That’s the beauty of modern action oriented RPGs, they’re quite easy to pick up and play, and that includes games like The Witcher 3.
I, too - like a sucker - picked this up over the holidays for a pittance. Knowing full well the very negative impression I had of the game from playing the trial when it was released.
Playing it again expecting an experience more like something from Piranha Bytes rather than a AAA Bioware release in a well regarded franchise has helped me get over the janky story and writing issues and power through to the stuff I do like about the game.
Nothing can make me ignore the first draft quality to the dialog or how much everyone in the Andromeda Initiative needs to die in a fire, but I’m pretty happy with the meat of mucking about on the planets. Ignoring the Nexus and the Task missions and the numerous pointless incidental firefights improves the game a lot, I think. I’ve got two planets pretty well wrapped up and I’m working on finishing number three.
The purple alien and Cora are tagging along with me right now, and I enjoy how chummy they are. Which highlights for me the main problem I have with this game. The game bends over backward to make you a chosen-one/savior but the people you are supposed to be saving are shown being mostly petty, pissy, stupid, and terrible. It’s not much of a motivator. Things improve when you start setting up colonies and meet the purple aliens, but at that point you’ve probably spent enough time on the Nexus to want everyone in the Andromeda Initiative to drop dead.
I’m enjoying playing the game now that I’ve got a handle on what it is and isn’t. I played through Homefront: Revolution last year and enjoyed it well enough for all its faults, so I expect I’ll wrap up Andromeda with similar feelings about it.
Playing through Andromeda made me appreciate even more how the Mass Effect universe was tailored for a particular story and how well resolved that story already was. The only thing Mass Effect adds to Andromeda is familiarity, and that doesn’t necessarily work out favorably for the game. I know Bioware wanted to make their own Star Wars but beating a dead horse might be going a bit too far down that road.
I think it’s a much better game it’s given credit for, but I do have complaints, and the biggest is that you spend so much time with Milky Way baggage and not the titular Andromeda.
I do like the overall story of the game and think a lot could be done with it. You have the ancient terraformer race, the “bio-borg” race which I feel is a small player in the larger scheme, and that black “stuff” that hunts and hates the terraformer race tech (who I think would turn out to be the real villain).
I am quite curious on where the story goes. I hope they make more in this new universe.
I think the odds of them going back to Andromeda when the reception was so poor are very slim. They’ll undoubtedly do more Mass Effect but it will probably be in some other, quite possibly less ambitious form.
After deciding Red Dead Redemption just isn’t for me, I decided to move on to ME: Andromeda thanks to the generosity of @divedivedive back in December.
I had always played the male Commander Shepherd in the prior ME games, but people seem to like femshep much better. Is that true of Andromeda? Is Sara a better choice than Scott?
It has no real bearing on the game. So the question is do you want to look at a female avatar and hear a female voice or male?
I think in the other 3 ME games, people liked the voice actor for femshep more. Typically I pick the guy, but if the voice actor for Sara is better I’d go with her. Like when I play AC: Odyssey I’ll choose Cassandra because everyone seems to love her voice actor.
For the record, Mark Meer absolutely killed it in Mass Effect series and he gets a lot of undeserved hate.
I agree with this. For some reason people seem to think every decision is a battle to be fought. The correct answer is that Jennifer Hale and Mark Meet both did amazing jobs in the original trilogy and you won’t go wrong with either.
Now that doesn’t answer @robc04’s question - so far I’ve only played once, and I did Guyder first time out so I can’t say for sure how Sara turned out. Might be worth trying and letting us know what you think.
Agree. I played as male shep in my first play.
Of course most acting falls under the banner of ‘that’s pretty good’. Something has to be extraordinary in either direction for me to notice. And about the only game to achieve this is Supergiants, which is as much to do with he writing and how the voice acting is used as anything else.
I played Sara and even kept her default look since she came off as a young, spunky “go get 'em” type who was kind of adorable.
I’ve been meaning to replay Andromeda, give it my traditional insanity run. Maybe I’ll give Sara her time in the spotlight and I can memorialize the game that had to die so that Anthem could live.
Default look was/is fine, but not the default haircut.
There are mods if you want her to look sexier.
I weep for video gaming, where people insist only on playing a female character if they can jerk it whilst watching cut scenes.
Yeah, it was gross how many of the mods tart up FemShep and FemRyder.
Never saw the need to do that. I just wasn’t a fan of the default hair style. It was too juvenile looking for me. I think the one I went with was basically the default hair style but if the hair wasn’t in a pony tail.
I did play through twice, once with each Ryder. They were both fine.
In my book there is only one FemShep: the default from ME1, with a scar in her left eyebrow, short hair, plain looking, unlike that pretty boy/male model default ManShep. And not the dolled up version in ME3.
Default Sara Ryder isn’t pretty, which is fine. A woman doesn’t have to be pretty. But she doesn’t look old enough to drink. Default Scott Ryder again has a male model’s face.