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Mass Effect Andromeda is Actually Really Good
- Thread starter Aske
- Start date
100% agree.
During all the game I had that feelng that this could be a reboot/remake of the first game in form and spirit.
I only had problems with the downgrade that was the music department and the new aliens.
Best game Bioware has made since ME 2.
I love setting up colonies around the universe. This game do open world better than most open world games out there. It has a slow start, no doubt about it, but i think once you get to Eos the game really starts to shine.
I think the Ryders lack the charm of Shepard but they are mostly ok. I guess the community and the press punished the game because of its bug and facial animation and mostly, for being too inclusive.
I love setting up colonies around the universe. This game do open world better than most open world games out there. It has a slow start, no doubt about it, but i think once you get to Eos the game really starts to shine.
I think the Ryders lack the charm of Shepard but they are mostly ok. I guess the community and the press punished the game because of its bug and facial animation and mostly, for being too inclusive.
One of these days I'll cave and buy it off PSN/XBL. I swear it stays on sale for like $9 every other month.
Eh, I don't know, I think it was lacking something. I got bored with it at some point and never finished it, maybe I got burned out and I'll come back to it eventually.
I don't think it deserved the ridicule it got though and I think it's overall a pretty good game. But considering the success of the Mass Effect trilogy I feel a lot of people were massively disappointed and that feeling kinda took over any rational critic of the game.
I don't think it deserved the ridicule it got though and I think it's overall a pretty good game. But considering the success of the Mass Effect trilogy I feel a lot of people were massively disappointed and that feeling kinda took over any rational critic of the game.
Is this One X Enhanced?
Reading about the planet design being one of the best parts makes me want to try and power through it.
Even in ME1 I loved exploring the reskinned environments.
Reading about the planet design being one of the best parts makes me want to try and power through it.
Even in ME1 I loved exploring the reskinned environments.
You will love the game then. Its not only about exploring planets but working on planet habitability to set up colonies. Thats amazing my friend.
Yep that's exactly what I think as well. Characters in MEA are more interesting and developped than those of ME1 if you don't take the sequels into account. I had great hopes for Andromeda sequels, it's really sad the franchise has been put on ice, with no hope of ever seeing anything from Andromeda again. I would have loved a sequel set some years later where you could visit a few hub cities developped from the small colonies you had installed in the first game.
Honestly I arrived on Eos I believe it's called and I never really finished that area. Thought the environment was rather boring in terms of exploration. I really should get back to it sometime because I've barely really what it has to offer.
It was a 6/10 game for me. Totally average. Not bad, not great. I thought the combat was great, but most of the rest was blah, and the animations were frequently bad. I don't think it deserved the outrageous amount of hate it got, but it certainly wasn't GOTY like some people wanted before launch.
It's a complete mess with some fresh paint in a very small number of places.
Bug-wise? Not really, I haven't run in to anything major.
I didn't encounter any bugs even before the patches. I'm sure there were some but no more than in other BioWare or Bethesda games. It was completely overblown.
What? No way, the OST is bland as hell, there's nothing memorable and there are definitely not enough tracks for a game this big. The title screen was okay and that's it basically. The OST would fit in any random "ambient space" playlist on Spotify or Youtube.
I actually like the game and the OST was the only thing that really disappointed me.
I couldn't get into it. Not going to bash the story because I didn't experience enough of it, but the open-world planets were so boring to explore and traversal was a real pain. It just made it a chore to play.
I also hated the UI, there was too much of it and it made the game ugly.
I also hated the UI, there was too much of it and it made the game ugly.
I found it fine and basically tolerable, at least until I reached this part.
Haven't touched it since I reached that planet.
Haven't touched it since I reached that planet.
It has some beautiful landscapes. Recently dropped at Voeld and oh the white.
Also, the Nomad deserves its own Motorstorm-esque minigame. *nods*
Also, the Nomad deserves its own Motorstorm-esque minigame. *nods*
It definitely had a ton of problems, from story to polish, but I had fun playing it. It's a shame it was released in the state it was, because the Andromeda "brand" is forever tainted now. If Bioware wants to try to do another ME game they will have to figure a new way of making it fit into the series.
