[Megathread] Mass Effect Andromeda

[Yriel]

hmm i don´t have any of your issues. onyl the problem with the mouse cursor in the middle of my screen.
and i have the feeling, that sometimes the AI react to late, if i engage far away. but usually the cover themselves

I play on PC, maybe thats the difference. I think most problems are because of the enemies disapearing into the floor or into the sky. The game doesn't let you continue if you are still in combat so NPCs wont't spawn and quests don't progress. I was able so solve a lot of my problems by leaving the planet and landing again. Then the enemies reset (and mostly spawn properly) and the quests work again. The only thing i couldn't solve was the questgiver in the town on Eos, he/she's just not there. And resetting those fights mean i have to do them all again.
Still, i have fun with the game.

[AcidicSyn]

I play on PC, maybe thats the difference. I think most problems are because of the enemies disapearing into the floor or into the sky. The game doesn't let you continue if you are still in combat so NPCs wont't spawn and quests don't progress. I was able so solve a lot of my problems by leaving the planet and landing again. Then the enemies reset (and mostly spawn properly) and the quests work again. The only thing i couldn't solve was the questgiver in the town on Eos, he/she's just not there. And resetting those fights mean i have to do them all again.
Still, i have fun with the game.

If an enemy gets stuck in the ground and you happen to be a biotic- shockwave/nova usually work for me to get them cleared and let me progress.

[Adam Jensen]

Gotta love some of the Nomad paint job descriptions, like Silent Step and Archangel. Little Trilogy Easter eggs there.

[Jastall]

H047 is such a cool idea. Not only is it visually breathtaking, but it's a change of pace from usual open world fare when you can only disembark in a select few locations. I'm enjoying it a lot.

[Derah]

Lol I thought she was just lesbian only. Is that the actual reason?

No its not. It is implied that you have sex with her, its just that her romance doesn't have an actual sex cutscene, just a fade-to-black. Disappointingly, almost all romances are like that.

They either have a fade-to-black with implied but not shown sex (Suvi, Gil, Reyes, Keri, Avela) or feature just kissing with no nudity (Liam, Vetra) or have a (mild) sex scene with actual nudity (Cora, Peebee, Jaal)

Its the particular choosing of who gets implicit sexy time and who doesn't that has been one of the few grievances some people have against this game that I feel has very real merit. I mean that choosing of who got DETAILED romance cutscenes is very suspect. Its almost like they were catering exclusively towards the straight male demographic (With only the hot straight male romance, and the hot lesbian romance showing any skin. Male Gay romances get jack shit, and female gay romances get jack shit with suvi, getting peebee only because males also got it)

The handling of romances has definitely taken a lot of flak because of this, particularly the nasty implication that dude-to-dude romances must be icky because that's the only combination that features absolutely no skin at all. Straight dudes get 2 implicit scenes, straight girls get 1, lesbians get 1, gay dudes get 0.

[WarpedAcorn]

I found a game crashing bug last night. After 10+ attempts I took to the forums and found out that it is a known issue for some users, no matter what platform you're on (I'm on PS4). I ended up having to load up a save from the beginning of the night and avoided the Mission. Lost about 2.5 hours of gameplay. =/

To be as spoiler-free as possible, there is a Mission on the Nexus called Contagion that starts when you talk to Captain Dunn on the Hyperion. DO NOT DO IT WITHOUT SAVING PRIOR. The quest will cause a crash when you try and enter the Docks at a specific point in its progress, which means you can't leave the Nexus. Allegedly, if its crashing for you, you can progress the story mission and come back to it later. I haven't tried that yet, but some people are saying that it works and some say it doesn't.

[Adam Jensen]

I found a game crashing bug last night. After 10+ attempts I took to the forums and found out that it is a known issue for some users, no matter what platform you're on (I'm on PS4). I ended up having to load up a save from the beginning of the night and avoided the Mission. Lost about 2.5 hours of gameplay. =/

That's sad.

