Mass Effect BioWare Montreal's Mass Effect: Andromeda - where element zero meets trisomy 21

[salaciousbcrumb]

We can't pretend much from the people who thought it was cool to have a scene with your crew watching a movie together like fucking overgrown children.

It's actually kinda symblistic. In ME3 your crew and friends are having parties and drinking. In Andromeda they are watching movies.
That's diffrence between teenagers and adult people.

And both of those scenes are embarrasing and appear to be written by pathetic fanboys who have no experience of human interaction an want to hang out with their shittily written animated characters.

To me those scenes apart from everything else, are arrogant and self indulgent. The game devs actually believe their characters are so great we want to see them hanging out and goofing off with each other instead of doing anything relevent to moving along the plot.

 

[Keppo]

The new alien design, the pink thing, is really bad. I never thought much of the original Mass Effect aliens like Salarians and Turians, but next to this new thing they look cool and original.

It's just a mess, and it looks like it's from a completely different series, not Mass Effect.

These two actually looks good and interesing, much better than what bioware did in Andromeda.

 

[Thane Solus]

i love how all popular youtubers and critics and jumped on the bandwagon = animations are shit, but so is the fucking story, ui and dialogues, but very few talk about that. Fucking useless retards.

 

[Reinhardt]

Bald women are ugly. Bald women with tentacles are hideous.

 

[gestalt11]

i love how all popular youtubers and critics and jumped on the bandwagon = animations are shit, but so is the fucking story, ui and dialogues, but very few talk about that. Fucking useless retards.

No, this is not entirely accurate. There are now multiple video "roundtables" of mainstream places like GiantBomb and GameSpot specifically calling out the really poor writing as the most egregious aspects of this disaster. They are using word like "amateurish" and "fanfic written by a 13 year old" (this latter one is highly accurate in the context its used).

Its almost like the just plain stupid character interaction animations (most combat and travel animation are not that bad but do have common weird glitches) lead to ridicule and the ridicule gave them implied permission to actually engage in actual cirtical thought. Many that say ME:A is poorly written will still not say the same about ME3 even though it obviously has some real shit writing.

 

[salaciousbcrumb]

Jim Sterling, or Stelling or whatever, made a short video with his first impressions (I won't link the video because he talks like a cunt)

Bollocks, jim sterling is a fine geek. Here's the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b98XmQOpmtI

The guy looks like a cunt, writes like a cunt and talks like a cunt, so he's a cunt.

I never heard him speak before that video, but my God is he fucking full of himself, in some parts of the video he starts doing this odd affected way of speaking as if it's smart or comical, then he does this self reverential stuff where he says something wrong, corrects it and then goes on about it for another 20 seconds. At then end of that clip he starts saying how he want's to do a video about his lack of cultural identity, making out he is dispossed because he grew up in the UK and moved to the US and now feels stateless because he dosen't know how he fits into society now, as if he has something brave and inspiring to tell us about growing up watching Carry on Films and how Americans don't know who Sid James is, where as he feels left out because he dosen't understand Baseball and he talks about this for three minutes of a ten minutes video game pre-review... The guy is a crank.

 

[imweasel]

The problem with biowhore aliens is that not only they are physically humanoid, but that they're also human in spirit.

There are numerous non-humanoid aliens in the series. Like the Leviathan, Hanar, Elcor, Keepers, Rachni, Geth, Reapers. All teammates are humanoid though.

Anyway, it is not at all too far fetched to assume that highly advanced alien life could also be bipedal and have two extremities to create as well as use tools (a feat required to create an advanced civilization), BUT Bioware's assumption that any alien humanoid is very human-like in practically every respect (and fuckable for a zoophilist, of course...) is pretty stupid.

 

[illuknisaa]

You've seen Cora and Vetra sex scenes, now share my pain and look at this weird shit. Looks like a discounted Avarar sex scene. But this time instead of space cats they are having sex with pink space rabbits:

It's funny that they imagined these alien like something evolved from a squid, judging by that skin and head tentacles, but they still have a bone structure almost identical to the human one. They even have the squared jawline. An unsettling merge between Davy Jones and a male fashion model. When I see these scenes I always wonder who the fuck can stomach "romancing" aliens. Even Asari in the original trilogy were unsettling but this takes zoophilia to a whole new level.

