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Mass Effect Andromeda - Thumb Drive Engaged!

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That's basically where I am with it. It helps that this is by far the most likeable crew Bioware has ever had at least for me. So far I would put this below ME2 and on par with ME3. ME1 hasn't really held up so I would call it the weakest of the bunch. Also as spotty as the writing has been I've yet to see anything as cringe worthy as EMBRACE ETERNITY.

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Holy man, do I ever disagree. The dialog is one of the most unevenly messy things in the game. It's mostly fine, but then you get some weird phrasing ("My face is tired..."), or even worse, some writer was trying to be funny, with all the sense of comedy of a reaction gif subreddit. When people say things like "the snark is strong with this one" and "Best. Pathfinder. Ever," I shudder to think of what might have been left on the cutting room floor. Ryder's reactions and attitudes are all over the place, even within the same conversation. As much shit as the trilogy's Paragon/Renegade system got, it at least allowed consistency of character. I've had conversations where Ryder shows professional concern during almost the entire dialog, and then the only option I get to end the tree with is with petty sarcasm. I've almost entirely stopped paying attention to what anyone is saying, skipping through lines to get the gist of what's going on from the subtitles.

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I'm starting to get to know the crew a little more and I'm becoming fond of a few of them. Typically it is not because of their reactions to me, but because of their reactions to each other.

Ryder as a character does make me grimace, but it's less awkward if I think of her as socially inept. I kinda like the idea of a socially inept space-captain making dad-jokes to aliens that want to stay on her good side but never know when to laugh. Speaking of the desire to please the captain, flirting feels inappropriate due to the power-dynamic on the ship; I find rejection more comfortable than acquiescence. I don't remember feeling that way in the other games.

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Hmm, maybe because I'm playing as a somewhat sassy and overconfident I haven't noticed the broken tone.

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In the first mission one of your buddies says "He Looks angry, maybe it's because I shot him in the face!"

 

There are some primo lines line that, but they seem to be getting less frequent as the campaign goes on.  The biggest thing with the dialogue and story I'm finding is that the game can't seem to settle on a tone.  There even appear to be some interactions that I think were supposed to have some kind of reaction shot, but they didn't have time to polish things up.  Instead it kind of delays the transition to the next shot which I think is supposed to be suspenseful, but just comes off awkward.  Also, this whole save the universe story they seem to be building can fuck right off, I'm at the point where it's actively getting in the way of other story threads I want to see play out.  At times it feels like I'm watching a TV show where they've introduced the end of season arc too early or have been too explicit with their foreshadowing and it comes off ham-handed.

 

For anyone that has played further in the campaign, does the pacing ever improve?  I'm at a point now where I have so many games to play I might want to put this one on hold until some patches and DLC come through.

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I am consciously trying to manage the pace of the game and failing to be able to do so. Though I can assign beacons, I'm having a hard time figuring out how much time to spend dialoging with crew, doing main-missions, and doing side-quests in main-mission areas. I constantly feel like I'm either bee-lining the main-quest, missing opportunities for dialogue, or getting completely side-tracked on areas I haven't gotten the fetch-quest for yet.

I'm still having fun with it. Honestly I think I'm enjoying the absurdity of the genre form more after reading some of thecatamites meandering essays on the RPG genre. I don't play many and this is my opportunity to see how right he is.

Here's an example of his take on the medium of computer-games being interesting largely based on what they promise and how they fail to deliver:
http://myfriendpokey.tumblr.com/post/152813051380/dumptxt

Quote

3. a good thing about video games is how truncated the stakes  are; in another form someone could labour for years, live with priestlike vocation towards the fullest reaches of their art, emerge with hard-won mastery over their abilities and finally commit a work which could fully capture the range and depth of human experience, etc. if they did all that stuff for video games the output would be a software disc about a clown who eats cherries in the desert and when hit by a car makes an ambiguous buzzing sound. in the bizarre refraction between intent and the result lie all the best and most exciting tensions of the medium.

 

For some reason Mass Effect: Andromeda's single-player campaign is providing me with a helpful example to have in mind.

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4 hours ago, Korax said:

The dialog is one of the most unevenly messy things in the game. It's mostly fine, but then you get some weird phrasing ("My face is tired..."), or even worse, some writer was trying to be funny, with all the sense of comedy of a reaction gif subreddit. When people say things like "the snark is strong with this one" and "Best. Pathfinder. Ever," I shudder to think of what might have been left on the cutting room floor.