The lack of polish and numerous bugs are highly disappointing, I expect more out of BioWare. Even Bethesda isn't this bad with bugs. And usually Bethesda bugs just end up either being CTD, or unintentionally funny (like Skyrim characters swimming in the air.)

I've had to reload the game or retry quests multiple times. Froze on a load screen for a cutscene during Jaal's mission. Couldn't interact with the transponder for the Asari ark. Quest item for PeeBee's mission didn't spawn. Both of those required I go back to a previous save.

As much as I anticipated this game, I could have waited another month or two for BW to polish and debug it a bit more.

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Good lord Elaadan is huge.

[Vertigo X]

Just out of curiosity do you guys think this game would've gotten the same reviews had it not been a mass effect game by bioware?

[Derah]

That's sad.

The lack of polish and numerous bugs are highly disappointing, I expect more out of BioWare. Even Bethesda isn't this bad with bugs. And usually Bethesda bugs just end up either being CTD, or unintentionally funny (like Skyrim characters swimming in the air.)

I've had to reload the game or retry quests multiple times. Froze on a load screen for a cutscene during Jaal's mission. Couldn't interact with the transponder for the Asari ark. Quest item for PeeBee's mission didn't spawn. Both of those required I go back to a previous save.

As much as I anticipated this game, I could have waited another month or two for BW to polish and debug it a bit more.

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Good lord Elaadan is huge.

This is really weird. I mean, i've seen videos of the many bugs and glitches but........ I've not encountered any of them. Did I get like a special version of the game or something? I mean I've had bugs, some of them quite annoying, but noting game-breaking that required loading a save, or made me waste hours of gametime.

So far, here are all the bugs I've encountered, which range from mildly annoying, to somewhat upsetting.

Single-player.

1: Mouse cursor. It has this annoying tendency of getting stuck in the center of the screen when you're not on a menu. Only solution is to press esc, move the cursor around a bit, then press esc again. Sometimes I have to do this multiple times to make it go away. If it happens during a conversation, the only solution is wait until I can choose a dialog option, and then be lucky because after clicking on an option, there's a 50/50 chance it will go away, or go back to the center. If it pops during a cutscene, I'm fucked because there's nothing to do in those cases, just watch the cutscene with the cursor right in the middle.

2: UI elements acting funky. When you press esc, your gameplay UI (Health, Shields, weapon, ammo, etc) goes away to show the menu. Duh, but if I reassign any power, all of the sudden, the gameplay UI superimposes itself on the menu.

3: Profiles and Favorites. When I save a current configuration on the favorites menu, it only saves my power selection, and unequips my profile. I then have to go back to profiles, equip profile again, then save again. This happens ALL the time. If I wanna change a power on my config, and then save that config, I have to save, then back to profiles, equip again, then save again.

4: Freezes. The game will sometimes freeze for 2 or 3 seconds. This would be infuriating if it was common, but thankfully its very rare. In a 4-hour session it will happen twice at most, so that's why I'm not too annoyed. Never happens in cutscenes, only in gameplay, and only in very frantic combat.

5: Objectives of completed quests keep popping up. For example, even though I've long since talked to evfra for the quest "A ray of hope", from time to time, it will still pop back into my objective tracker. This forces me to go back into the journal, and make some other quest the one actively tracked.

6: Visual glitch with cables, and the skybox on the nexus. There's a very specific type of cable in the game that must have buggy textures, because they keep flickering on and off. You can usually find these cables in kett outposts, going from computers to the ground. They sometimes are textured and sometimes are not. Skybox on the nexus has this problem (only in the docking area) where it also flickers sometimes.