Tbh I find the human in the vid far more disturbing. The garish contrast between her skin tone and hair color is just sickening. The makeup is also overdone. Like a cherry on top of shit sunday. Anyone who thought that appearance look attractive is either blind or mentally unstable.

Also whats up with only two dialogue options. People criticized bethesda on the only 4 options dialogue and bioware thought it was a good idea to double down?

 

[gestalt11]

I was walking through the grocery store the other day and trying compare it to ME:A. The conclusion I came to is most people , while not particularly attractive, are fairly "normal" looking (no i can't define that), but in ME:A a large number of people are flat out fugly in a way that is quite quite rare. Where I go to shop is quite ethnically diverse too so its not that.

I think a lot of it has to do with the weird big cheeks and jowls and messed up lips.

 

[prodigydancer]

I never thought much of the original Mass Effect aliens like Salarians and Turians, but next to this new thing they look cool and original.

Pfft. They are no more alien than D&D demihumans. Asari=elves, turians=outsiders (aasimar/tieflings), salarians=gnomes, krogans=orcs, volus=dwarves, quarians=gith, etc. The new races are shit but it doesn't mean the old ones aren't a bunch of walking tropes.

The only things that come close to actual aliens (where "actual" means they at least feel somewhat alien) in the ME universe are hanar, rachni and elcor.

 

[salaciousbcrumb]

I think for most Biodrones (and reviewers) that is really the worst aspect of Andromeda, it's an entire new galaxy and we still have bipedal, humanoid looking aliens.

The only immediate problem with it is that it doesn't fit your expectations. There are as many theories supporting the claim that technologically advanced intelligent aliens would be bipedal and upright as there are to the contrary. And the evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of bipedal intelligent primates: we know it happened at least once.

In all scientifically plausible theories, the way intelligent life looks depends on the conditions it evolved in. You could argue, for example, that intelligent life that evolved on a planet with much higher gravity and much thicker atmosphere in comparison to Earth, would indeed look nothing like humans. Those creatures would probably be horizontal in posture and would possibly move on more than two legs (or have a strong tail).

If, however, life evolved on a planet, that more or less resembles our globe, it is quite likely they wouldn't be that much different. They would probably need to move, so we can assume symmetry (most likely bilateral, if they evolved on land). They would need to have sensory organs on the front of their body, because that's the side that meets the environment first, when they move. This means, they would probably undergo cephalization and develop a head. Since they evolved in a thin atmosphere, they'd probably be vertical creatures and with that posture two legs are much more efficient than four or more. They would also need a way to manipulate the environment - upper extremities. Most probably 2, because that's quite enough to do most tasks. One could argue, that a creature could do more tasks simultaneously, if it had more sets of hands, but that would require more sets of "eyes" or the ability to concentrate on many objects at the same time. This, however, would mean a bigger brain -> bigger head -> higher mass -> more energy requirements and so on. As a result, 4 arms could turn out to be less efficient.

So there you have it - a bipedal, upright alien with two legs and two hands is not a huge stretch, although I'm pretty sure there are many home-grown scientists on the Codex, that have their own ideas on the subject.

Also why are all those alien species all comfortable with the same amount of gravity and breathing the same air composition on places where they all mix together, like the Nexus or Citidel? Human astronauts lose muscle mass in space, look at series like the exapanse where they make the guys who live in the asteriod belt long and thin and when they are captured by earth they can be subjected to torture just by exposing them to gravity. Also the Earthers in the series can knock them out with one punch.

Yet in Mass effect all the alien races are as strong as each other basically, all handle 1 G pretty well and breathe the same mix of air despite them all evolving differently on different planets. Only the Quarians are shown different in any other way.

If you actually consider this stuff it could make the game more interesting. Having councils disagree on the space station over the air mix and gravity and sabatage and fallout, other races having to use breathing aids or exoskelitons to survive the enviroment and give them strength to deal with the more brutal Krogans, you can imagine much more yourself.

