Any word on the next patch?
Delved back into the Wild Hunt for now. Going to try and finish that and Horizon while Andromeda improves a little. First patch did wonders but looking to see some more improvements.
May I think.
Honestly they just need better writers. They also need more money and time and a competent studio. Not saying Montreal is a bad studio but they are clearly not ready for AAA games in 2017.
There are so many little things they could have done that create lore building. Things like Liara audio logs are a good thing. Don't piecemeal the whole thing so it feels completely different at times. The first vault feels so different in terms of design. Clearly they rushed through some of the other vaults.
Easily the worst part of this game is it feels almost last gen at times. Backwards quest design and open world design. The fact most are easily clocking 70-110 hours shows you that it is also padded woth tons of time wasting filler. I don't want to see Mass Effect be an almost-ran series.
You're wrong- quest writing is fantastic. Quest
design is fundamentally incompatible with how they designed travel between zones however. Quoting myself from the community thread:
I know I've beaten the point to death but here's Inquisition as a point of comparison:
Inquisition:
- Open map with M
- open world map
- open another location
- click camp
Andromeda:
- Hold T to go to the Tempest
- Watch the Tempest leave the planet
- Hold E for the galaxy map
- Press space to zoom out from the planet to the solar system
- Press space to zoom out from the solar system to the cluster
- click on another solar system to fly to
- watch your ship fly there
- click on a planet
- either watch your ship fly there or hit tab to skip the animation
- Click on the planet to land
- Watch the ship landing animation
- Click the forward station to fast travel to
A few notes regarding quest design on this point though- the first being that in all fairness Inquisition does fast-travel better than most western RPGs, and the second is I do personally feel that many of Andromeda's side-quests are
very well written and are a definite step up from Inquisition- an example being something as basic as setting up the deceased Nexus engineer's beacons on Eos and hearing about their sick child's condition deteriorating while offering words of encouragement. Or alternatively the Salarian conspiracy quest, or the Angaran AI quest.
Additionally, I'm 100% on board with having an email system and even using it to trigger quests; what I'm
not on board with is having to go through steps 1 and 2 of the above to actually be able to access it. This shit should be accessible via your omnitool. Or at least board the tempest without having to take off.
On the point of multi-location quests the problem isn't entirely just being designed around being on different planets but different solar systems where you don't even land:
- Hold T to go to the Tempest
- Watch the Tempest leave the planet
- Hold E for the galaxy map
- Press space to zoom out from the planet to the solar system
- Press space to zoom out from the solar system to the cluster
- click on another solar system to fly to
- watch your ship fly there
- Right click to scan the system
- click point of interest to launch a probe
- fly to probe
- scan point of interest
This is asinine and what frustrates about this is that I find the quests that do this to generally be well written and actually interesting but actually
doing the quest by doing the above like 3-6 times is complete bullshit. Like, they're often not even fetch quests! The Salarian Conspiracy is about investigating, and talking. It's great until you realize you have to go through the 10-13 steps like 3 times because of reasons. God help you if you have to go to Kadara too.
Here are the conditions wherein I actually wouldn't mind the arduous travel system:
- Entire quest chains take place in one place. It's fine if you GET a quest on the nexus and complete it on Kadara, but the actual bulk of the quest needs to be in one zone
- Let me check email from the omnitool. Having to go to the tempest, watch it take off, then hold e to open my email to trigger a new quest sucks. Then I have to fly back down to actually do the quest
Here are the conditions where I'd be fine with multiplanet quests:
- fast travel like in Inquisition
- check email from your omnitool
Here's what we got:
- A system to get messages and quests that requires multiple steps and an animation sequence to fucking check- the email system
- Quests that take place on multiple planets and locations without it actually helping the story that it's a part of
- traversal required to complete these quests that are 10-13 steps long each time you want to go anywhere. A quest requires going to 3 places? Enjoy doing these steps 30-36 times.
It's a perfect storm of shit, multiple design paradigms at complete odds with each other. Each of them conceptually fine under certain circumstances but specifically aggravating when used both as is and together.