I feel like I'm one of the very few who was actually enjoying the game. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to devote much time to it since release and what little time I have had for gaming has been spent on Zelda and the new DS3 DLC.
The game was running perfectly fine on my PC since it came out. Then I decide to play it today for the first time since the patch and I can't play for more than 15 minutes before the damn thing crashes. Not to mention when it does work, it no longer runs at a smooth 60 like I was getting before, constant hitching and freezing now. Even multiplayer crashes after a few minutes.
GG Bioware. I'll let them cook up a few more patches and probably start a new character when it's actually ready.
If they were to make a new ME game that takes place after Shepard in the Milky Way then imo ending 4 would be a much more worthwhile place to jump from.
It allows them to breathe new life into that area while still retaining ways to do call backs to the older game.
Plus they can move away from the whole Reaper aspect that should be tied up.
For those who don't know what choice 4 is:
Not choosing any of the options that the starchild gives you, the Reapers "win" the fight and finish what they set out to do. However Liara's mission was a success, many many generations later after new civilizations emerge because of her time capsules she does what the promethians couldn't and gives those new species a way to fight and win against the reapers. Perfect way to open a new series in that same area and even allowing you to revisit some old locations (which obviously might be quite different now).
If they were to make a new ME game that takes place after Shepard in the Milky Way then imo ending 4 would be a much more worthwhile place to jump from.
It allows them to breathe new life into that area while still retaining ways to do call backs to the older game.
Plus they can move away from the whole Reaper aspect that should be tied up.
For those who don't know what choice 4 is:
Not choosing any of the options that the starchild gives you, the Reapers "win" the fight and finish what they set out to do. However Liara's mission was a success, many many generations later after new civilizations emerge because of her time capsules she does what the promethians couldn't and gives those new species a way to fight and win against the reapers. Perfect way to open a new series in that same area and even allowing you to revisit some old locations (which obviously might be quite different now).
I still dream of having a proper sci-fi game with fluffy space raptors or some equivalent as the protagonists, but we're so anthropocentric it hurts. The fact that Andromeda doesn't let us play as another species as the fourth entry in the series with a completely blank slate says enough.
I still dream of having a proper sci-fi game with fluffy space raptors or some equivalent as the protagonists, but we're so anthropocentric it hurts. The fact that Andromeda doesn't let us play as another species as the fourth entry in the series with a completely blank slate says enough.
Only played a couple of hours but Im getting Inquisition flashbacks while playing, I disliked DA:I, Im going to continue just because I love ME but I dont know.
That isn't going to work. In a lot of ways ME is sort of a mirror for us as humans. We know who and what we are. Our history is what anchors us in this world and forms the basis of how we respond to the other characters. Take that away and it all crumbles. Humanity is essentially the basis for all the other races too. Their unique characteristics and personalities are solidified by contrasting them with us.
ME cannot be done without humans. You can play as another species, sure, but humans always have to be there in some way.
A slightly different humanoid species wouldn't have our background and would ultimately have to be written as discount humans, thus cheapening the experience. But then we are right back where we started with species no one cares about, having to deal with the Reapers or some other galactic evil again. It's going to take one helluva writer to make that compelling.
Starting to dig in a bit more now that I'm back from vacation and this is all patched up.
A couple things that are really bothering me, albiet small things...
The Codex not being Narrated. That was one of my favorite touches of the trilogy.
And who's idea was it to pretty much mute the noise of the engine in the Tempest when compared to the Normandy and SR2? I mean, there are "12 hours of Normandy Engine Sounds" playlists on YouTube for a reason. It was a great little touch. And they even provided lore reason why the Tempest is silent? Nonsense. Bump the volume back up please. The ship feels less alive without it.
That isn't going to work. In a lot of ways ME is sort of a mirror for us as humans. We know who and what we are. Our history is what anchors us in this world and forms the basis of how we respond to the other characters. Take that away and it all crumbles. Humanity is essentially the basis for all the other races too. Their unique characteristics and personalities are solidified by contrasting them with us.
ME cannot be done without humans. You can play as another species, sure, but humans always have to be there in some way.
A slightly different humanoid species wouldn't have our background and would ultimately have to be written as discount humans, thus cheapening the experience. But then we are right back where we started with species no one cares about, having to deal with the Reapers or some other galactic evil again. It's going to take one helluva writer to make that compelling.
They could always go the way with Javik....to sneak in some humans. Have a small number of humans squirreled away underground and they survive for 50,000 years or more.
Only played a couple of hours but Im getting Inquisition flashbacks while playing, I disliked DA:I, Im going to continue just because I love ME but I dont know.