And there are no aliens based on different enviroments. Just look at earth, both birds and fish have the potential to develop greater intellegence, one offshot could have become the dominent species on the planet, or could still become one, so where are the hollow boned flying aliens or one's that need water to survive, but if you go on other planets you would find even more strange conditions to change the nature and makeup of a species.

Bioware just makes English speaking, oxegen breathing, 1g comfortable aliens that range in strength from John Cena to Pee Wee Herman... Also what about diseases?

 

[Sizzle]

that ....thing

The one on the right, or the left?

If you keep this up, you'll never land a writing gig for BioWare like you did for inXile :D

 

[Tick Tock Crocodile]

Tbh I find the human in the vid far more disturbing. The garish contrast between her skin tone and hair color is just sickening. The makeup is also overdone. Like a cherry on top of shit sunday. Anyone who thought that appearance look attractive is either blind or mentally unstable.

She reminds me of a really half-assed attempt at a ganguro girl. If you're going to go garish, at least go all in

 

[Athos]

You've seen Cora and Vetra sex scenes, now share my pain and look at this weird shit. Looks like a discounted Avarar sex scene. But this time instead of space cats they are having sex with pink space rabbits:

It's funny that they imagined these alien like something evolved from a squid, judging by that skin and head tentacles, but they still have a bone structure almost identical to the human one. They even have the squared jawline. An unsettling merge between Davy Jones and a male fashion model. When I see these scenes I always wonder who the fuck can stomach "romancing" aliens. Even Asari in the original trilogy were unsettling but this takes zoophilia to a whole new level.

Tbh I find the human in the vid far more disturbing. The garish contrast between her skin tone and hair color is just sickening. The makeup is also overdone. Like a cherry on top of shit sunday. Anyone who thought that appearance look attractive is either blind or mentally unstable.

Also whats up with only two dialogue options. People criticized bethesda on the only 4 options dialogue and bioware thought it was a good idea to double down?

I think that face is just the product of someone fucking around with the facial editor for the lulz like in the good old days of Oblivion.

 

[MercenarySnake]

When it comes to all of the Asari in Andromeda, it looks like they picked out all the shit genes on purpose. Those crab squid aliens are so fucking ugly.

 

[Stainless Veteran]

Jim Sterling, or Stelling or whatever, made a short video with his first impressions (I won't link the video because he talks like a cunt)

Bollocks, jim sterling is a fine geek. Here's the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b98XmQOpmtI

The guy looks like a cunt, writes like a cunt and talks like a cunt, so he's a cunt.

I never heard him speak before that video, but my God is he fucking full of himself, in some parts of the video he starts doing this odd affected way of speaking as if it's smart or comical, then he does this self reverential stuff where he says something wrong, corrects it and then goes on about it for another 20 seconds. At then end of that clip he starts saying how he want's to do a video about his lack of cultural identity, making out he is dispossed because he grew up in the UK and moved to the US and now feels stateless because he dosen't know how he fits into society now, as if he has something brave and inspiring to tell us about growing up watching Carry on Films and how Americans don't know who Sid James is, where as he feels left out because he dosen't understand Baseball and he talks about this for three minutes of a ten minutes video game pre-review... The guy is a crank.

His wife would fit right in into both Bioware and Andromeda though.

 

[DragoFireheart]

I am so glad I stopped at ME2. My money didn't go to ME3 which motivated the creation of this piece of shit, birthed from a slightly-less piece of shit game.

I spit on the name that is Bioware. May they be consumed by the Curse of EA by Q4 of 2018.

 

[MRY]

that ....thing

The one on the right, or the left?

If you keep this up, you'll never land a writing gig for BioWare like you did for inXile :D

I already worked for Bioware back on Dragon Age: Origins. The crew back in the mid-2000s I worked for were great -- wonderful teachers and very nice people and, I think, very talented at their craft. I'm sure the current folks are, too, but it's still fun to tease a little. Anyway, my writer-for-hire days are probably over.

 

[pippin]

The new alien design, the pink thing, is really bad. I never thought much of the original Mass Effect aliens like Salarians and Turians, but next to this new thing they look cool and original.

