Mass Effect: Andromeda

Calhoun

CatInABox wrote: »

Been going on for decades. Westwood, Bullfrog, Maxis, all developers that I loved back in the day. The amount of great developers that EA bought, mismanaged, then closed down is unreal. After a while, you'd think they'd realise that maybe it's not the developers fault, but their own.

True it has been but when the political beliefs of the dev staff become bigger than the actual game you know your in trouble.


Its a pity but it is what it is i was really looking forward to the next game and i also believe they had some decent sales on the games. I dont care what anyone says i loved i, sure the writing was cliched and animations may been off but its mass effect, this is hows its always been.

Gbear

Welll...
After about 75 hours I've finished (another 20 odd in multiplayer).

I don't think there's any spoilers here (other than the marked ones) but we're 6 weeks into launch so proceed at your own risk.

There's a core element of the game that's enjoyable and with the time I've spent I'm not going to say I was ripped off or anything.
With that said, the infamous graphics glitches are the least of the games problems.

I could write a dissertation on what's wrong with this game and why I believe it came to be that way but nobody wants to see that so I'll stick to bullets.

Exploration and Environment:
Scanning and moving around galaxy map has now been tried 4 times. It doesn't work.
-There's no need to move from planet to planet - a hover action that brings up the planet's information in a popup that scrolls in from the side would be quite sufficient.
-There should be half the number of explorable planets - it's just busy work.
-There's a serious lack of events in space. Should be boarding ships, actually exploring asteroids and comets.
-Resourcing shouldn't be click to get stuff - it should involve dedicated exploration of mines, asteroids, gas clouds. It should involve actual gameplay or not be there at all.
It should have material effects on the nexus - maybe unlocking new parts of the station as they get the materials to get more stuff up and running. Better than having 5000 of everything when you're only building stuff once every 10 levels.

-On planet exploration is also largely drudgery.
- All the "tasks" could be safely removed. They add nothing. They're a cheap box-ticking exercise. I don't really understand the motivation because they did take some effort to implement. If the game had no tasks and took 15 hours less to complete I wouldn't feel like I'd got any worse value for money.
Maybe they're a way to encourage exploring the worlds, but there's nothing worth seeing on them.
-Bland uniform tilesets, lack of vegetation, lack of diverse wildlife, no weather cycles, no day/night cycles.
-The skyboxes are pretty - especially Voeld, post-Vault.
-Random enemy encounters are just a pain in the hole after about half an hour.
-Sterile and unrealistic populated locations. Aya nearly works but people still just stand around. No crowds, no realistic movement, no children.
This all contributes to the environments feeling artificial and gamey.

I had thought it was mistake to remove the rover in ME2 and 3, but looking back, having well-designed side-missions within narrow confines just makes for better gameplay.
I can remember every single side mission from both games because they're almost all enjoyable. I can't really remember any from Andromeda - they're just a blur of driving around identical looking terrain looking for 12 gopher spleens or spaghetti quests forcing you into the painful galaxy map as you hop across four different solar systems and spending half an hour on a four minute quest that gives you 2 lines of diagloue as a payoff.

-There's too much duplication of travelling cutscenes. Some of it presumably covers over loading screens but I'd nearly prefer them.
Similarly, the first time you enter a system, there should be a cutscene of you zipping around, shooting out probes to planets and points of interest, but you by and large shouldn't have to actually do it yourself because it isn't actually gameplay.
It should be seen as part of the UI, to be navigated through as quickly as possible, so you can get to the actual gameplay.

The remnant, their vaults, the enemies themselves, the backstory - that's all pretty good, their slightly cliche cephalpoid design notwithstanding.

Inventory and Resources:
-All resources, loot, research and credits totally irrelevant both in gathering and use.
-The scanning function opens up the chance to feel like an explorer but because the way resources work it's largely wasted.
-Resources should be more abstract and related to side missions that advance progress of Nexus (eg get fuel with interesting refinery mission - allow access to new planets that are farther away).
-Credits serve no purpose and if you had a bug preventing you from getting any, it would make virtually no difference to the game.
-Massive overabundance of crafting resources. Mildy inconveniencing early on but no scarcity after about 15 hours.
-Lack of progression in weapons unlocks leaves you with a mostly static loadout for the last 2/3rds of the game because you already have the best.
-Unlocking higher levels isn't satisfying if it's locked to level. At least it should be limited by scarce resources so you feel like you actually earn your progress - it'd be a better way to use up credits.
-AVP is grand in theory but most of the unlocks are useless.
-Research shouldn't be something you spend. It's data. It doesn't go anywhere.
-There should be no crafting or loot from enemies. Neither add anything.
Reasearch points in the relevant field (Heleus, Remnant or AI) should unlock tiers of weapons. A few bits of resources should be expended to unlock individual weapons and credits should be used to upgrade them.
There should be no level cap on the level of weapon but it should be prohibitively expensive to do it willy nilly.

