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

[Night Goat]

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)

This is way more interesting than anything that was actually in the game.

 

[MRY]

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)

This is way more interesting than anything that was actually in the game.

I never played it, but I found the design documents I went through really amazing, full of great stuff.

Also, though, fully of odd oversights that show just how really good people can still overlook really obvious stuff. Perhaps my only meaningful contribution to the game was getting them not to name the main mountain range "the Kozarks." Oh, Canada...

--EDIT--

BTW, I'm sure this is old news, but they basically had a rudimentary form of D:AO running in a modded NWN (for testing and iterating the dialogues and quests as the game engine was being developed). So when they sent me the "build" of "DA:O" and I loaded it up, expecting to see that awesome scene with the barbarian and the girl on like a giant stone bridge, I was totally crestfallen to instead find a totally ridiculous NWN with a new over-the-shoulder camera mode. I remember sending an awkward email to James Ohlen along the lines of, "Oh, I thought, ahh, the graphics style was kind of different." He got a good laugh.

EDIT2: Here are the screenshots I'm talking about: http://imgur.com/gallery/PmDpG/new

 

[Sizzle]

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.

Thanks for writing that. I'm sorry that your work didn't make it in, sounds like it would have been fun

 

[salaciousbcrumb]

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.

I take it you haven't seen people trying to make an attractive face in the MEA character creator? Basically the face you see there would have been someone fucking around for hours trying to make a decent face, before just going, fuck it that'll do, let's play this piece of shit.

 

[DeepOcean]

Polygon provides the In-depth coverage - "Mass Effect's most bangable aliens, ranked": https://archive.fo/lU6HN

garme jurnalizm!1

Kotaku - Here's How Mass Effect: Andromeda Handles Sex and Romance: http://archive.is/zKw8O
Arse Technica - The correct alien sex choices in the Mass Effect trilogy: http://archive.is/gek4h
Autostraddle - Mass Effect Characters, Ranked By Bangability: http://archive.is/VGX9E

"Oh God, I just got through a depression but now I'm fine... Just gonna read the news about videogames and enjoy some fun."

Read article about Mass Effect 4 "How to roleplay a guy sucking the four dicks pink alien and how that doesn't make you less of a man."

Grab the psychiatrist phone number "Doctor, please, intern me, the reasonable people are on the psychiatric hospital, those people outside are scaring me."

 

[salaciousbcrumb]

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.

There are far more than three, there's hours of the stuff and I'm not being hyperbolic here, everything I've seen in this game I would throw out if I were given the script to read. I'd go so far as to ask the writers what and who the characters are supposed to be, then scrap the characters and sack the writers, the writing is that bad and the voice actors aught to be ashamed as well, not just for their poor performance but actually reading this stuff without question for a paycheck.

The characters, and the dialogue are a fucking discrace and you would get better results from giving a bunch of schoolkids half an hour to think of characters and then another half hour to adlib a scene, again I'm not being hyberbolic. How this was written, looked over, edited, passed to a consultant, recorded and animated around, then edited and tweeked, with people spending hundreds of man hours over every minute of a scene and nobody mentioned it really is beyond comprehension.

 

[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.

I take it you haven't seen people trying to make an attractive face in the MEA character creator? Basically the face you see there would have been someone fucking around for hours trying to make a decent face, before just going, fuck it that'll d, let's play this piece of shit.

Like in the good old days of Oblivion. It's funny because in this they went back to the roots, the face editor of the original trilogy was awful and any custom face would make the facial animation look really awkward. From what I've seen the editor in Inquisition was way better.

 

[MRY]

I'm not sure this anecdote sheds any light on the question, but a funny random story from when I worked at TimeGate Studios on Axis & Allies. The publisher, fearing German censorship laws, put various limitations on what the game could show (no swastikas, no Holocaust, no SS, no Hitler). My script got bounced back from them for referring to the Germans as the "Third Reich." I then resubmitted it with "the Third Empire" and it was accepted. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Who knows how things happen in this world.

 

[Dexter]

BTW, I'm sure this is old news, but they basically had a rudimentary form of D:AO running in a modded NWN (for testing and iterating the dialogues and quests as the game engine was being developed). So when they sent me the "build" of "DA:O" and I loaded it up, expecting to see that awesome scene with the barbarian and the girl on like a giant stone bridge, I was totally crestfallen to instead find a totally ridiculous NWN with a new over-the-shoulder camera mode. I remember sending an awkward email to James Ohlen along the lines of, "Oh, I thought, ahh, the graphics style was kind of different." He got a good laugh.

