Yeah, it wasn’t really anything great, but I did appreciate that they didn’t just underline and boldface “get it?” at me. I did have to make the connection back to Zaeed, and it’s been a while since I played ME2 and 3. Other folks might have felt it was way more obvious.
Haven’t run into Conrad’s sister yet though. Do you get to pull a gun on her?
Ok finally finished it. Not 100%, but all quests marked on map were done.
This is just recycling material from earlier games. Mysterious technology left by an absentee creator? Check. Normandy? Check and Check. Wholesale slaughter of anyone who looks at Shepard/Ryder funny? Check, check and check. Gameplay wise it is meaty but still recycled from ME3. Jump jet doesn’t add a lot to the run-and-gun gameplay wise. Does it deserve ~70 metacritic score? I don’t know. All I know is it is a bit meh.
Most of the crew members suck IMO. Drack the grumpy old man (with a bad hip) is the only good one. Jaal the alien is not alien, just bland (and no he is not another Javik, Javik is a funny fascist, and Jaal clearly isn’t a fascist). Cora is bland. Peebee is absolutely annoying. Her loyalty quest is even more PITA. Vetra is ok (and no not another Garrus, she is much more shady). And what’s-his-name is so bland I can’t even remember his name.
The crafting again is broken like DA:I, because it is so expense to craft a weapon. Every 10 levels or so you need a new weapon to keep up with enemy level, it would be too expense to craft a new weapon every 10 levels, because some component like element zero is very very very hard to come by. Mining is just more busy work.
Inquisition perk/cryo pod is basically equivalent, influence in DA:I = AVP in ME:A.
And Bioware is still crap with the scripting of personal missions. So after coming back from a totally mysterious space station, your crew tells you he is having a baby? Really?
And the graphics is disappointing Most of the human faces are just terrible. You talk to Suvi all the time, but compared with Sara, she looks pretty plastic. And I haven’t even got to Addison.
This is definitely my take, although I’m not nearly done. I don’t even know if I’m half way through.
It seems like a less polished version of earlier ME games. Like, they put their B-Team on it.
Here’s a funny thing - I find myself reading these criticisms and nodding along, yep that’s true. And yet I still unequivocally love this game. Maybe I should wait until I finally beat it (I’m wandering around Kadara at the moment) but so far nothing has really been much of a turnoff.
I write about this half-jokingly, but I stand by my belief in Pogue’s Law: there is no {thing} that is so awful that someone doesn’t love it. I don’t believe Andromeda is awful but I can see someone being let down by it. I just feel like this game was aimed right at me - I always said I loved the openness of the first Mass Effect, please sir may I have some more? And I actually got it! How often does that happen?
Ya, I think the game is fun, don’t get me wrong.
In a vacuum, I think it’d be hailed as a great game… but the reality is that it’s a successor to some really amazing games. And it’s now a market where we’ve played games like Witcher 3, and HZD, so the bar is set that much higher.
But the reality is that the Witcher 3 was possibly the best game ever made, by anyone, ever. It’s certainly a contender for that title at this point. Simply because a game isn’t the champion of all games doesn’t mean it’s crap.
The bugs and stuff are annoying, but at this point I just kind of look at them humorously.
The only real failing of the game, compared to prior ME titles, is really just the fact that I don’t really give a shit about the NPC’s. Maybe that’ll change? But it’s definitely not the same as earlier titles where the characters were awesome.
It’s an absorbing game but the Bioware formula is really obvious by now. Being that it’s basically Mass Effect: Inquisition is disappointing and it doesn’t have the sense of wonder ME1 had, the compressed focus of ME2 or the almost satisfying (except for the Starchild nonsense) payoff of all the little decisions from the previous 2 games.
This is why I say it feels pointed right at me: I totally feel that sense of wonder I had in the first game. Possibly more, even. And not having the focus of the second and third games, by comparison being much more open, is a strength in my book. If you’re going to put your game in space, by god let me explore a little.
I always liked the apocalyptic wrap-up of the third game, even regretted that Bioware walked it back again after the public outcry. One thing about those games that was stronger I think was the villains. The reapers were a pretty awesome, unknowable, near omnipotent enemy. That’s hard to top, but I guess I still have yet to see how the game wraps up.
As for the characters, well it’s hard to compare given that we had three games to get to know a bunch of them. I’d put Liam and Cora against Kaiden and Ashley, sure. They can’t top Garrus or Wrex, but then I don’t think I really loved Garrus until the second game.
Anyway, I’m glad I am not responsible for writing a review. I’d give it high marks and if Tom put it on the front page all the Metacritic mouth breathers would be all over me. All I can say is I’m getting out of it what I hoped, so far. If you aren’t, I can see how all the various bugs might seem like death by a thousand cuts.
I said it in the other thread, but the bugs and glitches aren’t that big a deal to me. If they get fixed, then that’s great, but even if they don’t, I know they weren’t intentional. More egregious to me is the stuff that falls flat, but is presented as intended. What happened Bioware? I know this was the Montreal team, but I feel there has to be an amazing post-mortem someday.