Overall, I think there's too many kinds of resources. It feels like there were several opinions on how to handle resources but rather than pick one, they picked everyone's to keep them happy.
"Minerals", "biological samples", "remnant hardware", "kett hardware". That'd be more than enough, with maybe 1 special version of each for unlocking ultra-rare gear.


Gameplay:
-Saving grace of game up to a point.
-Powers movement and controls are solid enough - best in series in most respects.
-Except too grindy and game becomes trivially easy after about level 25.
-Change for the sake of change in profiles system. Maybe it could've been better implemented and useful, but as is, more constricting than anything.
-Too few availble powers. Maybe if they had 3 profiles available for each tier of skills - biotic, tech and combat, and then gave you 4 active abilities that would've been a better, more flexible compromise.
-Access to all weapons from 1/4 of the way into the game make for uneven difficulty ramp (a grind to very easy and then mostly static thereafter) and boring static inventory for most of the game.
-Weapon consumables are mostly a bad idea. Maybe have consuables for the cobra, but ammo powers shouldn't be limted.
-Outlaws utterly bland. Only the Hydra is fun, and that's more about aesthetics than gameplay.
-Kett interesting enough, but bullet-sponginess of elites makes them a chore.
-Remnant are ok.
-Physics makes for really annoying trudging around after ragdolled enemies.
-Architect fights were fairly enjoyable but again too easy. Should've been more variation - maybe in space or something.

Role-Playing and Story:
-Romance, inter-personal relationships, comedy - mostly handled amateurishly. Not a particular stick to beat Andromeda with - Mass Effect has mostly been poor for story on a technical level.
-It lacked a hook early on and I didn't know what the point of the story was until the last mission.
It was if anything too mysterious. Shepard had all these details - the massive ship, Saren being a traitor, the prothean beacon and that all drew you in, before being expanded on. You had an immediate goal and straightforward trail of breadcrumbs to follow.
The end goal for most of Andromeda was creating colonies but that made the story lose momentum immediately after a strong opening and the bits of the main story weren't enough to revive it. It seriously lacked focus.

-The Krogan deserve special mention because holy **** were they terrible.

Leaving aside that all female Krogan had 1 voice actor, the characters themselves weren't up to much. Kesh is grand but Morda sounded like they let one of the developers children come up with her whole plotline. The fist-fight with whatever faceless goon she defeats in her warren is the worst thing that's ever happened in a Mass Effect game.

-Liam is awful. How on earth has he earned his place on that crew?
-Cora is mostly awful and sounds like Lisa from Team America, World Police at times, with her straight-faced delivery of Asari combat doctrine that sounds like it's from a 1990's martial arts c-movie.
-Alien crew, Gil and Suvi are grand. The little glimpses of depth to Drack make me notice the lack of it elsewhere.
-Kett are menacing enough but after the Reapers, they're pretty small fry.
-Most intersting parts where those that hinted at the Milky Way and what went on there.
-All Alien NPCs have exactly the same face.
There's 1 female Krogan, 2 male Krogan, 2 Asari, 1 Male Turian and 2 Female Turian faces. The extras are your squadmates. The rest have some facepaint.

Another thing that annoys me - you have a team but you never really use it.
The Suicide mission in ME2 and Citadel in ME3 show how you can integrate the whole team into a mission while still maintaining the 3-man main team with Shepard/Ryder.
They don't have to do it all the time, but the odd time would be nice. It's immersion breaking and a wasted opportunty both from a story and gameplay perspective.
There's loads of tactical decisions you could make - maybe having PB in the support team means she take control of some remnant, or maybe Jaal lurks around in the shadows randomly sniping lads for you.



In summary, other than Jetpacks, everything good about Andromeda was inherited from the previous games. It doesn't have much to recommend it from a story, production or technical point of view. Most of the meta-game elements were either poorly conceived or poorly implemented.

It's mostly a timesink with decent combat mechanics.
If it wasn't called Mass Effect I probably wouldn't have bothered with it, or this overly long critical analysis.