EDIT2: Here are the screenshots I'm talking about: http://imgur.com/gallery/PmDpG/new

Afaik those were the Screens they used back in ~2004 for the first Announcement/E3 Reveal: http://www.ign.com/articles/2004/05/13/e3-2004-dragon-age

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...a-classic-rpg-poll.74414/page-11#post-2199712

I remember kinda being disappointed when it turned out to look completely different upon reveal.

 

[MRY]

Yeah, that's where I had seen them prior to starting work on the project.

 

[bat_boro]

Any indication how this is selling so far?

 

[skacky]

 

[Melcar]

Bioware is seriously fuck up man.

 

[Somberlain]

It's like Codex is having a beach party while M/S Bioware is sinking offshore

 

[AwesomeButton]

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.

I have something just for you. I don't think it's been posted yet:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-03-21-how-to-actually-enjoy-mass-effect-andromeda

How to actually enjoy Mass Effect: Andromeda
Play it again, SAM.

By Edwin Evans-Thirlwell Published 23/03/2017

There's enjoyment to be gleaned from Mass Effect: Andromeda, but in order to discover it, you might need a guide. No, not SAM, your cranially implanted AI assistant. SAM is awful - a toneless bore who doubles as a cautionary tale about leaving work notifications active on your phone, forever bleating at you to mine things, scan things, check your email, take vidcalls and spend your Andromeda Viability Points. As the vehicle for much of Mass Effect: Andromeda's more tedious content, he makes a far more convincing nemesis than the story's actual villain, who at least puts you through a few decent firefights en route to some scenery-chewing monologues about racial supremacy.

You can't mute SAM, alas, but you can read this article (or watch the accompanying video) about what to focus on in BioWare's fourth Mass Effect, a game of obscene bloat, hilarious and/or maddening glitches and ghastly hoop-jump design that harbours a few worthwhile missions, nice views and a sparky, generous array of combat options. Onwards!




Put off the filler

To seriously appreciate Mass Effect: Andromeda you've basically got to become a minor sociopath, resilient against all entreaties for aid. Spotted somebody fidgeting on the periphery of a scene, casting their eyes heaven-ward and crying "woe is me"? Halt, adventurer! Don't ask them what the matter is, because they'll only tell you they've lost their geology A-level notes and before you know it, you'll be picking over limestone formations in some godforsaken crevasse.

You can carry on playing after finishing Andromeda's campaign to complete the majority of side missions, so feel free to ignore some of the bittier offerings (e.g. scan X busted power boxes, find X herbal specimens, recon uncharted worlds etc) on your first runthrough. Bear in mind, though, that certain missions like the quests to investigate the missing turian and asari arks will affect the endgame a little. Companion loyalty quests are, as far as I can tell, completable after the endgame too, though some are tethered to your progress through the main storyline.

Another hub, another bunch of needy cattle to resolutely ignore.

Do the Vault missions first on each planet
Most of the game's explorable planets features a Remnant Vault - a vast, buried labyrinth made up of simple switch-and-platform puzzles that houses a mighty terraforming machine, activation of which bumps up the planet's viability for settlement by a whopping 40 per cent. It's absolutely worth doing these before any other activities, because planets are more pleasant to navigate once terraformed - it means you can spend longer away from the Nomad in some areas without running out of life support, and there are fewer, annoying, performance-killing particle effects to worry about. Once you've terraformed a planet, you'll also be able to found a Nexus outpost with its own crop of missions.

Vaults are quite entertaining in themselves, if repetitive. To reveal the entrance, you'll need to visit three monoliths and complete some simple sudoku-style puzzles, scanning the environment for glyphs and plugging them into four-by-four grids (you can spend tokens gathered at smaller Remnant ruins to auto-complete these puzzles). Once you're in, it's all about using switches to raise platforms, unlock doors or erect defences such as energy bubbles that shield you from harm - gentle conundrums that accompany more taxing firefights against Remnant robots. There's a pinch of Halo's AI ecology to how the Remnant do battle - you'll encounter Assembler units that like to hide and build other units, and artillery-type enemies who dig in behind frontal shields.

Tweak the settings
One of the Andromeda's many inelegances is that conversations are sometimes inaudible because one participant is a dozen metres away, or even in a different room entirely. It's especially aggravating when you're trying to follow squad mate banter, so hit the Settings screen first thing and switch on subtitles. You might also want to set the game to always display objective markers on screen, because the world map can be a little opaque.

I could really see a list feature ranking gaming's countless long-dead civilisations in order of practical-mindedness.