The long and short of it is don't get too bogged down running around doing "additional tasks". Those are largely the weakest content in the game. Likewise Eos in many ways is the weakest planet zone in the game. The next few you'll encounter are all more interesting. Eos is basically the new Hinterlands. Do your business and then GTFO of there ASAP.
Mass Effect was originally inspired by Star Wars and many of the original devs had worked on KOTR... so it's natural that game leans more towards space opera than hard sci-fi. Still, Casey Hudson was an engineer and pilot while Drew Karpyshyn was used to working in D&D settings that required a high degree of thematic consistency and verisimilitude. You can see how their sensibilities added up to a setting that had a believable foundation and reasonable extrapolation of scientific principles. Sure, they had the gravity-manipulating ‘mass effect' to fall back on if they needed to explain something out of the ordinary (like biotics) but they did so in a way that was consistent and as a player, you could understand the underlying ‘rules of the galaxy' if you dove into it. It wasn't all perfect of course (the short timeline of human galactic expansion is a well-known inconsistency) but you could see the effort.
I can't discern any such effort in Andromeda. Without exaggerating, every single new concept introduced to the setting falls apart if you look at too long. The codex plasters over the cracks with explanations that make surface-level sense but don't hold up to scrutiny. In this game, anything that can't be explained rationally and believably comes back to:
- SAM is magic and knows EVERYTHING
- Remtech is magic and solves EVERYTHING
- The Benefactor's resources are limitless and build EVERYTHING
You know what makes good drama? Limitations. Sci-fi classics, in literature and cinema, are always about heroes using their smarts to work with or around limitations. This game tries to set up interesting conflicts and high stakes but invariably the solution to any major obstacle is
SAM/Remtech magic
.
Worse, the game doesn't even give weight to its magical solutions – everybody treats these things matter-of-factly and goes out of their way to avoid thinking about the implications or downsides of employing them. Peebee is the perfect embodiment of the game's attitude towards science, discovery and technology: let's get the cool toys and damn the torpedoes!
In the old games we had races that were highly distinctive, exotic and, well, alien. Attention was paid to morphology, speech patterns, diet, adaptation, culture and motivations. The two new races don't measure up; they're just tired tropes (noble native warrior and barbaric cannon fodder respectively) with unimaginative reskins. In the trilogy, planets had unique fauna, from floating gas bags to sentient mind-controlling plants to giant worms to fire-breathing insects. We went to worlds where eating the local flora would rot your brain or an erupting sun broke the magnetosphere. There is nothing as quirky, interesting or unexpected in Heleus except
maybe the first time you descend into a Vault... but they kill that sense of awe by brute force repetition.
.
Not sure why they sell the game on ‘exploration' when there is nothing to discover. Either the flag has already been planted by
a previous wave of colonists/exiles
or it's the same stuff as the last planet or they leave whatever big mystery catches your fancy to DLC or latter instalments. Environmental problems are just damage-over-time effects that you
solve by activating magic technology
.
I'm not asking for Asimov or Clarke here but SOME intellectual curiosity would go a long way towards selling why this setting needs to exist beyond ‘it's Dragon Age with rayguns'.
Mass Effect was originally inspired by Star Wars and many of the original devs had worked on KOTR so its natural that game leans more towards space opera than hard sci-fi. Still, Casey Hudson was an engineer and pilot while Drew Karpyshyn was used to working in D&D settings that required a high degree of thematic consistency and verisimilitude. You can see how their sensibilities added up to a setting that had a believable foundation and reasonable extrapolation of scientific principles. Sure, they had the gravity-manipulating mass effect to fall back on if they needed to explain something out of the ordinary (like biotics) but they did so in a way that was consistent and as a player, you could understand the underlying rules of the galaxy if you dove into it. It wasnt all perfect of course (the short timeline of human galactic expansion is a well-known inconsistency) but you could see the effort.
I cant discern any such effort in Andromeda. Without exaggerating, every single new concept introduced to the setting falls apart if you look at too long. The codex plasters over the cracks with explanations that make surface-level sense but dont hold up to scrutiny. In this game, anything that cant be explained rationally and believably comes back to:
- SAM is magic and knows EVERYTHING
- Remtech is magic and solves EVERYTHING
- The Benefactors resources are limitless and build EVERYTHING
You know what makes good drama? Limitations. Sci-fi classics, in literature and cinema, are always about heroes using their smarts to work with or around limitations. This game tries to set up interesting conflicts and high stakes but invariably the solution to any major obstacle is
SAM/Remtech magic
.
Worse, the game doesnt even give weight to its magical solutions everybody treats these things matter-of-factly and goes out of their way to avoid thinking about the implications or downsides of employing them. Peebee is the perfect embodiment of the games attitude towards science, discovery and technology: lets get the cool toys and damn the torpedoes!
