Mass Effect Andromeda - I'm not Commander Shepard and this is my favorite sequel

@malkav11 has given plenty of positive impressions and some mixed reactions too, throughout this thread. I can see him not wanting to do a final summary yet like Murbella did because he’s only part of the way through the game. I’m in the same boat myself. The 45 hours or so I’ve played, I’ve had a really great time. But in a game that’s probably over 100 hours, maybe I’ll start seeing all those flaws that Murbella is talking about soon enough.

I feel like we’ve had a pretty good little discussion going, we’ve covered the pros and cons and justified why we either like or don’t like Andromeda. I think also, it’s been valuable to discuss the relative merits of the open world design versus a more structured, critical path design (I’m really trying to avoid saying “on rails”, to keep things neutral) of ME2, for instance. I think a person weighing buying the game could do a lot worse than reading this thread.

I have already argued with Murbella in the past. I don’t feel the need to go there in future, and wouldn’t have responded to him at all if someone had not appeared to be basing their decision not to buy a game I think is pretty great so far primarily on his posts. If you really want me to do a similar point by point breakdown of my impressions I imagine I will do that when I finish the game but that’s a ways off.

I’m afraid this feature is completely wasted on NG because there aren’t enough skill points to make use of it. Passives are simply too strong to skip and that’s where bulk of your points will go. Even if you went out of your way to make use of this on NG you’d still need to reach level 40 or so before it would even begin to make sense to use it.

Yeah, I don’t see myself actually using it myself, both because of skill point economy and because I’m simply too lazy. But it’s theoretically an option.

Sorry but I don’t understand what you are saying here. I am about level 45 and I use this feature all the time. I switch between cloak/pull/throw and cloak/overload/incinerate all the time. There are plenty of skill points available so I don’t understand what you are talking about. I’ve maxed out all of these skill trees that I mentioned above), both biotics passives, both tech passives, the Combat Fitness passive (less the last level) and almost all of assault rifle and sniper rifle and half way up pistols.

I also have half of Eleadan and half of Voeld to complete and I still haven’t gone after a certain ship. I haven’t wandered aimlessly, killing mobs to boost my level, but I’ve done almost every quest on the planets I have “finished”. So I’m not sure how you can say there aren’t enough skill points available.

As I said, you can go out of your way to make use of it but it won’t make you more effective. Skill balance is terrible and some skill combos roll over everything, even on Insanity. My sentinel profile was basically terminator mode and even though I had spare points in a couple different skills in biotic and tech trees I never used them because Lance + 2 primers (one for shields and one for armor) made short work of everything.

And I don’t really see many (if any) people who outright hated the game. There’s the people (like me) who think the open world part of the game was extremely weak and still manage to give it about a 7 because it’s still a decent game. And the people who enjoyed the open world aspect of it more seem to give it an 8. Thinking this game is a 6 or a 9 would be a fairly fringe opinion.

That being said, I would love to have given up the open world aspect in exchange for better designed and less content, personally. The loyalty missions are almost jarring in how much better they are than the majority of the game.

To expand on this, i don’t feel the current weapon mods really allow much customization.

(from memory)

There are 3-5 weapon mods (not available on all weapons types).

Damage: Basically every weapon should use this in most cases.

Melee boost: If you have a very melee focused build this might be good. If you have a build that frequently uses charge (like me), this is a decent filler as you still probably melee sometimes. Otherwise this is not useful (obviously).

Spare ammo: Decent filler but not great. I very rarely had ammo problems past early game. YMMV. Obviously this does not work with remnant weapons or when using the heat sink aug.

Piercing: I personally didn’t find this useful at all. This was useful in ME3 mainly because of the frequency of enemies using metal shields. These are not present in MEA. There is a certain enemy that uses an energy shield in the game, but it has a hole in the shield event from the front.

Lightweight materials (sniper rifle): Pretty good until mid game when you will probably have some talents to deal with weapon weight, unless you completely avoid combat (probably not a good idea).

The way i see it, there is a transition point mid game where you get enough points in combat (even with a build that isn’t focused on the combat tree) where you don’t need the two extra mod slot aug anymore because you don’t need mods like lightweight or spare ammo.

Early game with the bonus slots aug, i just used every type of mod which allowed me no choice.
Mid to late game i just used Damage/Melee or damage/piercing for sniper.

I like the idea of weapon mods, but i feel they need to add more to make it really allow you to customize your weapon using the system. All this led to me doing was switching out my weapon mods every 5 or whatever levels to the newer version, not making any customizations to my weapon.

YMMV. If you have sworn an oath to never put a point in combat, Spare ammo and lightweight materials will be better.

