Mass Effect: Andromeda Pre-Release Thread

[Jedi Exile]

i want to be a krogan

 

[sullynathan]

Is it hair? Keratin as in fingernails? Enamel as in teeth?
If it's hair, how deep is the root?
Can you shave it?
Can you pull it out? Can you imagine the hole in the skin if you pull it out?

Argh, it makes me physically sick, I'm not lying.

I just made that shit up

 

[Popiel]

This game looks so fucking bad.

 

[Freddie]

That looks far more better paced than anything I have seen in SP videos. No emptying entire clips into enemies, one shot sniper kills, combos actually do something. I'm surprised, Now it will remains to be seen how grindy it's going to be.

 

[sullynathan]

That looks far more better paced than anything I have seen in SP videos. No emptying entire clips into enemies, one shot sniper kills, combos actually do something. I'm surprised, Now it will remains to be seen how grindy it's going to be.

I was obviously expecting it to be far better than ME3's combat and multiplayer. Only certain AAA series go backwards in terms of combat.

 

[Jarmaro]

Are Salarians made of plasticine? His look tells me "Just kill me already"

 

[Immortal]

LOL DUH!! OF COURSE IT CAN.......... I think...?

 

[Jarmaro]

Btw, our father looking similiar to us, whatever our appearance is, is pretty big incline. They actaully made step forward in some cases. You can not like gameplay, but amount of freedom we get in fighting and moving is lethal in comparison with ME2 or ME3.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/03/14/mass-effect-andromeda-review-opening-hours/

The first few hours of Mass Effect: Andromeda are… well they aren’t good

By John Walker on March 14th, 2017 at 10:18 pm.

I had, by purpose or distraction, not found out anything about Mass Effect Andromeda [official site] before playing its review build, beyond that it was set in a whole new galaxy. Ooh goody, I thought! A sci-fi RPG series I completely loved, but with a fresh start, baggage shed, and the extraordinary potential of a setting in a galaxy entirely unlike our own.

Yeah, about that. The first five hours of Andromeda are a gruesome trudge through the most trite bilge of the previous three games, smeared out in a setting that’s horribly familiar, burdened with some outstandingly awful writing, buried beneath a UI that appears to have been designed to infuriate in every possible way.

I had gone in assuming this would be more BioWare pleasure. So far – and let’s be clear, there’s lots of room and time for it to pick up and turn things around – the first few hours have been just awful.

This time out you begin by choosing whether you’re a lady or a man called Ryder, daughter or son of a leading figure in an expedition to leave the Milky Way and start new lives in Andromeda. Using magic telescopes the various familiar races of Mass Effect were able to spot “golden planets” in the new galaxy, and setting out in massive ships called arks, each race shipping about 20,000 passengers, they set off on a six hundred year trip in cryo-tanks to reach the new lands. I love this start! It says, “We can be anything, do anything!” If that’s the plan, the game isn’t showing its hand in this early section.

I’m at a loss. What I expect from BioWare is slightly dodgy combat, but splendid writing and characters. What I’ve seen so far is some decent enough combat (but nothing beyond what you’d expect in a third person shooter), and some of the most dreadful writing. I cannot emphasise enough how poor it’s been.

Humanity travels to a new galaxy for the first time, there’s so much hope, so much potential, but oh noes, everything’s horrid, and there’s a reptilian-looking alien race on a dusty sand planet that shoots you with ray guns on first sight. Really?! A different galaxy and the diversion from the norm is so slight that between the generic bone-headed (literally) lizards and their pew-pew antics are, er, floating rocks? (Seriously, the game thinks this innovation in portraying reality is so novel that every character feels the need to mention it.) Within seconds you’re apparently the Chosen One, a Pathfinder, which means someone who can look at a planet and say, “Yes, I think people might be able to live here.” Er?

Within minutes of starting there’s a cutscene in which a soldier type is shooting an already entirely dead corpse, and someone else has to say, “Hey, hey, take it easy,” and he fires off a few more shots and declares himself satisfied. I can’t even imagine how anyone can feel okay with writing that into a script without experiencing enough shame to just get up, walk away, and keep walking until they fall off of or into something.

Both Gary Carr’s Liam (a companion) and Zoe Telford’s Addison (grumpy Space Captain Lady) sound as though they’re distractedly reading from a page where the text is too small in a poorly lit room, which is a real problem when both are in such prominent roles. Telford’s E-NUNC-I-AT-ING makes it sound like she’s reading phonetic words in a language she’s never heard. Thankfully Fryda Wolff is perfectly good as your character, Ryder (no one plays Mass Effect as a guy, right?), so at least you don’t wince at the sound of your own voice. In a saving throw, the brilliant Kumail Nanjiani is cast as a Salarian, Director Tann, but he’s so far not been given anything worth saying. Most of the rest are stilted or dreary.

