Korax

Got some narrative dissonance with Harper that's extremely reminiscent of Jack in ME2. She's a biotic commando who can rip apart an APC with her powers and was sent to an asari military unit after scaring her superiors. She's barely done anything helpful in combat and is the only squadmate I've had that's been downed during a fight. Mechanically, she's just as inexperienced and low-power as you, but of course she's narratively ready to give you shit for not being a "real" Pathfinder. FUCK FOREVER the galaxy map. I kind of enjoyed tooling the Normandy around the map in previous games. I also didn't really mind scanning planets. But the whole fly-through that happens EVERY SINGLE TIME you do anything is such a tedious waste. Select a planet. Spend a good 5-10 seconds doing nothing as you get a first-person swoop from current location to the destination. Fly just close enough for a dramatic orbital pose, then have to BACK THE FUCK UP again because scanning requires a view of the whole planet. Then there's maybe a 25% chance that there's actually something to scan, and you didn't just waste a bunch of time. I do like the feel of the combat so far. I've found the cover system to be pretty intuitive, though the one thing I wish it would do is automatically switch shoulders when coming up to a corner that you could otherwise aim around. Probably a side effect of not being a full locked-in mode.

One little goof-up that I don't think I've seen mentioned yet: On the first planet you get to, it's raining, but the raindrop maps don't get applied to the characters' helmets, they get applied right to the faces. It looks like everyone's wearing some sort of sauna suit and sweating themselves to death.

I'll probably want to get in on some MP action, though not until the actual launch. Origin ID is LordKorax.

ME3 multiplayer had consumables like that. They were a possible drop from the gear crates that you could buy, either with in-game credits or real money. From the brief look at the menu, it seems that the consumables are available for individual purchase, but weapons and characters are still in random boxes, which is pretty much the only thing I didn't like about ME3's unlock system.

Hunter's bow, sharpshot bow, war bow, ropecaster, tripcaster, two slings - blast (explosive) and regular (elementals), rattler (burst-fire bolt thrower, never really used it), and tearblast cannon (a short-range air cannon that only blows off components - got it from the hunters' lodge sidequest chain).

And done! Just short of 50 hours to complete.

A warbow can be extremely useful. If you hit a cryo cell with an ice arrow or a power cell with a shock arrow, it fizzles for a bit and then releases an elemental explosion that can help with crowd control. The purple version also has corruption arrows, which causes a berserk state that can make things crazy. I mainly kept the hunter's bow, sharpshot bow, and ropecaster, with the fourth spot swapping between whatever elemental weapons seemed appropriate to what I was doing. Just finished the main quest. I liked the ending, and they found a way to have a sequel cliffhanger without being dumb about it (though at first it seemed to be going in an extremely contrived direction). I just checked my trophies, and I only have two left to get the Platinum... so I will probably round out my playthrough of the game with those.

So I've done every single side thing that I could find (cauldrons, tallnecks, side quests, collectibles, bandit camps, vantage points, corrupted zones), hit level 50, and started going through the story. While there have been a few elements to the main story that were a bit surprising to me, it's mostly gone the way I expected. A side effect of exploring almost everywhere before the game thinks I will is that some of the impact of what was supposed to be an introduction to a difficult enemy encounter is subverted. Oh, this quest's goal is deep in Stormbird territory, it's gonna be a hard thing to get to, but I already triggered the intro cinematic when I wandered here five hours ago, also I can just tie the thing down with my ropecaster and override it. I appreciate that they tried to make collectibles useful by having vendors that will sell you reward boxes for completing sets, but almost all the actual rewards are more useful to an early-game character, and some of the areas you have to go the find them definitely aren't early-game. There's a little nod to how they're working with Kojima, with three "Stranded" collectibles. As little as I've found stealth to be useful against the machines, it's much more viable when going after human targets. They're much more likely to go down in one hit, and they don't have the detection that some of the robots do. There have still been a couple times when the game was more interested in making a specific story happen, so some people have been impervious to my sniping but then went down easily after I walked forward enough to cause a cutscene. I have the purple version of all the armor types, but I've been using the Protector armor almost exclusively, because of my proclivity to just run in and start swinging heavy spear attacks. I just finished the Ancient Armory side quest, though, and the armor I got from that seems pretty sweet.

For me, the CYOA discussion brought to mind House of Leaves. Without getting too far into it, it's a weird story within a story (within another story?). After a while, the layout of the text itself starts to reflect some of the events it portrays. During one part, characters are lost within a mysterious labyrinth, and the pages themselves become labyrinthine. The main thread isn't that hard to follow, but the entire section is a mess of footnotes, some of which have their own footnotes. Some of those lead you to loops of earlier notes, some don't actually have associated notes, and there's at least one note in the jumble that doesn't have a referent in the text. To connect it with the Dark Souls lore discussion, it actually is a book that you could read in different ways. There's all sorts of extraneous information, explicit and implicit, that's not necessary to understand the basic story, but adds flavor to what you're reading if you go the trouble of understanding it.