In the old games we had races that were highly distinctive, exotic and, well, alien. Attention was paid to morphology, speech patterns, diet, adaptation, culture and motivations. The two new races dont measure up; theyre just tired tropes (noble native warrior and barbaric cannon fodder respectively) with unimaginative reskins. In the trilogy, planets had unique fauna, from floating gas bags to sentient mind-controlling plants to giant worms to fire-breathing insects. We went to worlds where eating the local flora would rot your brain or an erupting sun broke the magnetosphere. There is nothing as quirky, interesting or unexpected in Heleus except
maybe the first time you descend into a Vault... but they kill that sense of awe by brute force repetition.
.
Not sure why they sell the game on exploration when there is nothing to discover. Either the flag has already been planted by
a previous wave of colonists/exiles
or its the same stuff as the last planet or they leave whatever big mystery catches your fancy to DLC or latter instalments. Environmental problems are just damage-over-time effects that you
solve by activating magic technology
.
Im not asking for Asimov or Clarke here but SOME intellectual curiosity would go a long way towards selling why this setting needs to exist beyond its Dragon Age with rayguns.
Mass Effect was originally inspired by Star Wars and many of the original devs had worked on KOTR so its natural that game leans more towards space opera than hard sci-fi. Still, Casey Hudson was an engineer and pilot while Drew Karpyshyn was used to working in D&D settings that required a high degree of thematic consistency and verisimilitude. You can see how their sensibilities added up to a setting that had a believable foundation and reasonable extrapolation of scientific principles. Sure, they had the gravity-manipulating mass effect to fall back on if they needed to explain something out of the ordinary (like biotics) but they did so in a way that was consistent and as a player, you could understand the underlying rules of the galaxy if you dove into it. It wasnt all perfect of course (the short timeline of human galactic expansion is a well-known inconsistency) but you could see the effort.
I cant discern any such effort in Andromeda. Without exaggerating, every single new concept introduced to the setting falls apart if you look at too long. The codex plasters over the cracks with explanations that make surface-level sense but dont hold up to scrutiny. In this game, anything that cant be explained rationally and believably comes back to:
- SAM is magic and knows EVERYTHING
- Remtech is magic and solves EVERYTHING
- The Benefactors resources are limitless and build EVERYTHING
You know what makes good drama? Limitations. Sci-fi classics, in literature and cinema, are always about heroes using their smarts to work with or around limitations. This game tries to set up interesting conflicts and high stakes but invariably the solution to any major obstacle is
SAM/Remtech magic
.
Worse, the game doesnt even give weight to its magical solutions everybody treats these things matter-of-factly and goes out of their way to avoid thinking about the implications or downsides of employing them. Peebee is the perfect embodiment of the games attitude towards science, discovery and technology: lets get the cool toys and damn the torpedoes!
In the old games we had races that were highly distinctive, exotic and, well, alien. Attention was paid to morphology, speech patterns, diet, adaptation, culture and motivations. The two new races dont measure up; theyre just tired tropes (noble native warrior and barbaric cannon fodder respectively) with unimaginative reskins. In the trilogy, planets had unique fauna, from floating gas bags to sentient mind-controlling plants to giant worms to fire-breathing insects. We went to worlds where eating the local flora would rot your brain or an erupting sun broke the magnetosphere. There is nothing as quirky, interesting or unexpected in Heleus except
maybe the first time you descend into a Vault... but they kill that sense of awe by brute force repetition.
.
Not sure why they sell the game on exploration when there is nothing to discover. Either the flag has already been planted by
a previous wave of colonists/exiles
or its the same stuff as the last planet or they leave whatever big mystery catches your fancy to DLC or latter instalments. Environmental problems are just damage-over-time effects that you
solve by activating magic technology
.
Im not asking for Asimov or Clarke here but SOME intellectual curiosity would go a long way towards selling why this setting needs to exist beyond its Dragon Age with rayguns.
Your post is great. I was thinking the same things. Everything in this game is just too simple or convenient for me. Having said that, I am enjoying the hell out of it. While I wish things were different, I hope that the negativity that Bioware has received will make future games better.
Mass Effect was originally inspired by Star Wars and many of the original devs had worked on KOTR so its natural that game leans more towards space opera than hard sci-fi. Still, Casey Hudson was an engineer and pilot while Drew Karpyshyn was used to working in D&D settings that required a high degree of thematic consistency and verisimilitude. You can see how their sensibilities added up to a setting that had a believable foundation and reasonable extrapolation of scientific principles. Sure, they had the gravity-manipulating mass effect to fall back on if they needed to explain something out of the ordinary (like biotics) but they did so in a way that was consistent and as a player, you could understand the underlying rules of the galaxy if you dove into it. It wasnt all perfect of course (the short timeline of human galactic expansion is a well-known inconsistency) but you could see the effort.
I cant discern any such effort in Andromeda. Without exaggerating, every single new concept introduced to the setting falls apart if you look at too long. The codex plasters over the cracks with explanations that make surface-level sense but dont hold up to scrutiny. In this game, anything that cant be explained rationally and believably comes back to:
- SAM is magic and knows EVERYTHING
- Remtech is magic and solves EVERYTHING
- The Benefactors resources are limitless and build EVERYTHING
You know what makes good drama? Limitations. Sci-fi classics, in literature and cinema, are always about heroes using their smarts to work with or around limitations. This game tries to set up interesting conflicts and high stakes but invariably the solution to any major obstacle is
SAM/Remtech magic
.
Worse, the game doesnt even give weight to its magical solutions everybody treats these things matter-of-factly and goes out of their way to avoid thinking about the implications or downsides of employing them. Peebee is the perfect embodiment of the games attitude towards science, discovery and technology: lets get the cool toys and damn the torpedoes!
In the old games we had races that were highly distinctive, exotic and, well, alien. Attention was paid to morphology, speech patterns, diet, adaptation, culture and motivations. The two new races dont measure up; theyre just tired tropes (noble native warrior and barbaric cannon fodder respectively) with unimaginative reskins. In the trilogy, planets had unique fauna, from floating gas bags to sentient mind-controlling plants to giant worms to fire-breathing insects. We went to worlds where eating the local flora would rot your brain or an erupting sun broke the magnetosphere. There is nothing as quirky, interesting or unexpected in Heleus except
maybe the first time you descend into a Vault... but they kill that sense of awe by brute force repetition.
.
Not sure why they sell the game on exploration when there is nothing to discover. Either the flag has already been planted by
a previous wave of colonists/exiles
or its the same stuff as the last planet or they leave whatever big mystery catches your fancy to DLC or latter instalments. Environmental problems are just damage-over-time effects that you
solve by activating magic technology
.
Im not asking for Asimov or Clarke here but SOME intellectual curiosity would go a long way towards selling why this setting needs to exist beyond its Dragon Age with rayguns.
Mass Effect was originally inspired by Star Wars and many of the original devs had worked on KOTR... so it's natural that game leans more towards space opera than hard sci-fi. Still, Casey Hudson was an engineer and pilot while Drew Karpyshyn was used to working in D&D settings that required a high degree of thematic consistency and verisimilitude. You can see how their sensibilities added up to a setting that had a believable foundation and reasonable extrapolation of scientific principles. Sure, they had the gravity-manipulating ‘mass effect' to fall back on if they needed to explain something out of the ordinary (like biotics) but they did so in a way that was consistent and as a player, you could understand the underlying ‘rules of the galaxy' if you dove into it. It wasn't all perfect of course (the short timeline of human galactic expansion is a well-known inconsistency) but you could see the effort.
I can't discern any such effort in Andromeda. Without exaggerating, every single new concept introduced to the setting falls apart if you look at too long. The codex plasters over the cracks with explanations that make surface-level sense but don't hold up to scrutiny. In this game, anything that can't be explained rationally and believably comes back to:
- SAM is magic and knows EVERYTHING
- Remtech is magic and solves EVERYTHING
- The Benefactor's resources are limitless and build EVERYTHING
You know what makes good drama? Limitations. Sci-fi classics, in literature and cinema, are always about heroes using their smarts to work with or around limitations. This game tries to set up interesting conflicts and high stakes but invariably the solution to any major obstacle is
SAM/Remtech magic
.
Worse, the game doesn't even give weight to its magical solutions – everybody treats these things matter-of-factly and goes out of their way to avoid thinking about the implications or downsides of employing them. Peebee is the perfect embodiment of the game's attitude towards science, discovery and technology: let's get the cool toys and damn the torpedoes!
In the old games we had races that were highly distinctive, exotic and, well, alien. Attention was paid to morphology, speech patterns, diet, adaptation, culture and motivations. The two new races don't measure up; they're just tired tropes (noble native warrior and barbaric cannon fodder respectively) with unimaginative reskins. In the trilogy, planets had unique fauna, from floating gas bags to sentient mind-controlling plants to giant worms to fire-breathing insects. We went to worlds where eating the local flora would rot your brain or an erupting sun broke the magnetosphere. There is nothing as quirky, interesting or unexpected in Heleus except
maybe the first time you descend into a Vault... but they kill that sense of awe by brute force repetition.
.
Not sure why they sell the game on ‘exploration' when there is nothing to discover. Either the flag has already been planted by
a previous wave of colonists/exiles
or it's the same stuff as the last planet or they leave whatever big mystery catches your fancy to DLC or latter instalments. Environmental problems are just damage-over-time effects that you
solve by activating magic technology
.