 

I don't disagree, but I was introduced to the possibility that this is intentional and I am now wondering about it. If you were to compare those lines to a generic Hollywood blockbuster in 2017... how different would they be? Those kinds of films have always had dumb one-liners like these, and the fact they're a bit more "age of the internet"... makes me wonder. I think there is a not inconsiderable possibility that some people behind this game viewed the new setting as an opportunity to freshen the series up for a younger audience.

 

However, it then ends up uneven because I also think there were a lot of people working on the game who actually want to tell a mature science fiction story. Honestly, this is not a new tension for Mass Effect - there was always a tug of war between high-minded ideals of exploring cultural and political themes through science fiction and just making a great "shit blows up" action movie in space. I think these games were always kind of uneven, and it might just be even more obvious now that the original creative director and writers have passed it over to a new crew who're trying to figure out what they want to say.

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Also, I recently played through all of Mass Effect 2 and 3 on insane, and let me tell you the animations and writing there aren't exactly top notch either. All the best stuff is in the DLC.

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I will say this ME:A hasn't hit any of the highs of the previous games yet. And it's lows are for the most part a tad lower. Still the outfits for the women on your crew are less baffling on the whole (Seriously what was up with Samara?) and it's nice to finally have a good number of female aliens in the series. It stumbles pretty hard with it's token trans NPC and the game has some issues with colonialism but it's nice to not have to stare at every women's cleavage and/or ass in a Mass Effect for once.

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2 hours ago, Vulpes Absurda said:

It stumbles pretty hard with it's token trans NPC

 

I have been thinking about this, and while I understand the criticisms of the portrayal, I wonder if it was an attempt to depict some kind of utopian future in which deadnaming yourself just isn't a big deal, just another biographical detail you might include if you were already inclined to tell the pathfinder which planet you grew up on etc. That's going to ring false as not anything that someone in our current/real political context/milieu would ever do, but in some idyllic imagined future? I dunno.

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Either way had they consulted just about any trans person on the planet they would have known better then to write that scene like they did. I understand they weren't trying to be hateful but they were a least somewhat hurtful. And I'm certainly not calling for a boycott over it but I feel it needs to be brought up at least.

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I get the impression that the writers expected the big twist to be a lot twistier for the audeince given how the characters react to it. 

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Ooh boy. I somehow already put 32 hours into this game. I also think this is a very mediocre game (and I say this even though the first Mass Effect is my favorite one from the trilogy and one of my favorite games ever).

 

A lot of people in this thread already mentioned it, but the UI and UX are really, really bad, even by BioWare standards (at least on PC); just the fact that you press "M" to see the Map and then have to press ESC twice to go back to the game; or that prompts are inconsistent, with some needing to be closed with the spacebar and others with ESC; and that the Journal requires you to slam the ESC key 4 times to go back to the game...

 

In terms of the narrative, I'm very annoyed that the bad guys are once again the -ugly- aliens whose only purpose are to be shot in the face and be the villain of the game (not a fan of batarians, vorcha and collectors for the same reason). And for a game that is supposed to take place in a whole new galaxy, things sure feel very familiar: there's a desert planet, a tundra planet, a purple forest planet, kinda. This game was a great opportunity for some more non-agressive and non-bipedal aliens (I miss the elcor and hanar) but it doesn't seem like it will happen. :/

 

The first hours of the game also really rubbed me in the wrong way. For a series that was lauded for taking consequences, politics and morality somewhat seriously, the condescending way that everyone treated the planets and its inhabitants with no repercussions was extremely irritating to me. But hey, this planet is a dump and the aliens shot first so it's okay to treat them like monsters I guess. I get that it isn't what the story is about, but I wished there was a little more exploration on the more morally questionable aspects of the whole colonization effort. 

 

I encountered a lot of bugs but the only real bad one was on Voeld, where the lighting for the whole planet got fucked up and entering any smaller enclosed space that has a lamp would suddenly flash a bunch of lights all at once everywhere. Thankfully I had already done the important sidequests over there, because there's no fix for it yet that I could find.

 

My favorite thing about this game so far is that you can finally create decent asian characters in a BioWare game, here's my Ryder:

 

MEA-Sara-1024x576.thumb.jpg.57ff22d933a6f86937a131671aa0286e.jpg

 

8 hours ago, clyde said:

I made a fan-game.

Spoilers for the "Liam Costa: Armor Diplomacy" quest.

http://www.flickgame.org/play.html?p=bfcaa789e75d09b67db74f71587b61de

 

I'm waaay into this!

