Mass Effect Andromeda

[Gusington]

I guess I have to stop using bundles of twenty dollar bills as kindling in my fireplace.

[jamus34]

Not to pee in anyone's pool, but can this side discussion be moved to the entry in the politico forum?

I'd rather not see this thread closed as I am interested in what the other members think about the game itself.

I have my own issues with EA, to the point I refuse to pay full price for their games but still like to hear others thoughts on them.

[Jarhead0331]

Not to pee in anyone's pool, but can this side discussion be moved to the entry in the politico forum?

I'd rather not see this thread closed as I am interested in what the other members think about the game itself.

I have my own issues with EA, to the point I refuse to pay full price for their games but still like to hear others thoughts on them.

What if someone's impression is that the gameplay is racist? 

[mirth]

Not to pee in anyone's pool, but can this side discussion be moved to the entry in the politico forum?

I'd rather not see this thread closed as I am interested in what the other members think about the game itself.

I have my own issues with EA, to the point I refuse to pay full price for their games but still like to hear others thoughts on them.

What if someone's impression is that the gameplay is racist? 

The Blue Alien privilege is noticeable.

[Tpek]

But bashing the game for it's boring gameplay and plethora of bugs is getting too old.
We need new avenues of criticism. :(

[mirth]

Well, Amazon just issued me a $5 credit on the game as part of some pre-order price guarantee. Knocks what I paid for the Deluxe Edition down to $50.

[glen55]

Well, Amazon just issued me a $5 credit on the game as part of some pre-order price guarantee. Knocks what I paid for the Deluxe Edition down to $50.

I got it for $44.09 from cdkeys.com.

I'd hate to mention actual gameplay, but I had some fun with it last night. Combat is more fluid than prior ME combat, which was mostly about pranging away at each other from behind cover.

The start of the game is pretty much on rails, as in a traditional Bioware game, but supposedly it is much more open-world, go-in-any-order later on. I did the first world, which only takes an hour or so, and it is similar to a traditional good Bioware game, with good cinematic elements and a tidy story line that sets the player up early on as someone who will play a significant role in a bigger narrative. 

Didn't get far enough in to have much to say about leveling and loot. There isn't an actual tutorial, but there's a menu item called "Tutorials" which is actually a bunch of illustrated pages about gameplay. I didn't bother to read those yet, but they look to be well worth reading and may actually add up to a decent online manual as there are a fair number of them.

[W8taminute]

still hopeful for this game.  so any of you that do have it my question is as follows:  have you come across any 'kill the white people' statements?  when playing the game do you have the slightest feeling that the message of the story is white people bad everyone else good?

i can't even believe i'm asking that question and i resent we live in a world situation now that is filled with this sort of nonsense.

[Jarhead0331]

still hopeful for this game.  so any of you that do have it my question is as follows:  have you come across any 'kill the white people' statements?  when playing the game do you have the slightest feeling that the message of the story is white people bad everyone else good?

i can't even believe i'm asking that question and i resent we live in a world situation now that is filled with this sort of nonsense.

My hunch is that it is much more subtle than anything like that.

[mirth]

You're all overlooking the most important facet of any Mass Effect game - lesbian sex with a blue alien. If that's in Andromeda, it's all good.

[jamus34]

You're all overlooking the most important facet of any Mass Effect game - lesbian sex with a blue alien. If that's in Andromeda, it's all good.

scissoring just got real...

[ghostryder]

What concerns me more than the political stuff is the two things Bioware are known for. Stellar voice acting and story.

I absolutely fell in love with Mass effect 2. It was like sheppard had been thrown in with the dirty dozen. Almost all companion characters shined. Thane shined as an assassin and you got drawn into his 'humanity' on how it effected him. Some of the most potent cut scenes revolved around him. Jack was the black sheep that doesn't expect to be liked and pretends she doesn't care when in fact her underpinning truth is the opposite. Tali is the hesitant sweet farm girl type hidden by the helmet. It takes work to reach her emotions as she's good at hidding them- Miranda is the high school drama queen with a silver spoon up her ass that you love to hate. The elusive man played by martin sheen - yeah rl left wing nut but that doesn't distract from his acting abilities.

Here I fear Andromeda has none of that.