I'm not asking for Asimov or Clarke here but SOME intellectual curiosity would go a long way towards selling why this setting needs to exist beyond ‘it's Dragon Age with rayguns'.
Yeah, this hit me early on when Suvi asked if I wanted to read her science paper about Eos geology/flora and I thought "YES PLEASE" expecting some Codex info, but soon realized the game was setting up a sit-com level joke where we (aboard this science vessel) have to pretend a science paper is boring, and when she emails it to us the ship's computer assumes a science paper must be spam so quarantines it.
Somewhere along the way Bioware forgot this was an RPG series that appeals to a science crowd, and thought it appealed to a huge 10 million+ CoD crowd who just wanted an action game with zero brainpower involved, and it shows in pretty much every facet of the game design and writing.
Question for anyone who's running a biotic build. Why doesn't charge work with annihilation for a biotic combo? It says in the description annihilation setups up combo primers and charge detonates them but it never works for me.
Question for anyone who's running a biotic build. Why doesn't charge work with annihilation for a biotic combo? It says in the description annihilation setups up combo primers and charge detonates them but it never works for me.
Yeah, this hit me early on when Suvi asked if I wanted to read her science paper about Eos geology/flora and I thought "YES PLEASE" expecting some Codex info, but soon realized the game was setting up a sit-com level joke where we (aboard this science vessel) have to pretend a science paper is boring, and when she emails it to us the ship's computer assumes a science paper must be spam so quarantines it.
Somewhere along the way Bioware forgot this was an RPG series that appeals to a science crowd, and thought it appealed to a huge 10 million+ CoD crowd who just wanted an action game with zero brainpower involved, and it shows in pretty much every facet of the game design and writing.
Yep. As I've posted I liked the game and gave it an 8 after beating it. But this rings very true.
Sadly not surprising the focus would be on action when they put the team that had done little of note aside from the MP mode in ME3 before. Easy to see why they'd approach the game like the main reason most people loved the series was for the combat/gameplay when for the majority of fans it was the story, atmosphere, characters, dialogue and choice and relationships that sucked them in.
And yes I know lots of people loved the combat too, especially here where we're mostly hardcore gamers more drawn to gameplay.
Anyway, there's still enough good bits in there that I liked the game, and the great combat (deadzoneas/input lag aside) help with that. But it definitely falls flat with lots of bits like that, moments ruined by terrible dialogue (animation as well for some but that didn't really bother me), good quests buried in sea of awful ones etc.
I Agree with everything BrassDragon brings up. And in my mind this is the biggest fault of the game.
However, ultimately I had a complete blast playing the game for over 80 hours, mostly ignoring the "additional tasks".
Most of the other quests were good to excellent, the combat is super fun, I like all the crew and I even enjoyed driving around in the mako after upgrading it.
I would rate the whole ME series as 2 > 3 > A > 1 but it is hard to compare since 2 and 3 could build on the characters of earlier games and Andromeda is so much bigger.
The hate this game gets is in my opinion totally out of control. I especially find criticisms from people who liked Fallout 4 baffling.
I likewise thought the extreme outrage over ME3 was crazy. The only way I can explain it that people wants wildly different qualities from a ME game.
Hopefully these qualities can be distilled down into separate game so everyone finds new things to love.
I spent ~200 hours playing ME3 MP and I expect to be playing ME:A MP for a long time.
Mass Effect was originally inspired by Star Wars and many of the original devs had worked on KOTR so its natural that game leans more towards space opera than hard sci-fi. Still, Casey Hudson was an engineer and pilot while Drew Karpyshyn was used to working in D&D settings that required a high degree of thematic consistency and verisimilitude. You can see how their sensibilities added up to a setting that had a believable foundation and reasonable extrapolation of scientific principles. Sure, they had the gravity-manipulating mass effect to fall back on if they needed to explain something out of the ordinary (like biotics) but they did so in a way that was consistent and as a player, you could understand the underlying rules of the galaxy if you dove into it. It wasnt all perfect of course (the short timeline of human galactic expansion is a well-known inconsistency) but you could see the effort.
I cant discern any such effort in Andromeda. Without exaggerating, every single new concept introduced to the setting falls apart if you look at too long. The codex plasters over the cracks with explanations that make surface-level sense but dont hold up to scrutiny. In this game, anything that cant be explained rationally and believably comes back to:
- SAM is magic and knows EVERYTHING
- Remtech is magic and solves EVERYTHING
- The Benefactors resources are limitless and build EVERYTHING
You know what makes good drama? Limitations. Sci-fi classics, in literature and cinema, are always about heroes using their smarts to work with or around limitations. This game tries to set up interesting conflicts and high stakes but invariably the solution to any major obstacle is
SAM/Remtech magic
.
