1765

I did. Like I said upthread, they have enough AI variability and spawn variability that even though I did that base what felt like 50 times, it never felt like a repeat of previous attempts except in certain narrow corridors and rooms.

Plus the design of that base is pretty neat in that it’s very 3D, not just a 2D layout. You can use your jumpjets at several points and jump across points or jump to roofs and shoot down from there, or huddle up at the lowest levels of the base and fight from there. There’s a LOT of variety of encounters within that base, so the thought of seeing it again several times is actually quite pleasant. It’s well designed.

1766

I always play normal in ME games and usually find it challenging enough. But now that I’m pretty leveled up (level 40) I’m finding it pretty easy. Switching between biotics (throw/pull) and tech (overload/incinerate) wiht cloaking in both profiles and I feel pretty god like now. I only switch to Tech when I need to take down armored foes since that’s a weak spot for biotics. Even mechs and krogans don’t scare me right now, and the last base bosses go down pretty quickly now (though the first one was pretty tough). People complain about their companions always dying but that must be on higher difficulties because mine rarely die and are pretty good at taking out enemies (though I still wish I could control them). The game has a lot of niggling flaws, (Bioware’s QC was pretty poor on this game for the first time in my experience), but I really do like this game, flaws and all.

1767

Companions do hardly any damage and are squishy so I tend to favour defensive skills when assigning their points.

1768

It really depends on the difficulty. On normal they can wreck havoc when they are skilled up a little…

1769

That’s not been my experience. I do spec their defense first, and after that they are not squishy. And then I start adding offense and they can be quite deadly, again, all playing on normal.

1770

For companions I used Cora and Drack. They use the charge skill and if you do the same thing, you become a Pinball Squad. It helps to mark your current market has priority so they move with you.

The talk barter between Cora and Drack is not the better, so probably do this only for grinding or if you don’t care much about what they say in the open world.

1771

Wow, this was really not that great of a game.

All of the ME’s had their time sinks, but Andromeda is a time black hole. I think it must be a Canadian thing – maybe Ubi Montreal and BW are swapping spit.

Character graphics and animation are atrocious, terrible, awful. They’re worse than ME, and ME is nearly ten years old. Shiny plastic people.

The writing is terrible. Nothing has any impact. “Tell, don’t show” (the opposite of good writing) is everywhere. “You know, I’m a do-it-before-thinking-about-it kind of guy.” TMI right off the bat. “This better be rock bottom!” Ugh. Confront a guy who has been rigging panels to explode all over a station, and the encounter ends with said guy doing the canned exit-stage-right animation after telling you “fine, I’m out of here”. Good lord.

The combat is OK, except that now Shep^H^H^H^H Ryder has access to every skill, it’s fairly friggin easy.

Vetra is the only acceptable romance, since the love scenes consist only of Shep^H^H^H^H^H RYDER GODDAMNIT and our Turian friend exchanging chaste kisses. Thank god.

I wonder if anyone from the old BW had anything to do with Andromeda, because this is a mess that trips all over itself, and shows that the BW studios must be run these days by the incompetent and/or the inexperienced.

2/5 quatloos, glad I picked this up at a discount.

Bonus pissy nitpicking: the people who wrote the planet descriptions. I know, I know, they probably wrote them like 4 years ago, and then some intern assigned them willy-nilly to the planets. But looking at a barren, airless moon, and then being told that has a surface atmospher 900x that of Earth (Venus, basically), just another sign of pure sloppiness. Look, I know what barren moons (and content) looks like – I play Elite Dangerous.

1772

One of the subtle things I loved in the original ME was those planet descriptions. Sometimes they had sneaky references to other classic SF, like one planet with a reference to Zaphod Beeblebrox, just not by name. It was a small thing, but one I appreciated.

1773

There was also a planet whose description in the first game that made mention of the creators of the reapers, who didn’t even show up until DLC for the third game.

1774

The game is good.

But they devs should stop tryiing to do open world games (what they do worse) and focus on what they do better (linear quests).

Also the game can be turn into terrible if you are a completionist and just do everything. Because that means doing a lot of low effort quests and fake (real) unnecesary (neccesary) loading screens.

1775

Man, I keep reading posts and articles saying Bioware should give up on open world games and I could not disagree more strenuously. I am super stoked they avoided the on-rails experience of ME2 & 3 and gave us some room to stretch out. You don’t like wandering the planets doing side quests, don’t do 'em. Win/win.

1776

I think Dragon Age could stand to rein things back in a more (though not completely) linear direction but the open world stuff works much better for me in Mass Effect. Especially in the galactic exploration framework of Andromeda. Although I do kinda hope any followup spends a lot more time on uncharted planets with only some of them indigenously populated and preferably most of those limited to that planet, rather than it being a lot of going boldly where the angarans already are.

1777

I wrote a post in this thread prior to release (too lazy to go find it) that said basically I hope they intersperse some “empty” planets in with the core plot-heavy ones. Not literally empty, I guess, but maybe uninhabited or unstable or even like a big puzzle - anyway, looking for variety in general. Having played basically the whole game now, I still think that kind of variety would have been nice, there’s certainly room for improvement. I just don’t want the open world concept shitcanned.

1778

Awwwww man. I’m really bummed to hear that Andromeda doesn’t have those types of planets. :(

1779

It’s not that bad, just that each world is kind of a mishmash. There’s going to be a fair amount of combat, a decent quantity of fedex quests, and a few puzzles in the form of vaults. But it can get kind of samey after hitting a few worlds. I’m a dude who craves variety, and mainly that’s in the form of climate and environmental dangers. Could have been better.

1780

soo, basically me1 mako planets.

1781

I am one of the few who liked ME1 Mako planets. It was fun to stumble on the little mini-dungeons. I really disliked that everything in Andromeda was dumped into the five “core” planets, and all the other planets were merely XP awards or resource awards.

1782

The AVP meter having space only for 5 planets was a joke.

1783

You get a like, because finally someone understands me!

1784

Hey, I liked them too.