turd on the previous titles and it's fans.


Infracted for flaming.

[Lorianus]

So there's been some complaints and controversy, and now they are moving the embargo even closer to release? I am so skipping this.

No ?, streamers are even allowed to stream the whole game at somepoint beginning tommorow from what i gathered from twitter, the embargo got not closer its the other way.

[thilicen]

No ?, streamers are even allowed to stream the whole game at somepoint beginning tommorow from what i gathered from twitter, the embargo got not closer its the other way.

Yep, I misread it!

[Lahis]

Okay so ran out of trial time (which was cut short because of the problems to get the game running... but more of that below)

In general I do feel positive about the game. Definetly feels like Mass Effect game, but the trial is way too short to really get into the meat and potatoes of this series: story and especially the characters. So far nobody has annoyed me (not even Liam who people seem to love to hate) and my brief meeting with Drack reassured that our resident Krogan will definetly be great grumpy bad ass to have around. Running around the Nexus and doing detective sidequests there definetly felt like the familiar Citadel missions from early ME1. When I arrived on Eos, I got overwhelmed by stuff to do and when I was running after sidequest objectives, I actually ended up at the third Monolith and met Drack way before I actually went after the main objective and met up with Peebee. I'm certain the supposed order of these events is the other way around, giving how the road from the landing zone circles to the Monoliths. So open world and semi-sequence breaking is definetly a thing. Overall, unlike the outbursts would make one to think, I haven't disliked the writing, but maybe I am just too much of an uncultured swine and don't understand high arts and writing like the average YouTube commenter.

Combat gameplay is excellent. I played on Insanity and every battle had proper tension to them (also, rip those who pick "Vanguard" to start out with on Insanity... take something with ranged powers that work on organics). The mobility of combat is amazing. There is no cooldown on the jumpjet, though hovertime is limited, so you can just zip and jump around the battlefield constantly. Also love teh fluidity of teh new skill system. I was having trouble with Remnant bots at one of the story mission objectives (wiped to them several times) and then I remembered that I had one unused skillpoint. So I broke away from the Adept/Vanguard build I was going for, got Overload and the synthetics went down much easier. Didn't really try crafting yet, because I didn't find any blueprints for weapons/mods I didn't already have. Overall the game left positive impression on me.

But let's talk about the issues then.

The memefaces have surely given lot of ammo to the haters, and not without reason. The facial animation is pretty bad at places, but it has been just few incidents and not enough to turn whole hundred hour game into flaming pile of shit like reddit and YouTube comments want us to believe. The overall facial animation quality is also pretty last gen. Random NPCs act just like they have done in every ME game so far... but this is next gen, new engine and new consoles so they should look much better already. Much of the facial animation outside of the cutscenes is procedural, but surely they could have improved that. Default Sara Ryder face seems to emote really bad for some reason, but custom faces looks much better. Go figure. Alien facial animation looks fine, but it's harder to hit uncanny valley with Turians, Salarians and Krogan than it is with humans. I've witnessed only one glaring animation error, and that is the infamous Peebee gun. How something like taht is in the finished (and Day-1 patched, since the Origin download already contains that) product is beyond me.

Overall, I didn't find the animation issues too bothering. Sure, Bioware should be doing much better at this point, but few stiff faces will not kill the game (for me atleast). Definetly not 10/10 GOTY performance on that regard, but I still think the game will be solid.

On technical side, game runs greatly on my machine. I was bit worried how my old i7-2600K would handle it, since on paper it's way below minimum, atleast on model number, but overclocked at 4.4 Ghz it had no issues. With GTX 1070 and 16 GB of RAM, the game gave me Ultra presets as recommended, and at 1980x1200 resolution it ran at solid 60 FPS during gameplay. Sometimes in cutscenes it dipped below that, lowest I recall was around 45-50, but cutscenes seem to pull out some extra effects beyond normal visuals.

On less stellar techinal notes, I did have some issues. Most notable is the fact that the game won't run if I have the drivers for my Ugee UG-2150 installed. How something like this can happen is beyond me, but atleast EA has taken note of it and hopefully they'll resolve the issue at some point. The other big issue I had was the stuttering/slowdown issue. Like I described previously, sometimes the game slows down to a stuttering and the movement speed is an unplayable crawl + my skill CDs bug out and I can't use skills. Strange is that the FPS stays at 60, sound effects play normally and some visual effects, like shields recharging, play out at normal speed despite slowed down movement and attacking. Weird physics/simulation speed bug, and other users on the help forums have reported the issue too. Alt+tabbing out from the game for a while with game menu open or reloading the save from main menu fixes this issue for me, so it's not gamebreaking but highly annoying. I encountered the scanner bug (the Omnitool scanner won't stay up but instead closes instantly) once towards the end and had to restart the game to fix that.

