Bjorn

Mass Effect Andromeda - Thumb Drive Engaged!

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I watched part of Waypoint's stream today, and Austin Walker said he had some reservations about the SP campaign, but that was based on what was still very early, limited play, but that he also thought there was tons of potential for great stuff. 

 

He also has spent awhile in MP, and seemed absolutely delighted with it. 

 

Also, Danielle and her puns make for delightful color commentary to someone's playthrough of a game. 

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The trial went live early tonight, I'm downloading it now.  Origin id is BjornDaDwarf and sent friend requests to those of you who gave your IDs.

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

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7 hours ago, eot said:

John Walker doesn't seem to happy with the early parts of the game. It's John Walker though.

 

Based on what I've seen in streams, he's only being a little John Walker. Seems very DA:I in space.

 

The multiplayer looks pretty good though. I might end up getting it just for that with friends.

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I really like DA:I and also thought the previous ga!es were some of the beat shooters of last gen so I suspect I'll be fine even if I've tempered my expectations a bit.

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Starting to feel concerned about the game. If the multiplayer is good that's a salve, but I would definitely like the game for the single player. No one has posted impressions without reservation. I watched some of the GB live playthrough, and man those facial animations (or lack thereof) is just weird and unnerving. I can get past the John Walker gripe of "There is fetch quest still", but it's not just him grumping. Coming off Horizon, where the conversation is fluid and Aloy and I have said the same thing out loud dozens of times at the same time (without it being from a dialogue wheel), Mass Effect feels old and kinda creaky? It feels older than Dragon Age in some ways.

 

Interested for someone who's playing early to chime in and give their impressions.

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The animations are really the only way the game falls short at least through the tutorial. And that is pretty bad to be fair. It makes Dragon Age: Origins like modern by comparison. Otherwise the writing is the same level of B-Tier but fun and the combat seems really fun so far if you liked the previous games. I'm not expecting to love the game but so far I feel fairly safe that I'll like the overall product.

 

I do suspect that the reviews will be on the lower side for a AAA game. There's been blood in the water for Bioware since DA2 and especially since ME3 and I suspect this game will end up bearing the brunt of that. Maybe not unfairly I only played through the first mission so I don't want to scream about ETHICS IN GAMES JOURNALISM but I do expect to hear "But The Witcher 3!" a lot.

 

Also the default Sera Ryder looks in all the cutscenes like a character in an Adam Sandler movie who just farted and is waiting for everyone else to notice. She has like this slight grin at all times regardless of what else is going on and it's super weird.

Natalie Dormer: "Your brother might be dead"

Sera: "Yeah but wait til you smell this!"

 

Also if anyone has more specific questions let me know and when I go back in I'll try to get answers for you.

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So I jumped into one multiplayer game last night after doing a short tutorial and the game crashed. did not realize it was running in the background so it totally sat there in the background for 3 hours running so I'm down to ~6.5 hours.

 

18 hours ago, Vulpes Absurda said:

 

 

Oh man, you nailed my thoughts on Lady Ryder - I was a total fem shep kind of guy but I am not sure if I can spend my Mass Effect expeience looking at the dumb expression she is constantly making. 

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Man this game just is not looking good when I watch people play it.

 

I want to like it because I loved Mass Effect 1 and was hoping this would bring back that love, but ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

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57 minutes ago, Twig said:

Man this game just is not looking good when I watch people play it.

 

I want to like it because I loved Mass Effect 1 and was hoping this would bring back that love, but ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

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I spent about 2 hours in MP last night and have thoughts.

Matchmaking/Lobby - Way, way, way better than ME3MP.  No loading screen entering or leaving a lobby.

 

The game is definitely faster than ME3 was.  It was jarring at first, but after a couple of matches I got used to it. 

 

THE KROGAN VANGUARD HAS NOVA.  KROGAN SMASH.