Worse, the game doesnt even give weight to its magical solutions everybody treats these things matter-of-factly and goes out of their way to avoid thinking about the implications or downsides of employing them. Peebee is the perfect embodiment of the games attitude towards science, discovery and technology: lets get the cool toys and damn the torpedoes!
In the old games we had races that were highly distinctive, exotic and, well, alien. Attention was paid to morphology, speech patterns, diet, adaptation, culture and motivations. The two new races dont measure up; theyre just tired tropes (noble native warrior and barbaric cannon fodder respectively) with unimaginative reskins. In the trilogy, planets had unique fauna, from floating gas bags to sentient mind-controlling plants to giant worms to fire-breathing insects. We went to worlds where eating the local flora would rot your brain or an erupting sun broke the magnetosphere. There is nothing as quirky, interesting or unexpected in Heleus except
maybe the first time you descend into a Vault... but they kill that sense of awe by brute force repetition.
.
Not sure why they sell the game on exploration when there is nothing to discover. Either the flag has already been planted by
a previous wave of colonists/exiles
or its the same stuff as the last planet or they leave whatever big mystery catches your fancy to DLC or latter instalments. Environmental problems are just damage-over-time effects that you
solve by activating magic technology
.
Im not asking for Asimov or Clarke here but SOME intellectual curiosity would go a long way towards selling why this setting needs to exist beyond its Dragon Age with rayguns.
Yeah, this hit me early on when Suvi asked if I wanted to read her science paper about Eos geology/flora and I thought "YES PLEASE" expecting some Codex info, but soon realized the game was setting up a sit-com level joke where we (aboard this science vessel) have to pretend a science paper is boring, and when she emails it to us the ship's computer assumes a science paper must be spam so quarantines it.
Somewhere along the way Bioware forgot this was an RPG series that appeals to a science crowd, and thought it appealed to a huge 10 million+ CoD crowd who just wanted an action game with zero brainpower involved, and it shows in pretty much every facet of the game design and writing.
It is a bit disheartening as a fan of this series how quickly this game declined. Gone from twitch, not too many playing MP. People holding off now for months to dive in waiting for patches. EA really is a piece of shit publisher. Guarantee they pushed EA Access, and wanted to meet fiscal release targets. Yeah they gave 5 years, but what is a couple more months. That is the difference between a subpar game and a game with more polish.
In terms of a sequel, who will helm it? Montreal which showed it cannot handle an AAA release? Edmonton has their own IP and one they would want to make sequels of if it does well. And then the other EA studios are all doing Star Wars stuff. Montreal will spend the next 2 months doing patchwork, maybe keep releasing their MP stuff, I can't foresee any quality Lair of the Shadow Broker stuff coming anytime soon.
I think folks are selling the Angarans short here. They have as much thought put into them as any other Mass Effect alien race. I especially appreciate their tendencies towards physical displays of affection, which dovetail nicely with their bioelectric capabilities.
Remnant tech indeed doesn't get much in the way of explanation, but I think that's by necessity - the entire premise, the whole concept, of an alien race that is so advanced they can create massive underground networks on numerous planets throughout an entire cluster that are capable of
terraforming the entirety of said planets in record time
is one that is so far removed from our current level of technological progress that we can't really come up with a good explanation for it all, and that's perfectly fine to me. Not everything needs to be explained.
Complaints about SAM's capabilities, on the other hand, just kind of annoy me at this point. Yes, he's crazy powerful and outrageously useful, and that's the whole bloody point - AI engaging in active symbiosis with its sapient hosts creates results that are greater than the sum of their parts. It makes plenty of logical sense and is also something that is potentially within reach of our own near future as we finally dive deeply into artificial intelligence and quantum computing. When you have untold quantum processing capabilities and the massive storage banks needed to accompany it, translating entire unknown languages when given literal zetabytes of information is going to be a fairly trivial task. SAM is literally built for this purpose, and I see nothing here that defies explanation or should be described as "space magic" (unlike Remnant tech).
I still get a kick out of reading the game's codex entries. I'm just not seeing what other folks are seeing here with regards to a weakening of the game's verisimilitude. Everything works, it's internally consistent, nothing is so far out-of-whack with the setting or its established parameters that I'm brought out of it.
Oh, and we're going to be seeing far more new alien races in the sequel if it happens. Going to be very interesting to see how they handle
the Kett vassal races
. The Quarian ark will be arriving as well, which should increase the biodiversity quite a bit. I can only hope it doesn't take another 5 years of development before we get to see it all.
That particular section only looks bad if you pick that particular dialogue option. The alternative dialogue option is far more reasonable and appropriate.