This is endemic. It’s so very, very bizarre to be playing a BioWare game where the characters are so empty and dull. Of course the two companions you start with in all three previous Mass Effect games are the worst, and that’s no exception here. But it doesn’t get much better. You are bombarded with conversation by nearly your entire crew early on, and they’re so freaking stereotypical. The exposition hangs off the dialogue like eighty ton weights, drowning any hope of emotional connection. Characters painfully tell you what their personalities are, rather than, say, having one. (“I tend to live the way I work: kinda “feel it, do it.” Not a lot of close ties, no real sense of purpose.” – Actual dialogue someone wrote on purpose.)

Generic Grumpy Space Captain Lady is there, right up front. With a deft hand she begins by correcting your grammar from “who” to “whom”, and then in the same conversation says “less” when she means “fewer”. Whatever, but don’t play Grammar Corrector if you don’t know any.

It feels so BioWare Paint By Numbers. Before the term has even been explained to you, you’re granted that awe-inspiring title of “Pathfinder”. People stop and mutter reverently when they realise it’s you, far before you even know it’s you. To get to grips with the title you need to dig through the game’s Codex, which is a crappy way of explaining one of its core concepts, let alone helpful in making the ridiculously early appointment anything close to meaningful. It feels so flippant, like a programmed sigh of, “Bollocks to it, the player has to become The Special One, no point dragging it out.” Within an hour of starting you’re so titled.

And then of course the first rando you speak to says, “You’re the Pathfinder! They’ll listen to you! My husband’s been arrested for a crime he didn’t commit!” There are like twelve people on this space station, but no, BioWare can’t not be BioWare, and awkwardly cranks out its most generic and over-used side quest right out the gate.

You’ll want to know about combat. It’s fine. It’s better than previous Mass Effects, because it’s been set free. You can still use your Biotic tricks like flinging people into their air, then popping off their head with your favourite gun, but now you can do it out in the open world rather than in some silly corridor. There are lots of ways to approach fighting, and you can spec up as a tank, a ninja or a ranged fighter, or a wizard, essentially. As I said at the start of this paragraph, it’s fine. Enemy AI is nothing to get excited about – mostly they bob up and down behind cover – but then that’s true of every game ever.

As for your own team’s AI… well, look:

What else have I experienced? EVERYTHING! The game throws #content at you in fistfuls, not pausing to tell you why or how you should care. You can craft absolutely bloody everything (which does afford the rather important ability to name your own equipment), from a madcap confusion of ludicrous curved lists that don’t scroll properly, where every action requires seventeen different clicks that confirm that you want to confirm that you want to craft the thing you don’t know if you need. You can gather minerals by exploring, and you need them for crafting or upgrades or whatever, and they’re so madly distributed.

“I’m tracking a huge mineral deposit,” says someone on your crew, so you trace the “anomaly”, fly to it in the laboriously slow animation, scan it, and then click to pick up, say, “+147 Iron”. Enough to make a gun.

It’s mindblowing how dreadful the planet scanning system is. That you have to watch the camera zoom in to wherever you were, then crawl across the solar system to wherever you clicked (in an animation that reveals nothing, offers nothing) and then every single time zoom in too far into that planet, hold for two seconds, then pull back out again to where it’ll eventually show the UI. I can only assume that in testing BioWare had a way to skip this, because otherwise anyone playing the game ahead of launch would surely have questioned the wisdom of making this completely unrewarding experience so unbelievably boring to wade through.

UI design is a spectacle of bad choices, and this is the one area where it’s definitely not going to improve after these scene-setting few hours. This is a design so poorly put together that you can’t even just look at a list of active quests. You instead have to pick your way through an unintuitive and irritating mess of menus, clicking on each blank mission category to see whether you’ve got anything active on the list inside each. It’s an opaque process, clumsy to navigate. (Hell, my hand incessantly twitches at my mouse’s thumb button to go back, as is standard in every web browser, but not implemented here.)

And why is the quest log highlighted with an exclamation mark indicating a new quest this time? It doesn’t always label the categories to show you which folder the exclaim applies to, and sometimes there isn’t actually a mission for the exclamation mark it does show, so click through each category in turn to discover no, no, no, no, no, and then realise that it’s because it’s moved a completed quest into the completed list.