 

I'm really warming up to Liam. His loyalty mission is the most memorable quest I had by far.

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*sigh* I'm on Hoth and and doing the mission to get into the big Kett thingy. Depending on how you play there's a 30 minute section with no autosaves and a lot of just random BS spawns. This really sucks, after I was enjoying it so much up until now.

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40 minutes ago, Dewar said:

*sigh* I'm on Hoth and and doing the mission to get into the big Kett thingy. Depending on how you play there's a 30 minute section with no autosaves and a lot of just random BS spawns. This really sucks, after I was enjoying it so much up until now.

 

The end of that mission was super buggy for me.

It kept telling me to blow up the "defense matrix" after I accidentally refused a ride outta there and even when I blew them up nothing happened. It was a long walk home.

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5 hours ago, designiana said:

I'm waaay into this!

 

I'm really warming up to Liam. His loyalty mission is the most memorable quest I had by far.


Awesome.

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It's not like I typically agree with the sentiments expressed on the Giant Bombcast, but Shoemaker's universal reductionism of the side-quests and Gerstman's marketing/psuedo-moral analysis that the game shouldn't have been made are both so ridiculous that I feel the need to mention it. 

I was thinking of Shoemaker's claims that all the side-quests are cookie-cutter generic filler as I was trolling around on Voeld last night and the cognitive dissonance of seeing so much convenient evidence to the contrary of an opinion stated so confidently makes me convulsively shake my head. I'm not claiming that the side-quests are the most compelling and well-executed interactive narratives I've seen, but atleast half of the quests on Voeld are far beyond kill-three-boars in ambition, audience-engagement, and relevance to the broader in-game world. I don't have any problem finding the types of bugs he complained about though. It's just when he starts to generalize about quality of narrative or aesthetic aspects it becomes apparent that he isn't very skilled at it.

And unless Gerstman is motivated purely by financial investment in EA and assuming that ME:Andromeda doesn't make a financial profit, I have a hard time imagining what possible authority he has in his own mind to suggest that the game shouldn't have been made.

I shouldn't have listened to their podcast maybe.

Austin Walker's opinions on the Waypoint podcast were really interesting though. The comparison between the narrative hooks in ME:Andromeda and ME:1's were well thought out. I find myself missing the cinematic skeumorphic qualities for ME:1 the more I play ME:Andromeda and I am constanty missing the style of and focus on music from the first game.

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I beat the game after 50 hours, so... spoilers ahead while I try to summarize my thoughts I guess? I didn't come away with many positive feelings, but I'm not sure what else I was really expecting aside from a way to burn some time. I'd probably put it a bit above ME3 in terms of my series rankings (1 = 2 (with DLC) > 3) Exceptional DLC might salvage it, but I don't think this team's earned my faith enough to consider buying any at this point.
 

Spoiler

 

In the end, I found it to be a largely bland and disappointing game with a few positive aspects that didn’t quite manage to redeem it. The basic combat and exploration loops were satisfying for the most part (though the spawning system in Kett bases is terrible,) but almost everything outside of shooting things and driving cars was a slog. BioWare seems to have staked the entire game on giving the player a sense of awe at the unknown and providing difficult choices based on the environment they find themselves in and then didn’t deliver on either. There were some pretty impressive sights scattered across the game, but none of the environments provoked a feeling of profound alienness (not even the critically-acclaimed floating rocks,) and the removal (not replacement) of paragon/renegade options made most possible decisions feel like they might as well be coinflips with bland outcomes.


Really, I think the paragon/renegade removal is emblematic of what I don’t like about the game. Most aspects of ME:A have the feeling of something being removed without a suitable replacement being provided. Characters, in particular, feel like an attempt has been made to remove some of the specificity of past ME characters (Mordin largely being summed up as the wacky alien scientist, etc.) but without providing anything interesting in their attempts at more rounded characters. Aside from the easily lovable angry grandpa Krogan, I couldn’t really bring myself to care about the lives (past or future,) of any other characters. There’s a bunch of history and a few interesting character traits, but nothing like the best characters from past games. The antagonist also finalizes the series long decline into just having “evil uninteresting aliens” to kill. The kett are Collectors 2.0 without even a remotely interesting backstory, dialogue, or visuals (and the human and robot enemies are just as bland.) The angara, too, are just the sorts of aliens established in the original trilogy without anything interesting about them. Like if Turians had just been slightly more pointy humans with a slightly different society (I realize they still kind of are that, but the angara are  aggressively boring for being from an entirely different galaxy and having the weight of the game on their shoulders.) Finally, none of the cities had any of the charm that the best ones of the original trilogy did. There’s little separating any of the colonies from each other, or from the hive of scum and villainy, or from the verdant nature city aside from what’s going on outside them and a few other touches.


The game’s actual writing didn’t do anything to support its weaker areas either. The twists are entirely predictable (especially on the nature of the kett and the identity of the Charlatan,) the dialogue is average when it isn’t plainly bad (there are a few bright points, though not many,) but at least the pacing of it all was decent. On the dialogue in particular, I was disappointed with how little cross-character interaction there was on missions, even when it wasn’t the best writing ever. That’s usually one of my favorite parts of these games.


Overall, I don’t completely regret having bought the game. The shooty bits were still fun, like I said, and it’s the only game of the series where I actually enjoyed some of the boss fights. I do regret spending time doing optional content in the hope of some of it being redeeming though, because none of it was.

 

 

 

 

 

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1 hour ago, clyde said:

It's not like I typically agree with the sentiments expressed on the Giant Bombcast, but Shoemaker's universal reductionism of the side-quests and Gerstman's marketing/psuedo-moral analysis that the game shouldn't have been made are both so ridiculous that I feel the need to mention it. 

 

Yeah, that was baffling. They started off with an "ugh, it's bad, right?" and then apparently made the assumption that everyone else in the world is in complete agreement and that it didn't need any more thought or elaboration. That whole conversation was such a waste of time and effort that didn't express anything worthwhile to me.

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This is kind of off topic but it's bizarre how much the Giant Bombcast and the Giant Beastcast have diverged at this point. I actually enjoy listening to the Beastcast and will sometimes prioritise it over other podcast episodes I have that are technically ahead "in the queue", whereas nowadays I do the opposite with the Bombcast. Brad and Jeff becoming the only remaining permanent members on it seems like the final nail in the coffin for me. I can definitely enjoy Jeff and his encyclopedic knowledge of bizarre fringe/historical game industry knowledge, but he needs someone to facilitate him talking about that weird shit and Brad is not the guy.

 

Meanwhile Vinny continues to be the funniest, most light-hearted host on the east coast, and all the others just bounce off him in wacky ways. Even Dan doesn't particularly annoy me on the Beastcast - because the clowning around atmosphere seems to obviate his desire to express real opinions, which I desperately don't want to hear from him.

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4 hours ago, clyde said:

I have a hard time imagining what possible authority he has in his own mind to suggest that the game shouldn't have been made.

 

While I disagree with Gerstmann on this, I feel this kind of reaction is just a bit knee jerk defensiveness. It's a valid opinion to hold that if Bioware is going to devote x amount of money/resources to a game, where x is greater than y, the amount spent on the last instalment in the series, it was a mistake to do so if the new title isn't a significant improvement on the old title(s) (which, again, a matter of opinion, but one he should be allowed to have without some claim to authority other than "I am a dude what played the old games and then played the new one"). That is a lot of money/person-hours that goes into something like Andromeda, aren't you the least bit curious what else Bioware could have done with it if they weren't making a mass effect?

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1 hour ago, juv3nal said:

 

While I disagree with Gerstmann on this, I feel this kind of reaction is just a bit knee jerk defensiveness. It's a valid opinion to hold that if Bioware is going to devote x amount of money/resources to a game, where x is greater than y, the amount spent on the last instalment in the series, it was a mistake to do so if the new title isn't a significant improvement on the old title(s) (which, again, a matter of opinion, but one he should be allowed to have without some claim to authority other than "I am a dude what played the old games and then played the new one"). That is a lot of money/person-hours that goes into something like Andromeda, aren't you the least bit curious what else Bioware could have done with it if they weren't making a mass effect?

 

I think it is fair to say that I'm offended by what he said. I don't know how much of that is in defense of Mass Effect: Andromeda specifically or if the absurdity of saying a game shouldn't exist is just more apparent to me when it is said about a game I'm currently enjoying. I interpret his statements more as "They shouldn't have made this game because it has sullied the franchise." than as an opportunity-cost. I have no respect for that opinion, I think it's pathetically egocentric (especially in the context that the game is probably being enjoyed by a lot of people outside of his particular corner of the internet). I like Gerstman, I think he is funny and genuinely enthusiatic in an inspirational and exciting way, but I lose patience with appeals to the purity of an intellectual-property over the creative freedoms and efforts of people making computer-games and the enjoyment by a portion of their audience.

