Mass Effect Andromeda

[Orogun01]

I gotta say, Liam's personal mission is funny. The writing is good even if some bits are direct quotes from StarWars, it feels like someone shocked a cadaver and we get a glimpse of what it could have been.

[Agiel]

Well a $40 million budget for a AAA title is _anemic_ and EA probably got what it paid for when the budget was $8 million per annum. For context, GTAV had a budget of $265 million and MGSV had a budget of $80 million (in a country that says nuts to workplace amenities and overtime pay bonuses, no less). 

[Orogun01]

Well a $40 million budget for a AAA title is _anemic_ and EA probably got what it paid for when the budget was $8 million per annum. For context, GTAV had a budget of $265 million and MGSV had a budget of $80 million (in a country that says nuts to workplace amenities and overtime pay bonuses, no less). 

I think they could have done more with it if they tried to do less.

[GhostofAnakin]

Squad mates suck in combat.  They just literally run all over the place getting shot and won't stay put.  Good thing I'm playing on low difficulty anyway, otherwise I'd spend the entire time reviving my squad or having to go solo in fights.

[Raithe]

 

Well a $40 million budget for a AAA title is _anemic_ and EA probably got what it paid for when the budget was $8 million per annum. For context, GTAV had a budget of $265 million and MGSV had a budget of $80 million (in a country that says nuts to workplace amenities and overtime pay bonuses, no less). 

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.

[Drowsy Emperor]

Baldur's Gate 2 was made in less than 2 years.

 

The irony of modern game development - down the same road as Hollywood in a fraction of the time. 

[SonicMage117]

Coming from someone who has ME2 but has never played an ME game before...

 

I was afraid to buy it, I almost did but then I stopped and thought "It looks TOO pretty and that's usually a bad sign" for fear that the franchise may have become another Call aof Duty, Halo, etc. Where graphics and marketing matter more than the actual gameplay itself...

 

Was I wrong to think so?

[Drowsy Emperor]

ME2 was one of the better looking games on release in some respects and that didn't stop you buying it then, no?

 

IMO Andromeda never looked too pretty at any point. In fact, it looked decidedly dated (compared to heavy hitters like W3) all the way. But it was not graphics that made it look good or bad, it was that the spoiled gameplay looked boring and that seemingly transitioned to the final product.

Edited March 27, 2017 by Drowsy Emperor

[SonicMage117]

ME2 was one of the better looking games on release in some respects and that didn't stop you buying it then, no?

 

IMO Andromeda never looked too pretty at any point. In fact, it looked decidedly dated (compared to heavy hitters like W3) all the way. But it was not graphics that made it look good or bad, it was that the spoiled gameplay looked boring and that seemingly transitioned to the final product.

Tbh, I got it free as a gift from a friend on Steam last year but your point still stands as I have bought other games based on appealing graphics/art styles.

 

How do they go backwards? I don't understand how devs cause their games/franchises to devolve! Why try to change what the fans love so much???

[Amentep]

So got ME:A over the weekend.

Initial thoughts are - positive.

 

Faces seem to have more diversity meaning there's good and bad in them. I haven't seen the horrors that I've seen people claim (but to be fair I always make-a-face and a lot of the flak I've seen regard Sara Ryder's pre-made face.  I will say make-a-face is a bit more challenging than I've seen before).

 

Some of the animations though are lacking - there have been several cases where eyes can't seem to track the same point, thus leaving some wandering eyes. 

 

I like the sense of exploration.  Still very early and a lot of detail to be fleshed out regarding plot.  Combat isn't easy.  I'm not sure if enemy AI is better or NPC AI is worse.

[Drowsy Emperor]

 

ME2 was one of the better looking games on release in some respects and that didn't stop you buying it then, no?

 

IMO Andromeda never looked too pretty at any point. In fact, it looked decidedly dated (compared to heavy hitters like W3) all the way. But it was not graphics that made it look good or bad, it was that the spoiled gameplay looked boring and that seemingly transitioned to the final product.

