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

[J1M]

You can't complete the "Date three people" achievement if you're gay right now. There are only 2 gay options.

Imagine you're gay. And you can't complete the achievement. Just imagine it.

I imagine that anyone degenerate enough to need to date three virtual people would also be degenerate enough to use a straight female character for said purpose.

 

[ColonelTeacup]

Dunno if this has been posted yet. Hilarious if the allegations are true.

I'm highly skeptical. Between the inside comments we've had from developers talking about toxic culture, mis management and lack of social cohesion, I'm incredibly dubious about
it all being managements fault. Rather, it sounds like a bunch of developers don't want their reputations ruined and are discreetly reaching out to try and lay the brunt of the
blame on the management. Especially when the former animations and lighting from the demos of ME:A compared to the finished product. That's not to say I believe it's all the
developers fault and not those in charge, I believe both are equally inept at their jobs. Of course there's most likely talented developers there, considering they have over 100
people working on andromeda and some of the models and textures are imprssive, but other areas are obviously lacking, which I doubt are the fault of external factors, when the
trailers that have been shown in comparison to the released product show a massive decrease in lighting, texturing, facial animations as well as animations in general when it comes
to the finished product.

Hi, you're new here so I'll give you some advice.
You don't need to enter manual returns like this.
There's no need to do that. This site will arrange the text for you automatically (just like a Word document does).

Oh. Is there a certain prerequisite for this to happen, instead of the run on sentences that reach the complete end of the posting box? I despise when I create one long run on sentence that reaches the end of my monitor, rather than a few perfectly formatted sentences that are smaller and easier to read due to being relatively short and all the same length.

 

[ColonelTeacup]

You can't complete the "Date three people" achievement if you're gay right now. There are only 2 gay options.

Imagine you're gay. And you can't complete the achievement. Just imagine it.

I imagine that anyone degenerate enough to need to date three virtual people would also be degenerate enough to use a straight female character for said purpose.

What of Bethesdas Fallout 4? IIRC you could romance every single companion, which must have been 6-10 people in 1 playthrough, some not even human. I think you could even have sex with a Robobrain at one point. I'm not certain on the dog, or the Super mutant, as I never lasted long enough to find out, though unless i'm misremembering, all Super mutants are sterile by default, which was a major point of being able to defeat the master without combat, by way of convincing him of this fact.

 

[GreyWardens Rock]

I give you permission to go and do it for me, good luck!

I'm not:
1. on reddit or someplace similar (not that it's a bad thing)
2. playing this shit (which is sort of a bad thing)

I'll be giving this a playthrough on my DRM free copy, just to see how far Nu-Bioware has fallen.

not DRM "free"

50GB seems much too large a size for this kind of game wasn't the original ME only 4GB?

about 7.

I really enjoyed various aspects of Kingdoms of Analur Reckoning

that a typo? great one.

 

[Excidium II]

In milky way, Shepard collar-grabs thugs.

In Andromeda, ryder gets shoved like a nerd being introduced to girls

 

[Reinhardt]

At least gays can fuck humans, not some space animals.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.pcgamer.com/mass-effect-andromedas-sequel-should-ditch-nearly-everything-about-andromeda/

Mass Effect: Andromeda’s sequel should ditch nearly everything about Andromeda
There's no more blood to draw from the kett or the angara.

Spoilers ahead, including for the ending.

I finished Mass Effect: Andromeda last night—the main story, that is, because I will never hundred-percent those wasted planets—and felt the opposite of what I've been feeling for nearly 10 years now. I don’t want more Mass Effect. At least, not if it stays this course.

Andromeda is a thousand ton tangle of narrative cables spread across a galaxy, ambitious and unwieldy. Characters reference events that haven’t happened, talk over themselves, don’t know if you’re coming or going—their dialogue only guesses at what part of the tangle you’ve navigated so far. That isn't my problem with Andromeda. Only BioWare makes RPGs like this, and each of its games is a hell of an achievement, even one as knotty and wild as Andromeda.

