Mass Effect: Andromeda Pre-Release Thread

[cvv]

Fuck, late to the party but whatever.

The "lead animator" chick? I can definitely see corporations hiring based on gender/racial quotas, especially in places as deranged by leftist mindfuck as Canada. "Guise guise we can't have this talented white autist coz we still have some empty slots for wymynz, niggers, redskins and transdimensional broomstick-kins."

Then again this whole thing got way too autistic even for the gamerverse. A megaproject of a game like this can have dozens of people working on animations and noone has the slightest idea what this chick was actually responsible for. Knowing corporate naming practices - a janitor can be "a physical spaces manager" - she could be "in charge" of two people responsible for animating a single alien. Or the hero's left nostril. Or anything else.

Plus the way I see it, the animations are not the biggest fuckup. It's the overall design of the faces geared towards the 10-year old bracket. The root problem can be in the concept art itself for all we know. Ultimately it's the project lead that should be shat on for letting this catastrophic turd loose on the public.

 

[HansDampf]

Damn GamerGate, ruining everything despite being dead for years.

 

[Reinhardt]

The "lead animator" chick? I can definitely see corporations hiring based on gender/racial quotas, especially in places as deranged by leftist mindfuck as Canada.

And when you need damage control - just throw her under the bus.

 

[Grotesque]

this Andromeda fiasco will give Star Citizen a boost and Chris Roberts will have yet another reason to indulge his obsession with details because of the fear of having the same fiasco on his hands.

 

[Iznaliu]

To be fair, the most influencial and supremacist black movement nowadays is a conglomerate of various black only socialist and communist groups: http://www.uhurumovement.org http://apspuhuru.org The modern black supremacy ideology is fundamentally linked to the postcolonialism theories that emerge from generally extreme left thinkers that were meddling with various "post-x" theories that are generally super gramscist at the base. It was extremely easy to replace classes with races and/or identify certain classes with certain races exclusively, and they all more or less reference old school marxist macro-economics.

So influential that I've never heard of them.

 

[Jarpie]

Not sure how lifting the review embargo early is going to help sales. Seems like a 'surprise' launch a few days early would generate more positive buzz.

It should help, since the game will get high scores regardless. That will reassure casual players and biodrones who are worried it could actually be poorly received by journalists.

The very existence of "review embargoes" continues to amaze me. The concept didn't exist in the 1990s or the early 2000s. It's a completely obvious ploy to keep potentially bad reviews hidden until developers have had the opportunity to con unwise people out of their money.

While I don't mind seeing unwise people get conned in general, I'm even less inclined to watch shit-tier developers profit from their shovelware.

There was no need for an embargo when magazines were the main source of mainstream reviews. Nobody could get a significant head start and the information was easily controlled. In the early 2000s the mainstream sites started to grow a lot and there was a period where you actually had the competition and less control by publishers, but it didn't last long. By 2003 big publishers were already doing it with the biggest projects, and Microsoft set the new standard for big hits with Halo 2 in 2004. This Eurogamer article describes the situation at the time:

Fair play to Microsoft, though. For the first time in living memory a genuine worldwide embargo was set, giving publications such as this a genuine chance to compete on a level playing field - at least in terms of the publication date. Suffice to say that the same rules didn't apply to Doom III, Half-Life 2 or Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which have all been slapped with bizarrely unfair and unhelpful reviewing restrictions, which seem to serve no purpose other than to benefit the larger organisations. But rightly or wrongly, Microsoft didn't allow for multiplayer reviews, and inferred, in fact, that testing for the service was still ongoing right up until the last minute.

Video game media in the early 2000s was pretty much dominated by the few major magazines and websites, so it made sense that people barely talked about this. Although they were already common (with AAA games) in 2003-2006, it wasn't until 2007-2008 that it became more common for journalists to openly talk about them, mostly because YouTube changed the game and media consumption through the internet was growing in general. Today YT and Twitch turn that up to 11.

Back in the old days, the publishers could keep journalists on a leash, since the biggest outlets had privileged access and breaking the embargo meant losing a competitive edge, not to mention all the special treatment with parties, promotional stuff, paid trips, ads, etc. If somebody didn't play nice, such as writing a harsh review in some cases, you could just cut all that and tell your pals in the industry about how a specific outlet/journalist couldn't be trusted.

Streamers and youtubers are pretty much independent when it comes to revenue and editorial policies, and they're also much more numerous, so there's no way to keep a tight relationship within a closed circle as publishers and journalists used to. Most youtubers and streamers have audiences with no reason to care about how or how much of the game is being shown or described, and the game could be negatively impacted by competition in several ways.