Tbh, I got it free as a gift from a friend on Steam last year but your point still stands as I have bought other games based on appealing graphics/art styles.

 

How do they go backwards? I don't understand how devs cause their games/franchises to devolve! Why try to change what the fans love so much???

 

 

Apparently it wasn't done by the core team. 

 

That aside, a company is just a name. The collection of people working there changes over time. 

 

Relic used to be a name that any RTS fan would wait wide eyed to hear about their new project. Now they're a WH40K mill that hasn't produced a good game since the second expansion of the first WH40K game. 11 years ago...

 

IMO Bioware has lacked a fresh direction for years. They have an ingrained way of doing things that is outdated in many respects but works because their fan base was persistent enough to carry them through and the critics are kind because of their accumulated reputation (see average metacritic grade for the piece of **** that was DA2) but both of those wells have been slowly drying up. Also it helped that the competition was (and still often is) pathetic to nonexistent. If you wanted to play a high budget RPG it devolved into Bethesda (lol), Bioware and CDProjekt. If you wanted it to have a story as well you might as well rub the first one out, leaving you with a game every few years. Not much of a market.

 

Bioware games are still mostly "good", aka passable, but that is damning with faint praise for a company that almost single handedly revolutionized the genre several times over. Its a normal process however. Even a world champion in any sport is only that for a while.

Edited March 27, 2017 by Drowsy Emperor

[the_dog_days]

Faces seem to have more diversity meaning there's good and bad in them.

 

Until you realize every asari (except for one) has the exact same face with slightly different color. Good luck in-seeing that, because once I noticed now it makes it impossible for me not to think of them all as the same character in different costumes.

Edited March 27, 2017 by the_dog_days

[Fenixp]

Relic used to be a name that any RTS fan would wait wide eyed to hear about their new project. Now they're a WH40K mill that hasn't produced a good game since the second expansion of the first WH40K game. 11 years ago...

To be fair, Bioware hasn't really evolved ever since the release of KOTOR, they keep repeating the same formula ever since - whereas Relic has actually been actively experimenting with otherwise stale genre of RTS and say what you will, Company of Heroes was a stellar RTS experience with all the attention to detail Relic was famous for, and there's never been and probably never will be anything quite like Dawn of War 2 with its RTT/aRPG hybrid gameplay, regardless of how much do you personally do/do not enjoy it.

 

It was really with THQ's financial issues since 2010 or so when Relic seemed to be reduced to a DLC churning machine, and I imagine that's also why many talented people left them. But aside from it being a stellar RTS, there wasn't really anything that interesting about the original DoW, whereas both Company of Heroes (to a lesser extent, granted) and Dawn of War II actually tried things that no other RTS games did before - which, to me, is Relic's main selling point.

 

I'm also not entirely sure about RTS fans being wide eyed to hear about next Relic's project, considering they released 3 games before Dawn of War, one of which was a sequel that wasn't particularly well received to my knowledge 

Edited March 27, 2017 by Fenixp

[Bartimaeus]

 

Faces seem to have more diversity meaning there's good and bad in them.

 

Until you realize every asari (except for one) has the exact same face with slightly different color. Good luck in-seeing that, because once I noticed now it makes it impossible for me not to think of them all as the same character in different costumes.

 

 

That's actually kind of a problem for all the ME games...and for all races, actually. The party members of those alien races look unique enough, but everyone else looks more or less the same outside of a few minor exceptions.

[Drowsy Emperor]

 

Relic used to be a name that any RTS fan would wait wide eyed to hear about their new project. Now they're a WH40K mill that hasn't produced a good game since the second expansion of the first WH40K game. 11 years ago...

To be fair, Bioware hasn't really evolved ever since the release of KOTOR, they keep repeating the same formula ever since - whereas Relic has actually been actively experimenting with otherwise stale genre of RTS and say what you will, Company of Heroes was a stellar RTS experience with all the attention to detail Relic was famous for, and there's never been and probably never will be anything quite like Dawn of War 2 with its RTT/aRPG hybrid gameplay, regardless of how much do you personally do/do not enjoy it.

