• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Mass Effect: Andromeda |OT| Ryders on the Storm

Staf

Member
So there's no way to change hair or appearance mid-game? My character is so damn ugly (and it wasn't even deliberate!)...
 

RedSwirl

Junior Member
I'm hesitant on this game after all I've heard but I'm also wondering if it could be a Dragon Age 2 situation for me.

I played DA2 long after the hype and criticism had kind of worn off and actually found a lot to like about it. I totally agree with everything people disliked about DA2: the plain graphics, the small scale, the dumbed down dialogue system, the repeated maps, and the simplified combat. Despite all that, the main thing I play BioWare games for -- the story and characters, was still really enjoyable and actually rather unique in DA2.

And hearing that some people still like ME:A kind of gives me some level of hope for whenever I eventually do play the game (probably April, May, or June or something after Zelda, DAI, and Persona 5). How is the Nomad exploration compared to the Mako in Mass Effect 1 (which I really enjoyed)? Honestly what I want the most is just that feeling of having your own space ship and traversing the galaxy.
 
Ok, couldn't have long sessions of gaming yet due to work but I have a three days weekend starting tomorrow so, time to shine.

Below isn't actually very spoilery, esp if you already have Jaal, but is a perfect example of why i find him so entertaining thus far:

Just dropping in to say that Jaal is one of my favorite Mass Effect squadmates.

I was driving in the Nomad with him and Cora, and they had a conversation about her biotics.

He asked if it hurt when she used biotics. She said that when she uses her full strength, it feels like a really powerful sneeze. Jaal asked what a sneeze was.

The Nomad banter is pretty great in general from what I've seen.
 

Nekrono

Member
They 'removed' that feature for this game (my guess: they didn't have time to implement it like so many other features in the game)

I doubt this is the case. Even though I enjoy ME2 combat it does suffer from a lot of cover based shooting and pausing every few seconds.

I don't think they wanted that type of combat gameplay for Andromeda. Once you get used to it the combat here is so smooth and fast, possibly what they always envisioned for the series.

I really wish favourites was more incentivized. The cooldown incurred by favourite swapping is punishing enough that I barely ever swap between my two existing favourites schemes, and have zero motivation to build additional ones.

Yeah I feel this way too, I'm trying to get into it and I'm currently trying to manage 3 but it's just too punishing with the cooldown timer. I wish the profiles were mapped to the D-Pad for an easy smooth switch.

Hopefully they reduce the cooldown when you switch, most of the times I switch I'm almost done with the battle when the abilities are ready, either that or I'm dead.
 

Lime

Member
I doubt this is the case. Even though I enjoy ME2 combat it does suffer from a lot of cover based shooting and pausing every few seconds.

I don't think they wanted that type of combat gameplay for Andromeda. Once you get used to it the combat here is so smooth and fast, possibly what they always envisioned for the series.

Having the power wheel does not exclude their design ideal of having the current type of combat gameplay. It's an unnecessary exclusion that only removes options for players who otherwise would like to play the game differently.
 

SolVanderlyn

Thanos acquires the fully powered Infinity Gauntlet in The Avengers: Infinity War, but loses when all the superheroes team up together to stop him.
Should I sell all salvage?
 

Bluenoser

Member
People on my PSN friends list have appeared to be playing nothing but MP so far. Every time I log in, they are never in the campaign mode. Is this indicative of how good the MP is, or how bad the campaign is... or neither?

I was just watching Jimpressions, and I gotta say, I am kind of glad I hadn't hyped myself up for this game, because it looks rough. It really doesn't seem like Bioware put their A team on this, which is a damn shame, because it's probably their biggest franchise. DA: Inquisition, while not a masterpiece, was a pretty decent game, so I'm wondering how this compares, as I've only seen brief gameplay footage.
 

FlyinJ

Douchebag. Yes, me.
I mentioned it before, but it's really bugging me-

Input lag is so bad on the Pro. Input lag never bothers me, except for Rise of the tomb raider where it was so bad it made precise aiming almost impossible. It seems even worse in this game.

Is it bad on the base ps4 as well? Or in other skus?
 
Should I sell all salvage?
Yes. It's just to make money. You can sell resources but you have to manually choose to.

So level 30 is a soft cap. I'm at level 32 now and I've unlocked all lvl 5 weapons and armour. I'm now finding gear goes all the way to 10 like in ME1. Not sure if it's all gear or just some. Need to be level 40 to get lvl 10 stuff.
 

ruimound

Member
Just did a Strike Team mission from Multiplayer, got a partial extraction (I was killed by a Fiend), and didn't get any Strike Team rewards from doing it. Do I have to get a full extraction for the reward? This seems insane - even in Bronze, full extractions have been really rare with PUGs. If this mode stays this challenging I might have to tap out until I can find some friends to play with... it's fun, but losing 12 odd minutes for no Strike Team rewards - which are already really minimal - feels awful.
 

