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213374U

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Everything posted by 213374U

  1. 213374U
    I am comforted by the fact that by the time I get around to it, it will likely be fixed for the most part. Probably, yeah. In a year or two when support has ended (going by how it was with ME3), it should be a pretty decent game. Anyway, this happened. Apparently someone, somewhere, was hurt by a conversation. With a fictional character. In a space opera. And BioWare can't have that, so they rushed to apologize and make all necessary changes. https://twitter.com/bioware/status/849671752192077828 I also was hurt (literally) after banging my head on my desk after the third consecutive crash. Where's my apology, BioWare?
  2. 213374U
    I was being facetious. What with the game being released basically in a beta state and all... I get the feeling that this is likely what happened. The chosen release date is pretty damning, as is the cancellation of the MP beta. I'd be willing to put money down that the biggest fixes in today's patch are for issues known before the game was released. Probably not ready to be rolled into the "day one" patch, but in the works already. Beyond perplexing design choices, this has managerial snafu written all over it.
  3. 213374U
    Why would you punish me and thousands of other innocent players? In other news, I encountered this: https://www.reddit.com/r/masseffect/comments/61itql/no_spoilers_huge_combatencounter_xp_bug_you_might/ In short, if you are not gaining combat XP, your game is broken with no fix. Good times.
  4. 213374U
    They considered that, apparently. The game could have used it. In spite of everything, I'm enjoying it well enough. Origin says I've played 123 hours @22% completion, so it's hard to say I'm not getting my money's worth.
  5. 213374U
    Totally need more options for BroRyder to bang.
  6. 213374U
    There is an augmentation ("Vintage Heat Sink") for that which you can apply to Milky Way guns. Whether it would be sensible and/or affordable to have the entire AI armory retrofitted with this kind of tech by default is up for debate, but the possibility is there.
  7. 213374U
    Nah, not saying it's a bad thing, that's a value judgment I'm reserving. But as someone who's completely uninterested in -and often outright weirded out by- BioWare romance, I can't stop being amused by the fanbase's fixation with them, to the point of protesting against "discrepancies", and even more so by the devs' continued acknowledgment of these "issues".
  8. 213374U
    Patch coming out on the 6th: https://www.masseffect.com/news/the-journey-ahead?sf53509845=1 edit: Never change, BioWare.
  9. 213374U
    The mute button works fine, but the interface is crap. The player you currently have highlighted doesn't change when hovering the cursor over others, and clicking on them brings up their Origin profile, but does NOT highlight them. I use the mouse wheel to select the correct player and then mute them. I generally just auto-mute everyone while in the lobby because I'd rather not have to do it if they decide to start yelling at mom or whatever, mid game. The crashes are widespread, and worryingly enough, very frequent on consoles as well. After they canceled the MP open beta just weeks from launch, it's clear as day that no real testing was done and the released product *is* the beta. Hey, early access games do it all the time, why not BWEA? Shoot me a PM if you want to run some games. At least if you crash, you can reconnect.
  10. 213374U
    Pretty awesome that companies outsource **** overseas to reduce costs, but if the end user tries circumventing regional pricing, that's a big no-no. That's globalization for ya.
  11. 213374U
    AFAIK, the $40 million is the absolute minimum this game may have cost to make, based on what ME3 was estimated to cost, with a much shorter development cycle and a smaller scope. No hard figures because EA doesn't release that kind of information.
  12. 213374U
    I know, and I enjoy silly vids as much as the next guy (the original "we'll bang okay" clip still cracks me up). It's just that it felt OOC for what Ars is... or what I thought it was... in my mind. I guess the piece is just reporting on what BioWare is doing, rather than offering opinion on what they should be doing, but still, I don't think that's a fire that needs more fuel added to.
  13. 213374U
    Yep. The Thessia arc was supposed to develop differently, possibly related to Cerberus being completely indoctrinated by that point, and it originally involved a betrayal where you had to choose between Virmire survivor and Liara. I was also very disappointed by how little weight the decision made during Legion's loyalty mission in ME2 had in the Rannoch plot. It's basically just a +/- numerical modifier to your War Assets, and a short remark from Legion, that's it. For a choice that's presented as either genocide or mass brainwashing, it felt... cheap. Also, dark energy? What dark energy...? Heh. The turian plot was, from what I read, intended to be more involved, with you doing more stuff around Palaven. But that would mean producing a lot of new assets, so instead they kept that asinine Cerberus "coup" on the Citadel, where they just had to add a bunch of decals to the walls, even though it made zero sense for Cerberus to do that at that point in the story. Oh well. That's what you get from shuffling writers around and having people work 90 hour weeks, I guess. I thought Ars was more or less a "serious" outlet. Posting that meme vid doesn't do much for their rep, in my eyes. The animations have been in the spotlight, but the game has other problems, gameplay problems, that are more pressing. And I'm not even talking about MP stuff. Things like banter (often mission-related) clipping, broken quests, dodgy hitboxes, a lack of a quicksave function, performance problems, etc. should be a priority rather than dealing with the backlash from "my face is tired". This is just more stupid bandwagoneering.
  14. 213374U
    Yep. What's most mystifying about it is that this sort of thing was already a pretty big problem in ME3 *and* is something that directly cuts into their bottom line. People doing this have no reason to participate in microtransactions. And after you ban someone -assuming they do, as they did in the past with mass ban waves- you've effectively lost a customer. Not building a more robust system this time around is very hard to justify.
