Mass Effect: Andromeda Pre-Release Thread

[PhantasmaNL]

Agreed on the LA Noire face-tech, still looks incredible. But didnt they spend years-and-years and an actual fortune on that? Also they hired real actors (from the B-list, but still). I like when you vaguely recognize a LA-N character but cannot quite name them.

Instead the characters in MEA look like retarded blow-up dolls.

 

[veevoir]

EA, please, would you just shut down this studio like you used to do with the other ones you bought? Bioware had its time, time to put it to rest.

Better studios that Bioware were closed for not even failing, just not getting the profits as high as they wanted, so how the fuck is Bioware still a thing?

Save yourself from playing this cockfest. It's not too late.

You're joking ,right? Miss all that fun? I'm totally buying it out of some bargain bin in the future, get some popcorn and a ton of vodka.
This is gonna be "so bad it is hilarious fun" selection, same as with some movies.

Why waste money? A few years from now you'll find it for free on Origin.

I see your point. Either that or on swedish game depository.

 

[commie]

Agreed on the LA Noire face-tech, still looks incredible. But didnt they spend years-and-years and an actual fortune on that? Also they hired real actors (from the B-list, but still). I like when you vaguely recognize a LA-N character but cannot quite name them.

Instead the characters in MEA look like retarded blow-up dolls.

Yeah that's why it didn't really become a thing as you need the actors themselves. LA Noire also had a relatively narrower cast for its 26 or so cases and human only to boot. For an RPG with a ton of sidequests and characters of all types and species, you'd need to add hordes of people and work even more to animate the Minotaurs etc. to get the same fidelity as the humanoid NPC's. Costs would go through the ass.

 

[Mark Richard]

After playing some more and gaining access to the first planet, the game takes a nose dive right into mmo land. Combat is still fun, the jumping and shooting, but at this point the game is starting to lose me. The whole running around and clicking on random things is not that much fun. Getting serious Inquisition vibes. Also met two new team mates, they ain't no Garrus or Liara. I want a nice structured adventure, since it isn't a RPG. This collectatron stuff feels old.

The game's length is a concern considering every prior entry in the Mass Effect series was a compact 25 hour experience. The success of Mass Effect intruded on Dragon Age's development, now it sounds like the success of Dragon Age is intruding on Mass Effect's development.

 

[salaciousbcrumb]

Someones edited some of the best snippets together. I was going to do an edit myself but the amount of shit content is just overwhelming, the scene alone with Tired face and mong Ryder is four minutes of pure gold. I'm going to have to check out the other videos today of that female Ryder playthrough, just look at how much shit has been harvested from part three alone, there's a solid 5-10 minutes of pisstake memes in just 40 minutes of playtime if the rest of the game is up to the same snuff then a video showing all the goofs would run well over 4 hours.

Bioware has delvered a masterpiece I'm calling it right now, this game right here will be a lolcow the likes of which has never been seen, bigger than DA2, ME3 and the TORtanic combined.

 

[Talby]

Someones edited some of the best snippets together. I was going to do an edit myself but the amount of shit content is just overwhelming, the scene alone with Tired face and mong Ryder is four minutes of pure gold. I'm going to have to check out the other videos today of that female Ryder playthrough, just look at how much shit has been harvested from part three alone, there's a solid 5-10 minutes of pisstake memes in just 40 minutes of playtime if the rest of the game is up to the same snuff then a video showing all the goofs would run well over 4 hours.

Bioware has delvered a masterpiece I'm calling it right now, this game right here will be a lolcow the likes of which has never been seen, bigger than DA2, ME3 and the TORtanic combined.

BioWare can still salvage this mess, they just need to add laugh tracks to every scene and market it as the first slapstick comedy sci-fi RPG.

 

[HoboForEternity]

 

[Rahdulan]

Golem? It all makes sense now, I guess.

 

[illuknisaa]

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

Golem? It all makes sense now, I guess.

hmm, an artificial person making artificial persons. Inception!
Perhaps he based their face and body movements on his own when the rabbi who created him taught him how to humans behave.

 

[Talby]

 

[salaciousbcrumb]

Spoiler

Toaster warning Gif within!!!!

I was still looking at the same video and only went back ten seconds from Tired Face. Basically at this point we might as well make webms gifs and take screenshots of the entire thing, it's so bad in so many ways.

 

[Hobo Elf]

EA, please, would you just shut down this studio like you used to do with the other ones you bought? Bioware had its time, time to put it to rest.

Better studios that Bioware were closed for not even failing, just not getting the profits as high as they wanted, so how the fuck is Bioware still a thing?

My guess is that BioWaste still makes just enough money that they are still profitable, but they also pander to the SJWaggots, so keeping the studio around is great for PR. EA can point at DICE and Bio and say "look how progressive we are, you guys!!".

 

[bylam]

Love this menu though, the shape and color reminds me of ME1's menu

Spoiler

Holy shit, they made their menu goatse!

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

Spoiler

Toaster warning Gif within!!!!

I was still looking at the same video and only went back ten seconds from Tired Face. Basically at this point we might as well make webms gifs and take screenshots of the entire thing, it's so bad in so many ways.

Man this is really lazy. It reminds me how bad DE MD intro ran on my computer, people walking through each other, materializing out of nowhere or disappearing all of a sudden, and people occupying literally each other.

 

[Jarmaro]

PCgamer isn't too kind for Andromeda, entire text is there but I will quote most important (as I see it) informations: http://www.pcgamer.com/we-have-mixed-feelings-about-the-first-few-hours-of-mass-effect-andromeda/
Keep notice that it isn't one man's opinion but fragments of 5 people telling their experiences, so it's even more valuable.