Too bad really. First impressions are everything and this game failed that hard.
I forced myself to finish the game, as I thought it might get better and due to my love of the series I perservered. It was ok, but there were glaring weaknesses - story, characters, lack of new races, exploration got stale quite quickly...it's a shame the mass effect series is on the backburner because of this game.
Archon's face always reminded me of a cute little Capuchin monkey.
This is the Archon
EatChildren's great post on the first page covers most of my complaints. I'll add that the exploration fell totally flat for me in the game. There's not a single thing you can find in the game just by flying around the galaxy or visiting some uninhabited world. Everything is marked and announced for you, at most you'll get a little blurb of text or some audio log. I know people hated the barren worlds in the first game, but I enjoyed rolling around in the Mako and coming up on some outpost where a few Alliance marines were just fighting off waves of Rachni. I missed those UNC missions from ME1 and wish they'd found a way to balance that better in ME:A than copying the Inquisition formula over to ME.
Eh, this was what BioWare showed at the first gameplay reveal at TGA 2016.A lot of people missed places like this one, which is amazing:
Also, that giant fungi is SO not Mass Effect and that's a problem with this game in general. Beautiful or not, the art style often doesn't mesh with the style-guide that previously served the series. I'm no expert on art but sometimes I feel like you can just tell. And further, stuff like the Angaran structures and the Kett architecture really has these rounded, goofy shapes it looks more like something out of Halo than Mass Effect. Mass Effect has always been more detailed, angular but with those signature curves, and I get it, different species, different imagery but somehow all Milky Way species fit under one artistic theme yet Heleus in Andromeda does not and it doesn't feel like it was meant to be like that in order to make it seem more alien.
It feels like someone designed "alien" stuff with no concern for how it is "alien within Mass Effect".
I always felt the Milky Way species designs were boringly similar to the extent that you had no clue if something was Asari, Salarian, Prothean or just advanced human. Andromeda was better, though Angaran design was still a too close to Asalarian style.
It's generally part of the very sloppy approach to Milky Way culture, which is less developed than Angaran despite having 4 games to 1.
I remember when the origin access demo launched and there was a group of about 4 to 5 people who didn't play the demo but would try and downplay everyone's negative impressions that had played it.
The game is shit. Ruined a great series and that really sucks. Uninteresting characters, bland open world traversal, feth quests out the wazoo. And that's not mentioning all of the technical issues at launch.
The game is shit. Ruined a great series and that really sucks. Uninteresting characters, bland open world traversal, feth quests out the wazoo. And that's not mentioning all of the technical issues at launch.
Agreed, Mass Effect 3 did have a better soundtrack than Andromeda. Bioware needs Sam Hulick to do a proper Mass Effect score.
I put the game down for a day when this happened too. There's even a video on Youtube describing the same reaction.I found it fine and basically tolerable, at least until I reached this part.
Haven't touched it since I reached that planet.
Incoherence is the SIGNATURE of bad storytelling and you simply can't excuse this scene by saying that something got cut or a glitch made something happen out of order. This was how it was written!! In one continuous thread.
The sad thing is that Hulick and Wall would have loved to come back but they decided to pick "generic tv show composer" instead.
They are gluttons for punishment. A friend of mine keeps trying to convince me this is the best game in the series he is a lunatic.
While I have seen Jack Wall tweet at Casey Hudson recently saying he'd love to assemble the "band" again, I think both he and Hulick were busy around MEA's production, but even if they weren't I believe there's actually some sort of unwritten budget model for composing for open world games where there's fewer big compositions and more just a handful and then lots of atmosphere-pieces in order to make it feasible when so many other resources have to be spent as well. It's just something I've noticed across Far Cry, Skyrim, Zelda etc. where it's as if the music is less designed for big moments and more full of ambience because the developers assume the player will do lots of different things in different order and since that's the case it makes sense to actually skimp on the budget for soundtrack entirely.