I personally can't knock them any points for including dialogue options that I'll never take. It's there, it's a thing, and if you don't like it just don't roleplay the character that way.
It is a bit disheartening as a fan of this series how quickly this game declined. Gone from twitch, not too many playing MP. People holding off now for months to dive in waiting for patches. EA really is a piece of shit publisher. Guarantee they pushed EA Access, and wanted to meet fiscal release targets. Yeah they gave 5 years, but what is a couple more months. That is the difference between a subpar game and a game with more polish.
In terms of a sequel, who will helm it? Montreal which showed it cannot handle an AAA release? Edmonton has their own IP and one they would want to make sequels of if it does well. And then the other EA studios are all doing Star Wars stuff. Montreal will spend the next 2 months doing patchwork, maybe keep releasing their MP stuff, I can't foresee any quality Lair of the Shadow Broker stuff coming anytime soon.
To be fair, more time would have given more polish and gotten most of the bugs out. But it's unlikely it would have fixed the poor writing, boring plot, characters many find lackluster, boring open worlds filled with shit tier MMO quests etc.
To me it's all on whoever decided to give the Montreal team this huge IP and task them with making the game much bigger in scope than prior ME games. The latter may just be on Montreal deciding to go that route, the first we don't know if EA pushed them to do it just to get an ME game out, or Bioware made the call so the main team could work on their apparently Destiny-like new IP.
I think folks are selling the Angarans short here. They have as much thought put into them as any other Mass Effect alien race. I especially appreciate their tendencies towards physical displays of affection, which dovetail nicely with their bioelectric capabilities.
Remnant tech indeed doesn't get much in the way of explanation, but I think that's by necessity - the entire premise, the whole concept, of an alien race that is so advanced they can create massive underground networks on numerous planets throughout an entire cluster that are capable of
terraforming the entirety of said planets in record time
is one that is so far removed from our current level of technological progress that we can't really come up with a good explanation for it all, and that's perfectly fine to me. Not everything needs to be explained.
Complaints about SAM's capabilities, on the other hand, just kind of annoy me at this point. Yes, he's crazy powerful and outrageously useful, and that's the whole bloody point - AI engaging in active symbiosis with its sapient hosts creates results that are greater than the sum of their parts. It makes plenty of logical sense and is also something that is potentially within reach of our own near future as we finally dive deeply into artificial intelligence and quantum computing. When you have untold quantum processing capabilities and the massive storage banks needed to accompany it, translating entire unknown languages when given literal zetabytes of information is going to be a fairly trivial task. SAM is literally built for this purpose, and I see nothing here that defies explanation or should be described as "space magic" (unlike Remnant tech).
I still get a kick out of reading the game's codex entries. I'm just not seeing what other folks are seeing here with regards to a weakening of the game's verisimilitude. Everything works, it's internally consistent, nothing is so far out-of-whack with the setting or its established parameters that I'm brought out of it.
Oh, and we're going to be seeing far more new alien races in the sequel if it happens. Going to be very interesting to see how they handle
the Kett vassal races
. The Quarian ark will be arriving as well, which should increase the biodiversity quite a bit. I can only hope it doesn't take another 5 years of development before we get to see it all.
That particular section only looks bad if you pick that particular dialogue option. The alternative dialogue option is far more reasonable and appropriate.
I personally can't knock them any points for including dialogue options that I'll never take. It's there, it's a thing, and if you don't like it just don't roleplay the character that way.
It is a bit disheartening as a fan of this series how quickly this game declined. Gone from twitch, not too many playing MP. People holding off now for months to dive in waiting for patches. EA really is a piece of shit publisher. Guarantee they pushed EA Access, and wanted to meet fiscal release targets. Yeah they gave 5 years, but what is a couple more months. That is the difference between a subpar game and a game with more polish.
In terms of a sequel, who will helm it? Montreal which showed it cannot handle an AAA release? Edmonton has their own IP and one they would want to make sequels of if it does well. And then the other EA studios are all doing Star Wars stuff. Montreal will spend the next 2 months doing patchwork, maybe keep releasing their MP stuff, I can't foresee any quality Lair of the Shadow Broker stuff coming anytime soon.
While I feel kinda bad for the people who spent five years of their lives making this game, I also hope the lack of popularity has taught EA a lesson in how not to ship an unfinished game.
My interest in this game dived off a cliff after a few planets. I didn't touch it in a week and sold it today. Nowhere near finishing but I just have no urges to go back to it right now.
Maybe down the road on a sale or something when it's been updated more.
While I feel kinda bad for the people who spent five years of their lives making this game, I also hope the lack of popularity has taught EA a lesson in how not to ship an unfinished game.
I doubt EA cares. If anything they will just look at Mass Effect as a weak brand and move on to the next thing they can milk (like Bioware's new IP coming soon).
