Author could have stopped at the title as he did little to go into why the game is “actually pretty good”.
I’m playing Andromeda now. I must have played before because I have a bunch of strike teams leveled up but I have almost no memory of what happens… that can’t be good foreshadowing for where this game goes.
I will say this is a better video game than prior Mass Effects. The combat and map navigation feel good. I just got to Eos and navigating the open map in the car is very well done.
Pluses: Good gameplay, good controls, story is pretty interesting so far. Weapons are decent and feel different when I swap guns. Jump jets are nice, cover works intuitively.
Minuses: Frostbite is a terrible engine. The characters are all washed out due to shitty lighting effects and low res textures always being displayed in close ups. 2006 Mass Effect looks better in so many ways. I can’t believe they made games with this rubbish for like 10 years.
I read somewhere BioWare reached out and recruited the Need for Speed guys to handle the driving code.
The soft cover mechanics is good. Jet pack is a nice addition. One of my combat styles was Stealth + Death from Above. Later I would “Space Marine” ground pound from the air. The combat options, character abilities, wealth of guns, upgrades, modifications, etc is kind of insane.
I can’t say ME:A is better or worse than the other Mass Effects. It was too different a game. Similar to how AC:Origins was very different than all the previous AC’s. It’s too bad so many people thought - different = worse. I loved the game, and still am not happy there won’t be a real continuation. Given the next ME has Liara in it, I don’t see ever getting an answer to what happened after ME:A.
I won’t belabor the point since we’ve discussed the topic in the next Mass Effect game thread but the folks at BioWare have left clues in the trailers that include references to Andromeda.
It certainly didn’t feel like a finished game. It felt like it was missing 1 chapter/planet never mind the cancellation of the Quarian Ark DLC.
We would have got that DLC and maybe filled in that gap if we didn’t have so many people complaining it wasn’t ME4. I suspect the weird facial graphics did more damage than anything else though; that was a surprising self-own.
Frostbite doomed this game. Even now on the Series X there’s terrible texture pop ins and the characters look flat in many scenes, like bad cartoons. It’s really fucking annoying.
The facial animations are fixed in 2021. I do remember starting this game before and it was hilariously bad. It’s a good game with subpar graphics. I remember gossip that Frostbite was forced on Bioware and it fucked the development Inquisition and Andromeda. They spent so much time fighting this shitty engine and trying to shoehorn RPGs into it that they had not time for polishing the game.
Gamers are brutal. There’s so much competition for our time now you can’t afford to cut corners and release rubbish. EA wanted to save a couple bucks on licensing Unreal and they fucked over an entire studio as a result.
The story, cutscenes, gameplay, they’re all good (so far). Give it another shot if you’re bored and fresh off the ME Remastered trilogy!
I still think it looks amazing myself. Way better than the previous games. Not quite as good as Inquisition but, y’know. They kinda did that to themselves with the choice of environments.
I talked up the cutscenes, and then last night I played the first landing on Voeld and Suvi snapped into the default pose partway through the animation. Standing up straight, arms and legs at 45 degrees. Lol.
If EA had delayed this game by like 6 months maybe they’d have kept this franchise going and selling games for the past 5 years.
Nah. You cannot fundamentally change the design of the game in 6 months. Poor facial animations and bugs are the least offensive aspects of Andromeda.
Personally I have to agree with whoever said that shoving Frostbite down Bioware’s throats is what killed the franchise, and eventually the studio.
I understand that perspective. It’s a very different game than the prior Mass Effects. EA wanted to monetize the shooter aspect of it too, I’m sure, with the strike team multiplayer. As someone who plays a lot of shooters, I appreciate the more action oriented gameplay.
It’s not a great RPG or a great shooter. The story, so far, isn’t as engaging as the trilogy and Ryder is not as good a hero as Shepard. But I’m digging it. If they could have iterated on this formula I think they would have found a great balance between the two and made more great games.
Yeah, I dug it as well, although I couldn’t tell you why. It certainly wasn’t for the squadmates (Hey, did you know Cora was trained as a Huntress?!!!), or for the character designs (since every species we are familiar with all look generic and the designs of the Kett and Angara are just hideous). The gameplay is fun enough, and I enjoy the fact that you’re just Ryder. You’re not having visions of impending invasions or anything like that. You’re just some kid thrust into a leadership position. Actually, now that I type that, I’m not even sure if that’s correct. So I guess the story is forgettable.
Maybe, but I think it is legitimately better at both those things (as far as mechanics go) than anything in the series prior. Like, I think not locking you into rigid classes is a good move, the progression’s at least as satisfying as 3 and better than the others, and there’s no fucking shared global cooldown on abilities. As far as shootering goes, it’s everything I liked about 3, with less emphasis on hugging cover (which I hate) and also jetpacks. Mechanically, of course.
I also quite enjoy the talking and the exploring and the vistas and whatnot, it’s just that it doesn’t really engage with its actual premise enough, spends too much time rehashing the sorts of things you did in the older games, and never has as strong a hook or characters for anything. (Even though I did, personally, like most of the party members quite a bit by the end.)
The areas where I felt it was better than prior games:
- create your own cover, get of your vehicle and use your vehicle as cover. This just really opens up on the gameplay so much in the open world.
- vehicle physics was great, so much more fun to just drive around
- I found exploring the ice planet and the desert planet’s slowly expanding open areas to be more so much more satisfying than exploring the little zones of play where you go from tiny area to tiny area in prior games.
The first game is still the best RPG in the series.
Yup. The leap from ME1 to ME2 was huge, gameplay wise. Was it a better story? Debatable. Mass Effect 1 is very, very rough around the edges. 2 feels like a polished game. 3 is iterating on a successful formula. Andromeda feels like it was a shooter first, and it probably is because Frostbite. It does the “video game” things better. Moving your character and putting pellets into enemies. The RPG, or table top game part, is better in some ways that previous entries in the series.
No it was not.
Better companions, and companion quests? Absolutely! But the main story was the worst thing about ME2. The careful world building and universe from ME1 are some of the best ever in gaming.
I put that watershed at 3, 2 for me is a big change without anything that makes those changes work. 3 is those changes but, y’know, fun.
And for me, RPG as a videogame definition aren’t about roleplaying (the story and choices and consequences are certainly better in earlier iterations, especially 1) but mechanics, which…ME1 had more numbers and trees and stuff, but I think the overall structure of those mechanics is better in 3 and Andromeda, without some of the baggage 3 inherited from earlier games.