That said, him being a TV composer I wouldn't be able to guess what hiring him would cost versus using game-composers like Jack or Sam, but just like David Hayter allegedly rose his asking price to perform as Snake due to the role being so vital, I could imagine Jack Wall and Sam Hulick aren't exactly as cheap to hire as they were back with ME1.
A thing you would often hear the devs saying around the time the trilogy was being made was that as it turned out they started feeling like aliens felt more human than the humans in the games because they were so expressive, and honestly I always liked Mass Effect's approach to its Milky Way aliens, and you can't say they had an underdeveloped culture compared to the Angara. There are some that I would've liked to see more of like Asari and Salarian. We did get social issues of the Asari like the pureblood taboo or the Ardat Yakshi syndrome and that they have the most dancers in the galaxy. I loved how they all had sort of a signature of Turians being the roman empire, totalitarian esque race, Krogans being these meatheads with a surprising spirituality in their ancient history and Asari believing in their "goddess" and stuff like that. I never felt like aliens were just the same as humans and they did a good job at communicating the differences. I remember how Turians often ask if "is that the right expression?" when attempting to use human conversational gestures.
What does the angara have? They do a weird bro-fist thing, they say "stay strong and clear" as a sendoff, they're "emotional" species (Really inconsistent in the game) and their art and homeworlds look like the dreamworks of sci fi. Their backstory also feels generic to me, being resistance fighters against another race that has invaded their previous home, so now they're rebels. It's uninspired IMO.
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The music has no real presence in the actual game itself. Compare that to the games in the trilogy, where the music was always up front and helped underpin key moments.
At this point that is long cast aside with how many faults Andromeda had on its own. If we should talk about the trilogy again, sure, I'm right back in the hate-seat regarding that stupid ending, but that was the least of my worries as I got well into Andromeda.
This is so true, completely agree on this post. The way shitty youtube channels and grumpy ME fans tore this game to shreds is a joke, making it sound like they'd rereleased Atari's E.T. or something.
The way captive fans tried to make Andromeda seem like a good game is the true joke
I think you can argue that some of the reception is indeed unfair. But this isn't a eurojank game, this is a game by one of the biggest publishers in the world, and for them to push it out to meet fiscal year targets instead of polishing up the game really should deserve derision. Look at what Ubisoft does now, they delay games to make them polished and continue working even on less popular games like Steep, far after their release.
There's a lot of hyperbole around the game, and a certain amount of jank that is gonna be present in these types of games. But I'd argue ME:A goes far beyond that and EA deserves to be mocked for the decisions they made. Developers don't, I'd bet anything they did not want to release the game in the state it was.
pretty much this, same problem the new Star Wars encountered at release (I'm referencing Force Awakens with this) where people complained by comparing to an entire trilogy
I haven't played the game, but I've seen quite a bit of footage. My main gripe is that nothing I've seen screams "new galaxy". There were more inventive stuff in ME1-3, and that was set in the Milky Way. Why not go all out with crazy designs and concepts for this? It all just seems so fucking safe.
It's pretty disappointing how childish people act when people express a positive opinion on a game the Internet has decided is bad.
I didn't really like it either outside of the mobility upgrades, but geez.
I didn't really like it either outside of the mobility upgrades, but geez.
Your loss, not an amazing game but it deserves a sequel. Lesser games have received them and have been worse than AndromedaI found it fine and basically tolerable, at least until I reached this part.
Haven't touched it since I reached that planet.
I don't understand this at all, the aliens in Andromeda is some TOS type of crap where the worldbuilding and internal consistency felt like it was done by a group of 10 year olds. In terms of variety at least the original trilogy has aliens like the Hanar and you seriously couldn't differentiate between an Asari and a Salarian?
Hollywood's style still much better than MEA's absent soundtrack. Sorry, music was one of the heaviest downgrades in comparison, Leaving Earth beats it by a infinite margin.
yeah i think one big problem is they kind of had to frontload the game with the more boring areas for narrative reasonsA lot of people missed places like this one, which is amazing: