Ugh. The writing in this is terrible. The shooting is pretty good, but this is not what I want in a Mass Effect Game and I regret spending $4.
I don’t know what it means to say that the writing was terrible. Did they end a lot of sentences with prepositions?
No, but as usual they did a bad job on major character interactions, and the quality of the writing was just plain worse than usual. In the last half dozen Bioware titles they did fantastic work on party banter and side story quest writing, enough to carry the clumsy main story, but in this game even those elements were weak.
I mean, that’s subjective. I can’t really dispute that the main plot is a touch underwhelming but I thought they did a very solid job of character writing. Some hilarious party banters too. Not quite as good as ME2 in that respect but since it’s mechanically 10x better, I think it works out.
Dialogue is dull and plodding. Characters are difficult to distinguish from each other. Pacing is bad - including random side quests where you solve the random problems of strangers before the launch of the ship kills early momentum. There are distracting and obvious plot holes. The conflict at the station is delivered entirely via dialogue dump instead of shown. Other Mass Effect games did not have these problems at this scale.
I assumed this article was just John Walker at his John Walkest, but his response was very similar to mine.
I completely respect “the shooting and collecting is good and I don’t care about writing in games” as an opinion, but I highly value characterization, dialogue and pacing in my RPGs, and I know Bioware can do better than this.
I don’t think @divedivedive stated that as his opinion? We’ve had some rounds of this, but thinking that the writing in MEA wasn’t all terrible is not the same as not caring about writing in games.
Well, I can get behind exactly this part of your statement. Andromeda could have been better. I didn’t particularly care for the kett as villains, who didn’t get all that fleshed out or explained very well. I definitely would have liked to have seen some of the missing plot pieces, like the business about the benefactor and, oh yeah, the quarian ark getting resolved without having to buy a book.
But the crew? We’re just not going to agree here. They weren’t all winners - I don’t know if anyone really likes Liam all that much, but even he got a pretty great character mission. And you can’t tell the characters apart? I don’t understand that at all - they all have individual motiviations and characterization. Not liking them is one thing, but I think Peebee, Drack and Vetra were the equal of any of the characters from the original series. Except maybe Mordin, but he didn’t show up until 2 - who knows what would have happened in the sequel we’ll never see?
And yes, my saying that the writing wasn’t as great as we’ve seen from other Bioware games doesn’t mean I’m saying writing doesn’t matter. It’s one leg of a table that’s a bit shorter than the others in this game. The shooting was pretty great, yes, I did say that. I still enjoy it just as a third person shooter. But with the pacing - I don’t think it’s significantly worse than the first game, for instance, which had you running around the Citadel doing random side quests like counting Keepers and trying to get a turian general reconciled with his favorite courtesan. If you’re going to say ‘but you can skip all that’ ok, you can skip a bunch of that stuff in Andromeda too. And as much as I love KOTOR, like everyone else, it still seems unforgivable that you don’t even get a lightsaber until you’re done the first planet and first six or so hours of the game.
Anyway, I’m not trying to talk you out of your opinion, you don’t care for Andromeda, that’s nobody’s business but yours. But while it’s got flaws, and I doubt anyone argues otherwise, there’s a pretty great core of a game in there. And I still like the basic Mass Effect experience it contained in its caramel center.
I think the characters were as good as the characters in ME1 that we came to know and love through 2 sequels. IMO, people are looking back at characters we came to know and love through 3 games to characters we are just getting to know in Andromeda the first time.
I thought the companions in this were very good - among my favourites in the series. Even Liam had his moments (cannot unsee walking in on Liam and Jaal “tops off”). The whole game suffers from being too fucking big. If it had been a tighter, more compact experience like its predecessors - ok, maybe a bit more expansive and freeform - then it would have been more satisfying. They made the same mistake with Dragon Age Inquisition.
It’s certainly possible the companions get more interesting. I didn’t finish the game.
I couldn’t agree more. I bought this over the holidays and managed to sink 6 hours into it, and finally the awful dialogue and terrible story (and that they managed to change an awful dialogue “choice” system to something even worse this time around) just made this something I couldn’t continue into. Obviously very subjective, but I found myself largely agreeing that what I managed to get through in Andromeda felt like the kind of disaster that could indeed end a series. Or at least put it on a lengthy hiatus. YMMV.
Does Liam have a whole Star Wars reference going on?
Anyway, I tried as a Leader, because I love my Sentinel, but sadly, I think I will need to switch to the Engineer.
Yes, Liam’s side mission is pretty much a big Star Wars reference. He’s not terrible really, I just got tired of him picking fights with the other crew members.
Just wanted to say, I used the premier mp add ons which gives some REALLY GOOD guns, and it makes this actually really fun. The starter guns in mp for MEA really suck, they should have upped the damage for the starters because the mp is alot more fun when you don’t have a pea shooter for bronze!
Now that I got HDR up and running I tried to launch this on a different OS than the main one, it launches OK… but when trying to load a game I am told that I no longer own the DLC, so my save-games refuses to load…
Noticed that EA Downloader doesn’t have a ‘repair’ option, but I suppose I can reinstall the whole thing and see if that resolves the issue.
Think I’ve spent more time in MP than Singleplayer for this game.
Edit: Weird, was sure repair option wasn’t there yesterday when I looked… clickyclicky.
Edit2: So… apparently reinstalling Origin fixes problems with the games, even though everything in Origin you’d expect it to do, works…
I came across this bit of info yesterday and considered posting it here but then I figured eh, the forum isn’t exactly hungry for news about Mass Effect. But then the thread got bumped and I know there’s at least a few fans around, so what the heck.
Let’s see if BioWare survives Anthem first. ;-)
Well, there is that. At worst, hopefully Anthem will at least be a decent swan song.
Interestingly enough I found this game really easy to drop for a while and then pickup again. I got like 3 planets to 100% viability and put the game on stasis, going on hiatus (again). I figure the “dumb ass colonists” have to get settled in before I resume the game.
\o/