7: I had this glitch going with barricade that prevented me from using it for my first 30+ hours of gameplay or so. Barricade normally has this charge-based system, where instead of having a cooldown, you just have a limit on how many barricades you can deploy before having to visit an ammo cache. Like grenades. Well, in one fight on the Eos Vault, I ended up using all of my barricade charges, and when passing through ammo boxes, the charges would not refill. Passed through forward outposts, and the charges still wouldn't refill. Left Eos and went to Havarl, completed havarl, and the charges would still not refill. I was starting to consider respeccing (as I felt the 2 points invested there were being wasted) when I decided to do an experiment. Put one point in grenades, used them all up, then went to a forward outpost, and voila, grenades refilled, barricade refilled. This is one serious bug. It prevented me from using one of my powers for quite a while before I figured out how to combat it.

8: Crashes. This one has happened only twice in my 70+ hours of gametime, so I'm not too terribly upset about it, but twice now the game has crashed for no apparent reason. No error message of any kind, the game just freezes for 3 seconds, then suddenly I'm in the desktop, and the game is gone. I am very upset with this bug though because while in single-player its only happened twice, its FAR more common in multiplayer. Every match, I basically have to pray that the game holds together and doesn't crash while I'm still there. Its been my biggest detriment to playing multiplayer so far.

And that's it. That's seriously ALL of the bugs I've stumbled upon in over 70+ hours of gametime. But I keep seeing reports and videos of people experiencing far more serious and actual gamebreaking bugs than this on their playthroughs.

Did I just get lucky and my version of the game was more special because it took me longer to download or something?

[WarpedAcorn]

Just out of curiosity do you guys think this game would've gotten the same reviews had it not been a mass effect game by bioware?

No. Bioware and Mass Effect have set a standard. If this were a new IP (and it very well could have been), you would probably see low sales numbers initially and an increase as critics praised the "New IP" and an "ambitious undertaking from a new studio". Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) people really care about Mass Effect and Bioware has a longstanding reputation. So when something is not up to standard, people freak out. The reason there was so much contraversy about the ME3 ending was because people cared so much for the series. They were not apathetic in the slightest. Similarly, fans hold ME:A to standards set by the series and the company, and falling short in any way will lead to backlash. Its a huge pressure for the development team, that's for sure.

[Vertigo X]

-snip-

I feel the same. I have about 50 hours in- 100% all planets, story complete, etc. and I have not experienced a single game breaking bug whatsoever. I haven't even had the bugs you have. The singular bug I can recall is one time a fiend got stuck and so it was a free kill. That's literally it.

[Adam Jensen]

No. Bioware and Mass Effect have set a standard. If this were a new IP (and it very well could have been), you would probably see low sales numbers initially and an increase as critics praised the "New IP" and an "ambitious undertaking from a new studio". Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) people really care about Mass Effect and Bioware has a longstanding reputation. So when something is not up to standard, people freak out. The reason there was so much contraversy about the ME3 ending was because people cared so much for the series. They were not apathetic in the slightest. Similarly, fans hold ME:A to standards set by the series and the company, and falling short in any way will lead to backlash. Its a huge pressure for the development team, that's for sure.

That seems to be the consensus and I agree with it. ME:A is a strong game, despite its glitches. It might have done better without being set to the same standard as the Trilogy.

If this was the opening game of a new IP and a new studio, I think you're right. People would see this as a good start with potential.

But instead, it's the fourth game of a very well-loved series by a very reputable developer that didn't hit as hard as fans had hoped.

[Elim Garak]

MEA is to ME1 like Star Wars E7 is to E4

Previous ME games I beat in under 30 hours, all quests. I then replayed a lot (hundreds of hours per each game).

MEA I finished story at 75% complete after 50 hours.

50 hours a single not fully complete walk-through. And It was basically in one sitting - I mean every bit of spare time I spent in the game.

And I'm not done with it yet, I started NG+ and I don't think I a stop at that.

This game is good, glitches aside. Better than ME1. It can only get better from this point on.

[Adam Jensen]

MEA is to ME1 like Star Wars E7 is to E4

Previous ME games I beat in under 30 hours, all quests. I then replayed a lot (hundreds of hours per each game).

MEA I finished story at 75% complete after 50 hours.

50 hours a single not fully complete walk-through. And It was basically in one sitting - I mean every bit of spare time I spent in the game.

And I'm not done with it yet, I started NG+ and I don't think I a stop at that.

This game is good, glitches aside. Better than ME1. It can only get better from this point on.

Better than ME1 (gameplaywise) but not ME2 or 3. Actually, it has the best combat in Mass Effect, but overall it doesn't beat out ME2 or 3. Or ME1's story.

[Elim Garak]

Better than ME1 (gameplaywise) but not ME2 or 3. Actually, it has the best combat in Mass Effect, but overall it doesn't beat out ME2 or 3. Or ME1's story.

ME2-3 were sequels to the already developed story and they were focused on it, sacrificing gameplay at times. They were good because of the story and characters.

But as standalone games (sans nostalgia glasses) they weren't better than MEA:

1. People wanted to land on planets and freely roam in MAKO (improved of course). MEA provides.
2. People wanted more content outside of DLC. MEA provides.
3. People wanted deeper RPG system, which only got simpler with each game. MEA has it deeper.
4. People complained how Paragon/Renegade system was too binary and locked them out of dialogue options. MEA changed that.
5. MEA added a lot of new featured to the ME franchise (from DAI)
6. And of course MEA improved combat even further.

Shepard wasn't an icon back in 2007, ME1 was just "a new guy" and Shepard was just another protagonist. It's only thanks to the success of ME1 that we love ME2 and 3 more than 1.

MEA reinvents ME1.

[Valeron]

I prefer the whole Reaper storyline to the one in ME:A

Love the combat here though, easily the best in the series. Animations, which everyone seems hung up about, don't bother me as I'm used to BioWare and their terrible animations (for a AAA company). Only bug I've encountered is the not being able to save bug (or the perpetual in combat part even when I've driven all the way to the other side of the map).

Fun game, it's not the best but I keep wanting to play it so it must be doing something right.

[Derah]

I'm kinda sad that defeating the architects doesn't yield any kind of epic loot. Or loot at all, since they all fly to the orbit of the planet, where they're reprogrammed to help wit the terraforming.

Makes it significantly less epic when you beat one. At least the dragon bosses in Inquisition dropped massive scores of rare loot and crafting mats. Architects could have at least dropped mats and augs.

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I prefer the whole Reaper storyline to the one in ME:A

This is not so much because the story is bad, but because the story belongs to a different genre.

The original trilogy was a Space Opera grand epic, akin to Star Wars.

This game is more of a Space Western adventure, akin to Firefly, or Cowboy Beebop.

Star Wars, and Cowboy Beebop are both excellent space stories, but for very different reasons.

I do believe that Andromeda is aiming for the Space Opera epic for the sequels though, given what is teased about in the ending.

[DaveL]

I'm kinda sad that defeating the architects doesn't yield any kind of epic loot. Or loot at all, since they all fly to the orbit of the planet, where they're reprogrammed to help wit the terraforming.

They usually leave a huge crate with loot behind..

[Edge-]

I'm kinda sad that defeating the architects doesn't yield any kind of epic loot. Or loot at all, since they all fly to the orbit of the planet, where they're reprogrammed to help wit the terraforming.

Makes it significantly less epic when you beat one. At least the dragon bosses in Inquisition dropped massive scores of rare loot and crafting mats. Architects could have at least dropped mats and augs.

That's really disappointing. I really enjoyed the dragon fights in DA:I (mechanically super simple, but hot damn did BW nail the "epic" feeling) and looting their skulls was super satisfying, even if it didn't contain anything immediately useful for my party.

That's a missed opportunity : /

[DaveL]

Anyhow, while im about to reach it..
Anybody spotted any significant difference between leaving the Ancient AI from Voeld to Angara vs. leaving it with SAM? Except their bickering in SAM node..