Nekrono

Member
Having the power wheel does not exclude their design ideal of having the current type of combat gameplay. It's an unnecessary exclusion that only removes options for players who otherwise would like to play the game differently.

The way I see it the power wheel was primarily in place because you have more than 3 of your own abilities at your disposal and your squad's abilities too. There was no way to map all of those in a controller and therefore they had to implement it in order to pause the game and allow you to select which ones you wanted to use and on which enemy.

Having that amount of control was great but it did make the gameplay really slow at times, especially on harder difficulties. They tone it down to just 3 in Andromeda and took away squad ability control in order to accommodate a fast and smooth type of combat.
 
People on my PSN friends list have appeared to be playing nothing but MP so far. Every time I log in, they are never in the campaign mode. Is this indicative of how good the MP is, or how bad the campaign is... or neither?

I was just watching Jimpressions, and I gotta say, I am kind of glad I hadn't hyped myself up for this game, because it looks rough. It really doesn't seem like Bioware put their A team on this, which is a damn shame, because it's probably their biggest franchise. DA: Inquisition, while not a masterpiece, was a pretty decent game, so I'm wondering how this compares, as I've only seen brief gameplay footage.

I havent played one second of the campaign yet, the mp is that good.
 

BizzyBum

Member
I hate the codex in this game.

Once you start getting a ton of listings you never know what's new. They only list 6 lines at a time and when you scroll down the star icon showing it's new disappears so unless you memorize what you read you don't know what was added.
 

Kagutaba

Member
I doubt this is the case. Even though I enjoy ME2 combat it does suffer from a lot of cover based shooting and pausing every few seconds.

I don't think they wanted that type of combat gameplay for Andromeda. Once you get used to it the combat here is so smooth and fast, possibly what they always envisioned for the series.



Yeah I feel this way too, I'm trying to get into it and I'm currently trying to manage 3 but it's just too punishing with the cooldown timer. I wish the profiles were mapped to the D-Pad for an easy smooth switch.

Hopefully they reduce the cooldown when you switch, most of the times I switch I'm almost done with the battle when the abilities are ready, either that or I'm dead.

I agree. It totally should be based on your cooldown at the time, so if all of your skills are ready to use - the skills you switch to should be too.
 
Just did a Strike Team mission from Multiplayer, got a partial extraction (I was killed by a Fiend), and didn't get any Strike Team rewards from doing it. Do I have to get a full extraction for the reward? This seems insane - even in Bronze, full extractions have been really rare with PUGs. If this mode stays this challenging I might have to tap out until I can find some friends to play with... it's fun, but losing 12 odd minutes for no Strike Team rewards - which are already really minimal - feels awful.

Do you mean Apex Strike Team missions? i was doing these during the trial, completing them, and i still wasn't getting the rewards when i logged back into my single player game.

I'm not sure if that was patched (or even a bug?)
 
Finding inventory management a little frustrating. If, say, I'm at a point where I've got weapons in the IIIs and armors in the IIIs and IVs, is it safe to just sell any Is and IIs, no matter if they say they are rare/ultra rare? Or does owning them offer some benefit (ability to upgrade them?) that I don't immediately see?
 
Do you mean Apex Strike Team missions? i was doing these during the trial, completing them, and i still wasn't getting the rewards when i logged back into my single player game.

I'm not sure if that was patched (or even a bug?)
Been doing the strike team missions through the Apex app, and every time I go to the Strike Team console in-game, I've got plenty of rewards waiting for me. The app is actually pretty streamlined/quick and I can't imagine not using it for those Strik Team missions.
 

BizzyBum

Member
Finding inventory management a little frustrating. If, say, I'm at a point where I've got weapons in the IIIs and armors in the IIIs and IVs, is it safe to just sell any Is and IIs, no matter if they say they are rare/ultra rare? Or does owning them offer some benefit (ability to upgrade them?) that I don't immediately see?

AFAIK, once you have the upgraded version there's no reason to own the lesser version.
 

Lashley

Why does he wear the mask!?
Loving this game tbh, it looks beautiful when you play (PC)

Yeah, the animations are hit and miss, but not enough to ruin the game
 
Been doing the strike team missions through the Apex app, and every time I go to the Strike Team console in-game, I've got plenty of rewards waiting for me. The app is actually pretty streamlined/quick and I can't imagine not using it for those Strik Team missions.