You don't have to craft...
If wading through turgid menus and weighing the merits of a +5 shield regen enhancement vs +4 tech area-of-effect numbs your imagination, fear not - there are plenty of gun parts, armour pieces, mods and consumables to pluck from bodies or treasure crates out in the world, including bespoke armour sets for the different species in the game, and some flashy N7 gear from the original trilogy. In general, if the critical path through a dungeon heads one way, always check around the corner in the other direction - there will, I pretty much guarantee you, be a treasure of some description. Likewise, if there's a low wall at the rear of a chamber with something mission-critical right in the centre, look behind that wall. This is a very predictably designed game.

...but crafting is cool
If you are in a lather at the thought of trading your Mark II Initiative Helmet for some sweet kett headgear, and you don't mind taking the time to gather raw materials, there's an absolute embarrassment of crafting options in Andromeda - three research trees for Milky Way, Helius Cluster and Remnant weapons and gear, plus gun mods you can apply (or remove) before each mission, and one-use augmentations that dramatically rework the item in question. This, for me, is where much of the satisfaction of the game is to be found - via judicious application of mods and augmentations, you can craft an assault rifle that fires wall-penetrating homing plasma darts, a shotgun whose pellets explode after impact, and chest armour that electrifies people who melee attack you. Remember to deconstruct (not sell) spare weapons or mods for crafting materials, and to free up precious inventory space.

You don't have to rotate your squad
No need to worry about keeping your sidekicks occupied - in Andromeda, characters level up even when not in the field, so everybody should be fighting fit by the endgame, providing you remember to allocate those skill points. Stick to the people whose company you enjoy - in my case, that would be either hard-nosed, soft-centred turian smuggler Vetra or Jaal, your stalwart angaran chum (characters don't always get along with each other, not that this affects the combat - pick Liam and PeeBee and you'll be treated to some tiresome grizzling about life priorities and putting the team first). If you're struggling in combat, I recommend bringing Cora - her biotic charge is rarely a match-winner but does at least tend to put her in the way of incoming fire, and her higher level abilities include some useful group buffs. You don't have any real control over comrades, but this way they can boost your chances indirectly.

Jaal dislikes hot weather and will remind you of this frequently.

Shortcut the resource-gathering
Every time you increase your Nexus level (a measure of your overall progress in settling Andromeda, mostly fed by carrying out missions on planets) you get a cryopod point to spend on thawing out Milky Way colonists for passive bonuses. Prioritise the ones that lead to regular deliveries of crafting materials, credits and so on - you'll have less gathering to do out in the field. On the other hand, to gain Nexus levels you'll need to grind side missions to earn Andromeda points, and some cryopod unlocks are tethered to how many planet-specific quests you've completed, so there's drudgery involved either way. Don't forget to pick the cryopod option that raises your inventory cap, too.


Prioritise the best planets
The shimmering ice world of Voeld is glorious to behold, distinguished by a massive kett cruiser bolted to a mountain at the map's centre, and features one of the game's better story missions. But as generic as it may appear, desert beauty-spot Elaaden is probably the pick - it's home to a mission involving a gigantic sandworm creature, a massive Remnant derelict that calls to mind that of Ridley Scott's Alien, and a vertiginous krogan colony where you'll come across some of the more amusing incidental writing. Elaaden is also more visually varied than it seems at first glance, mixing towering sandstone structures with rolling, wreckage-laden dunes and fungal grottos, and the game's armour textures look lovely in the heat and dust.

Choke upon the wrath of my magic spanner, henchman #579!

Dress to survive, not impress
One of Andromeda's annoying inconsistencies is that while you can revive squad mates, they can't return the favour - a pain in the gonads indeed during later Remnant Vault escapades that disallow manual saves, where you'll be steadily lasered to a crisp if you stray out of cover. For minimal frustration, go large on gear that keeps you upright and intact, rather than boosting your powers. Remnant Heritage armour in particular is resource-intensive - it requires large amounts of uranium, a scarcer commodity - but worth the trouble for its sizeable buffs to your shield regeneration and damage resistance. By the endgame I was able to tank multiple grenade blasts, all thanks to good old Remnant knowhow. Remember to plug a few points into skilltrees that increase your sturdiness, too, like Barrier or Combat Fitness.

 

[Lazing Dirk]

awesomebutton more like oldbutton

 

[Azalin]

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.

 

[AwesomeButton]

awesomebutton more like oldbutton

Yeah, a whole 8 hours left. Excuse me that I don't keenly follow the coverage of every crappy game. I'm just here for the lulz.