Andromeda starts off in the worst way possible, barely introducing you to a brother and father you’re supposed to care about before putting them in grave danger, then handing you the Pathfinder torch in typical Bioware ‘you’re the chosen one’ fashion. First contact devolves into a gunfight within seconds, and the big alien threat are goofy rock-faced bad guys who we know next to nothing about other than their ships are big and make scary sounds. On top of it, the first real mission in distant space takes place on a planet that could pass for Arizona at a glance. There’s ancient alien technology there. It’s big, angular, and requires solving Sudoku puzzles to interact with. At four or so hours in, Andromeda hasn’t given me a single reason to keep playing. Where are the interesting characters? The intriguing side quests and story bits? So far, it feels like Mass Effect fan fiction. Even so, I want to keep going. Bioware tends to stumble with their beginnings, so I’m hoping everything eventually congeals in a way that finally hooks me.

I will say this: calling Ryder's story a typical 'Chosen One' deal doesn't quite fit. I mean, you literally are chosen, in the game's first hour, to be the Pathfinder. But it's a person who makes that choice, not destiny or—as in Shepard's case—a magic space monolith. And the special powers that being a Pathfinder grants are tied into the game's existing fiction, a reasonably important part of the story, and a link back to one of the original trilogy's key themes.

Last week I wrote that I’d be fine if “Andromeda ends up being just quite a good Mass Effect game”, but today even that feels like a distant dream. I’ll caveat what I’m about to say by noting I’m only six hours in, but right now I’m not sure I even want to play much more, and that hurts given how much I was looking forward to this. Wait until you hear some of the writing, which is regularly straight up asinine. At one point I ran a group of Kett over in the Nomad and Ryder shouted out triumphantly: “Speedbump!” Ugh, ugh, ugh.

One of the things that’s really bumming me out so far is I just don’t seem to like any of the companions. Before it was a real Sophie’s choice who to take on a mission, because you wouldn’t want to miss out on bonding with Garrus, or Legion being all robo awkward. But in Andromeda, eesh. They all say such dumb stuff in combat too. Liam, in particular, is an absolute shuttle crash of a character.]

Returning to the set up, because that’s all we’re allowed to talk about, it blows my mind how clumsily the story is introduced. [Spoiler warning.] In the very first scene you wake to find your sibling is stuck in cold storage, and may never wake up. But because you’ve never seen the Ryder twins interact, and so have no investment in their relationship, it’s completely inert dramatically. The same goes for the antagonists, the Kett. You understand they’re bad simply because they shoot at you on sight, but I feel no actual antipathy for them. I laughed out loud when the big bad did his “grr, I’m pissed” face after he couldn’t open a monolith. That’s it? That’s what we’re given to glean from his character notes? The colonists they’ve massacred exist only as the very occasional body the away team stumbles across, so I also don’t care about them. BioWare, so often lauded for storytelling, seems to have settled on neither showing or telling, but just assuming we’ll accept these guys as some sort of rent-a-nemesis.

Guys, the planet scanning is awful. How did they make the planet scanning actively worse than Mass Effect 2? And even then, it was just spherical acupuncture, a pretty mindless minigame where you move a reticle around an orb until it vibrates. Now, moving between planets requires watching a slow first-person travel animation from the perspective of the Tempest. Getting between planets can take 10 to 15 seconds and most of the planets are completely devoid of resources. The ones that have anything just take a single click to suck up everything they’ve got, and just shows up as a tiny indication of the left side of the screen. +159 Iron or 50 Milky Way Research points or something. At least flash that stuff on the screen in big letters to tell me what a good space explorer I am. Even if it just gets me enough junk to buy one gun, I need to feel like all that time slowly crawling between empty planets was worth it.

 

[Multiple Sarcasm]

people occupying literally each other.

Kinky.

 

[Lagole Gon]

Now when I think about it...

Did Bioware use brother/sister selection... just to avoid a proper gender selection screen with 72+ options?

 

[HansDampf]

To be honest, while LA Noire faces can look pretty amazing, there are also moments where they look *extremely* fucking weird.

They can look "too real" sometimes like a real face slapped onto a low-poly character.

Did Witcher 3 use mocap? I don't think so.

 

[Cyberarmy]

So this is quickly becoming "The Turkish Star Wars (The man who saved the world)" of games kind of bad.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Worse pre launch of a Bioware game ever, this shit is hilariously bad and I bet people ate Bioware and EA are already sharpening knifes to stab the sacrificial cucks who will be deemed responsible for this failure.

Just look at this article from a gaming site... Unimaginable for a AAA release.

http://www.vg247.com/2017/03/16/mas...-have-already-reduced-it-to-a-laughing-stock/

 

[Naveen]

Most of their people right now are fairly new to the games industry. Once I read that people working on this game were doing it for the first time in their lives.

First timers? Funny, wasn't Baldur's Gate something like that, too?

 

[pippin]

Most of their people right now are fairly new to the games industry. Once I read that people working on this game were doing it for the first time in their lives.

First timers? Funny, wasn't Baldur's Gate something like that, too?

Baldur's Gate wasn't the first game in their careers, though. It could serve a point to describe Bioware as decline enablers, since very few DND rules made it into BG, and it's one of the first really popular rtwp games.

 

[Reinhardt]

Sign of aggression.

 

[veevoir]

Sign of aggression.

Forced rear entry