Apart from those two big technical issues (which I hope will be patched sooner rather than later), the game left solid impressions on me. All in all, trial helped me get over from taht reddit induced panic that teh game would fail horribly and I have positive feeling that the full reviews on Monday will not be all clickbaity Doom and Gloom like this preview coverage has been.

[Martymark]

All the reviews said the first 4 hours are garbage, so now they want reviewers to rate them on 12 hours instead?

Isn't that like losing a gamble and then demanding "best 2 out of 3"?

[Zelk]

He couldn't have said it better, perfect game for a braindead generation. Good thing that Witcher 3 set the bar so fucking high that it'll take another decade (if not longer) to top that.

He could have said it in less than an hour and a bit

[Lorianus]

snip

I also had a black screen start up because of my RGB Scimitar mouse from corsair and andromeda has not liked the software from it but i had no problem with my logitech keyboard and i think i know why that is, well not technically, but andromeda is taking advantage of my LED backlight on the keyboard it highlights automatically the movement keys during gameplay and when my ryder was on fire my whole keyboard backlight was flashing in orange, i hope they patch a option in to disable that and that corsair patches the mouse software because without it i cant use my macro buttons on it.

[Derah]

And by posting this you just proved what kind of an idiot you are.

Nice, ad hominem, because that CLEARLY makes you have the right automatically and deflates any arguments against you.

(that was sarcasm)

Did you even listened to everything?

No, why the fuck would I listen to an idiot, ranting for over an hour about shit he doesn't know nor understands about? I've seen plenty of other Azchats videos before, the dude is an ignorant, whiny, shouty, asswipe, that covers his insecurity and lack of valid points with excessive profanity, SCREAMING AT THE TOP OF HIS LUNGS, and making jokes nobody but other idiots like him find funny. I saw 7 episodes of him during Warlords of Draenor, and that was more than enough to make me decide his content is not worth watching for me.

Did you get the point?

The point that he's an idiot? sure, I got it.

we get this insulting slap in the face

Ahh the good ol' fashioned "Slap in the face" analogy. I'm surprised you're not using the "shoved down our throats" one either. Any other overused as fuck piss poor analogy you wanna use to get your poor point across? or you're just gonna cover it up with more insults because that totally makes you look like a mature and intelligent adult, I totes promise.

(that was more sarcasm)

[Ilikegreenfire]

Cora doesn't seem very... likable :/

She has a good reason to be, shamelessly reposting my self


When the intro mission starts kidRyder's shuttle is blown in half by lighting and their helmet visor is cracked is, the air is posinous but thankfully kidryder can mend the crack with an omnitool. Fast forward to the end of the mission Dad and kid ryder are blown off a remnant tower, This time Kidryder's visor pretty much completely shatters, However dadryder's helmet is fine, Likely because dadryders armor is better than kidryder's, and or becasue kidryders helmet was weakened from the earlier mending. So dadryder performs the ultimate fatherly duty, takes off his helmet and puts it on his child's head giving his life for his kid, and at the same time transfers Sam to kidryder, effectively making kidryder pathfinder.

I wasn't told what happens to dadryders body, it could have been left on planet, the area was swarming with kett and they already had to pack two shuttle crews into one shuttle so they may have had to leave him. The kett could very well recover his body and kettify him but i don't see how he could have faked his own death. Kid ryder technically died in the few seconds of breathing the planet air while dadryder was transferring his helmet theirs no way he survived.

Corra gets pissed at this whole situation, she was the 2nd in command, has 10 years of experience on kidryder, was dadryder's protegee, and she is a powerful biotic to boot, probably around Jack's level. It would be like if Picard transferred the command codes to Wesley who just happened to be with him when he died, instead of Riker, except the command codes can't be transferred without killing yourself.

[Deleted]

...

So, the fact is that you have no idea what's been talked about but you see yourself as qualified to comment on the subject? And you call other people idiots? Good, let's leave it at that fanboy, shall we?

[Derah]

So, the fact is that you have no idea what's been talked about

No, but its Azchats. That means his video is him shouting at the top of his lungs, spewing profanity, and bitching and moaning about EVERYTHING. Because its Azchats.

He's one of few youtubers where once you've seen a video of, you've seen them all.

And you call other people idiots?

Notice how I never called you an idiot, a courtesy you yourself refused to show.

[NoiseTank13]

Yeah, Azmongold is a fucking shitter whose opinion always flies in the direction of who gets him the most views, especially in WoD where he did such a 180 I'm shocked his neck didn't snap in half.

[Derah]

In other news, apparently the "recommended" specs and all the speculation regarding the optimization were bollocks.

The game is excellently optimized for PC.