It's just a mess, and it looks like it's from a completely different series, not Mass Effect.

These two actually looks good and interesing, much better than what bioware did in Andromeda.

they are just twileks. Mission was the cutest Bioware girl ever.

 

[Lhynn]

I already worked for Bioware back on Dragon Age: Origins. The crew back in the mid-2000s I worked for were great -- wonderful teachers and very nice people and, I think, very talented at their craft. I'm sure the current folks are, too, but it's still fun to tease a little. Anyway, my writer-for-hire days are probably over.

You do good work bro.

 

[Drax]

You've seen Cora and Vetra sex scenes, now share my pain and look at this weird shit. Looks like a discounted Avarar sex scene. But this time instead of space cats they are having sex with pink space rabbits:

It's funny that they imagined these alien like something evolved from a squid, judging by that skin and head tentacles, but they still have a bone structure almost identical to the human one. They even have the squared jawline. An unsettling merge between Davy Jones and a male fashion model. When I see these scenes I always wonder who the fuck can stomach "romancing" aliens. Even Asari in the original trilogy were unsettling but this takes zoophilia to a whole new level.

Tbh I find the human in the vid far more disturbing. The garish contrast between her skin tone and hair color is just sickening. The makeup is also overdone. Like a cherry on top of shit sunday. Anyone who thought that appearance look attractive is either blind or mentally unstable.

Also whats up with only two dialogue options. People criticized bethesda on the only 4 options dialogue and bioware thought it was a good idea to double down?

I think that face is just the product of someone fucking around with the facial editor for the lulz like in the good old days of Oblivion.

 

[Sizzle]

that ....thing

The one on the right, or the left?

If you keep this up, you'll never land a writing gig for BioWare like you did for inXile :D

I already worked for Bioware back on Dragon Age: Origins. The crew back in the mid-2000s I worked for were great -- wonderful teachers and very nice people and, I think, very talented at their craft. I'm sure the current folks are, too, but it's still fun to tease a little. Anyway, my writer-for-hire days are probably over.

Wow, did not know this. What did you do on DA:O, which parts of the game did you write?

 

[gestalt11]

that ....thing

The one on the right, or the left?

If you keep this up, you'll never land a writing gig for BioWare like you did for inXile :D

I already worked for Bioware back on Dragon Age: Origins. The crew back in the mid-2000s I worked for were great -- wonderful teachers and very nice people and, I think, very talented at their craft. I'm sure the current folks are, too, but it's still fun to tease a little. Anyway, my writer-for-hire days are probably over.

No at least some of the current are rather poor writers. This is quite obvious. But perhaps what is most disturbing is the lack of any QA or internal critque. I can understand being polite. I can understand not wanting to throw stones and glasshouses and all that. When no one writes well straight off the bat and makes all kinds of dumb mistakes that don't get caught and made better until some one else reads etc etc it is tempting to be lenient. But that is just the thing. There are at least 3 instances in the game where the thing that was written would never have been accepted through any kind of QA or peer review process. Whether we are talking about the "My face is tired" line or the painfully bad lesbian romance "13 year old fanfic" or the "His heart was broken before he was shot in the chest" line. Its unlikely that a competent writer would write these but it is certainly the case that no competent writer would accept them when reviewing a peer's work.

So no, as far as I am concerned, these things prove to me beyond a reasonable doubt that the current crop are not operating in a manner that would qualify as "very talented in their craft". I am sorry, I get it, I really do. But they failed on many levels, not just in product but also in their process in a manner that is truly not professional.

 

[MRY]

Wow, did not know this. What did you do on DA:O, which parts of the game did you write?

AFAIK, nothing that made it into the game. I did a Human Barbarian origin story (the gist was that you were betrayed by your blood brother and left crucified and then rescued by Duncan (was that his name?)), and a blind elf-hater who was secretly being cared for by an elf pretending to be a human trying to prove a big point (but the bigot was secretly not blind and was pretending in order to make the elf serve him as an ironic twist). I believe the origin story got cut for reasons unrelated to my incompetence, but if it had been brilliant, I'm sure they would've found a way to make it work. They offered me a senior writer job but I had to move to Edmonton (I think the unspoken thing was that it was too hard to work with me offsite). Since I was wrapping up law school at the time and bound for a judicial clerkship in Los Angeles, I had to decline. As a result, I shifted to doing truly mindless work for S2 Games, which actually paid better than Bioware, but was not exactly the font of great professional growth.

