Raithe

But say what you will about Rogue One...

I think the thing that gets me is that ME:Andromeda is full of interesting concepts and "could have worked" elements that for some reason are just... mishandled or not developed out, or generally executed in a way that doesn't quite work. I can understand how resources need to be managed during game development, but they laid the groundwork and ideas and then did nothing (or didn't do it that great). The idea that as you increase viability throughout the Cluster and find resources that the Nexus will grow and change. You get to choose which Cryo-Pods are woken up in order and depending on which you get mechanical boosts via Military/Science/Commerce but no actual fluff, its purely a mechanical number resource rather than having an in-game/universe effect. Although you had the trailer hype about the Nexus growing and constructing, that turns out to purely have been the in-universe Andromeda Initiative stuff and not actual game elements. There are basically two Nexus you have : The dark version when Hyperion arrives that's half shut down, then the "turned on" version after you put that first Outpost on Eos. I mean sure, as you locate other Arks and encounter the Angara you get a few more people and races wandering around and several overheard conversations change or such, but that's it. The maps and look stays the same. There's no change to the visuals of it. Outposts - On the one hand, that very first outpost has a few interesting aspects in the sense that you start it up and it's in one condition, you get a few quests related to troubles they're having or ways you can help out. Then after travelling around the cluster you return and get a nice bit about how the colony has developed while you've been away (both the outpost and the planet itself). But then that never happens with any of the other outposts you set up. So it turns what could have been an interesting way to connect you in to the outposts into a one-off storytelling exercise rather than involving game-element. Also for a niggling thing, while your map will show the location of major quest locations (or where you can pick them up) and some of the side quests, and quite often shows where members of your crew are lurking if they're on the map.... you have to hunt down the locations of important outpost people, which means you can potentially miss out on background conversations and some of the minor side-quests because you didn't realise that in the middle of those three non-speaking npc's standing in a crowd was a 4th who happens to be the outposts chief science officer who actually has conversation options. I like the idea that Research is split from Development. The science of discovering things doesn't always mean you have the resources to produce things. The scanning stuff added to the feel of being a Pathfinder and not just some military commando-type. However, it kind of falls apart due to a slightly awkward UI, and that the only thing you can R&D is guns, armour, and mods to either. Seriously, once you pick one gun type to use, it's not like you actually need to research the 20 other varieties of Assault Rifle "just in case". It's not like you can change your companions equipment, as it's only Ryder who uses them. If the research and development actually had some useful effect beyond that it would have been nice. Or even if you could Research other things that could provide help to Outposts, colonists, and Nexus itself. I ended the game with a huge amount of Research points I never spent because there was never any point to using them. You pretty much choose a gun, a suit of amour, and keep researching their improvements as you gain access to them when you level up. Beyond that, eh. Exploring systems and planet scanning. Okay, it's gorgeous imagery for travelling around the cluster and within the systems. However, after the 10th, or 20th planet, it hits a "Okay, it's pretty, but this is getting tiring/annoying" because you manoeuver through a slightly clunky interface each time, then hit scan, then find out if there happens to be any anomalies (all of which provide almost no benefits), then click a button to zoom out, then another button to zoom out, then select another planet, get another gorgeous "zooming through space as the solar system you're in rotates and moves, before closing in on the location you picked" visual before doing it all again. The anomalies you find can be of fluffy background interest, but half the time are simple "bacteria under the ice" "unusually large mineral formation" etc, and it's kind of eyerolling silly that an unusally large mineral formation you detect from orbit happens to be +43 Iron. When you can find more when mining with the Nomad. Also, you never get those one off missions or on-foot explorations during those wanderings. You really could have done with some of those like they did in the original trilogy. As it is, you only get to land on the specific story planets. Which also leads me to some of the quest structure and UI elements... Travelling to other planets and quests that have you move back and forth. Understandable, and makes sense in a lot of cases. But it can be as annoying as all get out (especially anything that takes you to Kadara port). Because you have to go through the: travel to the Tempest - sweet visual of ship leaving planet as loading screen - use navigation console, zoom in on system you want, travel there, select planet, travel there, click land - sweet visual of ship landing as loading screen - find out if what you want is on Kadara port itself, find out its not, so you have to select the elevator to take you down - loading screen as you go to slums - run 30 meters to get outside of that map - then you can select the world map to fast travel - do the quest thing, find you now have to go back to the original planet and quest giver (or yet another planet as a continuation of the quest) - get in the Nomad and use the "T" option to have the Tempest pick you up directly - sweet visual of leaving the planet as loading screen.... I'm sure you get the point. I really wish they gave you options of landing on Kadara at the outpost when/if you develop one there and not leave you stuck having to go through all of that every time you want to go there. While in a gamer and mechanical sense I get the whole "Just because I have a quest that's about speed and vital to save someones life, I can spend an hour trolling around here and making sure I've picked up alllll the quests before I leave" can be a thing, it annoys the roleplayer in me to have a vital quest that talks about speed..and not rushing off to handle it before coming back. And , frankly in the later half of the game you get a whole load of quests that have you bouncing back and forth across the planets. While that's fairly easy to implement on a fantasy world and a world map... When you have to go through about 6 or so screens and a multitude of mouse clicks just to travel from one location to another to fetch something...and then return, it really starts to suck enjoyment out. And yes, they've obviously planned Andromeda to be the first of it's own series or to use future dlc to flesh out / finish storylines. There are several quests which while they can be resolved in a certain sense, are pretty much just there to open up aspects of the universe but not answer the questions. Purely hooks to hang things from in the near future (and to have choices made that transfer across to later games).