Embargoes are also important for publishers in terms of social media impact. If you have your reviews and footage spread across 10 days, the game won't be trending nearly as high on Twitter/Facebook/Reddit when compared to a specific day where websites, youtubers and streamers are talking about or showing the game at the same time. A very high peak is much more desirable than a mediocre average, specially when the publisher itself can decide when that peak will happen.

Whether they're morally justifiable or not is a different question. I think some types, such as launch day embargoes, are definitely meant to deceive foolish consumers and boost pre-orders, but having no embargo at all means less effective marketing and potentially harmful content with false and/or misleading content. The most common embargo seems pretty harmless to me. You get a review copy a week or so before release, can't stream or show content past a certain point until the embargo is lifted, and after that it's all fair game.

Yes there was competition to get out reviews out first dunring the 90s, at least in the UK. I remember one of the editors in finnish gaming magazine regularly making fun of english gaming magazines for reviewing games based on demos or barely playing in rush to get review out before competitors.

 

[meanwhileInPoland]

who the fuck comes up with that straight from tumblr shit? why would EA pay anyone to write that crap?

Spoiler

loled at kill.me.now. salarians as always the only saving part of Mass Effect

 

[Sykar]

I swear, Vampire:Bloodlines had better facial animations and lip sync...

 

[ERYFKRAD]

I swear, Vampire:Bloodlines had better facial animations and lip sync...

And better walking animations too.

 

[Jokzore]

Hmmm...

(Green one is Julian Gollop)

Which one of you brave souls is going to find his calendar modeling?

Ask and thou shalt receive

Spoiler

http://kotaku.com/sexy-calendar-features-topless-game-developers-1671938292

EDIT: bonus for all you masochistic loonies out there

Spoiler

 

[Scroo]

who the fuck comes up with that straight from tumblr shit? why would EA pay anyone to write that crap?

Spoiler

loled at kill.me.now. salarians as always the only saving part of Mass Effect

Oh god who wrote this shit, how can this be in the game?! Is it supposed to be funny? Or cute? agawd I think I died a little by watching that

but the music in the end made me wanna replay ME1

 

[Azalin]

who the fuck comes up with that straight from tumblr shit? why would EA pay anyone to write that crap?

Spoiler

loled at kill.me.now. salarians as always the only saving part of Mass Effect

One of the 15 tumblr writers they have on board obviously,at least on some level they know how much this sucks(kill me now)

 

[salaciousbcrumb]

Then why has he made these... for fun...

He really has nothing to do with CDPRed. He's co-owner of independent 3D animation studio. Recently they did cinematics for Prey, Hitman, Watchdogs, For Honor, TotalWar Warchammer, bunch of commercials, United Nations and FX for some live action movies. It's not like he's animating those, it's about 100 people working in PI. Also it's apparently very expensive to make, their profits used to be on some pitiful level ($5k/year for entire company and they are in Poland), so don't expect any game developer making anything similar.

Didn't he also make the end game animation in Witcher 1 and he's making a Witcher film....
....Anyway I understand and accept your point that he dosen't have anything to do with the actual in game animation, I would say that I used his video as a cheap shot to attack Bioware, but that's not really true, I was just using it as a animation project to compare against the cosplay girls shitty showreel and it's not like I couldn't have taken any part of any Witcher 3 character interaction and used it to shame Bioware by the comparison.

 

[Multiple Sarcasm]

who the fuck comes up with that straight from tumblr shit? why would EA pay anyone to write that crap?

Spoiler

loled at kill.me.now. salarians as always the only saving part of Mass Effect

Please, let it be the same dialogue for male Ryder. Tumblr cuckery overload.

 

[moon knight]

 

[Grif]

who the fuck comes up with that straight from tumblr shit? why would EA pay anyone to write that crap?

Spoiler

loled at kill.me.now. salarians as always the only saving part of Mass Effect

The salarian described my reaction perfectly. They were the best race for a reason.

 

[an Administrator]

who the fuck comes up with that straight from tumblr shit? why would EA pay anyone to write that crap?

Spoiler

loled at kill.me.now. salarians as always the only saving part of Mass Effect

 

[salaciousbcrumb]

Tell me, give me refrences, I run that game on near highest ratings on a ten year old q9300 processor and I only had lag when I had 4gb of ram and a 470 and tried to go back to windows. Now I upgraded to 8gb of ram and a 1050 but kept the trusty q9300 the game runs out as smooth as Burma Shave,

The only bug I have is Geralt standing on the table after he's talked to the book dealer in Novigrad, but you can still walk off the table and carry on.

I am missing the point of talking about optimalization, many people are actually saying Andromeda is good o's justptimized. We are talking about bugs here.
Maybe you missed bugs, were lucky. But I remember how all reviews and people on witcher 3 release were bashing it for how broken it was (was, not as it is now), I've seen a lot of videos presenting them.
I'd even risk a statement that it was no better than andromeda.
You want references? There are many videos about it on internet, youtube. Like this, for instance:


You can all have fun from bashing Andromeda for its bugs, but saying that this something uncommon is straight lie.
Game hasn't been released yet, but in view of all they showed us in 10h I can say that Andromeda is typical AAA title this days in topic of bugs and glitches.

In all respect to you that's just a bunch of crap. You've posted a compilation of bugs in Witcher 3 that was harvested from around the internet. I've posted a 8 minute unedited section of this game from one guys playthrough and pointed out 20 parts that are fucked up, plus there are countless other graphical glitches in that clip alone.

And as I say I've played hundreds of hours of Witcher3 plus the expansions on highish settings on a computer with a processer that pre dates the Brooklyn bridge and I get 40plus FPS and the only bug I have, is when Geralt decides to stand on a table after talking to the book dealer in Novigrad. And it seems that a lot of other people who play the game for hundreds of hours also encounter few problems. All in all from the sheer scale of Witcher 3 I am really impressed it has so few proplems. Compared to Fallout 3 Which crashed everytime I was in a house when I first played it and New Vegas which was buggy as hell in the opening training mission with Sunny Smiles or whatever her name is, I'm pretty impressed with how Witcher3 runs.

You might have a point if people were just mocking the glitches, but their not their mocking the animations which are awful and like I've mentioned before badly staged, they move the characters around to face people who are going to speak, before they talk! Then there are parts where a character is talking and the other characters are ignoring them and looking at each other, which makes me think of Bradylama at a party trying to talk to chicks
:selfhate:

And If you notice in the thread my main gripe has been the writing which is the worst I have ever heard, ever, in anything and I've watched some terrrible movies and bad plays in my time.

Now bugs are bad but can be fixed and are forgivable, because the developers didn't intend them to happen. The shitty writing a awful animations though were intentional and were pored over by hundreds of different people for hundreds of thousands of hours and nobody thought to edit the script or change the animation or redo the voice acting, did anyone even notice? Did anyone at Bioware break cover and speak out and say "Hey guys I was just mixing the sound on this section and the writing is fucked up, this woman thinks that talking about bacteria is poetry. She also sound like a text to speech program."

 

[Repulsive]

THE NARRATIVE BEGINS

Scumbags Harass Woman For Working On Mass Effect: Andromeda's Animations

Spoiler

Internet cretins engaged in a harassment campaign against a woman who worked for Electronic Arts this weekend, flooding her social media and various internet profiles with vitriolic, often misogynistic messages. Her sin, it appears, was working on animations for the game Mass Effect: Andromeda.


Allie Rose-Marie Leost, who worked for EA’s motion-capture labs in Vancouver, saw vicious harassment on Twitter and other websites today, most often from people who blamed her for Andromeda’s awkward facial animations. The harassment appears to have been primarily triggered by a vile blog post at Ralph Retort, a right-wing, GamerGate-tied website, that claimed Leost was the lead facial animator on Andromeda. That website also accused her of performing sexual acts to get her job at EA.

Here’s a small sample of the hundreds of messages Leost faced today:

As often happens with these internet witch-hunts, the harassment campaign against Leost was based on false information. BioWare today released a statement clarifying that she was not, in fact, a lead animator on Mass Effect: Andromeda. (There has been some confusion over whether Leost’s social media posts indicated that she was a lead, but given that she worked at EA Labs and not at the Andromeda team’s offices in Montreal, it’s clear that’s not the case.)


BioWare also condemned the abuse with a statement this afternoon:

Leost did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

Somehow, the attacks seem completely predictable despite how terrible they are. In the age of President Trump and GamerGate, it all feels straight out of some especially insecure and desperate playbook. Starting with the transformation of a game’s sometimes silly character animations into a conspiracy, and then later a scandal in which the data points waver between incomplete and meaningless, the cycle isn’t new by this point.