Despite the extraordinary opportunity of a fresh start, fresh characters, and even a fresh galaxy to set it in, this feels like a lengthy rehash of what came before. It is bad in many ways, from its madcap AI, poor character faces, dated design and most of all, horrible writing, but its biggest crime is just how unavoidably, all-encompassingly dull it is for so, so many hours. - RPS


Think about a new galaxy, a whole new potential of life forms, of evolutionary exoticism, of astounding new ideas. Now discard them all and think of intensely familiar bipedal people living in ordinary cities with ordinary thoughts, relationships, educations, jobs, and would you believe it, technology exactly on a par with what you just happened to bring with you. Floating octopuses that think in cascading colours? Societies based on amorphous interaction? Ideas better than the ones I'm throwing out? Nope, not a single thing.

Companion AI is a disaster, most distinctly because it's so incessantly noticeable. You want your buddies to just be there, trotting behind you until fighting starts. Instead they are bonkers, darting back and forth as if chased by wasps, and have the most wonderful/ridiculous need to climb on top of things. Just stand in a room looking at a computer terminal and your buddies will jump up onto cupboards, beds, desks, whatever they can find. More than anything, they take this most difficult path on offer. Why run down some stairs when they can jump over a railing behind some crates, then have to run in an enormous circle around a building to find you again?! It's definitely amusing, but bloody stupid.

But get into battle and it's much more serious. I cannot tell you how often they just run in front of you and stand still, screwing up shots, bumping you out the way, not shifting out of cover you need, or ignoring enemies immediately in front of them. They can be a help, and when it works it's fun to see them using their abilities to kill off enemies, but they're just as likely not to.

What unites all these different features is the most unrelentingly dull writing, cliches and aphorisms pouring out like the waterfalls they'd use as an analogy in this sentence. Every chat lasts three times longer than it needs to, and they're achingly boring from casual encounters to the deepest moments in relationships.

Perhaps most significantly, they made the bold decision to remove good/evil responses that have been a mainstay of the developers' RPGs, but they've failed to replace them with anything close to as meaningful. As a result, they've essentially removed the majority of choice at all. At one point you're offered an extremely significant deal that contains an element that's tantamount to extortion. In any other BioWare game before you'd argue this, perhaps choose it as the lesser of two evils, or reject it based on principle. Here you get two choices: to accept it, or accept it while making a joke. It's quite bizarre how far they've gone in removing the illusion of autonomy, while still seeming to think they're offering dialogue choice.

I've never before played a BioWare game where I wasn't torn about who to take with me in a landing party. Those moments of, "Oh no, but I have to take X on this trip because it's his home planet, but that means I will miss Y! There's not even a glimmer of it. I resentfully take two along, not caring what either will add. It's so, so odd.


I mentioned in my last article about how atrocious is the UI, and it bears repeating. It's awful in every imaginable way, bewilderingly so. Menus are miserable to navigate, and often barely functioning.

There's nothing I've found that redeems its crappy writing, threadbare companions, moribund story, and ghastly UI. But, well, the best I can say is it occupies time.


Pretty horrid review from RPS and it seems the game gets nothing right. I'm just confounded with "I can't believe it" as Bioware never does story or voice acting bad--but here it's awful? In order to gut a team's strength like that you'd have to look at upper management and I think I found a nibbit on that. Whenever I apply for a job I research the company. the web is full of reviews from previous employees of most companies of any size. One such site to obtain them is glassdoor. This anonymous individual's review paints an alarming and disturbing development cycle for MEA.


https://www.glassdoor.ca/Reviews/BioWare-Reviews-E22998.htm#rmvd

take a look at some excerpts from below from the review. The link above has the full review.

For example.

"Bioware Edmonton and Montreal symbiosis is broken. Lots of conflicts and bro culture."

"Lost over 13 leads (game design, art, audio, prog, senior core leads, etc) in 5 years at Bioware Montreal on Mass Effect. Edmonton lost only 3. It is clear that Edmonton has the bigger part of the stick when it comes to purge Leads and Producers who are not aligned with their leadership style."

"Putting people on performance improvement program (PIP Program) is the new tactics to get rid of people. Once again more than 10 people in Montreal got slammed with this bureaucratic uppercut to let go people that are not bending to Edmonton leadership styles in the last revision cycle. This approach is used by the Montreal Leadership to purge the mess from the lack of vision cause by upper management in the last 4 years (throwing people under the bus to protect bad core management)"

"Renaming crunch to Finaling mode. Which means company pays for your lunch but you have only 30 minutes to eat and then getting back on the keyboard. Was lasting for over 2 months and was a real catastrophy."