 

Heavy Melee, as near as I can tell, is gone.  And this blows big juicy chunks.  The Krogan backhand was the most satisfying thing in ME3MP.  This is just wildly mystifying to me.  From all early accounts, melee was getting a great overhaul/refinement in SP, but removing Heavy Melee is pretty gutting for MP.  The bit I played around, I also didn't see melee combos.  Before, most characters had a light combo, now the couple I tried just did the same light attack over and over.  

 

The Omni-Button is gone.  No more, "Hit A for everything".  Move up against cover and you automatically take cover. 

 

Promotions seem to be gone, which is not bad.  You level up each individual character to 20 (you leveled up entire classes in ME3), and then can respec either with cards that drop, or spending the new currency that you get from specifically doing Strike Team missions.  Each character has a permanent experience pool which once filled gives small permanent bonuses to all characters, which I think is something similar to what DA:I did. 

 

I only glanced at the Strike Team stuff, but it seems interesting.  Each MP Strike Team match has modifiers that give benefits and penalties, like you might have reduced weapon damage but increased power damage. 

 

Much like what we've seen from SP, the models are a mixed bag.  Some are really good, but some of the humans just look wrong.  Like, heads to big for bodies in some cases. 

 

The Supply Pack (rockets, medigel, etc) is much more reasonably priced now.  I didn't buy one to see what the quantities were, but in ME3 it was 30K credits and now it's 5K.  You can also buy supplies with the Strike Team currency. 

 

Out of like 7ish matches, I think only 3 of them reached extraction.  Bronze is fucking hard when you're starting out with all low level characters/equipment.  Which, that makes it pretty hard for me to have a good feel for the long term play, because ME3 really shined once you were better kitted out. 

 

Matches are 6 waves plus extraction, but they seem to start off with more enemies on wave 1, so it's like they cut the first 4 waves.  It does speed up matches, I think the longest one was maybe 20 minutes.  I think it may ultimately make matches feel...less weighty or epic, but overall being able to play more matches in an evening is probably better/more fun.  It would really suck in ME3 when you only had an hour or so to play, and ended up with a nightmare team who could drag out a match to 30+ minutes. 

 

I would say that overall it was a pretty positive experience, but I don't have a good feel for if it's got the legs that ME3MP had, because a lot of that is going to be contingent on how it feels at Silver/Gold with higher level characters and gear.  Leveling up characters feels a lot slower, but that might just be because I'm stuck doing bronzes. 

 

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I haven't read most of the recent coverage so I don't know exactly what the negative points are that've been brought up, but I've just gotten to the end point of the singleplayer content in the trial, so I'll give a brief set of my impressions so far.

 

It feels a lot like a spiritual successor to the first Mass Effect. Actually it feels so much like a more recent, bigger budget spiritual successor to the start of the original trilogy that my mind kept being drawn into thinking of it in terms of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It doesn't hold up all the time, but the relationship between TFA and A New Hope is not entirely dissimilar to the relationship between Andromeda and ME1. There are parallels between this and the first game in both good and bad ways, and some of these are enhanced and some exacerbated by the current (post Dragon Age Inquisition) BioWare style.

 

Examples of these parallels can be blatant and specific, like the Nomad rover very clearly harkening back to the Mako of ME1, or they can be more subtle and thematic, like the focus on exploration and learning about a new galaxy (in ME1 the galaxy was not necessarily new to your character, but it was new to humanity in a broad sense and new to the player). The combination of this focus on exploration, and the feeling of being out on the frontier they're trying to engender, and the attempt to fulfill the promise of ME1 (something the team talked about before release) mean that you spend quite a lot of time doing the same kind of stuff you did in ME1. Specifically, flying to planets and driving around in your rover. There was a pretty decent amount of busywork in ME1 related to this, and Andromeda seems to bring that along too. You can definitely spend a lot of time driving around the terrain, scanning everything that looks even vaguely out of the ordinary, launching mining probes and gathering resources. It feels very much like a blend of ME1 and DAI in that sense.

 

Continuing both the "echoes of ME1" and "potential busywork" trend is the inventory. In contrast to ME2 and 3, which mostly stripped out inventory in favour of just having a list of guns that you could put in a given slot, Andromeda leans back towards complexity. Weapons and armour now have multiple levels, eg. Viper I, Viper II, etc. To get the weapons you have to first research them, which requires research points earned by scanning things, and then develop them, which requires resources acquired by mining or looting. There's nothing out and out wrong with these systems per se, but I haven't found them interesting yet and I suspect they're mostly going to be fairly unaffordable in the early game, a distracting annoyance in the midgame, and completely forgotten in the lategame once I've maxed out whatever I actually like.

 

These echoes go both ways, however. While Mass Effect 2 is generally considered the better game (and there's a strong argument to be made for that), the first entry in the series is the one that showed us why it was worth caring about. Exploring all the alien cultures and worlds, and navigating the political climate based on an interesting history that was gradually revealed was all really enjoyable, and I've definitely seen flashes of that in these first few hours of Andromeda. It's also much easier to relate to the situations and characters in Andromeda without either the fantasy world of DAI or massive Reaper threat of ME2&3 in the background. Being excited about exploring a new galaxy is something I can actually imagine myself feeling, and many of the characters genuinely resonate on that frequency. You also have the opportunity to play your Ryder that way - as someone who is exploring because they're an explorer. If nothing else, it lessens the cognitive dissonance of dossing around doing side quests while the world/galaxy is ending.

 

Overall then I've enjoyed my time with the trial - I've just started getting to know a new galaxy and a new set of characters, and I'm enjoying the feeling of shaping my Ryder's personality without being bound to BLUE OPTION/RED OPTION conversation trees. The sense of exploration is nice, and the odd blend of optimism while remaining philosophical about people's essential natures and tendency to squabble feels very Star Trek to me, in a good way. I think the game is set up in such a way that you could spend a lot of time doing kind of filler content/busywork, much like you could in Inquisition, but I don't yet get the sense that I'll be heavily penalised if I don't. It may be the case that this is one of those games that you have to exercise judgement and self-control with to decide what it is you actually want out of it. Scanning every little bit of every world isn't interesting to me, but I know someone who enjoyed DAI specifically because she got that sense of fulfillment from checking absolutely everything off the list.

 

The one totally fair critique I have noticed on the internet (because it's been everywhere) is of the facial animations. In most scenes they're stiff as hell, and it's a mystery as to why. The first Mass Effect was a watershed moment for conversation interactivity and performance, and that became a central pillar not only of that series, not only of every other BioWare game, but of most of the genre since. The fact that they made no effort to improve it this time is a massive missed opportunity, though in fairness I can only imagine how expensive that would be for a game of this scope. It's bizarre that this and Horizon Zero Dawn appeared so close to each other and both had this particular flaw - although Horizon's facial animations were sometimes good in cutscenes (but arguably this only made it more jarring in gameplay).

 

P.S. It's worth noting there are a decent number of new features to Andromeda that I haven't mentioned because they simply don't become apparent during the trial. For example the switching out of skill builds mid-combat seems interesting, but I'm too low level for it to be relevant at the moment. Equally, increasing the viability of a planet (and for whoever was worried about planets already being occupied earlier in the thread, the first one you start this process on is a barren radioactive wasteland until you arrive and start trying to sort shit out) and gradually waking up colonists seems like a neat broad game loop, but I'm just not far enough in yet to talk about how it actually shakes out.

Edited by Gwardinen

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Thanks for that writeup, I'm sure it'll prove really helpful. I've had a good laugh at all of the glitch videos, but realistically my enjoyment of the game is going to hinge on whether I like the characters or not. The combat looks good, but it's not the be-all and end-all in a game like this; there has to be downtime between the carnage, and a reason to want to save the world/galaxy/universe (delete as applicable) 

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Great posts folks!

