Mass Effect: Andromeda

DSoup said:
I'm only fussed about the performance issues but I gather that reviewers didn't have the day 1 patch. Common criticisms from reviewers include the removal of the paragon/renegade system which I am personally pleased with because these were simplistically binary and it's not the game's place to judge my decisions against an arbitrary moral line. Also the lack of a deep RPG, which on the face of it is bad in an RPG game except I play RPGs because they give gameplay/combat variety not because I want to roleplay as somebody else. And the combat is gooooood.

Finally, the lack of an epic story driving your forward. I don't know how you top the Reaper storyline but I am actually glad they didn't just to try amp up the odds and contrive another galaxy-ending story. This is the mistake much fiction makes by thinking each successive tale has to escalate things which just becomes ridiculous.

Also my inclination in games like Mass Effect was just taking my time exploring the galaxy. I'm still working through Mass Effect 3 but I think it fails in that the urgency of the Reaper invasion could push some people to ignore side missions but where they are actually critical - and fun! So letting me tackle the galaxy at my own pace, which I'm going to do anyway, is preferable to a story pushing to do X, Y and Z in a set order. That was the appeal of Mass Effect 1 and which I think ME2 and ME3 lost through a main story imperative.
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This is a good point.

ME2 and ME3 were trying to be too much. Saren was perfect as an antagonist. It's as if every RPG must have the scope of LOTR, when they just need to be smaller but still great in terms of being an RPG.
 
iroboto said:
This is a good point. ME2 and ME3 were trying to be too much. Saren was perfect as an antagonist. It's as if every RPG must have the scope of LOTR, when they just need to be smaller but still great in terms of being an RPG.
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Yup. It's nice to save the occasional world or universe in Zelda, Mass Effect, Halo and Witcher 3. Equally it's nice just to help Ellie in The Last of Us or beat the bad guys in GTA, Far Cry and Assassin's Creed. You don't need an epic story for a game to be fun to play and sometimes an overbearing story isn't conducive for a good game. A narrative sense of urgency really should only be employed when there is a real need to act fast - which is a rarity in modern games.

Elder Scrolls and Fallout always made me feel that the mission was important but not so important that I'd feel guilty about exploring or doing a few side quests. The Witcher 3 dangled the ever-present threat of the Wild Hunt and need to find Ciri a little too hard for my liking. In an open world you need the player to feel they have time to explore and not have them feel that ignoring the main quest will result in the end of the world.

I like the sound of Andromeda for all the reason that real RPG and Mass Effect aficionados will probably dislike it.
 
Ike Turner said:
WTH! I just realised that I'm the one who started this thread exactly 4 years ago...time flies..and the game is finally releasing in a few minutes/hours...:runaway:
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"My guess is that this will most probably be a Q42014 release" :p

How do you feel about Frostbite now btw, is it suited for ME? I think ME:A looks great, tech-wise.
 
ProspectorPete said:
"My guess is that this will most probably be a Q42014 release" :p

How do you feel about Frostbite now btw, is it suited for ME? I think ME:A looks great, tech-wise.
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My prediction was totally off-mark o_O
Frostbite has turned into one of the most advanced and polyvalent engine and frankly is perfectly suited for ME. The game looks awesome (besides the shitty eyes..). ME:A also seems to have implemented Mirrors Edge's SSR implementation which works quite well (but obviously still has many of the screen space shortcomings). Planets/worlds are apparently huge (IIRC one planet is as big as Dragon Age: Inquisition's whole map.)
 
DSoup said:
Yup. It's nice to save the occasional world or universe in Zelda, Mass Effect, Halo and Witcher 3. Equally it's nice just to help Ellie in The Last of Us or beat the bad guys in GTA, Far Cry and Assassin's Creed. You don't need an epic story for a game to be fun to play and sometimes an overbearing story isn't conducive for a good game. A narrative sense of urgency really should only be employed when there is a real need to act fast - which is a rarity in modern games.

Elder Scrolls and Fallout always made me feel that the mission was important but not so important that I'd feel guilty about exploring or doing a few side quests. The Witcher 3 dangled the ever-present threat of the Wild Hunt and need to find Ciri a little too hard for my liking. In an open world you need the player to feel they have time to explore and not have them feel that ignoring the main quest will result in the end of the world.

I like the sound of Andromeda for all the reason that real RPG and Mass Effect aficionados will probably dislike it.
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Hm, wasn't Alduin in Skyrim sort of a world-ending calamity as well? The quest givers certainly made the whole thing feel rather urgent. I also found it amusing how the civil war basically stopped dead in its tracks just so the Dragonborn could raid his hundredth cave.
 