I think some of the cutscene animations look positively dreadful, some of the supposedly normal NPC faces look like Splicers from Bioshock, the VO is spotty, and the characters as written are the blandest, most nothing people ever, but the gameplay isn’t terrible. I guess for me, it’s just mediocre. I’m not sure if that’s me viewing previous ME games with rose-tinted glasses, or if I’ve been spoiled by other great games that have come out since 2012, but this feels like such a step back for the franchise.
Not a dig on anyone else, but I’m not getting any sense of discovery or wonder in MEA. It’s a whole other galaxy and I don’t think anything has really given me that “Oh crap, what is that!?!?” feeling that I got. It’s completely rote and perfunctory to me.
I was hoping to feel this but everything feels smaller and a shadow of its former self. A single cluster to explore in Andromeda, way less alien species (compared to the biodiversity of the Milky Way races we were introduced to in ME1-3) and everything ends up feeling like a less-inspired, paler knockoff.
MW races:
Vorcha, Batarian, Volus, Turian, Salarian, Krogan, Hanar, Asari, Elcor, Drell, Geth, Quarians, Yahg, Rachni, Protheans, Collectors
Andromeda races:
Remnant, Kett, Twi’leks and a bunch of Andromedan fauna?
I don’t think I have the vocabulary to explain to you guys why I feel the sense of wonder in the game. Every turn has shown me something new and interesting. I just got to Kadara, which has its own Bartertown-like upper and lower levels. The outlying badlands have people struggling to get by with tools that are constantly being stolen from them. A couple of nights ago I set up a series of hammers on Eos that drew out a massive snake robot thing that I had to work to take down. I’ve been trying to set up a movie night with my crew on the Tempest to build camaraderie.
That’s just random things that pop in my head, if all that sounds lame to you I don’t think anything I can say would change anyone’s mind, and honestly I am not in the mind changing business. It works for me. That’s all I got.
I find myself in agreement with you (again), and I think the fact that Andromeda is less apocalyptic is one of the key things that appeals to me. I liked the original trilogy fine, but I love the fact that with Andromeda they consciously went back to the first game and built on that (by way of DA:I, as many have pointed out – I haven’t played any of the DA games, though I have DA:O). The fact that it seems less apocalyptic fits with the overall tone of this game, which is a lot more perky and optimistic than ME2 or ME3.
I absolutely adore this game, flaws and all.
The problem with the ending of the third game was that it didn’t give a shit what you chose, which went against what the game was all about.
For instance, my thinking in that game was to choose synthesis. Because then the AI entities are cool, and the biological entities are cool, and the gate system is cool. Nothing gets destroyed.
But nope! You pick that one, and the gate system somehow STILL gets destroyed, because of reasons? F that S.
I hereby officially express regret that I brought up the ending of ME3, we discussed it to death in that other thread. I will let that one lie from this point forwards.
I get the feeling of the wondrous exploration, like in Skyrim where the most remote corners of the map can potentially have some unmarked cave with goodness knows what inside.There are lots of that too in ME:A.
I like ME1 random planetside exploration. They should have more of that rather than concentrate the exploration into 5 or 6 worlds. This is the frontier for goodness sake. Things are random, so let’s have even more of that.
But then there is the plot, which is been-there-done-that, except with a different coat of paint.
Which brings me back to design philosophy. I get that after ME3 they think they should listen to their fans more. I, however, completely disagree, because the result is more-of-the-same games. And the bland ME:A is the result: more of the same, but just different enough to call it new. They need to take creative risk and show people what they don’t expect. Build it well enough, and the new new thing will shut the most self-entitled manchild up (or rather, the manchild will be drown out by all new fans). In other words, I think they need artistic flair, like Steve Jobs, who understood this when he said “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them”.
The random space worm boss fight is completely unexpected, and that is just fantastic.
But then some accountant must have argued that all that work may not be appreciated because the quest is pretty random and easily ignored, so they pepper it in all explorable planets so in all likelihood the player would have came across at least one of those random quests. So the quest becomes repeatable, therefore not unique, and therefore not unexpected any more. Well, fuck the accountant.
I agree with that. I think a lot of people complained about the empty worlds in the first ME but I think the bigger golden worlds would be more impactful with a few more smaller, less likely packed ones.
I would have been fine if they had done it Star Rangers HD text-adventure style.
Which is not really something we’re ever likely to see in a “triple-A” release.
But to sort of build on that: has there been anything else like Space Rangers? And if you want more graphical appeal, it seems to me that one could do a lower-budget version of Mass Effect that’s more similar to, say, Shadowrun Returns (isometric, no voice acting, plenty of text) or something.
I’d play it. I mean hell I played the crappy iOS shooter tie-in with ME2, or was it 3? Anyway if someone made a 2D JRPG like Cthulu Saves the World or a Star Rangers/Star Control/Starflight clone based on ME, I’d be all over that.
after driving around on uncharted planets with the mako in ME1, some of the payoffs at finding points of interest were long blurbs of text so i don’t see why they couldn’t expand on that. i certainly would read the fiction w/o voiceover.
So -I’m at the point where I need to start tracking down the other arks, and apparently there are asari, turian and salarian arks out there. Does that mean the Hyperion is the human ark, despite carrying a bunch of other species? Or just predominantly human? Or maybe just has a human pathfinder? If this is something that gets explained and I just need to hold off thinking about it, well and good. And if it never gets explained and I should just stop thinking about it well, ok.