If he was talking about the opportunity-cost of the game, then I don't agree with it, but I wouldn't think it was nearly as pretentious. That's what I was trying to get at by mentioning the hypothetical that he is financially invested in EA.

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On 3/26/2017 at 11:32 AM, Dewar said:

Also, I recently played through all of Mass Effect 2 and 3 on insane, and let me tell you the animations and writing there aren't exactly top notch either. All the best stuff is in the DLC.

 

To be fair, the original trilogy was made 10, 7 and 5 years ago respectively, and ran on machines that had 1/16th the ram by teams that were at their largest half the size of Andromeda's.  Those projects were also far less ambitious, and for their time pretty significant steps forward.  If I recall correctly, facial animations and in particular the eye shading was a pretty big deal.  Back in the 2000s a lot of techniques were used in game development that are no longer acceptable, or at the very least in a higher def environment show their flaws. One particular example is that if you start your single player campaign before connecting the servers, the game stops trying to connect and you can't do the apex missions.  Now you think that if you go up to the terminal and try to do an apex mission in this unconnected state, a connection would be attempted, but instead the game tells you to go back to the main menu and wait for the connection to complete.  You can break a feature of the game by going through a menu too fast, there's just no excuse for that.

 

After having spent around 15 hours with the game, my biggest problem with it I think is that the team seemingly failed to consider the specifics of the game they were designing.  It feels like at a certain point they just started wholesale carting things over from mass effect that didn't really fit anymore given how different of a game this is.  For example, the 3 ability structure that has become common in many games (most notably destiny) is built around having specific pairs of abilities, and most importantly a superpower or defining one.  Then the favorites system seems to indicate that the game wants you to swap abilities around, but throws in a global cooldown on all the abilities when this happens and ultimately discourages this kind of gameplay.  This favorites system also doesn't have guns as a part of it, so it's not really possible to create the wildly varying play styles that existed in ME3.  The combat system seems to value momentum, encouraging you to dodge around the battlefield to avoid damage, but then all the AI opponents use hitscan weapons and are able to change their aiming direction just as fast as you can move.  I even had a moment when I last played where I was up on a cliff, jumped off and hit my jump pack right before landing, only to have the game warp me back to the position I jumped from.  I have still managed to have a fair bit of fun with the game so far, but the game is far too at odds with itself for me to really become immersed in it, and I think this is the source of a lot of the hyperbolic takedowns that have been coming out of late.

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8 hours ago, clyde said:

 

I think it is fair to say that I'm offended by what he said. I don't know how much of that is in defense of Mass Effect: Andromeda specifically or if the absurdity of saying a game shouldn't exist is just more apparent to me when it is said about a game I'm currently enjoying. I interpret his statements more as "They shouldn't have made this game because it has sullied the franchise." than as an opportunity-cost. I have no respect for that opinion, I think it's pathetically egocentric (especially in the context that the game is probably being enjoyed by a lot of people outside of his particular corner of the internet). I like Gerstman, I think he is funny and genuinely enthusiatic in an inspirational and exciting way, but I lose patience with appeals to the purity of an intellectual-property over the creative freedoms and efforts of people making computer-games and the enjoyment by a portion of their audience.

If he was talking about the opportunity-cost of the game, then I don't agree with it, but I wouldn't think it was nearly as pretentious. That's what I was trying to get at by mentioning the hypothetical that he is financially invested in EA.

I often find myself thinking along the lines that things shouldn't have been made. Generally speaking I'm not a fan of sequels. For example, I said after playing Dark Souls that I kinda wish they wouldn't make any direct sequels, because the game stands so well on its own and any attempt to continue it will almost inevitably fall short (even if it manages to improve some aspects). It's not that I want to deprive anyone (or myself) of the experience of having played Dark Souls 2 & 3, it's that I think retreads like that are fundamentally less interesting and as From showed with Bloodborne, starting fresh usually gives something more memorable.

 

If you want to continue a great thing, you should have an equally great reason to. I understand that not everyone shares this opinion, plenty of people want things that never end, and are happy to retreat the same territory with ever diminishing returns. Personally I find works whose primary value consists in evoking some previous work to themselves be of little value.

 

I don't know where ME:A falls on this spectrum, so I'm not making a judgement there. I understand the perspective though.

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