[quote=“Bateau, post:1868, topic:76729, full:true”]
As I said, you can go out of your way to make use of it but it won’t make you more effective. Skill balance is terrible and some skill combos roll over everything, even on Insanity.[/quote]

Who cares? Why should I care? I don’t know how many times I need to say this but “more effective” meme is irrelevant. SP isn’t some kind of competition where I try to see if I can kill things faster than you. And there’s no MP component where we fight each other. So ignoring Insanity (where I can see certain builds might be required in some sense, though I have yet to see proof of this), I don’t care whether your build is optimal and kills things faster. There’s absolutely no reason why I should care or why this even matters. If I can play with the skills I noted above and play successfully, if my character build is viable/playable, why should I care if it’s not the most efficient? All builds in an RPG don’t have to be as good as another, and in fact, I’d argue that this is pretty hard to do. All that is important is that all or most builds are viable/playable, so that I am not gimped into creating a character that I cannot finish the game with. I don’t care if you have a build that can kill 50% or 100% faster, all I care about is can I play my build and have fun with it.

As, yes, my build using biotics and tech does make me more effective. Biotic does very little damage to armor, so switching to Tech when I see an armored foe allows me to take them out, then I can switch back to biotics. Given my build choices, yes, switching profiles make me more effective. More effective than your super min/max build, no probably not, but why should I or anyone else care about that?

I’m not trying to give you a hard time, I just don’t see why this insistence that all builds be equal and balanced really matters - at least on normal difficulty. If I can play the game with almost any reasonable build, why should I care that one isn’t as effective as another?

[quote=“Murbella, post:1870, topic:76729, full:true”]
I like the idea of weapon mods, but i feel they need to add more to make it really allow you to customize your weapon using the system. All this led to me doing was switching out my weapon mods every 5 or whatever levels to the newer version, not making any customizations to my weapon.[/quote]

Augments supply what you are looking for - they are pretty unique. Weapon mods are really replacements for skills. For example you left out a couple. Scopes for example, make guns more accurate but there are skills/profiles that do that also. If you don’t choose that skill, then the mod gives you a work around. Another mod gives stability (gun recoil, staying on target after firing). Again, there are skills/profiles that assist with that but if you don’t choose those, here’s a mod to help. Same with the lightweight materials (as you noted), spare ammo, etc. Many/most are substitutes for skills you choose not to take. You use mods to mitigate against untaken skills, or allow you try to various builds that you might not choose otherwise.

I don’t disagree, they could have been better. But I enjoyed them enough to always put a +2 mod slot aug on everything. Also always used Piercing, shooting creeps hiding in cover never got old.

Bioware went out of their way to support this feature narratively by putting it front and center in the prologue mission where Alec Ryder goes all AI-enhanced-N7 on an entire kett outpost. Now I’m not sure if Bioware is aware of this “more effective” meme you mentioned (I certainly wasn’t aware it’s a meme) but from what they’ve shown in that mission it’s pretty clear that this feature is supposed to make you adapt to any situation and thus make you more effective vs whatever you’re fighting.

But even if you ignore the skill imbalance, most of the skills in the game are designed to work best when they’re at 100%. Many don’t get their new mechanics unlocked until you’re on 5th or 6th evo and a lot of them require strong passive support to be fun to use - without that the cooldowns are long, the damage is low and you miss out on some special interactions unlocked by passives. Profiles also require significant skill point investment to climb up the tiers.

Which brings me back to my original point - you can go out of your way to make use of this feature but you’ll end up with a bunch of skills that feel off because they’re not at their full potential. And you can only slot 3 at a time. Now it’s your choice if you want to faff around and needlessly prolong the combat encounters and wrestle with the awkward menu system, wait out the switch cooldowns, etc - but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a poorly thought out feature. Instead of doing what they did they should’ve had all profiles unlocked from the start and give us the option to allot entire skill point pool to each profile separately. That would be perfectly in line with what they were showing in the prologue and it would also make sense to utilize as a gameplay mechanic.

Not denying that would be more useful, but can you imagine doing skillpoint management seven times every time you level?

I think someone who likes going into menus to switch profiles wouldn’t have a problem with that, lol.

There is no need for menus, you can set them up and they are bound to f1 to f4.

Exactly, just hit the button.

That’s great if you happen to be in the minority who plays with the kbm, what about gamepad users? And weren’t there seven profiles total?

There are 7 different profiles and you can set up 4 different favourites for them. I assume there is a button to switch them on controler as well but I can`t help with the details on that.

I found out how:

Holy shit. I can’t believe how well hidden that is. Basically you have to go into the profiles and then hit the back button the 360 controller, or the View button on the Xbox One controller, or the touchpad on the PS4 controller, and it takes you to a whole new menu that I didn’t know existed. A favorites menu.

And then while you’re playing, when you press the View button (or touchpad or back button) to bring up the shortcuts, you can press X (or Square) to get to the Favorites.

I think this is the first time I’ve played a game for 45 hours without finding one of the main menus in it.