Right, same here. That's not the issue. The issue is when you're in game, you can choose to do the Apex ones in multiplayer. When i did that a couple of times during the trial, you boot over to multiplayer, match into the mission, beat it, boot back to the main menu, and when i'd "resume" back to my sp game, the rewards from beating the Apex mission in mp weren't there. Like I hadn't even done it.
 

T.O.P

Banned
Having quite a lot of fun with the game so far, and (except for some awful animations) the graphics are damn gorgeous, running flawlessly locked @60fps and almost everything maxed of my rig

Back into it, i'm even digging the story so far :)
 
Having the power wheel does not exclude their design ideal of having the current type of combat gameplay. It's an unnecessary exclusion that only removes options for players who otherwise would like to play the game differently.

Or, more likely, they wanted to bring the SP and MP in line so they play the same. You can't exactly pause time in MP, so removing it (as well as the sniping time slowdown thing for infiltrators) removes the biggest differentiation between them.

I've only played up until the Nexus and I'm quite enjoying it. Habitat 7 was cool, even if the constant lightning got a bit annoying. I particularly enjoyed poking into the abandoned alien building and hope there's more stuff like that down the road. It really does have that sense of discovery and mystery that is really just what I wanted from the game. The animations aren't as bad as many like to make them out to be, with the worst examples just being the ones that have been cherry picked for spammable gifs. Writing isn't that great, yeah, but I don't mind it too much. It almost has a cheesy sort of charm to it, and if you just embrace the cheese it can even be funny. I feel like a lot of people were expecting the game to have a tone similar to ME3 where everything is on the brink of ruin and it's all moody and frantic and stuff, so getting more light-hearted and casual dialogue threw people off. While I haven't gotten to the actual open world bit yet, I also feel like people have been spoiled after Witcher 3, Horizon, and Zelda when it comes to open worlds hence why this one hasn't been received well.

Hopefully I have more time to dig in soon.
 

Lister

Banned
The way I see it the power wheel was primarily in place because you have more than 3 of your own abilities at your disposal and your squad's abilities too. There was no way to map all of those in a controller and therefore they had to implement it in order to pause the game and allow you to select which ones you wanted to use and on which enemy.

Having that amount of control was great but it did make the gameplay really slow at times, especially on harder difficulties. They tone it down to just 3 in Andromeda and took away squad ability control in order to accommodate a fast and smooth type of combat.

... with zero tactics.

Hate the 3 power limit. Fucking leave that on consoles, give me more on PC.
 

BizzyBum

Member
Because all the other intelligent life they'd run into was humanoid with 2 exceptions so it seemed like a pretty safe bet?

I'll chalk it up to BioWare playing it as safe as possible.

We would also relate better to them as opposed to if the new aliens we meet were squid. Though I think it would have been great to meet an abstract alien with language barriers ala Arrival. Who knows, maybe the Remnant are like that.
 

Akai__

Member
Anyone else having a bugged Strike Team screen? I can't even Exit out of the tab where you'd normally upgrade and inspect your Strike Teams.

Only buttons that do something are the bumpers and if they wouldn't, it would be a softlock trap screen. X,Y,B,A buttons just don't do anything in there anymore and I don't know why.
 

TheChaos

Member
One thing I appreciate about this game is the sense of real companionship with the Tempest crew. As good as the old games were, none of the party members, except for maybe in 3, interacted with each other outside of missions. They each stayed in their corners of the ship until Shepard came to talk.

It's something I really noticed in my recent replay of Mass Effect 2. As large and as great as that cast is, absolutely none of them (except Miranda/Jack and Tali/Legion in maybe two instances) talk to one another. They don't pal around, send emails, anything. You can ask Jack what she thinks of Thane or Samara, but you can never actually see that worked out in the narrative.

It's because most of the party members in ME2 are optional. There are 12 squadmates and too many combinations of characters recruited/not recruited to have them talk to one another. It's the same in DA:I where the advisors like Cullen and Leliana were the only ones talking with each other back and forth.
 

Lister

Banned
Why did the Initiative think that they'd find humanoid life in Andromeda?

'cause they found it all over the Milky way :p

This is standard trope. It's not easy to make aliens you can have adventures with and identify with if they aren't at least a bit humanoid. Take s a lot of thinking out of the box.

What bothers me the most is the waving away of the technological limitations established in the previous trilogy, and the tremendous effort this endevour would have taken.

In ME the races in the milky way barely comprehend the Citadel. They still don't understand how it maintains itself and lack the engineering to even hope to attempt building one. You're also limited by fuel when traveling FTL without a mass relay.

