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Early impressions from RPS for ME:A. It's... not good

Game development in general is rough, from what I hear. Which is why I find it patently ridiculous how harsh people are being over what amounts to tiny details. People aren't even just calling it out anymore, they're straight up reveling in the negativity.

Are you new to gaf? Gaf typically nit picks stuff to death...
 

Crossing Eden

Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
They're pretty damn attractive people. Same with default male Shepard and default male Ryder. None of those are average looking self inserts
Because they're ideals, there's a difference between being attractive in general and being conventionally attractive like a super model.
Do you understand that saying things like "you're part of the problem" is probably one of the most insulting things you can say to someone? You're completely dismissing any and all frame of reference the other party might have because they don't agree with you. Despite what a lot of people here might think, the attractiveness of characters in video games is *NOT* just as important an issue as combating racism.
Combating sexism and racism in the industry are equally valid goals.

Just because you want someone in a game to be attractive doesn't mean you want to fuck them, my dude.
That's what it seems like people are saying when they photoshop game characters to fit very specific standards of beauty.

I'm sure there are celebrities that you think are ugly, that other people think are attractive. I think you're taking one point, which is "I don't like how FemRyder looks" and presuming several different things about the poster because of it.
That picture is all that needs to be said.

I think FemRyder is unattractive, personally. I don't care if she's a self-insert for the player, because I'm going to be staring at her face for countless hours. If Steve Buscemi was the target for Joel in TLoU, I probably wouldn't have played TLoU.

Now, a good counter-point to this, which is the reason I don't really give a crap if she's attractive or not, is that you can customize the character. So if I want to be Shrek, the Pathfinder, I can be-- green skin and all. Or, I can be <insert your celebrity of choice>. In ME1, I made my male Shepard super attractive. I was Hotty McBody.

The point that I'm trying to get across is that we're not going to solve anything by talking about how minorities are represented in video games. Pointing out misrepresentation is well intentioned, but is more or less pointing out "perceived racism," when the intent behind the representation isn't inherently racist. Same thing with gender representation and perceived sexism. For every post about how it's stupid that the armor for every JRPG female ever is bikinis, there isn't a single post pointing out that Batman's armor literally has abs. Batman is supposed to be sexy in a way, as are those armors-- those were intentionally designed that way. Video games are an entertainment medium, and as such, you should be able to interact with them whatever way you like. There isn't a wrong way to interact with your game.
The hell is perceived sexism. Men not getting sexist shit is how this industry ended up in this state in the first place. Just because you don't get it doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist.

There's a very thin line between being progressive, and being authoritarian. You perceive something as giving someone more rights, someone else perceives it as their rights being taken away. This is why conversing about it in a serious manner that doesn't fucking involve "you're part of the problem" is so crucial, because by saying "you're part of the problem," when things go wrong, it's your fault for dismissing both fair and unfair criticism of your platform.
Fem Ryder and Peebee need v shaped chins, thinner faces, and more makeup like other video game characters is pretty authoritarian.
 

Kthulhu

Member
The writing and tone shifts from mere sentence to sentence conversations is just...really awkward and borderline terrible imo. Listen to the video linked if you want to hear it in context. It doesn't help, it just makes it worse imo.

Lines like this:

source.gif


source: https://youtu.be/Vss92x8YaF0?t=1h37m56s

I mean...it's a valid thing to say...I guess? I'm sorry, my face is tired from dealing with everything? Huh? You could say this is nit picking, but for a game series that prides itself on character interaction, I'm consistently finding the animations, transitions, tone, and writing to be really off putting and bizzare.

Good god, it looks like they didn't even give a shit. Glad I didn't preorder.
 
Game development in general is rough, from what I hear. Which is why I find it patently ridiculous how harsh people are being over what amounts to tiny details. People aren't even just calling it out anymore, they're straight up reveling in the negativity.

Mass Effect is an RPG shooter and interacting with the NPCs in the world via conversations is a big part of the game.

Apologies for reveling on something that can effect the enjoyment of the conversations. I'm sure looking at a dead eyed NPC while in a badly animated/voice-acted scene would be the bee's knees for everyone.
 

Kinyou

Member
Because they're ideals, there's a difference between being attractive in general and being conventionally attractive like a super model. .
I'm not sure what difference you mean. Point is, those player inserts are clearly meant to be hot. So your argument that she's not hot because she's a player insert doesn't make sense.
 

Matt

Member
Game development in general is rough, from what I hear. Which is why I find it patently ridiculous how harsh people are being over what amounts to tiny details. People aren't even just calling it out anymore, they're straight up reveling in the negativity.
While that is certainly true, I wouldn't point it out if it was the normal level of roughness...
 

Revolutionary

Gold Member
I've watched some streams today and it's pretty much what I expected. An interesting story with boring combat and janky presentation.
In for a rent.
 
Horizons janky animations are far more jarring to me than ME:A because the faces look so beautiful and realistic my brain expects the same from the facial animations... But then when they start it rips me from my immersion.

With ME:A the faces look only a little better than the animations. So I'm not looking at the face and expecting amazingness. I'm expecting the same standard as I've been seeing so when the animations start it's not as bad for me.

Do I think that the faces in Horizon overall look better? Absolutely.

But would I also rather the facial animations more closely matched the same fidelity of the rest of the face? Absolutely.

I wish that ME:A had better faces like Horizon and better animations to match them but am glad that neither outweigh each other so much that they are as immersion breaking as Horizon is for me.

I also think it's ok to call things out that you don't like or would like improved though so I'm ok with complaining about the animations. But it would be nice if this was equal from both sides and done in the name of actually improving the game with constructive criticism and not just fanboy game vs game wars.

Thing is, none of this means that either game isn't fun to play. As you can see, even with the janky animations from Horizon, people are still able to enjoy it and look past it.

I mean, think of some of your favorite games of all time from the past and think about some of the janky parts of them and how you where still able to have fun.

Yeah I don't agree with you as far as Horizon is concerened. There's obviously a bit of jank here and there but majority of the game is pretty good:

SickHarmfulFrillneckedlizard.gif
ComplexLimpingBlackwidowspider.gif
DesertedVerifiableEuropeanfiresalamander.gif
TalkativeElatedArchaeopteryx.gif
 

Kthulhu

Member
Game development in general is rough, from what I hear. Which is why I find it patently ridiculous how harsh people are being over what amounts to tiny details. People aren't even just calling it out anymore, they're straight up reveling in the negativity.

It's not a tiny detail. This is a AAA game with a heavy focus on character interaction.

Voice overs and animations are the last thing you can't afford to fuck up.
 
She's a literal self insert for the player. She's not there for you to wanna fuck her my dude.

I see now that your poor arguments have been effectively shot down, you're resorting to this nonsense. I don't want to fuck any animated characters. What we're talking about is purely art and aesthetics. But nice try. If your first post wasn't dickish enough, you certainly hit it out of the park with this one.
 

Vire

Member
Looks worse than I thought initially actually after watching this GB stream. This game is going to get slammed in reviews...
 
I played the shit out of DA:I but it had a lot of flaws, they disappointed me when they left important stuff on the DLC(should have known better.) and the sidequests were so uninspired.

But something about Andromeda feels so off, it's so weird..
 

Symbiotx

Member
The Giant Bomb stream just looks like they're trying to make fun of everything. Guess it brings the views, but to contrast, I watched someone streaming it, and it was a waaaaay better indicator of if I'll like the game because he was just playing it instead of making a point to talk about how horrible the animations are 100% of the time.
 

kitzkozan

Member
Yeah, sometimes the face looks good. But the speaking/mouth animation is nowhere near good. Its like a robot mouth moving up and down, no matter what is being said.

People just have it out for Bioware. Around these parts, the bar for being impressed by Bioware's work is significantly higher than other companies. It seems like Bioware would have to release a 12/10 to get any recognition, but Guerrilla Games has barely functioning facial animations for even the main character, and its great!

Guerilla Games is superior to Bioware in term of raw talent. They still struggle with putting out quality games on a consistent basic (which is very hard to do), but they do have the tech. Fantastic tech along with great art designs and top notch moment to moment animations. There's just no way we can compare GG and Bioware.

I don't expect Bioware to match GG or CD Projekt Red respective strengths, but they should at least reach the AAA standard.

ME: A is an AAA game based on it's budget, but the team working behind it is so sloppy that it's an A / AA caliber game. The roughness of Andromeda is usually what you get out of some obscure European dev which has no money and are in way over their heads lol.
 