Just started this game on the Pro, looks pretty damn good and sharp actually, especially the HDR and lighting. Also made a somewhat decent Fem Ryder using preset 1.
1u4u8a.png

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https://abload.de/img/25kuj7.png
 
I don't think anyone expected Uncharted 4 quality facial animation from a big rpg. Most people don't expect Uncharted 4 quality facial animations from any game. The problem is that Andromeda's facial animations aren't even on par with the ones from the original 2007 Mass Effect.

Besides, most people do not care about the process. They care about the end result. That is a perfectly reasonable stance to take. After all, EA doesn't care whether the 60 bucks you're meant to cough up are chump change or a year's worth of saving pennies either.
 
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Sigfried1977 said:
I don't think anyone expected Uncharted 4 quality facial animation from a big rpg. Most people don't expect Uncharted 4 quality facial animations from any game. The problem is that Andromeda's facial animations aren't even on par with the ones from the original 2007 Mass Effect.

Besides, most people do not care about the process. They care about the end result. That is a perfectly reasonable stance to take. After all, EA doesn't care whether the 60 bucks you're meant to cough up are chump change or a year's worth of saving pennies either.
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http://www.animstate.com/round-table-mass-effect-andromeda/

Other explanation and one guy from the ME1 team but working on another place told it was difficult to move to a new engine... The ND animator told the animation was low quality but they were thinking they can correct it all by handf but not enought time/budget and a too big game. more than 1200 NPC...

 
Rodéric said:
I'm all for finding out what went wrong, but that's what post-mortems are for, as a client I'm unhappy to see that a full price game isn't up to the quality standard set by its predecessors...
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I never said it is not a problem but I don't blame the team, I blame the producer, the leaders...
 
I'm several hours in and I can honestly say the animations/voice acting while not good are not bothering me much. What IS bothering me is the constant "Click on XXX, wait for YYY". After playing a lot of open-world games with light RPG elements, I think I've come to the conclusion that this is more my type of game now. i really enjoy the story in games, which is probably what drew me to RPG's in the first place, and this game has a LOT of story. Unfortunately, the series of actions you have to perform, and the WAITING that so many of those actions trigger that you have to go through to obtain each crumb of story hasn't been worth it so far.

And the voice-acted NPC dialog is starting to remind me of Final Fantasy's summons. What was once a defining characteristic and integral part of the experience is seeming more and more like something that just slows the game down. I can read the text on the subtitles much faster than the VA is reading the lines. Not every conversation needs this kind of focus, especially when the need to prepare for these is probably what is behind so many of the click and wait transitions in the game. "Yo dawg, we heard you like to click and wait, so we added some click and wait that lets you click and wait so you can click and wait more!"

Also: So much backtracking. There's no excuse in this age of game design for making me have to fight my way deep into a structure and then walk the entire way back out again through a now empty, action-free, area.
 
I started playing last night and it's no where near as bad as it's being made out to be. The animations are pretty poor, and there seems to be quite a lot of jitter and framerate issues. But I've just come from Horizon so this was always going to look bad. I'm not sure about the combat either at the moment. The guns don't feel like they have much impact and the enemies die in the most theatrical way possible which is quite funny but immersion breaking as well. I turned off the film grain filter which has helped with the viusals somewhat but... I don't know; I think once I've been playing for a few days I'll get used to it and get into the story instead which is what this is all about.
 
Yeah, its no Life of Black Tiger level of bad.
 
Cyan said:
that's beautiful. Certainly a very good looking female. I've seen videos on the Meme Effect thing and faces were bad overall, not to mention animations.
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Haha thanks, I usually invest 2 hours into character creation for a Meme Effect:LOL: game, that's like half of the fun alone. Also have the image of a Google searched attractive girl on my ipad next to me for reference. I reckon it just takes a bit of time and patience to get the face somewhat right but yeah the animation is unfortunately still disappointing.
 
Really love the rocket boosted dashes and leaps, that's like the best thing ever happened to a combat scenario for me! It makes me feel powerful, nimble and agile, actually got me out of a few sticky situations with it :). I'm still very early on so can't comment too much on the overall weapons and powers but they do seem typical for a ME game. The dialogue is pretty cringe worthy sometimes and the facial animation don't help at all, character models look kinda low poly but the lighting saves them somehow. The abundance of SSR is very welcoming too. The environment looks beautiful on the first planet, fully utilizing HDR, it's better than I imagined overall. A good start so let's hope the rest is good too.
 
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