I still have a lot of admiration for James Ohlen and David Gaider, and I really enjoyed meeting the two doctors.

Incidentally, as I've mentioned elsewhere, in my conversation with them they said their greatest aspiration was to develop an engine and artistic capacity to make realistic facial animations because that was how they would achieve the next tier of characterization in their games. I wonder whether they feel gratification at not being a part of Andromeda, chagrin at having missed out, or second thoughts at the whole facial animation aspiration.

 

[salaciousbcrumb]

I also have my doubt's about that $40million development cost, it seems the average salary for a Bioware designer/animator/artist/whatever is about $60'000 us dollars.

Now Bioware claims it took hundreds of people 5 years to develop the game.

60'000 x 100 x 5 = 30million.

Now you can dispute that figure by saying they all weren't working on it at the same time, which is fair, or they also had some, judging by the quality of the work, interns working on it, which is also fair. But then again they also had people working overtime during the crunch period and I just looked at an article that said Ubisoft had 90 people working on Watch Dogs at one time, from just one division, which represented only a third of their current staff on the project. So there could have been 200-300 hundred people working on the ME3 during some periods. Also I haven't factored in company benifits and pension payments. Also the largest salaries to the CEO and large one off payments to voice actors, composers and others.

The staffing costs alone may have exceeded $40million, before all the other development costs, licenses, office costs, Making a Transexual Bathroom in the office, Paying skippy the Janitor, Clevland the security guard and Janice the dinner lady.

By way of comparison Watch Dogs took the same amount of time to develop and was also made in Canada and cost $68millionUS...Now you could say here Andromeda was developed on the cheap to that and I'd agree, it certainly looks that way. But it appears EA didn't think that, because their preditions to the games success are inline with the sales of Watch Dogs so I'm assuming they thought they were getting a similar product for roughly the same investment.

Another comparison is CD Project in Potatoland Witcher 3 cost $46million to make, took a year and a half less in time to make and they were paying out in potatoes, here's a conversion of a yearly salary into USD...

Artist $15'000

CDPR Enviromental artist $18'000 (Bioware salary $65'000)

CDPR Senior Engineer/Programmer $45'000 (Bioware basic software engineer salary $80'000)

So CDPR were paying out much less than half of Bioware in Salaries across the board, their operating costs were much less, they would have been matched in government subsidies and breaks by Potato government as much as the Candian government helped out Bioware, it took them a year less to make the game and they don't need to pay out for a dental plan as Poles have no teeth, nor for maternity leave as Poles know better than to employ irrational women as anything other than cleaner, cook or office prostitute.

And EA/ Bioware expect us to believe that their game cost $40million and Witcher 3 $46million, even though it took them much longer to make and they were paying at least double the salaries?

Just to make a quicker point here than this. I've just looked at CDProject team for the Witcher 3 now it says over the course of the development there were 1500 people who had some involvement in making the game but the dev team themself had a core team of 240 people.

Now here I'm going to be really generous to Bioware...

Let's say CDProject had all those 240 people on average working on the game on salaries all the time. And Bioware only had 100 people on average working on this game all the time, their staff costs would come out nearly the same based on the pay difference in both countries.

Now there are other factors to add in such as the high pay rates of the CEO's in Canada compared to Poland and the fact CD project dosen't have a parent company to make money for. But the main one is it took them a year and a half less to make the game. So if Bioware spent $30million on 100 staff over five years CD project spent $21 million on 240 staff over 3 and a half years.

So CD Projects staffing costs in the best case for Bioware are about $10million lower with 140% more staff. They developed their own engine, they also had less overheads because of the cheaper costs of operating in Poland and less mouthhs to feed at the top because they have no parent company. So how can we be expected to believe that Mass Effect Andomeda cost $40 million to make and the W3 $46million?