Real Hero

Member
The Giant Bomb stream just looks like they're trying to make fun of everything. Guess it brings the views, but to contrast, I watched someone streaming it, and it was a waaaaay better indicator of if I'll like the game because he was just playing it instead of making a point to talk about how horrible the animations are 100% of the time.
No it just looks really bad in spots there reaction is natural
 

Diancecht

Member
The Giant Bomb stream just looks like they're trying to make fun of everything. Guess it brings the views, but to contrast, I watched someone streaming it, and it was a waaaaay better indicator of if I'll like the game because he was just playing it instead of making a point to talk about how horrible the animations are 100% of the time.

Well if the animations are dogshit, you are going to talk how the animations are dogshit.
 
A little reminder from 2014:

32973255012_456f36c092_o.jpg


This is most certainly NOT an issue of the engine.

Why, OH WHY are the eyes of the Mass effect characters so fucking trash when they knew how to design them and render them 3 years ago.

As a game developer I dont usually like to say things like "someone should be fired", because I know how freaking hard is to make games, but holy shit, the one (or team) that was in charge of or giving the pass as "its good enough" needs to seriously rethink how freaking bad he/she is making the game look only with that simple decission.
This shit is amateur hour. This stuff is the level of eyes the sims 2 and 3 vanilla had more than 10 years ago.
Like, if I were the game designer in the game right now and seeing all this, I would demand asap a retuxture of all the character eyes to add as a 1 day patch. The animation of the eyes is also a problem, but thats much harder to fix, though it also should be fixed.
 

imBask

Banned
The Giant Bomb stream just looks like they're trying to make fun of everything. Guess it brings the views, but to contrast, I watched someone streaming it, and it was a waaaaay better indicator of if I'll like the game because he was just playing it instead of making a point to talk about how horrible the animations are 100% of the time.

even on mute those animations look like garbage
 

Lime

Member
Yeah as a huge ME1 fan and hyped for the studio's desire to replicate the best parts of each game, especially exploration in ME1, and based of shinobi's comments last year, I'm going to borrow a friend's copy or just wait until the GOTY edition is released and mods have fixed the worst of it.

It has huge red flags showing up. The disastrous animations in a narrative-heavy AAA game along with the so-far shitty writing and space jesus stuff is a deal-breaker for me.
 

Ikuu

Had his dog run over by Blizzard's CEO
Think I'm going to cancel my pre-order for this one, starting to see more and more negative impressions, and the footage EA has released hasn't been all that great.
 
Even though I don't expect Andromeda to be GotY material, I am confident I'll enjoy it. I love good sci-fi and I grew up watching a bunch of B movies with my dad.

Anyway, with all of the positive impressions floating about, there were bound to be some negatives. It's quite alright, though considering the reviewer and his dislike for the Witcher I'm not sure his criticisms will apply to my perception of the game. I don't expect top tier writing from video games, though I do appreciate when it does happen. The animations bother me, but not enough to avoid the game.
 

Vire

Member
"I like that you can pan around so you can look at these stiff ass models having robot conversations"

lolz
 

Vlaphor

Member
If this game is at an utterly massive scale, then I'll be OK with this of presentation. If this game is Mass Effect scale...then this just looks real bad,
 

DeaDPo0L84

Member
I'm so torn, I want this game to be an amazing open world rpg experience but I just feel like I'm gonna come away disappointed. Witcher 3 is my favorite game of all time, and I just got the platinum for Horizon so my bar currently is pretty high. You could show me these videos a few years back and I would've been okay but great games in the same genre as ME have just simply done it better and ME looks dated for it. The awkward cut scenes and dialogue exchange remind me of Alpha Protocol, ugh. I have it digitally po so they got my money but I might use my "courtesy" refund this go around before it launches.
 
FemRyder looks like she was designed by an alien race based on a vague description of what humans look like. Are those photoshops sexist? I don't necessarily think so. Are they the product of a society that perpetuates unrealistic beauty standards for women? Absolutely.

But I'm on Liana Kerzner's side on this topic. I don't know what BioWare's intentions were, if there were even any, but it's undeniable that BroRyder looks way more attractive than FemRyder.
 
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