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

Most of the game's explorable planets features a Remnant Vault - a vast, buried labyrinth made up of simple switch-and-platform puzzles that houses a mighty terraforming machine, activation of which bumps up the planet's viability for settlement by a whopping 40 per cent.

>Make a game about finding habitable worlds
>Rip off Total Recall by sticking giant, ancient, alien planet terraforming machines
>Ruin your premise of exploration by having them coincidentally be on almost every world


Oh and lol, all of them terraform atmospheres suitable for human life even though they were made for/by aliens.

How convenient.

 

[Hellion]

Just found out that they withhold for use in future DLC explain the absence of Quarians, Elcor and Hanar in-game. It appears that all of the above species were supposed fly together in the Quarians' Ark Ship, but it broke down just before its scheduled take-off so their departure was delayed. "They should arrive in Andromeda sometime in the near future" according to in-game dialogue.

"DA:I in space" seems like a pretty accurate tagline in general. But with even worse animations, writing and companion NPCs.

 

[imweasel]

"DA:I in space" seems like a pretty accurate tagline in general. But with even worse animations, writing and companion NPCs.

This is what Bioware promised gamers back in 2015:

Mass Effect 4 won’t be Dragon Age: Inquisition in space

 

[Sykar]

Not just shitty animations but also shitty colission detection, what a surprise, Bioderp.

 

[Artyoan]

I played all the Mass Effect games for the first time in sequence knowing little to nothing about them, only that the ending of the trilogy needed the lowest of low expectations. I kept direct spoilers to a minimum.

I really enjoyed it. Right after having finished, I would have loved nothing more than another Mass Effect game.

I have no intention of ever buying this. Even before the poor reviews, there was not one aspect of this game that didn't look as generic as possible. I had assumed it would have at least some quality to it as far as the basics go. Even that was too much.

This turned out to be a dumpster fire well beyond what I thought it could be. Throw in Bioware's progressive/identity based politics and a large dose of schadenfreude, this roasting will be going on for quite some time.

 

[moon knight]

 

[ColonelTeacup]

They should have called this thing Mass Effect: African Tranny.

Just ran into a hologram of Jien Garson, the woman who started the Andromeda Initiative and died in an accident upon arriving. She's another a tranny with a lisp.

They also felt the need to tell us that krogan have 4 testicles.

Weren't the Krogans near extinct in the old trilogy? Maybe the wonderful new advances in transexual surgery are connected to the sudden rise in the Krogan population...

IIRC they were steadily increasing in population due to how often they fuck, and spew out eggs, so the genophage slowed them down but to acceptable numbers for the other Species, so those other species could compete and not be overrun like before. Mordun mentions this to you too, the point of the Genophage was to slow their population, never to stop them. The reasoning fori Krogans never creating an empire again is due to them loving to fight too much, which causes them to become mercenaries or become wandering bands, which Wrex was trying to stave off and unite all the Krogan clans, to try and make a Krogan empire and boost their numbers further and stay away from fighting and warring everywhere, just to bring up their numbers.

If they did reverse the Genophage on the Ark or wtv the fuck that ships called, they've fucked themselves. It doesn't take a lot of forsight to see what will happen when the Species that breed like ants, love to go to war, and so far as I can tell, always create warcentric governments or clans will do once they start to outbreed all the competition and have a shot at being the rulers of the new galaxy.

This has probably brought up by someone somewhere in Codex, but procreation aspect created a stage for some very interesting power play in Galaxy. Sadly it went underused but some of the decent parts of ME2 and ME3 had some of that.

Krogan with their super breeding and need for space and Asari, who can reproduce with any species and offspring will always be Asari. Geth, another faction that could just keep building more Geth. For me it looks like Humans and Turians, (Quarians even if they had a planet) perhaps Salarians were in pretty interesting situation what comes to galactic political play.

Of course some humans, BioDrones had to come and mess it up because they were willing to fuck anything, so I guess they decided in BW so, let's forget this and make more species 'romancable'.

Good point. Bioware really dropped the ball on this game. Personally I would have found it far more interesting if the game centered on finding a suitable planet while you try to keep the arks together and deal with rising political tensions between the arks as resources become scarce, and different political parties emerge on each ark, with motivations that end up clashing with other parties on each respective ark, as well as rising tensions due to cultural, racial and resource issues. It would have been much more interesting imo. You could even compete with different groups on each ark when searching planets to find needed resources, causing rivalries between groups from each orgnaization as well.