I’m not Commander Shepard but here is where I’m going to rant and rave with spoilery spoilers without any tags.
I’m early on (only reclaimed first planet) so I don’t know if I encounter any Volus, Hanar, Batarians, Quarian, Vorcha, Yahg, Elcor or Drell but so far Andromeda feels a lot less nuanced/complex than the first 3 games.
First contact, waking up after 600 years, and launching into a new galaxy all seem routine, humdrum and anticlimactic.
Yeah, that first contact with the new species and proceeding to immediately understand them was really lame.
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oh i’m getting that impression. not sure where everyone is saying it’s an ‘open world’ when it’s just the same bioware formula of ‘do planet events trigger do another planet or 2 then final critical path cutscene’
they also look like ugly playdough muppets.
Awesome, the Andromeda bitch session has spilled into a secondary thread! Let me get in on this:
Number of planets - looks to me that there are five colonizable planets. I arrive at that by looking at the planet display on the circular table on the Tempest. For me at this point it lists Eos, Voelde and Havarl - going from memory so the spellings may be off. But there are more planets to visit than that, for instance Aya where the angara live, and then the planet where the exiles ended up, which I have just visited. Anyway, more than four. And how in the hell do you land on a planet like Eos, just to pick one, and tell me this isn’t an open world game?
Anyway regarding Eos, since this is the spoiler thread, I ran into the giant flying snake robot last night pretty much by accident, and I took it down. Have to say it was pretty epic - the combat in Andromeda is pretty damn satisfying.
Here’s a question that popped into my head yesterday while playing…
Ok, so this game takes place prior to most of the previous Mass Effect trilogy. Cool.
They apparently made some ships and flew off to Andromeda. There’s no explanation of how they actually accomplished this. We know it took a long time, like 600 years or so. But given Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away, I don’t see how they actually did this. But whatever. Space magic.
But here’s a bigger deal:
How the fuck are we flying around in Andromeda between systems?
If I recall, while spaceships can fly around pretty fast within a system, the key to space travel BETWEEN systems in Mass Effect is due to the network of the giant gates which were made by some ancient civilization… At the end ME3, the gate network is explodified, and galactic civlization is fucked, because no one can really go beyond the system they are currently in.
So now we are in Andromeda… and there IS NO GATE NETWORK. We have no means of propulsion which enables interstellar travel between different star systems. So WTF is happening?
It seems like they’ve broken with one of the primary fucking lore points from the series… indeed, the key thing from which the series itself derives its NAME.
If I recall correctly, the gate network allows for faster FTL (and for ships without an FTL drive to travel faster-than-light). Most proper starships have FTL drives themselves. Wasn’t the original Normandy supposed to have been the smallest ship fitted with an FTL drive, or did I imagine that? The Tempest has a drive that allows it to cover 13 light years per day.
Anyway, you might want to read the Mass Effect wiki about this.
Edit: yeah, here it says that the relays allow instantaneous travel between them, so I don’t see the problem. More specifically: “Hailed as one of the greatest achievements of the extinct Protheans, a mass relay can transport starships instantaneously to another relay within the network, allowing for journeys that would otherwise take years or even centuries with only FTL drives.” So that explains why in Andromeda we’re stuck in the Heleus Cluster instead of zipping around the whole of the galaxy.
Why did the game open with the Hyperion “jumping/folding” in then?
Dropping out of FTL, I’d say. Seems perfectly consistent to me.
The ships in mass effect have always had FTL, but it’s only practical for short distances. If you want to jaunt over to the other side of the Milky Way, you have to use Mass Effect relays.
The Milky Way is 100,000 light years in diameter. The tenpest, which is supposed to be state-of-the-art, can do 13 light years per day. That’s still 21 years for it to cross the Milky Way, assuming no stops.
Yeah, you see the Tempest dropping out of FTL every time you land on the Hyperion.
Grrr, so many unskippable transition movies.
They aren’t bothering me too much, yet. That may change by hour 50.
One quirk of exploration that I find odd - can’t decide if I don’t like it - is when you choose a planet to approach, you do the first person flight right up to it, then pull back a bit. Every time, even when you go to stuff like the Hyperion. It kind of weirds me out, why not just fly up to the final position, why the zoom in and pull back?
Weird, so I had really thought that the mass effect relays were some totally critical thing, given that you essentially need them to move around in the previous mass effect games. I guess we just used the gates to travel between different clusters of stars?
Still, this seems like the mass relays were way less important than I was under the impression of, in those games. I had though that destruction of the relay network was akin to stopping the flow of spice in Dune, and that travel between star systems was essentially going to be ended.
This is kind of the impression at the end of ME3 too, with Joker and the Normandy getting stuck on some planet in the middle of nowhere.
But apparently, no big deal? I mean, you can travel across the whole galaxy in 21 days? That’s basically trivial.
EDIT: Ohh… 21 YEARS… not days. Well that’s different then, I guess.
So the mass relays are still necessary, but they can still get across the galaxy. Just slower.
Ok, so then at around 13 LY/Day, you’re talking about the time it took to get to Andromeda.
Well, 13 light years a day is how quick the Tempest can travel. Considering that the Andromeda Galaxy is about 2.5 million light years from us, it seems that the Arks covered about 11/12 light years a day, or a rate slightly slower than the Tempest. That seems reasonable within the context of the fiction.
Forgot to mention - ran into Zaeed’s son on Eos. Took me a minute to piece that together, but I recognized the last name, Massani, just couldn’t place it. Kept thinking about it, and the character mentions his dad leaving when he was young. That threw the switch for some reason.
Finished the main story at 60 hours. Still have a lot of cleanup to do, as it is a soft ending. With a nice epilogue, including the Bioware equivalent of the Marvel end-of-credits scene, along with a nice little telegraph of what the DLC will be about.
I fully intend to take my time getting there, but how do you feel about the ending? Pretty good or a let down?
It was kind of a worthless, tenuous connection though. I liked running into Conrad Verner’s sister though.