The maker of this video had a sister with a low-grade gaming PC, AMD Phenom 2 4300 quad core, 8 gigs of ram, with a GTX 660 of 2 gigs as a GPU. And she could run Andromeda on High with only 1 setting disabled, and still maintains a 50-55 FPS at all times during hectic combat, dipping into 60 FPS during cutscenes. That's pretty damned impressive considering her CPU is well below minimum specs, and her GPU just barely makes it in. And this was on High, if you put the graphics on medium or even low, the requirements get even smaller still.

One can infer then, that if your PC is well above the stated spec, you should have no issues running 60+ FPS on Ultra. If a rig well below minimum can run at 60 on High, that just shows how well optimized the game is for PC.

Kinda reminds me of how amazingly well optimized was Metal Gear Solid V for PC. My old rig was VERY old (It was a gaming PC from 2010) and I was still able to run that beauty with almost everything but shadows set to High (Shadows were set to medium) and I still had a beautiful FPS at all times.

[Ilikegreenfire]

And by posting this you just proved what kind of an idiot you are. Did you even listened to everything? Did you get the point? It's garbage compared to previous ME titles and Witcher 3 is just here for the reference of how an RPG should be made. No one is comparing ME to W3. From a company that used to produce top quality RPG games we get this insulting slap in the face that pretty much drops a giant turd on the previous titles and it's fans.

What i have played so far is not any sort of drop in quality over the trilogy if anything its an improvement. Me1-3 had pleanty of shitty facial animations, thats nothing new. From cross eyes in 1 shep rape face in 2 and 360 owl necks in 3. Whenever you system tries to animate coustom faces things can get silly. Your right the witcher is a diffent series, they get to fully mocap their protagonist as they only have to work with one head not 18 they also have a lot less dialogue time with fluff characters so they can mocap the ones like triss, ciri ect well.

Some improvements in Andromida over the original trilogy include.

Voice acting, Maleryder blows maleShep out of the water in the just 7 hours i spent with him. same goes for companion voices.

Combat, is better in every conceivable way.

Exploration, gone are the boring barren planet grinds on ME1, when you explore you actually feel like you are discovering things on amazing handcrafted planets.

Emotional attachment, i won't say more because of spoilers.

Story line, the companion with least content in andromida has more than the one with the most in 3

Andromida may not be your cup of tea, if you even played the trial, that's fine but don't go trying to call it insulting or a slap in the face. Even the mass effect subredit calmed down after the the massive circle jerk that was yesterday go look. Today everyone is just trying to revive the circle jerk but its not working.

[Edge-]

Good to hear about the optimization. Frostbite has been fantastic on PC for a while so I was a bit confused by some of those specs they were putting for recommended, glad it wasn't BioWare somehow screwing that up for some reason : P

[Lahis]

Good to hear about the optimization. Frostbite has been fantastic on PC for a while so I was a bit confused by some of those specs they were putting for recommended, glad it wasn't BioWare somehow screwing that up for some reason : P

Yeah, the announced specs had me worried too, thought I'd have to get expensive upgrade in the form of new MoBo and CPU.

But looks like the LGA 1155 still has some time left.

[Derah]

Also several romances have been confirmed.

Bi-romances

Jaal, Vetra, Peebee. I mean, no surprises with Peebee, I mean, asari, I'd be more surprised if she WASN'T bi. Pleasantly surprised about Vetra.

Straight-exclusive romances

Cora (damn U_U) and Liam. What a shock, the token 2 humans are the token straight romances. Anyone else is shocked? or just me?

Gay-Exclusive Romances

Gil (wow, enjoy having Renly Baratheon as your lover, gay gamers got really lucky here :P) and Suvi for the ladies.

These are apparently the only full-fledged romances with a storyline, presumably a romance cutscene, and reward the paramour achievement. But apart from these, there's also a lot of other "light romances" spread around here and there. These range from simple flirts, flings, one-night stands, etc, and yes these too are also available in a wide range of flavors, from human to alien, to straight/gay/bi.

The light romances haven't been fully documented however.

You can also flirt with characters whose orientation is not compatible with yours, for example, flirt with Gil as a female ryder but they'll just shut you down, and then you don't do it anymore.

[-aiko-]

Plays like shit on my 780Ti. I suppose it's time to upgrade, but ME:A doesn't seem like a game that really needs something higher /shrug. Kind of annoyed.

[Jastall]

Not surprised to hear that the optimization is decent. Inquisition also ran fairly well, not quite as well as DICE games but it certainly was no issue for most people, given that my semi-potato could run it at Medium settings with a dash of High. It's a shame that facial animations are bad, because otherwise it looks to be a technically competent game.

I'm still salty over the lack of quicksave, and no manual save during priority missions. But at least Mike Gamble has tweeted that they're looking at it. Better late than never, yet the fact that these very, very basic RPG features did not make it at launch I shall never understand nor forgive.