 

4 hours ago, Gwardinen said:

 

 

I'm of pretty similar mind as you, and after playing a bit more I'm more optimistic about the game.

 

In regards to the faces, I had seen some chatter online suggest that if you create a custom Ryder the animation is a little bit better. I don't know if it is just me getting used to the poor animation, but it did seem a little bit less abrasive with my custom lady Ryder. Some of the stuff is just god awful still, it feels weird that we are still watching cut-scenes where your characters eyelids are clipping through there eyes, etc. 

 

I'm not thrilled about a new race of bad guys, but I am kind of excited to go out and meet some new species and put some hours exploring a new galaxy. 

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Something I should point out for those who may not be aware is that there are actually a couple of ways to try this game to see whether it's for you (and whether you can even run it well, if on PC). Firstly there's the Origin/EA Access that is allowing some of us to play 10 hours of it beforehand. It costs £4/$5 and gives you the trial of this and a few other games, plus some full games for the length of your subscription. This is available on both PC and console.

 

The second way is for PC only - Origin has the "Great Game Guarantee", which is their refund policy. It works a little differently to Steam's. You can refund any game until a week has passed since you bought it, or 24 hours have passed since you first launched it, whichever comes first. The 24 hours thing is arguably more generous than other policies in some ways, and it should give people a chance to at least see how things run and experience the opening of the game. From a performance standpoint I'll say that my framerate has been fluctuating, possibly in part due to my older CPU that is dragging my other components down. My hope is that with a patch or two and some new drivers from nVidia I might have a better time of it.

 

I have about an hour left of my trial - were we thinking of getting a Thumbs team together for a little bit of multiplayer today?

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I still haven't touched SP, just going to leave that for Tuesday, but I've put a few more hours into MP (I actually activated Access on the lady's origin account as well so I would have time on Sunday to for sure play).

 

I'm really warming up to MP, as long as it's not laggy.  Now that I've got a couple of characters I like, a little more map familiarity and am more comfortable with the pace and movement, there's a lot of potential here.  But, lag, lag is the devil.  That increased movement and speed make lag feel even worse than in ME3MP.  If you've got good internet, probably not that big of a deal, but with our shitty internet....

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Lag is what has me worried. My internet is fine-ish if none of the three other people in the house are streaming anything.

 

Either way I have 8 hours left on my trial so I'm done to play some today for sure. I'll hope on Origin and fiddle with character creation for a bit so feel free to send me match invites.

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Man, I've had nothing but terrible luck in the MP.

 

1st match - We lose the host instantly, game crashes

2nd match - I load into the match but no one else does so I get creamed

3rd match - I load in, the mission hasn't started yet, all my team mates arent moving. Host drops, load back in, same thing is happening. Host drops again and the it crashes. 

 

Of course I used consumables on each of those, so I've kind of just lost everything. Not a huge deal, but this kind of stinks.

 

EDIT:

 

I rebooted and played a few matches with Vulpes which was fun. I don't know if my 2500k is up to the job of hosting matches which is a bummer. 

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The multi in this is really fun so far I have to say. All the free to play stuff in it is a bummer but it does reward you with a fair number of points for every bronze win so I don't think it'll be too bad and it gives you a decent number of classes to start so you should be able to find something you like fairly early on.

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I've put about 5 hours into the trial, both MP and SP and while there is a lot to like here, the technical issues have been present throughout.  I've only managed to complete 3 MP games so far (having crashed out of all the others), and have even crashed out of SP a few times.  I don't think this is too big a knock against the game though, I imagine there will be an early patch that will address most of these issues on the first day if not shortly thereafter, but in the meantime if you plan on picking this up on PC I'd at least give the trial a run if you can to see how it performs.