  15. 213374U
    I don't know about speeding animations up specifically, but I know for a fact that Cheat Engine is being used for godmode, infinite ammo, no cooldown on powers etc. on public MP lobbies. You'd think they'd have learned from ME3, but apparently not. So my guess would be, yeah.
  16. 213374U
    However little it may cost, it's still more than using one developed in-"house". In an ideal world, this also has the advantage of having more or less direct access to the people who programmed the engine and any and all necessary documentation. In spite of that, bafflingly enough, Bioware cannot seem to program decent online functionality no matter what, on an engine originally designed to build multiplayer games with. At any rate, I'm skeptical that being a division of EA means having more resources. EA's business model seems to be based on two things, mainly. First, create or preferably acquire successful franchises, and then start churning out sequels as quickly as possible, regardless of quality and production values. Second, nickel-and-dime customers as much as possible through microtransactions. Neither of those things require great financial effort, outside of marketing costs, which seems to be EA's forte. The steady decline of SWTOR is more evidence that EA would rather reduce costs to maintain profitability, than invest in hopes of increasing revenue. By the way, I bought the Super Deluxe Edition. More money than sense and all that...
  17. 213374U
    Oh my god. All these years. I feel so... so cheated. How could you, BioWare?
  18. 213374U
    Asari had different faces for sure. These are all from ME2: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] Perhaps they weren't hand-crafted except for Liara, but it wasn't just the makeup. Being basically blue female humans, it stands to reason that they had a system in place to quickly build faces as they did for random humans. Why they couldn't afford something similar for Andromeda is anyone's guess. edit: actually, not that different. Maybe clever use of makeup, skin tone and tattoos. Hmm
  19. 213374U
    The Tuchanka and Rannoch arcs were definitely the high points of the game. Not just the way the plots are finally resolved, but also the ways they could resolve, based on decisions you made in ME1 and 2. I was actually pleasantly surprised by how dark the tone was if Wrex had died in ME1 -- the genophage turned out to be the right call. However, side by side, you have the completely nonsensical Cerberus "coup" which was a leftover of a plot that saw the organization as Reaper puppets, the laughably bad dream sequences, the whole "help the krogans so they help the turians so they help the humans...", the entire first act whose only saving grace was the "leaving Earth" scene, the canned prothean that was supposed to have been the Catalyst but ended up as a narrative stump, and other things I'm probably forgetting. If they had had time to treat the game in its entirety as those two plot arcs, ME3 would have been a completely different game. Alas, 'twas not to be. Still a good game, though.
  20. 213374U
    Former BioWare animator explains why animations in Mass Effect: Andromeda are the way they are Your loss, really. There was a lot going on under the hood in ME3 combat, and by the time the last patch hit, it was a pretty well polished product with a lot of variety and gameplay depth. For a shooter, at any rate. Its weakest point I'd say was a dearth of maps.
  21. 213374U
    Sigh.
  22. 213374U
    Thanks, this is what I wanted to know. So nothing like in ME3 where it boosted your War Assets and Galactic Readiness to affect the endings, then? Just loot. Looks like they learned their lesson in that regard at least, then. Re: difficulty. They aren't necessarily harder, rather they have specific modifiers. For instance, one is IIRC -50% weapon damage/+100% melee damage. If you have a melee build this actually makes the match easier. I don't recommend attempting any but the APEX Bronze missions yourself, unless you have friends you can play them with. The random lobbies are filled with people obviously taking advantage of the "seamless transition" mentioned by Raithe, with level 1 characters and starter weapons... on silver and gold.
  23. 213374U
    Does anyone know if the APEX strike teams do something for SP? I'm running them constantly from the app because the currency you get from that is necessary to purchase stuff in MP, but I'd like to know if you actually need to do something with them in SP. The missions are returning a lot of loot, along with research points and minerals. That's probably a good thing because I won't have to bother looking for elfroot, but not so good in the sense that I probably have much better equipment than I'm supposed to. I just got a Reegar Carbine from a gold lootbox and it just melts faces. And I'm playing on Insanity...
  24. 213374U
    biovar let me romance pls Just kidding*. Seriously though, I see nothing wrong with wanting the main cast to be good looking. Regardless, the whole thing's being blown way out of proportion, and the game has other problems. Online performance is dismal, for instance. Getting booted to desktop for no reason in the middle of a game is no fun, either.
  25. 213374U
    I have this pathological need to entertain all viewpoints, even the extremely stupid ones. If you watched only the first 40 or so seconds, you missed a few gems. He says that ugly main characters make Bioware sex scenes awkward to watch. Yeah, he went there. He's also pretty sure that an ugly Ryder would be more likely to end up hooking up with the turian because he or she would be "out of options". That being said, I find it hard to dispute that Bioware is a company that has for a long time now committed to pushing the "SJW" (ugh) agenda, and that ugly characters are ugly by design. For instance, Liam is a rather good looking lad. And BroRyder, while not Dutch underwear model-level hot, isn't fugly and at least resembles the model they supposedly based his likeness on. So it's not that Frostbite cannot render pretty characters or that artists are unable to model them. The reasons why they went this route are anyone's guess, but it pays to remember that Bioware simply cannot win. Remember the derision when they touched up Ashley for ME3? DA2 Isabela? Heh.
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