Bjorn

Mass Effect Andromeda - Thumb Drive Engaged!

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If you want to pre-order through Origin, but not sign up for Access, there's currently a 7 day free trial that appears to still get you the 10 percent pre-order discount. 

 

Also, we're a month out from release, and they still haven't fucking released the system requirements.  What are you doing Bioware?

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On 1/25/2017 at 3:20 PM, Bjorn said:

I dusted off my barely used Twitter account to ask if early access included multiplayer, and it does!

 

early.JPG

Oh man these are the scoops I crave. Thank you for doing such good work.

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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.

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Just now, Korax said:

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.

 

My birthday is the 19th (Sunday), and I pretty much just plan on treating myself to the trial on it.  I do wish it was more time, but I'll take a little birthday treat. 

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Finally, a good look at combat and it looks so fucking good y'all.  I'm on the hype train, and I'm not getting off. 

 

 

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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.

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There's a bunch of positives I see in it.  I like the speed things are moving at.  It looks faster than ME3, but not crazy, twitch fast.  The verticality with the jetpack is really good (I enjoy the goof during one point where the player goes to jumpjet away and runs into a roof right above them).  I really think it looks like they've learned quite a bit about combat from ME3 MP.  The little teleport jump was an MP addition.  I think Annihilation Field was as well.

 

It makes me a little sad that SMGs have been eliminated as a weapon class, because a couple of my favorite weapons were SMGs (Geth SMG and Hurricane), but it's probably for the best.  Overall they felt like they never had a clear role to play and that led them to be almost always the inferior choice to any other weapon.  They should have been shield strippers, but were never given that as an innate bonus. 

 

I AM VERY EXCITED ABOUT EVERY CHARACTER BEING ABLE TO HAVE A KROGAN HAMMER.

 

I'm hoping that armor gets revisited as a flat damage reduction it's been in the past, as it looks like they otherwise haven't messed with the shield/armor/health types.  The flat damage reduction just was kind of boring, as it limited mod/ammo options for high RoF weapons and had a near zero effect on slow, big hit weapons. 

 

I also find it very exciting that you won't be locked into class trees anymore.  Being able to combine Biotic Charge with some soldier class powers should be very, very fun, and will likely be my first character I make.

 

I am disappointed to hear that the stealth damage bonus for cloaking still exists.  Hopefully it is scaled back, stealth bonus damage was the biggest imbalance in the game. 

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For some reason, I haven't been too excited about ME:A, despite enjoying every Mass Effect game so far. I think it comes from playing Mass Effect 3 with all the DLC installed, and trying to do every optional quest and whatnot. They were largely good quests, but it just felt so odd being able to twat about indefinitely when the fate of the universe is hanging in the balance. Of course, this is a complaint common of many, many games.

 

Anyway, watching that trailer, I am super hyped for this. I think it looks amazing how the jetpack can be used not just to shoot into the air, but also to the sides. Should hopefully make combat less about finding cover and just hunkering down, and more about out flanking and surprising foes. Plus, every class can use every weapon, which should just have been the case in every game tbh

 

 

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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?

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Yeah, supposedly they are going to do away with that whole system.

 

Quote

Players of previous Mass Effect games will know if you want to make the best version of your character stats-wise, you have to pick Paragon or Renegade and stick with it, nuance be damned. This new system is designed to get away from binary moral choices, to encourage players to actually pay attention to conversations, and choose dialog options that make sense for their character. "With agree and disagree it changes by the circumstance and it changes by the character you’re talking to," Walters said, "so you have to actually be more engaged in what's going on, to know if you're going to do that."

 

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Came out in Giant Bomb's chat ramble over b-roll that they've retained the Power Combo system from ME3. That is a good sign, it's one of the fun niches to dig into as you go deeper into multiplayer.

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Mass Effect: Andromeda dev says game features 'full nudity,' says it's 'totally softcore space porn'

 

 

Also, the system specs for PC were finally released:

 

MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

OS: 64-bit Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10
PROCESSOR: Intel Core i5 3570 or AMD FX-6350
MEMORY: 8 GB RAM
VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA GTX 660 2GB, AMD Radeon 7850 2GB
HARD DRIVE: At least 55 GB of free space
DIRECTX: DirectX 11

RECOMMENDED SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

OS: 64-bit Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10
PROCESSOR: Intel Core i7-4790 or AMD FX-8350
MEMORY: 16 GB RAM
VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA GTX 1060 3GB, AMD RX 480 4GB
HARD DRIVE: At least 55 GB of free space
DIRECTX: DirectX 11

 

I'm really going to have to think about bumping my GPU up to an RX 400 series, will have to see if I can justify that in the next few weeks or not. 

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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.

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Yeah, I've got an FX-6300, so technically right below the minimum, but I'm hoping that won't actually be a big deal.  The lady put quite a few hours into Inquisition on the same machine, and I don't remember her having any complaints about performance. 

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I'm mainly intrigued as to why it recommends an i7 - there normally isn't much in an i7 that benefits gaming. Is it just the sheer throughput that a top-end relatively-modern i7 can provide? I'm not an AMD guy so I don't know how the FX-8350 compares. Is there something that both of those chips have in common?

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I've been continuing my insanity playthrough of Mass Effect 3, and I'm starting to get really enthused for Andromeda. 

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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.

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I'm looking forward to it. I never played any of the ME2 or ME3 DLC, so I'm getting to see some of this stuff for the first time.

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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.

 

 

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The officially canceled the multiplayer open beta.  Which, this close to launch is particularly surprising since it hadn't happened yet.  But it is a bit concerning that after announcing a public beta months ago they ended up not on a schedule to actually have one. 

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I'm kinda OK with that, as I never want to spend that much time in the betas, so then I feel behind when I start playing at release. I wouldn't imagine that multiplayer is going to be that much different than ME3 to worry about a server stress test, but then you never know I guess.

 

On a side note, I've been playing through ME3 again and I forgot how many talky bits are in it. It gives me hope that as the gameplay continues to go more action, that there will still be some interesting conversations and story peppered in between.

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Yeah the thing people forget about the facial animations in Bioware games is that there's so much talking that there's kind of a limit to how good it can be with out the budget ballooning out of proportion.

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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.

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