Gwardinen

I actually don't seem to have access to any war bows yet, despite having the purple sharpshot and hunter's bows. Which is annoying because, yeah, I keep seeing things asking for frost and shock arrows. As for my select wheel, I mostly keep the two bows I do have in, and then usually a ropecaster and tripcaster in the other two, but often one of those will get swapped out for the sling. If I ever get a war bow it'll probably go into that secondary set of rotating debuff weapons too. There are just those six weapon types, right? I kind of think they should have just made the two side slots have primary and secondary weapons in that case - maybe you "mouseover" them and press a button to switch. Having four slots for six weapons is just annoying enough to manage that it takes away from the smooth freeform nature of the combat. If there had been like 12 weapons I would have understood their desire to have the UI be less finicky more.

In case you're not aware, your notebook will tell you which bits of any machines you've scanned are vulnerable to what, so you don't just have to cycle wildly through arrows to figure it out. As for the armour, I had the same quandary. Since as you mentioned some fights can't be avoided, I went with the Nora Protector. However there is another viable option; I forget its name but the armour that has a number of elemental resistances on it. Survivor perhaps? Since I've been wearing the Protector armour I certainly can take a hit in melee, but any kind of elemental attack definitely fucks me up. That said, you can customise any armour set to a certain extent with modification items.

I recommend watching it on YouTube. I remember it being a pretty well shot scene. Certainly it stuck with me long enough... though I imagine the impact will be lessened if it's not you making the decision for your version of Shepard. This week is a horrible stressful mess of work for me, but knowing that Andromeda early access starts next Thursday is helping me pull through it!

So my original ME trilogy playthrough is as a renegade, which means: It was totally fucked up and one of the few times a game has ever made me feel genuine regret. Which itself might actually be an argument for the system pushing you into choices, but ultimately that was kind of a fluke of numbers and interesting content aligning. Hopefully Andromeda will (like the Witcher) manage to get me to make difficult choices without needing it to be backed up by +2 Renegade points popups.

Because of the dumb "pick your alignment before you play" nature of the original trilogy... a choice involving Mordin in ME3 went a way that I truly did not want it to as a player. I still feel like shit any time I think about it. He was the very model of a scientist salarian.

There are a couple of things in some of the newer videos that have me pretty interested. In this one I really like the idea of setting up a few builds that can be swapped between in combat depending on the situation you're facing: And in this one my main "oh shit that's neat" moment was when they showed stuff out of the window that reflects the position the ship is currently at. That's Star Trek as fuck and I love it.

I'm pretty much exactly where you are, Bjorn.

Huh, fair enough. It's just unfortunate that I happened to accidentally stumble into the most boring outcome. Hopefully things will work out better in the rest of the game! That said, I'm also moving incredibly slowly through the game. I don't know what it is about it but I really struggle to play long stretches. It may have something to do with the tension I feel between wanting to experience the writing and world and absolutely not wanting to experience another isometric CRPG in any systemic way. I honestly think I'd enjoy this game more if it was a choose your own adventure book.

Really? I struggled to find an interesting way to resolve that encounter. The objectives even said to talk to the enemy with multiple party members, but he ignored me after the first person.

Yeah once I played through the Citadel DLC in ME3 I started getting really into the idea of hanging out with some neat aliens again. That DLC is the most direct fan servicey comedic/sentimental sequence I've ever seen in a game, but it really works if you've enjoyed your time in that universe.

My concern is my CPU - it was causing me some problems in Dragon Age: Inquisition so I'm worried about it again here. That said, I totally don't have the money to replace it, especially because at this point I'd also need a new motherboard. Still, I'm hoping BioWare is a bit more savvy with the Frostbite engine now that they've released one game with it and Andromeda might run a little better. Certainly there are other games (even the gorgeous Battlefield 1) with that engine that play absolutely fine on my computer.

Does anyone know whether there's any way to watch it from outside the US yet?

Does anyone know whether the game is still designed around doubling down on a particular alignment to get special conversation options? I've been playing through the ME3 DLC that I never got a chance to check out and it's reminded me that sticking to either Paragon or Renegade all the time is boring for me. The problem is that, systemically, if you don't build up enough points in one particular direction you will be locked out of certain conversation options (that are usually the best ones). Is there any information available on how this stuff will work in Andromeda?

I'm not posting this in an attempt to get you back into the game necessarily, especially if you think it's healthier for you not to play it, but I will throw up some brief explanations for the sake of posterity. The Valkyrie's shoulder pin relies on a particular mechanic that class has, called the "dodge block". When the Valkyrie dodges, her guard automatically changes to the direction of her dodge. This allows her to dodge into an attack and block it. When this happens, if you immediately hit the heavy attack button (the timing window is fairly small) she'll perform the shoulder pin. Regarding guard break countering; currently the way it works is you have to hit the guard break button just as the opponent's guard break animation hits your character. However, this is pretty difficult and actually penalises you for seeing the guard break coming and countering too early. For that reason it's been said that in the next patch the behaviour will be reverted to how it was in the beta, which allowed countering as soon as the opponent's animation began.

I thought that was just a notebook? Otherwise why did he need the pen?

Yeah I enjoy it a lot. I'm looking forward to the release tomorrow (although really I should be working).

I would agree with that. It's well enough made and the shooting is pretty on point, but it all feels a tad purposeless. The story doesn't seem particularly interesting and I certainly have no affection for the characters. My intuition says if you can get a group of four people you like together to zigzag around the world in some kind of madcap military caper it'll be an entertaining experience (because there just aren't enough AAA games that allow you to play the whole campaign in coop, let alone open world ones), but that playing it alone is probably not worth it.

If anyone else is interested there's an open beta from Thursday through to Sunday. You can preload it on Uplay now. Unfortunately I will be away most of the weekend, but I thoroughly recommend trying the game!

Neat! I'll happily do some multiplayer with any other Thumbs playing it on PC. Edit: I guess I should dust off my hardly-ever-used Origin account for this purpose. The username is Gwardinen if anyone wants to preemptively add me.

I'm also in this, for the record, if anyone's interested in playing together! My Uplay name is Kuruvar. Sadly all my keys are already spoken for (although FYI a lot of people, including some of my friends, are having difficulty redeeming invitations at the moment).

Can someone remind me whether there's an easy way to just play the DLC parts of Mass Effect 3 on an already finished game save? I kinda just want to actually play through the stories of Leviathan, Omega and Citadel (which weren't out when I originally played the game).

I've been pondering finishing my alternative playthroughs of ME2 and 3 because I didn't see all the DLC in my main playthroughs. I'm just not sure I'll actually have time to do so before Andromeda hits - and even if I do I'm a little worried about burnout stopping me from enjoying it when it does arrive.

Holy crap, I remember Liero! We used to play that all the time at school.

I am also considering signing up to the Origin Access in March for this. I have two extra reasons, however; 1) It also allows you to play Battlefield 1 for 10 hours, and I've heard the campaign for that is not terrible. 2) I was actually "given" Mass Effect Andromeda as a Christmas gift, by way of a preorder. Unfortunately the person who preordered it for me selected the slow shipping option, so I probably won't actually have my copy until a few days after release.

So I didn't see a GOTY.cx thread for 2016 up yet, and we're approaching the final week of the year. Does anyone have their thoughts in order yet? As a brief visual reminder of some of the games this year, I present PC Gamer's video retrospective below. Couple of caveats: It's only PC games, and there are a few games in there that were shown this year but haven't actually been released yet.