I enjoyed Andromeda in part because of that heft. As I pushed through bugs and boring sidequests it could still delight me with a casual exchange between my squadmates, a reference to something I’d done earlier or a joke at my expense. I’m not hung up on animation glitches and I’ve pushed aside the reams of dull, expository dialogue to appreciate the fun exchanges where I’m getting shit for cheating on my ship girlfriend with my land boyfriend.

Even if it were untangled and smoothed over, which BioWare intends on doing, I still wouldn’t have left Andromeda feeling primed to come back. If a sequel happens—and this isn’t necessarily the start of a new trilogy—I hope they freeze me and shoot me at another star 600 years away. Start the whole thing over, because this canvas was primed with bad paint: a science fiction story that runs away from all its interesting science fiction ideas. Andromeda is afraid of its own premise.

Party boat colonizers

Few aboard the arks had a good reason to colonize Andromeda. It wasn’t for a more comfortable life. Settler life is hard. It wasn’t for freedom or wealth—though the civilizations of the Milky Way are capitalist—because there’s no way to trade with their home galaxy or ever return, and the Initiative isn't exactly egalitarian. It wasn’t to escape impending doom, though doom was impending. When asked, the characters answer: Because science! Because exploration! To escape something in my past?

These are ridiculous reasons to colonize a new galaxy. The Milky Way includes 100 billion stars, and that wasn’t enough?

If you watched all the dad fragments, you know the truth: the Reapers were the motivation for the Andromeda Initiative. Of course they were, but why this is a secret baffles me. If the settlers believed they were the last of their kind, a science fiction story could begin—what would humanity do to survive? But with nearly everyone blissfully ignorant, they’re just a bunch of weirdo tourists who slept their way across dark space because it seemed cool.

The Andromeda Initiative is an aimless, friendly invasion, which helps it avoid too much discomfort. Rather than conquering Aya and Havarl, the two most viable planets, humans and the Milky Way aliens make nice with the pleasant angaran natives, who integrate easily even as we kill their people in skirmishes with the anti-alien Roekaar faction. The real enemies are the kett, after all, competing invaders who are violent, cult-like assimilators akin to the borg. We’re cleared to kill them on sight within minutes of arriving in Andromeda. And shooting the Roekaar is just self-defense on our part, not on theirs.

But it is self-defense for them. The Roekaar are called xenophobic for their distrust of aliens, but they’re not xenophobes, they’re responding to an invasion. The Initiative is clearly more advanced than the angara, and when advanced civilizations meet less-advanced civilizations, history is clear on what happens—I assume even in Mass Effect’s world.

But not this time! Andromeda concludes that despite a few political differences here and there, we’re fundamentally good invaders in contrast to the kett, who are fundamentally bad invaders. They want to assimilate you into their collective. We, however, just came to hang out.

Had the kett been just as hostile but natives themselves—not evil co-invaders bent on galactic domination—Andromeda’s characters would’ve had some real struggles. If we win the war, which we initiated by flying into their galaxy, what will we do to them then? Does our survival matter more than theirs? As it is, the issue is intentionally avoided and then barely addressed with the Roekaar, who Ryder kills without much guilt. We came to a new place, defeated the other invaders, and saved the natives (except for a few bad seeds who just didn't get us), just like no culture in recorded history has done. We're the kindest colonialists ever.

Forgetting earth

The Nexus uprising comes closer to having an idea. What happens when a civilization is stranded, never able to return to home, and hope is dying? Andromeda’s answer is authoritarianism, rebellion, and exile. This bubble is prodded more thoroughly than the colonization bubble, but never popped. Is Director Tann a fascist hiding behind pleasantries? Even if he is, Ryder can laugh it off.

Coincidentally, I’ve been reading Liu Cixin’s science fiction series, Remembrance of Earth’s Past, alongside playing Andromeda. It also involves aliens who threaten human life, interstellar travel, and space colonization—and I could quote it endlessly.