 

It was really with THQ's financial issues since 2010 or so when Relic seemed to be reduced to a DLC churning machine, and I imagine that's also why many talented people left them. But aside from it being a stellar RTS, there wasn't really anything that interesting about the original DoW, whereas both Company of Heroes (to a lesser extent, granted) and Dawn of War II actually tried things that no other RTS games did before - which, to me, is Relic's main selling point.

 

I'm also not entirely sure about RTS fans being wide eyed to hear about next Relic's project, considering they released 3 games before Dawn of War, one of which was a sequel that wasn't particularly well received to my knowledge 

 

 

What do you mean there wasn't anything interesting about the original DoW, it introduced the entire territory resource system, terrain modifiers, on field upgrades, squads, shift away from base building etc. that CoH replicated. CoH improved on the formula but the formula is wholly from DoW and credits to innovation go to that game. 

Anyway my phrasing is carefully worded. It says since the second expansion of DoW, which includes CoH and Dark Crusade which was definitly their last high point.

 

DoW 2 experimented, but it was a case of: "the operation succeeded but the patient is no longer alive".

 

I would say that both companies experimented but not radically so. Mass Effect switched gameplay to a different genre about as much as DoW 2 did for the original DoW. With varying degrees of success, but its been years since either produced a groundbreaking title.

Edited March 27, 2017 by Drowsy Emperor

[Fenixp]

What do you mean there wasn't anything interesting about the original DoW, it introduced the entire territory resource system, terrain modifiers, on field upgrades, squads, shift away from base building etc. that CoH replicated. CoH improved on the formula but the formula is wholly from DoW and credits to innovation go to that game.

Well... Terrain modifiers existed a long time before that, along with territory control system. Not sure about field upgrading. Not in that combination per se I suppose, but it never seemed like significant update considering it's essentially a streamlining of Blizzard's expansion model.

 

Anyway my phrasing is carefully worded. It says since the second expansion of DoW, which includes CoH and Dark Crusade which was definitly their last high point.

All right, fair enough.

 

DoW 2 experimented, but it was a case of: "the operation succeeded but the patient is no longer alive".

 

I would say that both companies experimented but not radically so. Mass Effect switched gameplay to a different genre about as much as DoW 2 did for the original DoW. With varying degrees of success, but its been years since either produced a groundbreaking title.

Come on, Mass Effect slapped dialogue wheels on top of Generic Third Person Shooter, Dawn of War 2 actually seamlessly connected two genres that I could never see working together previously - and it was far from being a bad game, especially after refinements that Chaos Rising introduced.

[Raithe]

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...

 

 

1>Somehow, the Initiative had gained access to highly advanced Geth long range sensors ,which gave a whole lot of supposedly very accurate details about the Helios Cluster. Just in the 600 years of the journey, **** happened that changed it. 

2> Apparently there's a big Mysterious Benefactor behind the Andromeda Initiative who knew about the Reapers and didn't think they could be stopped, and thus wanted to get a bunch of people out of the Milky Way to ensure the survival of humanity. So a heap of string-pulling pushing it along and getting Nexus and the Arks built before any possibility of war breaking out might restrict resources.

 

 

[Drowsy Emperor]

 

What do you mean there wasn't anything interesting about the original DoW, it introduced the entire territory resource system, terrain modifiers, on field upgrades, squads, shift away from base building etc. that CoH replicated. CoH improved on the formula but the formula is wholly from DoW and credits to innovation go to that game.

Well... Terrain modifiers existed a long time before that, along with territory control system. Not sure about field upgrading. Not in that combination per se I suppose, but it never seemed like significant update considering it's essentially a streamlining of Blizzard's expansion model.

 

Anyway my phrasing is carefully worded. It says since the second expansion of DoW, which includes CoH and Dark Crusade which was definitly their last high point.

All right, fair enough.

 

DoW 2 experimented, but it was a case of: "the operation succeeded but the patient is no longer alive".