Somehow, these bunch of fringe lunatics wanting to be jettisonned out of the milky way on untested technology (how miserable must their lives have been!), managed to build technology that can be fully automated for centuries, and maintain FTL for that same period of time, AND when they get there they just up and built a citadel on their own.

These ar engineering feats they couldn't comprehend bakc home, and even if they could be acocmplish would require the resources and expertise of entire governments, planets and several species for decades if not centuries.

But nah, Their leader was wealthy, so there you go.

Also, this is supposed to happen between ME2 and ME3, and yet this thing that must have taken the combined budgets of 3 entire species to actually get off the ground is never mentioned? Shepherd never heard of the crazy people wanting to go to another Galaxy? Of course this is more aproblem with where they placed this thanwith the original games, which were obviously made before the concept for ME:A was being written.
 
'cause they found it all over the Milky way :p

This is standard trope. It's not easy to make aliens you can have adventures with and identify with if they aren't at least a bit humanoid. Take s a lot of thinking out of the box.

What bothers me the most is the waving away fo the technologicla limitations of the previous trilogy.

In ME the races in the milky way barely comprehend the Citadel. They still don't understand how it maintains itself and lack the engineering to even hope to attempt building one. You're also limited by fuel when traveling FTL without a mass relay.

Somehow, these bunch of fringe lunatics wanting to be jettisonned out of the milky way on untested technology (how miserable must their lives have been!), managed to build technology that can be fully automated for centuries, and maintain FTL for that same period of time, AND when they get there they just up and built a citadel on their own.

These ar engineering feats they couldn't comprehend bakc home, and even if they could be acocmplish would require the resources and expertise of entire governments, planets and several species for decades if not centuries.

But nah, Their leader was wealthy, so there you go.
I think people paid to be part of the initiative. It's basically a pyramid scheme w/o the profiteering. The Nexus is not the Citadel it's just a big spacebase.
 

Brokun

Member
Been doing the strike team missions through the Apex app, and every time I go to the Strike Team console in-game, I've got plenty of rewards waiting for me. The app is actually pretty streamlined/quick and I can't imagine not using it for those Strik Team missions.

There's an App? Holy shit I did not know this was a thing. Downloading now!
 

Lister

Banned
I think people paid to be part of the initiative. It's basically a pyramid scheme w/o the profiteering. The Nexus is not the Citadel it's just a big spacebase.

The citadel is "just a big Space base" too. It's not easy to build a big space base. It is smaller though, abotu a quarter the size. Still seems implausible given tthe rest.

I think there was a better way to achive the same thing though, without necessarily straining credulity to it's limits.
 
Finding inventory management a little frustrating. If, say, I'm at a point where I've got weapons in the IIIs and armors in the IIIs and IVs, is it safe to just sell any Is and IIs, no matter if they say they are rare/ultra rare? Or does owning them offer some benefit (ability to upgrade them?) that I don't immediately see?
I'm uncertain too. I think once you get a weapon or armour you get its blueprint allowing you to make a copy. But first it has to be researched (from I to II etc) which I believe is tied to your overall level.

So I assume once you've researched a higher level you can safely sell them or break them down.
 
The one saving grace of boss fights on Insanity difficulty is that more often than not they get bugged on a ledge and can't move. Still want to tear my hair out doing them though.
 
What's the overwhelmingly abhorrent nature of that line?

It's a mildly cheesy action movie type line...?

Half the time when someone trashes the script in Andromeda and then offers an example of a line that to them is particularly awful, it strikes me as pretty innocuous. Even the oft-cited "I've been talking so much, my face is tired" line from Foster Addison. A little awkward, sure, but is it really that odd of a thing to say?
 
I'll chalk it up to BioWare playing it as safe as possible.

We would also relate better to them as opposed to if the new aliens we meet were squid. Though I think it would have been great to meet an abstract alien with language barriers ala Arrival. Who knows, maybe the Remnant are like that.

Can't have sex with a squid alien or a slug alien, lol.
 

Bisnic

Really Really Exciting Member!
Soooo.... Drack & Jaal or Drack & Peebee?

Just for banter mind you. Which one would be the best? Do people you romance have anything unique to say outside of the Tempest?
 

Lister

Banned
What's the overwhelmingly abhorrent nature of that line?

It's not just that line, though it's ridiculously eye roll inducing. It's that so many are equally bad or worse.

Many sound like amateurish attempts at giving you a little insight into the character, but they inevitably come off like something out of a kid's TV show. You can't trust kids to get nuance or make inferences - to examine what the character says and does and paint a picture. No, you have to spell it out:

"Hi. I'm bubbles, I'm a color fish, and I enjoy collecting shiny rocks and looking for adventure!"

Agh.
 
Top Bottom