Oh, and in case that seems like a breeze of a system, it’ll merrily change which mission you’re pursuing without telling you! I was following this dumb murder mystery side quest, but because there was a main story plotline on the same planet it decided to switch its pursued quest to that one. It does this all the damned time. It’s beyond infuriating.

Side quests feel like something from a 2004 Korean MMO. Just complete nothingness, running from map icon to map icon, scanning objects with your scanner when told to, and then AI companion SAM letting you know that, yup, the source of the defects has been found/animal has been captured/toddler reunited with rabid tiger, despite your actually doing nothing relevant to the tissue-thin narrative.

I desperately hope this all improves. Above is what I typed out as I played the sections up until the point at which EA say we may reveal/discuss no more until our review. The thoughts as I experienced them as I played. The reality of playing games is, as you get deeper in and things start to improve, those earlier frustrations can become tempered, and their impact on the overall impression lessened. I strongly hope that will be the case here, and I’ll be able to report next week, “Yes, that was all true of those opening bits, but gosh it gets better!” I really, really hope so, because damn, this is the more Mass Effect we’ve been waiting for for so long.

I’m as shocked as you are, and I’m sure if you need to you’ll find gushing coverage elsewhere, but I like to think I’ve evidenced everything I’ve criticised here. And gosh, I hope we can look back at this and laugh. We’ll know by Monday. Meanwhile, if you want to, you can pay to play these first few hours via Origin Access and get at it on Thursday. See if I’m wrong.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Ok, even the SJW Walker is bashing it, when is this sorry company getting closed?

Dammit, ninjad

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/03/14/mass-effect-andromeda-review-opening-hours/

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Mac Walters cannot into writing.

Mass Effect lost it's soul starting with ME2. They have turned a Space Opera into a dumb military shooter.

 

[sullynathan]

Btw, our father looking similiar to us, whatever our appearance is, is pretty big incline. They actaully made step forward in some cases. You can not like gameplay, but amount of freedom we get in fighting and moving is lethal in comparison with ME2 or ME3.

Well technically fallout 4 had that, and I think even some games before that had it too

 

[oldmanpaco]

Btw, our father looking similiar to us, whatever our appearance is, is pretty big incline. They actaully made step forward in some cases. You can not like gameplay, but amount of freedom we get in fighting and moving is lethal in comparison with ME2 or ME3.

Well technically fallout 4 had that, and I think even some games before that had it too

Thought that was a feature in FO3 as well but maybe not.

Also that RPS review is hilarious if only because the dude seems so shocked that bioware could make a crap game. He must have skipped DA:O, ME2, DA2, ME3, and DA:I.

 

[Anthedon]

That's a downright sensible article by John Walker. Looks like Andromeda truly is DA:I in space.

 

[Projas]

Mwahahahahaha. No. Stop shitposting. You obviously don't know shit about what you're writing about.

The amount of cases Portugal has against it in the European human rights courta is absurd... Also it has a shit ton of cases against it due to double tributation. Do you think they care? Nope, things continue as they have for countless years without any fucks given.

You give too much credit to those child fuckers in Brussels.

European Court of Human Rights is not an EU institution, you know that, right? It's an institution of the Council of Europe, those are two completely different organizations.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

so the first hands on says what i already told by glancing at a trailer.
holy fuck guys, when will you learn to listen to my experience?

 

[moon knight]

Also that RPS review is hilarious if only because the dude seems so shocked that bioware could make a crap game. He must have skipped DA:O, ME2, DA2, ME3, and DA:I.

He skipped Inquisition.

 

[donkeymong]

Mac Walters cannot into writing.

Actually he is a decent character writer. He wrote the dialogue for Wrex and Garrus at least in the first game. But writing stories is really
not his thing...

 

[donkeymong]

That looks far more better paced than anything I have seen in SP videos. No emptying entire clips into enemies, one shot sniper kills, combos actually do something. I'm surprised, Now it will remains to be seen how grindy it's going to be.

Lol, the female characters in the multiplayer look better then anything in the singleplayer so far.
By the, Bronze is the easiest difficulty, so dont get your hopes up.

 

[sullynathan]

He must have skipped DA:O, ME2, DA2, ME3, and DA:I

Wait, mass effect 1 is supposed to be the good game here?

 

[Lambach]

He must have skipped DA:O, ME2, DA2, ME3, and DA:I

Wait, mass effect 1 is supposed to be the good game here?

It's on the Codex Top 70, you filthy pleb.