Everyone should play ME3 at least once just for the sheer gloriously camp, cheese-tastic, fan-wankery, unadulterated space opera fun that is the Citadel DLC.

Hm. Well I've wrapped up my first run through the game. Not sure on the ending, it has plenty of cinematic buzz to it, and the concept is good enough, but mechanically the final bit jars me some. Not so much a big boss battle, as handling waves of enemy while waiting to hit several "buttons" - although the entire rest of the team drop in halfway through to help out. You never get to personally shoot the big bad. What's also done is that once you wrap up the "story" as it were, the end credits run, you get a teaser hint of unresolved enemies, before there's an Epilogue section of game to play through. With a couple of small quests, dialogue and choices to handle. Then the Helios cluster is left open for you to continue exploring and wrapping up unfinished quests and the like. Of course, there's a whole heap of hooks and unanswered questions that have been raised in the game (along with some of the choices you make that so far seem to have no consequences just yet) that are obviously groundwork for a mixture of future DLC and follow-on games. I'm curious how they'll be planning on handling it. Further adventures of one of the Ryder's or possibly the next generation and showing the fallout from everything you've done 30 years down the line? Also, for those complaining about the sense of people just deciding to go to another galaxy with no clue...

I think they could have done more with it if they tried to do less. There does seem to be that feel as if they ran out of time or money or both and things they had planned to develop never happened.

As far as I know, the Apex Strike Missions are just a little extra hard for better rewards compared to the normal Strike Missions. They're all basically a fluffy reason for the multiplayer, and simply give you the option to use the fluff of them with the single-player game. Also I believe it's set up so you can "seamlessly" go from single-player to multiplayer within the game, or at least, that's the theory they gave. Mechanically, there's no connection to any of the story. Edit: You get the option to host or join someone else who has hosted it. You get people playing the MP side will create the matches because Apex Missions give greater rewards, but do something like boost the damage of the enemies (or something along those lines) that increase the difficulty.