My interest in this game dived off a cliff after a few planets. I didn't touch it in a week and sold it today. Nowhere near finishing but I just have no urges to go back to it right now.
Maybe down the road on a sale or something when it's been updated more.
My cousin was same way. He played ME more than me and yet couldn't stand this game past Eos no matter how much I convinced him to keep it. Game feels like an also-ran. It is just there but nothing really stands out. Enemy design, level design, voice acting, cinematics, graphics, quest design nothing is really top of its class. I mean people keep praising the dialogue but I feel it is even more limited than ME3 was. The variations don't really make for any tonal change. A quest like Contagion just sums up the quality of the quest design altogether and how frustrating it is. People love the Sudoku, but I honestly felt like I was playing those Bioshock 2006 water valve puzzles. There is nothing of any substance. Even quests you think are major just end with no consequence. You may get some random follow up email.
Free the Asari Ark and bring thousands of Asari back to the Nexus, here is a shitty 10 second low budget cinematic of the same assets walking by, and you make a dialogue speech of 3 seconds and 2 random identical Asari come by after and you tell them something random like stay vigilant and thats it. The Nexus goes back to looking like nothing changed, no consequence or emotion.
I think folks are selling the Angarans short here. They have as much thought put into them as any other Mass Effect alien race. I especially appreciate their tendencies towards physical displays of affection, which dovetail nicely with their bioelectric capabilities.
Remnant tech indeed doesn't get much in the way of explanation, but I think that's by necessity - the entire premise, the whole concept, of an alien race that is so advanced they can create massive underground networks on numerous planets throughout an entire cluster that are capable of
terraforming the entirety of said planets in record time
is one that is so far removed from our current level of technological progress that we can't really come up with a good explanation for it all, and that's perfectly fine to me. Not everything needs to be explained.
Complaints about SAM's capabilities, on the other hand, just kind of annoy me at this point. Yes, he's crazy powerful and outrageously useful, and that's the whole bloody point - AI engaging in active symbiosis with its sapient hosts creates results that are greater than the sum of their parts. It makes plenty of logical sense and is also something that is potentially within reach of our own near future as we finally dive deeply into artificial intelligence and quantum computing. When you have untold quantum processing capabilities and the massive storage banks needed to accompany it, translating entire unknown languages when given literal zetabytes of information is going to be a fairly trivial task. SAM is literally built for this purpose, and I see nothing here that defies explanation or should be described as "space magic" (unlike Remnant tech).
I still get a kick out of reading the game's codex entries. I'm just not seeing what other folks are seeing here with regards to a weakening of the game's verisimilitude. Everything works, it's internally consistent, nothing is so far out-of-whack with the setting or its established parameters that I'm brought out of it.
Oh, and we're going to be seeing far more new alien races in the sequel if it happens. Going to be very interesting to see how they handle
the Kett vassal races
. The Quarian ark will be arriving as well, which should increase the biodiversity quite a bit. I can only hope it doesn't take another 5 years of development before we get to see it all.
That particular section only looks bad if you pick that particular dialogue option. The alternative dialogue option is far more reasonable and appropriate.
I personally can't knock them any points for including dialogue options that I'll never take. It's there, it's a thing, and if you don't like it just don't roleplay the character that way.
Agreed 100% with this post. BrassDragon's post has received a circle jerk of praise, and while it is a well reasoned and thorough post that brings up a lot of valid observations, I also think that it overstates the sophistication of the trilogy (especially ME2 and ME3) and sells MEA short in many of the ways described in the quoted post.
I'd expand more if I wasn't on mobile, but the post I'm quoting covers most bases.
Check their rank 6 skills on the character sheet. They should be available if you've completed the loyalty mission. It'll also say so on their codex page.
Check their rank 6 skills on the character sheet. They should be available if you've completed the loyalty mission. It'll also say so on their codex page.
If they were to make a new ME game that takes place after Shepard in the Milky Way then imo ending 4 would be a much more worthwhile place to jump from.
It allows them to breathe new life into that area while still retaining ways to do call backs to the older game.
Plus they can move away from the whole Reaper aspect that should be tied up.
For those who don't know what choice 4 is:
Not choosing any of the options that the starchild gives you, the Reapers "win" the fight and finish what they set out to do. However Liara's mission was a success, many many generations later after new civilizations emerge because of her time capsules she does what the promethians couldn't and gives those new species a way to fight and win against the reapers. Perfect way to open a new series in that same area and even allowing you to revisit some old locations (which obviously might be quite different now).
I think this will happen after the Andromeda trilogy ends. It makes sense to go back to the Milky Way, but after the controversy dies down about ME3 and fans are ready for it.
Shockwave is nice thanks to the big radius.