“Life reached an evolutionary milestone when it climbed onto land from the ocean, but those first fish that climbed onto land ceased to be fish,” warns one character in Death’s End, the final novel of the trilogy. “Similarly, when humans truly enter space and are freed from the Earth, they cease to be human. So, to all of you I say this: When you think about heading into outer space without looking back, please reconsider. The cost you must pay is far greater than you could imagine.”

The cost in Andromeda’s case was about 10 hours of space mining, but more to the point, I can’t think of a single interesting quote from Andromeda. Where Liu fills hundreds of pages with questions about cosmic sociology, space fascism, quantum mechanics, colonization, and war, Andromeda whispers them. They float around, listless and transparent, drifting away when the story needs to progress and far duller questions are asked and answered. What would happen if evil aliens assimilated other species, integrating their DNA and turning them into drone-like cultists, but you could kill them? You’d kill them. What would happen if you found ancient alien tech that could terraform planets? You might try to turn it on. Did God create us? Maybe, or maybe it was ancient aliens.

Leave it all behind, I say. The kett aren’t interesting. The angara aren’t interesting. They’re muck that chokes all the actually interesting ideas in Mass Effect, like why a society terrified by artificial intelligence keeps building the damn things, and whether or not every corner of the universe is stuffed with aliens who want to kill us. If you believe Liu, it is, and for a good reason—one Andromeda doesn’t even wonder about while we craft our shotguns. No one asks why the kett are doing what they're doing. They're just bad.

The big Mass Effect reset, as much as I enjoyed the little character details and the combat, was a dud for me. It starts with a great premise—humanity is invading a new galaxy—and then shies away from asking what humanity becomes as a result. But it can be reset again.

As Chris wrote in his optimistic take, Mass Effect is a series of reinventions. They’re always imperfect, but starting with Mass Effect 2 each game has ambitiously formed its own identity and defied expectations. What I currently expect from an Andromeda sequel is another big kett bad guy—the end sets that up very clearly—and more driving around planets helping people stuck in sinkholes. I hope it defies that expectation.

 

[hajro]

Three body problem was dope, too bad i dont have enough time to read

 

[cvv]

Three body problem was dope, too bad i dont have enough time to read

Reading Dark Forest now and it's even better. It heavily reminds me of Dune, with all the intrigues and mindbenders. Also dark and brutal without being emogrimdark. A breath of fresh air compared to the recent mushy emo Western sci-fi by liberal hipster urbanites.

 

[Andyman Messiah]

I've honestly enjoyed every BioWare game ever, in some form, but I'm still not interested in Andromeda and I will never play it, and I think I know exactly why that is.

I honestly might have played this and enjoyed it thoroughly, it really looks like an okay shooter with some wonky animations and dialogue, but it just doesn't have a good Shepard replacement.

It's not an ok shooter unfortunately. The map size, a.i., encounter design, semi-auto fire rate and weapons damage on higher difficulties (esp. "assault rifles"), camera perspectives (zoomed in gears of war in an open world game with huge maps but also close-in fighting arena areas where you can be attacked from all sides) and so on and so forth just are not designed to work with each other at all. ME3 actually did the shooting and also the actual impact/damage of the abilities better imo.

Hmm. What little footage I've seen made me think they had made a return to Mass Effect 1's combat, an awkward third-person shooter with some half-assed cover functionality. I very much prefer the full cover shooter combat in ME2/3 but I thought ME1 was at the very least passable.

Everyone also treats the protag like a loser too. The AI bosses him around and the companions don't really defer to his authority. Also no instances of collar grabbing but lots of awkwardness. Typical Ryder:

Well, based on everything I've seen, Ryder *is* a loser. I don't think I've ever seen a serious or angry or "jerk" dialogue option. I've been watching some gameplay videos and it's been nothing but Yes, No, and Joking/Obnoxious answers.