 

I would say that both companies experimented but not radically so. Mass Effect switched gameplay to a different genre about as much as DoW 2 did for the original DoW. With varying degrees of success, but its been years since either produced a groundbreaking title.

Come on, Mass Effect slapped dialogue wheels on top of Generic Third Person Shooter, Dawn of War 2 actually seamlessly connected two genres that I could never see working together previously - and it was far from being a bad game, especially after refinements that Chaos Rising introduced.

 

 

That's how you see it but the CoD crowd that wouldn't be caught dead with elves and dragons was successfully courted with galactic elves and space dragons because of it. I never enjoyed Mass Effect so I'm not about to defend it more than that. I fell the like the combat design was brainless and atrocious and was lukewarm on the story to the point that I uninstalled ME3 about 20 minutes into the game.

 

I don't think DoW 2 was bad, but I don't think it was good either. The game was taxing to play for a scale that was tiny and unimpressive and felt like a step back in every way except graphics.

[Amentep]

 

 

Faces seem to have more diversity meaning there's good and bad in them.

 

Until you realize every asari (except for one) has the exact same face with slightly different color. Good luck in-seeing that, because once I noticed now it makes it impossible for me not to think of them all as the same character in different costumes.

 

 

That's actually kind of a problem for all the ME games...and for all races, actually. The party members of those alien races look unique enough, but everyone else looks more or less the same outside of a few minor exceptions.

 

 

It was a problem in ME before hand.  I've only met a couple of Asari and one or two Turians so far in ME:A and they seemed distincter to me in there than in ME1-3.

[213374U]

Former BioWare animator explains why animations in Mass Effect: Andromeda are the way they are
 

 

 

I fell the like the combat design was brainless and atrocious and was lukewarm on the story to the point that I uninstalled ME3 about 20 minutes into the game.

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.

[majestic]

Everyone should finish ME3 just to see the ending. Without the extended cut at first. In its full glory. There simply are no words for it.

 

Although that horse has been beaten to death and back some, so let's leave it at that...

[Raithe]

Everyone should finish ME3 just to see the ending. Without the extended cut at first. In its full glory. There simply are no words for it.

 

Although that horse has been beaten to death and back some, so let's leave it at that...

 

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.

Edited March 27, 2017 by Raithe

[Zoraptor]

Yeah, nah. ME3 costs $25 here, and the Origin dlc costs... $24. At least you can buy the proper amount of krazee kurrencee through the Origin app now rather than having to spend $32 buying more than you need.

 

If they sold an ME3: Ultimate GOTY Collection Enhanced Edition it would have been on special for less than the individual DLC by now, DAI is more recent and its Ultimate Edition has been less than $25 already. The Origin DLC sounds like something I'd like- plus I liked ME3 well enough anyay- but their pricing and lack of discounts on it is just mickey taking at this point.

[Malcador]

Well, there is YouTube. At least for the purposes at hand right now

[majestic]

Well, there is YouTube. At least for the purposes at hand right now

 

Sure, you can do that, but it removes one important part of the ending. Being part of the game before that. For all of Bioware's faults, Mass Effect 3 was, up until the last segment on the Citadel, pretty much perfect space opera, and for the better part they managed to have wonderful payoffs for those who played all the other games and imported their characters.

 

Things like fostering peace between the Geth and the Quarians after learning it wasn't as clear cut as the tired old AI uprising plot.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oES7oUpoNhc

 

The way how Legion, before sacrificing itself, refers to itself as "I" for the first time. The underlying score, the animations (except Shepard's rape smile but hey, only Andromeda has weird facial animations ). Tali's answer to the Geth question, her being conflicted over mourning a Geth. Funny how the scene gets silly again once the Tali romance in this video comes up, but hey, that's Bioware romance. *shrug*

 

Of course it is full of pathos and designed to tug on your heartstrings, but this is pretty much as good as space opera can get.

 

And *then* it drops the hammer at the end. It's like Bioware went and hired Roland Emmerich to do a David Lynch twist ending.

 

*huff*

 

Erm, time to calm down. *sigh*