 

[TripJack]

What I expect from BioWare is slightly dodgy combat, but splendid writing and characters.

lol what a dumbfuck

 

[sullynathan]

's on the Codex Top 70, you filthy pleb

That's because it's the only rpg ME

 

[veevoir]

When RPS does something set in tone more fitting for a codex review.. It must be beyond shit.

I like how he hopes it will get better in the embargoed part.. yeah good luck with that.

Edit: also a reddit link for instant cancers. Guise, I think I found where the bioware forum went.
https://np.reddit.com/r/masseffect/comments/5zfpfw/mea_spoilers_rock_paper_shotgun_preview_not_good/

 

[oldmanpaco]

Five Hours In, Mass Effect: Andromeda Is Overwhelming

Patricia Hernandez
Today 3:50pm
Filed to: Mass Effect
118.6K
38724

I’m about five hours into Mass Effect: Andromeda, and so far, it seems like Bioware has created a behemoth of a sci-fi action RPG.


Our review will drop later in the month, but for now, here’s 20 minutes of the very first mission, played on PS4. Note that the footage has been lightly edited to get rid of stuff like ‘the two minutes I didn’t know where to go.’


Some quickfire thoughts, in bullet-point form:

• As many of you know, the story involves a journey into the Andromeda Galaxy, where humanity must find a new home. The task of finding habitable planets falls on you, the ‘Pathfinder.’ Wouldn’t you know it, once you actually arrive at Andromeda, the ‘golden planets’ you scouted ahead of time aren’t what you expect them to be. Actually, little of the colonization scheme goes according to plan, with some ships getting lost, some people stuck in cryo, others staging a rebellion, and in general, supplies are dwindling fast. The tension is immediate: you’re in a completely new territory of space and nobody can help you. Everything is going to shit. Can you untangle the mess?
• Character creation seems like an improvement - I made someone who appeared human on the first go around, without feeling too much regret once I saw them in action.
• The new dialogue system is MUCH better. Now there are a many different types of responses, none of which are the obvious right/wrong/paragon/renegade choices. I’ve found myself picking liberally, depending on what felt right.
• The voice acting feels more natural now, because you’re not a gruff Spectre.
• Combat is more intense and kinetic, largely because of the added mobility. I can run, I can dash, I can get in the enemy’s face. On normal, the game seems harder, too - I’ve died in the tutorial mission / first real mission, which I’ve never experienced in a Mass Effect game before.
• I love that I can mix and match abilities, regarding of what specialization I pick.
• Then again, the number of SYSTEMS and CHOICES are kinda overwhelming, and Andromeda throws you right into the thick of it. Where older games felt as if Bioware were making a compromise between an RPG and an action game, it feels like they’ve gone full throttle in both directions this time around. Combat is thrilling, but you’re also going to spend a lot of time managing resources and equipping different things.
• I was surprised to find that the tutorial mission had several optional side-quests I could pursue, and that the map was so big, I had multiple path options too. In the mission you can watch above, there’s an obvious critical path, but you can also stop and investigate more of the planet, if you’d like. So many choices! The game feels more on the scale of Dragon Age Inquisition, though I haven’t seen any filler yet.
• To wit, all the side-quests I’ve seen thus far were really interesting, including figuring out what to do with the first potential murder of Andromeda, to investigating who the hell keeps sabotaging some ship tech.
• Gun customization is back, and you can add all sorts of modifications and tweaks. I accidentally gave my pistol a big scope, which made using it unwieldy.
• There are so many small environmental details that pop out even in the middle of combat, whether it’s floating debris, or cool little lights lining the fancy new technology you encounter. Andromeda is a looker, and Bioware uses that power to great effect—planets look alien.
• There’s a whole lotta scanning in this game. You’re going to scan everything from containers to corpses, Batman-style.
• I haven’t gotten to know all of the characters very well, but what I’ve seen thus far has me intrigued. The female Turian I’ve met seemed more kickass than Garrus (!). I’ve met a racist Salarian. I’ve met a very...forward Asari. I’ve met a lot of people who are just trying to get by under trying circumstances. Nobody is boring. Even the most annoying characters have a reason as to why they’re being so dickish.
• This game has some of the fanciest haircuts I’ve ever seen.
• The new Mako (aka the Nomad in this game) handles better, but still has some funny physics to it, depending on what you’re trying to traverse.

We’ll have more on Mass Effect: Andromeda in the coming weeks. For now, if you have questions, I’m happy to chime in the comments.

The female Turian I’ve met seemed more kickass than Garrus (!).

The female Turian I’ve met seemed more kickass than Garrus (!).

The female Turian I’ve met seemed more kickass than Garrus (!).