It does have a bit of an awkward pacing. The first 10-15 hours of it is pretty much that big opening sprawl of introduction and showing off gaming mechanics and initial lore and setting out the situation. It's that "First planet - prologue: Becoming the special one", then "This is your Hub" followed by "This is your ship and companions" then the "This is the 2nd planet and you'll find out what it means to be a pathfinder ; plus story stuff" kind of run. Then it proceeds to introduce you to the native intelligent species and you start to get a few choices of where you go in the cluster over the next 5 or so hours. You get the final companion as part of that process. I think the game stats have that at about the 25-30% mark done? For all they've gone on about the exploration side and flying around the galaxy, there aren't really that many options once you get past the flying back and forth between 3 planets and the hub for that first quarter of the game. I'm enjoying it as it goes, but there are a fair few niggling things that I'm having to ignore and rely on the good bits to balance out the rough spots. The first loyalty mission I did was definitely a highlight of the story/mission design I've seen so far. The one thing that annoys my minor OCD is the amount of "Task: XXX" missions that get tagged into your journal. They aren't important per se, and about half of them are the "Collect X variety of thing or such" without any map points to aim for. And a few variants that require you to find and scan 3 or 5 of the same items across multiple enemy camps to be able to decipher/triangulate or such.... the problem being none of those camps are marked in the wilderness and it seems that its a random chance that the item you need to scan will appear in any camps you do find. So lots of just driving around the wilderness hoping to find the damn unmarked camps. However, supposedly, doing some of those Tasks will result in reduced difficulty for certain specific missions that you have to do as part of the main plot.

Why American farmers are hacking their tractors with Ukrainian firmware

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp_Fw5oDMao&feature=youtu.be

I did one of the Loyalty missions last night - Liam's, and it turned out quite amusingly entertaining. I'm curious how it could turn out if I'd made different choices earlier in the game - not to put too much spoilers on it, but certain colonists turn up to help out.

The real question would be, would you feel happy and productive working if your office was at the centre of that arch?

I still went ahead and picked up a copy of the game (and technically I might have used VPN to start playing it Tuesday rather than wait till Thursday for the UK release). Picked up from where I'd run through on the trial play and carried on. I'm going to say outright that there are issues with it, it's got a fair few niggling flaws in the background, but it's also got a handful of interesting concepts and attempts. For what it is, I'm enjoying it and can see it being value for money. The main issue is that it doesn't actually feel like an AAA game, which is definitely at variance with the hype train they had running for the past year. It's the odd little flaws, and the lack of polish that seem to set this apart from previous Bioware games (heh, it does have a certain Bethesda feel to it in that matter). There's a few odd triggers that click in unexpectedly - you meet a companion npc on a planet and are obviously intended to complete that story branch that has them join you before returning to the ship, because if you return to the ship before they join you.. you can still end up overhearing that companion who isn't even on the ship having conversations with your other companions. There is some fun dialogue and some god-awful ropey dialogue. The animation is.. what it is, and there do seem to be a bit of awkwardness with texture popping with characters. The planets and backgrounds are gorgeous and lush. The music, while not bad on its own is very subdued and unlike previous ME games, they don't seem to use it to add emphasis to any emotional moments. There's no really soaring tunes to carry you along when you step forth onto a new world, or suggest the beginnings of action. But what is there is decent , standard action-rpg wander around and do stuff and explore lore, shoot things and talk to people. I'm wondering if it'll really open up once you've gotten the initial Angara thing dealt with. They talked much about the open exploratory nature, but so far it's still been fairly constrained in where you go. And the fact that 15 hours into a game and they're still introducing new gameplay mechanics does make you wonder on the pacing - but then it makes a certain sense that you're not going to deal with colony/outpost expansion until a point you can start establishing them. The return to Eos after some time has passed and seeing how it's changed in that time, and how some of your earlier decisions have shaped it is nice, so I'll be looking forward to seeing how well that carries on in the future and with any other colonies established. All in all, it's going to be an interesting journey as this game goes along. I'm pretty much expecting a lot of unpolished diamond and rough edges but to still be entertained as I ignore the occasional jarring animation and odd glitch.

One thing that's somewhat disappointing is the music. Don't get me wrong, the music itself is quite decent in itself, however it is very subdued and understated and is very much minor background rather than sweeping space opera exploration. It doesn't quite have the emotional kick/carry off that the music from the ME trilogy have.

From one of my American friends..

Having that late night re-watch of John Carter. There is something about that film that I just enjoy. A certain pulp adventure silliness that starts to cross into space opera. That, and Ciaran Hinds and James Purefoy obviously just having fun bantering between each other once again after Rome.