 

A far as the game itself goes, I can only describe it as uneven.  It seems like at some point in development ME:A was a very different game, but then just got hammered into the shape of a standard RPG and the tonal inconsistency shows, particularly in the early hours of the single player campaign.  A great deal has been made about the facial animations thus far, but what has frustrated me is the generally poor craftsmanship I've been seeing throughout.  I don't know that most of these things will matter to someone who doesn't work in game dev, but for my circle of friends it's been a source of frustration.  Rather than go into too much detail, here are the major sticking points for me

 

- the cover system is generally frustrating, particularly when moving a tad too far in one direction or turning to face a flanking enemy, which in some cases causes your character to exit said cover.  It's neat when it works, but it more than often gets in the way.  I can't imagine a verison of this cover system that wouldn't be better suited by just having a crouch button and context sensitive aiming animations.

- You can see a lot of the DNA of Dragon Age: Inquisition here, even down to some of the sound effects. I count this as a good thing, but if you didn't like that game there is probably a fair bit about ME:A you won't like as well

- Weapon reloads are interrupted by god damn everything, including getting into cover it appears, unless this was just a follow on from the network issues I was seeing.

- All the weapons so far feel incredibly unique, which is quite a feat given how many there are.  I don't know that the gunplay is as good as something like destiny, but the mechanics of the weapons dovetail quite nicely with the powers and movement systems.

- The UI doesn't communicate effectively-- it's either too much information, not enough, or redundant.  For example the ability icons appear as light blue buttons with a light blue highlight to show their cooldown on the bottom right of your screen, but this information is shown more clearly in the curved bars appearing around your aiming reticule.  

- There is so much to do in this game. I've made it to the stopping point in the trial where the SP campaign ends, and I'm still discovering new systems, menus, etc, most of which is unexplained.  If this kind of thing bugs you it might be frustrating, but I've quite enjoyed how much this lends to the game's sense of scale.

- The momentum of the jump and dash feel a bit clumsy, it's not as clear or predictable as something like destiny and the camera doesn't do a great job of framing the action when the jump pack is engaged.

- The melee is a big step back from ME3.  it doesn't go in your facing direction necessarily, and similar to the jump the camera doesn't make any attempt to frame the action when it's being used

- The physics system is a mixed bag.  The biotic nonsense from ME1 is back, where you can just send characters flying up into space, but interactions on things like the biotic charge, jump and dash seem to be more prescriptive.  In other words, don't expect much in the way of emergent interaction on the physics, I don't think there is any kind of a unified system in place.

 

 

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27 minutes ago, itsamoose said:

- the cover system is generally frustrating, particularly when moving a tad too far in one direction or turning to face a flanking enemy, which in some cases causes your character to exit said cover.  It's neat when it works, but it more than often gets in the way.  I can't imagine a verison of this cover system that wouldn't be better suited by just having a crouch button and context sensitive aiming animations.

 

I see what you're saying and it definitely has some moments of "that's not what I meant to do at all", but I'm not sure I entirely agree that just throwing in a crouch button would be better. I really like the idea of a context sensitive cover system that doesn't require the dedication of a crouch button that can be used for other things - and the actual necessity of taking my thumb off the stick to press it. It's just unfortunate that the implementation is sometimes a little weird here.

 

What I will say is that the game seems to be suggesting that you should be spending less time hunkering down than in previous entries in the series anyway, due to its high mobility jetpack dodging stuff. However to contrast with that at the start of the game you are pretty damn squishy, so I'm not sure how realistic that ideal is.

 

Quote

- There is so much to do in this game. I've made it to the stopping point in the trial where the SP campaign ends, and I'm still discovering new systems, menus, etc, most of which is unexplained.  If this kind of thing bugs you it might be frustrating, but I've quite enjoyed how much this lends to the game's sense of scale.

 

Yeah I forgot to mention this but there's actually a Tutorials option in the menu that has information on almost all of this stuff. Which is kind of a strange feature to have (or decide you need) in a AAA game in 2017. It doesn't necessarily bother me to have a bit of didactic info squirrelled away in-game that might have once been in a manual, but it is sorta weird if you missed (or never got) the brief explanation of any given system during gameplay.

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