PRESIDENT TRUMP
GAMERGATE

DESPERATE
DESPERATE

People said mean things over the internet, news at 11. That comment section there is pure cancer too.

 

[Starwars]

Though the writing in the above romance clip is bad enough, what really kills me is that Ryder's voice is acting all embarrassed while there is nothing going on in terms of the animation. Just that soulless stare.

Also, the camera angles are *horrible*. Why would you place the camera like that, above the companion being flirted with, looking down on her and... her hair. And then cutting to the back of Ryder's head, still looking down on the companion. It's just... ugh.

 

[Blaine]

In fairness, Mass Effect romances have always been fairly cringeworthy. In every single one, two people develop a completely unbelievable romance out of the blue and then have awkward wooden mannequin sex with a fade-to-black.

How cruel is that? You don't even get to see sum fuk, just a robotic "courtship," then a glimpse of wiggling mannequins, then nothing.

Note: This is a whole new level of cringe, though. There's Tumblrwhale ambergris all over this shit.

 

[Repulsive]

who the fuck comes up with that straight from tumblr shit? why would EA pay anyone to write that crap?

Spoiler

loled at kill.me.now. salarians as always the only saving part of Mass Effect

"No I mean, I think you're cute and I like seeing you up here." My face is tired.

 

[salaciousbcrumb]

Black supremacy is indeed far left. As for being against supremacy--ludicrous. They believe what they believe to be superior--and consequently those who believe those things to be superior. That the belief system is technically available to all people doesn't change the basic distinctions between true/false, good/bad, better/worse.

To be fair, the most influencial and supremacist black movement nowadays is a conglomerate of various black only socialist and communist groups: http://www.uhurumovement.org http://apspuhuru.org The modern black supremacy ideology is fundamentally linked to the postcolonialism theories that emerge from generally extreme left thinkers that were meddling with various "post-x" theories that are generally super gramscist at the base. It was extremely easy to replace classes with races and/or identify certain classes with certain races exclusively, and they all more or less reference old school marxist macro-economics.

Wait, wasn't this thread about Mass Effect: Andromeda? Are there black supremacists located in the new galaxy player has to ally with or fight against? I know I would play it to fight them deplorable whytys, which are colonizing new galaxies and sex enslaving native life forms. The game would be the ultimate postcolonialism metaphor.

UHURU ya all

I love black supremicists they are fucking hillarious. Lot's of their ideology is like something out of a 1950's science fiction novel, I read Malcolm X book when I was a kid and he sounds like a mental patient even though he's probably the most elequent and intelligent black supremicist there's been. Some of them think they were chosen by aliens, some that aliens robbed them of their kingdoms and made them slaves while uplifting the white devils, some others think the white devils usurped their kingdoms and turned them into slaves and have white washed history check out these guys...



The whole clip is pretty lulzy, but it's funny when the guy starts claiming all the Kings and Queens of England were black, the Vikings were black and showing Louis pictures in a book, then Louis starts mildly trolling them by saying he thinks they're borderline. Then he lists the historical figures to the guy and asks them if they were black...Beethoven...BLACK...Mozart...BLACK...Cleopatra...SHE LOOKED BLACK BUT SHE WAS WHITE...William Shakespere....UNDOUBTIDLY BLACK...Abraham Lincoln...THATS STILL IN DEBATE...Christipher Colombus...(LAUGHS) HE WAS WHITE...Henry VIII...BLACK, THERE ARE FAMOUS PEOPLE THAT LOOK WHITE BUT ARE BLACK FOR EXAMPLE FAMOUS SINGER LOOKS LIKE A WHITE MAN BUT HE IS BLACK....Who?...TOM JONES

 

[Repulsive]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA

 

[Taskityo]

who the fuck comes up with that straight from tumblr shit? why would EA pay anyone to write that crap?

Spoiler

loled at kill.me.now. salarians as always the only saving part of Mass Effect

Wow. That whole scene sounds very YA Twight-ish in writing quality. Now I know the target audience for this game, maybe 16-19 year olds and not Adults into Thinking 'Hard' Sci-Fi. The Kett fit right into either YA Sci-Fi or just something Generic in 'New Release.'

In fairness, Mass Effect romances have always been fairly cringeworthy. In every single one, two people develop a completely unbelievable romance out of the blue and then have awkward wooden mannequin sex with a fade-to-black.

This is true, but one would expect for Bioware to at least try improving their formula and write something believable. If there is one thing that annoys me about either a Modern Bethesda or Bioware game are the excuses like "expect jank, that's the charm" and they still give it a 10/10.