Also Deus Ex music is way too good for any Mass Effect.

 

[pippin]

What makes them think they have it in them to make a sequel?
inb4 Obsidian makes it with MCA as a hired gun

 

[erickaqua]

Three Body Trilogy pretty much murdered most alien movies for me to be honest, the Dark Forest Theory just makes too much sense!

 

[Infinitron]

Oh boy.

 

[Projas]

Good to see they have their priorities in order

 

[pippin]

Why don't they make the game all over again if there's so many tings to "fix"?

 

[Excidium II]

Oh boy.

Those statements always look p. funny.

 

[Space Satan]

Dialogues are unbearable. Fanfiction.net unbearable
Facial animations are unbearable.
Cuscene animations are unbearable AND mandatory. Explore a system? Here, play unskippable animation EVERY time. On EVERY empty planet.
Not a single dialogue option other than YEA! and SURE! Not even a trace of brancing choices.
Faggotry at its finest.

 

[Tom Selleck]

the NHIS reported in July 2014 that 1.6 percent of Americans identify as gay or lesbian, and 0.7 percent identify as bisexual.[1] In a Williams Institute review based on an June–September 2012 Gallup poll, approximately 3.4 percent of American adults identify themselves as being LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender).[2] An earlier report published in April 2011 by the Williams Institute estimated that 3.8 percent of Americans identified as gay/lesbian, bisexual, or transgender: 1.7 percent as lesbian or gay, 1.8 percent as bisexual, and 0.3 percent as transgender.

I mean, obviously such a lucrative market that you want to be spending resources catering to them and also just them.

ALSO

• "both [with the trannies] internally at Bioware"

The Montreal studio has already added eight employees over the summer, and the remaining 20 new hires will comprise programmers, designers and artists. BioWare is looking for more senior people, Roy said, as they will form the core of a studio that will ultimately employ about 150 people.

0.3% of 150 = 0.45

So, statistically speaking, there should be less than half of one tranny at Bioware.

Of course we know that's not the case. But food for thought.

 

[Echo Mirage]

Oh boy.

Hmmm, so they need one more gay romance option to calm the social justice noise and round out the numbers. And here they are rewriting a tranny npc. And all on short notice...

Eitherway here's hoping they fuck it up and make it even worse.

 

[pippin]

Oh boy.

Those statements always look p. funny.

They don't even bother to put their company logo, or the game's logo, and they don't sign it. Nobody is taking the hits at Bioware. Nobody is taking responsability of the things they have done. They really seem to be half dead at this point.

 

[Drax]

I told you guys it was best to wait for FitGirl's repack.
Apparently...

Upcoming repacks
⇢ Mass Effect: Andromeda, 28.2 GB

Ridiculous.

 

[Padzi]

Oh boy.

Those statements always look p. funny.

They don't even bother to put their company logo, or the game's logo, and they don't sign it. Nobody is taking the hits at Bioware. Nobody is taking responsability of the things they have done. They really seem to be half dead at this point.

Are they serious? I thought someone was just taking a piss. I don't understand Bioware.

 

[RPGMasterLvl2]

Oh boy.

It's hilarious that BioWare thinks there will still be trannies 800 years into the future.

Future doctors will be shocked that we considered chopping off someone's dick as an acceptable treatment of mental illness. We will look like barbarians.

In the future characters like this will be seen as a ridiculous early 21st century anachronism.

 

[Kaz]

It's hilarious that BioWare thinks there will still be trannies 800 years into the future.

The problem isn't even that. Trannies and gays shouldn't be part of a mission dedicated to colonize a new place (Andromeda). They can't reproduce, all they will do is waste use more limited resources. The Bioware "writers" will never acknowledge that reality.

 

[Iznaliu]

Future doctors will be shocked that we considered chopping off someone's dick as an acceptable treatment of mental illness. We will look like barbarians.

I somehow doubt this, but even if you're right, ME:A isn't meant to be hard sci-fi.