The way Andromeda is handling abilities is so all over the place to me. There are no classes, you can gain abilities and specialize in whatever way you want! Also here are profiles, which give you bonuses to almost-class-like groups of abilities, hope you specialize in specific ways to take advantage of them! But also you can just change between them whenever you want, guess you're out of luck, variety-wise, if you specialized in something! None of this changes the fact that I will be going full-on Adept, because being a rad space wizard who flings purple-blue orbs of energy is all I want to do.

I finished all the Cauldrons. I like that after the first one they varied up the designs so they didn't feel too similar. I also got all Blazing Suns on the hunting challenges. I like the idea of the challenges, but some of the later ones boil down to brewing a ton of potions and then just tanking damage from the 10 other machines in the area as you're trying your damnedest to kill the 2 that the challenge cares about. I've done so much side stuff that the main quest branches open to me now are level 14 and 15, and I'm level 41.

I went through the first Cauldron and it is cuh-RAZY.

Congratulations to Brendon on winning the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the IGF Awards! I whipped up a quick award sticker to slap on the box:

To be clear, though I'm fine with some amount of guidance (gotta learn basic controls and systems), as soon as a lesson becomes an obvious railroad I almost always try to break it. If the game handles that gracefully, great! But Horizon doesn't, at least in what I saw. And it's especially strange how it then flip-flops between jamming a lesson in your face when you don't do it exactly right and then assuming that you would never do anything but follow those instructions, so obviously it doesn't need to pay attention to what you're doing. I haven't tried going back to the beginning area, but I fully expect to be able to. When you're made a Seeker, the Matriarch is pretty clear about how it affords you the ability to come and go as you please.

Okay, so, as expected, once the story finally kicks off, you get turned loose in a huge area with all sorts of stuff to find and things to do. That's much better. Faces haven't improved, but I have noticed something: when an actual cutscene is happening, there's some decent emoting going on, but as soon as you're in a conversation, the characters just lock in on each other, staring blankly and vaguely opening their lips. It's weird. One thing I will say is that stealth is way less possible/important than the intro bits want you to believe. There are some spots where you can creep around and eliminate targets one-by-one, but my overwhelming experience has been that I can get one, maybe two enemies down and then things go loud. Which is mostly fine, because the melee spear attack can just waste enemies in a way that nothing else does. Even the major story points just shove stealth to the side. The first major challenge is against an enemy that you will have to ambush multiple times and is hard to hide from once alerted. Then there's an arena fight that you just can't hide during. And then ANOTHER arena fight that prevents any stealth. Oh, and if you didn't go to the trouble of buying other weapons along the way, it's gonna be a problem, because your regular ol' bow is pretty shitty during two of those fights.

I was SO CLOSE to getting SA for the Hokkaido elusive targets, and then after I killed one of them I stumbled into a non-obvious restricted area and was almost taken out by a guard.

Hmm... Haha, nice. I'm not really worried about others exploring or expanding the mine. Plus, you found an underground ravine, which is a generation feature that I really enjoy for some reason.

I don't have anything real to say about this yet, I just wanted to lay claim to the joke. Looks pretty cool.

I completed the construction of my tower! There's not much inside right now, but I did make a decorative design on the first floor to welcome visitors. Don't worry if your eyes start to numb when crossing it, that's probably just your imagination. If you climb all the way to the top, there's an observation deck, with a view of the draw distance surrounding area. And to keep the hordes at bay, the setting of the sun activates a protective lava flow.

I carved out a patch across the lake to start building a cool fort. Also, I made a little graveyard?

Yeah, that's actually a bit encouraging to me. I didn't think that there would be huge mechanical changes to the combat, but I did have the tiniest twinge of doubt because of the way DAI over-MMO-ed itself. Seeing some nice shooting with recognizable ME elements is good.

10 hours is nowhere near enough time to cover 5 days of early play for me, especially for a Mass Effect game, and even more especially when it falls over a weekend.

Man, it's been way too long since I've played. If you could add LordKorax to the whitelist, that would be great!

After a few restarts and a lot of casing, I had a great plan that went south almost immediately after taking out the target. Still completed it, but was spotted a whole lot and spent a bunch of time hiding in laundry baskets.

The recent update allows you to add custom contracts to a Favorites list, which is a slight improvement. Man, I wish they'd go deep on letting users have access to all the different stuff that the game keeps track of. There are escalations that can impose time limits on objective completion, enforce specific weapons/disguises, and completion order. There are a series of challenges in Bangkok that require an unseen kill with a specific weapon and disguise, but then also require that the body be found. All sorts of states are being kept track of. I don't know how hard it would be to allow access to those without it being a messy dev toolkit, but I want to open up the game's guts and fiddle around so badly.