"Retaliation and harassment is sadly a reality. If you talk and ask questions you will be tag as a trouble maker and end up in a bad position."

"HR won't help you out. They will deny the current harassment from Monreal management by ignoring and not documenting the facts. In other words if you leave don't talk. Just let it go..."

"Many benifits got cut due to too much time extension to get the game done."

This is just one review but scrooling down many others mirror it. Throw bad management in the mix and the best teams will produce crap. Pure speculation on my part of course but it makes one wonder.

[Nefaro]

But bashing the game for it's boring gameplay and plethora of bugs is getting too old.
We need new avenues of criticism. :(

Ooo! Ooo! ME! ME!







I caught a few seconds of the game's advert.

The slow weepy pop song playing in the foreground made me wanna [vomit emote].  What the heurkin feuks?  A game about mass killing IN SPAAACE, and they have that shitpie playing as the theme music?   L:-)

Shoot the alien "I have cancer and decided to tell you just now" theme music first.

[glen55]

I've played enough for a quickie mini-review-in-progress. I think it's probably cruising toward a B at this point.

Combat is excellent. Probably the best combat in any RPG I played. You get jet packs, so it's 3-dimensional, enemies flank you and drive you to new positions frequently, and you get some very different ways to handle things depending on which character class you play. There is a lot of fluidity in your class spec, as you get to change "profiles" that give you class-type bonuses for each mission or during the mission if you go to the right spot, so it's possible in this big game to fully investigate all those different ways of handling combat in a single game. Also, you can completely re-spec your character on a fairly standard plan of cheap to start with, then increasingly expensive - but the curve toward expensive is not as steep as in some games, so you can re-spec several times without breaking the bank. Combat is a bit more difficult, as well (although there are still an abundance of difficulty options, so never fear). You can no longer pause and give orders in combat, although you do have some key commands to give your squad go there/hit that/come here-type orders. Squad AI is rather lacking, but I think some of the reviews exaggerate the problems. Just like other Mass Effect games, you have to do most of the work but not all of it. Concentrate on keeping your squaddies alive, and they'll keep the bads from ganging up on you to some extent. That's what they're there for.

There are more hybrid classes than there were previously, so I think there are as many different level-up options as you had in ME 2, i.e., more than in ME 3.

I haven't noticed any of these infamous facial animation problems. Maybe I'm just not looking for it. There are some great-looking environments in the game. It's not open-world, but it's open-ish, more so than in any previous Bioware(/EA-Bioware) game. Really looking forward to seeing more planets.

Bioware has never quite gotten interfaces right, and this one is quite clunky. You have to drill through multiple menus for most stuff, expecially checking quests. Crafting is rather difficult to understand, but isn't really a vital part of the game. I've crafted a few useful weapons and armor pieces without fully knowing what I was doing.

The biggest problem, and the reason this game isn't cruising toward A territory, is the same problem from Star Wars: The Old Republic. It's a VERY big playable world/universe and there are lots of quests and lots of quest-givers. Just as in SWTOR, the makers seem to think that they have to give you story, they have to give you voice-over for every little bit of everything, plus lots of background info and voice files lying around here and there to be clicked on. And - while some of it is quite good - a lot of it is just committee writing en masse, cranked out on a production line. Lazy, cookie-cutter stuff, not up to par with some of the fine story-telling from games like KOTOR, Jade Empire and ME 2. And - especially early in the game - there's SO MUCH of it.

Also, although they cut the number of characters back from ME 3, there are still too many. Why not let your squaddies re-spec and change profiles, too, so you can get by with less of them? The more squadmates you have, the more background you have to wade through in order to get to know them. Exposition overkill, part 2.

They seriously need to either scale back the exposition, or put a lot more TLC into crafting it. A ton of cookie-cutter crap to wade through is just not a plus.

Reviews I've read indicate the game opens out and becomes more fun as you go along. I'm hoping that the gameplay to yakking ratio increases significantly. If so, I might eventually come back with an A after all.

[JudgeDredd]

Thanks Glen. This is on my radar, though I haven't finished the first one yet and not even started the second one