Skerries

TL;DR - it was OK

Gbear

Skerries wrote: »

TL;DR - it was OK

You can list all the bad things but it's not like you tot up the score by counting the mistakes and subtracting it from 100%.

In the end it was enjoyable enough because, if nothing else, it's using a proven franchise's mechanics, lore and setting.

Gbear

In better news, I had a go off MP for the first time in a while yesterday and loved it.

They might need to tweak it a bit more to make it more difficult again after dramatically strengthening powers, combos and most weapons, but the powers and weapons feel infinitely better.

Skerries

really pissed off with EA at the moment
the latest patch 1.07 has stopped me from playing the game
I'm 95 hours in and was about to head to end game when this happened
Looks like it has effected loads of people and I have tried all the known fixes with out success :mad::(

SeantheMan

Skerries wrote: »

really pissed off with EA at the moment
the latest patch 1.07 has stopped me from playing the game
I'm 95 hours in and was about to head to end game when this happened
Looks like it has effected loads of people and I have tried all the known fixes with out success :mad::(

Game breaking bug or something in-game you don't like ?
You actually can't play the game ?

Skerries

yes, I physically can't play the game
It just won't start

things I have tried

Updated the graphics card driver
Deleted the 2 exe files in the game folder in order to force a repair
Deleted the dlc folder.
Removed (restart) and Installed MS C++ Redist 2010,2012,2013 and 2015 (both x86 and x64)
Repaired the game
reinstalled the game twice
Reinstalled Origin
Ran MasseffectAndromeda.exe in compatible mode with admin rights
tried a fix where you have to change the language
tried an offline fix
created a new user account

nothing worked

Gbear

Skerries wrote: »

really pissed off with EA at the moment
the latest patch 1.07 has stopped me from playing the game
I'm 95 hours in and was about to head to end game when this happened
Looks like it has effected loads of people and I have tried all the known fixes with out success :mad::(

Same with me.

The game won't launch.

K.O.Kiki

Skerries wrote: »

yes, I physically can't play the game
It just won't start

things I have tried

Updated the graphics card driver
Deleted the 2 exe files in the game folder in order to force a repair
Deleted the dlc folder.
Removed (restart) and Installed MS C++ Redist 2010,2012,2013 and 2015 (both x86 and x64)
Repaired the game
reinstalled the game twice
Reinstalled Origin
Ran MasseffectAndromeda.exe in compatible mode with admin rights
tried a fix where you have to change the language
tried an offline fix
created a new user account

nothing worked

Gbear wrote: »

Same with me.

The game won't launch.

I had to create a new Admin account, uninstall both Origin & ME:A and then download everything again in order to get it to work again.

Definitely won't do a 2nd playthrough of this.

K.O.Kiki

That was a great final mission, too bad it took 84hrs to get to...

There are a lot of words I could use to sum up my Mass Effect: Andromeda experience, but in 3:

Outdated, frustrating, underwhelming.

Potential-Monke

And i just after picking it up... Great.

So far, i'm enjoying the experience, just met the

friendly race, well, so far they're friendly

, so not very far in. The facial animations are terrible, the movement animations are terrible, the voice acting is mediocre at best, but at least space and the planets are pretty. Moving around within the galaxy from the map is beautiful (minus the tears - PS4) but completely unnecessary just to check out each planet (the resource planets should have been scan-able from anywhere, having to travel is a waste of time). There's little to no explanation of the resource gathering or crafting side of things.

On the positive side of things though, it feels like Mass Effect. Ryder, so far, doesn't have the charisma of Shepard. Plus it doesn't help that the character voicing him sounds like Nolan North or Troy Baker (even though it's someone completely different apparently). It's actually putting me off, as i keep expecting to see Nathan Drake, and it's ruining it for me slightly.

Anyway, i'll stick with it, as discovering new planets/races is interesting enough to keep me going, and the secrets of the ProteonsRemnants is intriguing enough to keep at it for another while.

Skerries

Gbear wrote: »

Same with me.

The game won't launch.

Holy Hell! turns out it is Irish based users with this problem and changing the language to UK English should resolve it

http://answers.ea.com/t5/Bug-Reports/Game-not-launching-after-Hotfix/td-p/6068770/page/19

degrassinoel

fcukign early access games lol

Kur4mA

Gbear wrote: »

Same with me.

The game won't launch.

I've been having this issue also and tried a ton of troubleshooting. I can't believe it was just language settings. :mad:

Shougeki

I am f*cking sick of this ****. A week of unplayability because they didn't bother their hole doing localization testing. If there is a restriction on regions surely they could god damn test it.
Now I have lost all my save games also. Never buying an EA game again.

Skerries

Shougeki wrote: »

Now I have lost all my save games also. Never buying an EA game again.

I used this to get my save game back from the cloud

Origin - MEA -Settings - Game Properties



Uncheck Cloud Save

Restore Latest Local Save

Re-Check Cloud Saves

Shougeki

The Restore Latest Local Save was greyed out. My cloud also shows 3MB out of 1GB available so I'm not sure they are going to be there. I'll try when i get home from work, but I am not holding out hope.

Kur4mA

I used to do QA and this is honestly one of the laziest bugs I've ever seen. It would be hilarious if I wasn't affected by it. EA are a right shower.

Shougeki

Kur4mA wrote: »

I used to do QA and this is honestly one of the laziest bugs I've ever seen. It would be hilarious if I wasn't affected by it. EA are a right shower.

Not only that, they have people based in Galway FFS! I would imagine they get free/cheap versions. You would think it might be a priority to fix their ****?

If I cannot get my saves back I am going to go there and remove the office from the map. :P [joking!]

Nah on a serious note, I don't think I'll buy another EA or BioWare game. If these saves are unrecoverable I really don't think I could face starting again.

Gbear

I can change language but the only English options are "English" in the Origin settings and "English US" in the ME:A properties.

Anyone got this working again? How did they do it?

Potential-Monke

I take it this is affecting online only yeah? Because, even though i'm getting enjoyment from the game, i definitely wouldn't be up to doing the last 20 odd hours again...

Skerries

you have to change the language to have only English (United Kingdom) in the Windows OS in the region and language setting

Mr. K

I started this yesterday, it's decent so far. I love the sense of exploration, but the first mission felt like a less fun version of the Eden Prime intro in the first one. The dash and thruster jump are really cool though.

degrassinoel

Skerries wrote: »

you have to change the language to have only English (United Kingdom) in the Windows OS in the region and language setting

Bioware's hidden agenda revealed!

Gbear

Back in business and loving it again.
Multiplayer that is.

Loads of variation in gameplay types, the game is still challenging on Silver and Gold, solid enough performance.
It's still not to where ME3 was but there's hopefully more to come. We're getting a steady trickle of new content rather than packs with half a dozen new characters, weapons and a map every couple of months.

A new map was released recently and it's a bit more like a real mission, where you progress through a more linear level rather than run around a kind of sandbox. Nice for a change of pace.

At times it feels a bit of a grind but to be fair I've unlocked 2 new characters, a new shotgun and got another 20-odd levels on various characters, upgrades and weapons today.

EoinHef

Couldnt get this going this morning,tried rename local save folder,deleting .exe and repairing.

Didnt work,did see one mention of changing OS language but thought they couldnt be that dumb....lesson learned....never underestimate how dumb devs can be. Ill try that fix in the morning.

Tbf Origin rarely gives me trouble,download speeds are good too so ive no real problem with it.

EA's support is hilarious though,follow their own links to their support forum and there is pages and pages of complaints in different threads where EA hasnt answered about or acknowledged the problems. Its so poor really,they seems to prefer just to host the forum and hope users come up with fixes between them. Extremely poor really

Gbear

A Salarian Infiltrator with the Ruzad is something approaching the Claymore Salarian from ME3.

I was demolishing Silver with it at level 6. You never die, you one shot or 2 shot everything bar elites and you have a spare shot when you miss.
And the sticky grenades murder anything armoured.
You even have time to get all the objectives and resurrect all your fallen comrades.

Less good against the Remnant but murders everything else, particularly in the more claustrophobic levels.

It probably won't do the damage for Gold but the Ruzad is only an uncommon or maybe a rare.
A Crusader, Dhan or maybe even the Piranha (which I own) would probably give it the DPS it'd need.

Kiith

Finally got around to finishing this today. I took a break for a few weeks, but i'm glad i finished it in the end. Some of the companions were quite good i thought. Peebee, Vetra and Drack in particular. And the main story was decent in the end. Fun final mission anyway.

Overall, i enjoyed it. Some massive flaws, but it's nowhere near as bad as some people are saying.

K.O.Kiki

Article by Kotaku on ME:A's development cycle
http://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-troubled-five-1795886428