Mass Effect: Andromeda

So, finally finished the main quest last night.  The ending was pretty good.  Not good enough for me to replay it just for that, but satisfying enough that I'm fine.  I may replay later to try out Vetra's romance, and it's a shame there's no Drak romance, he's awesome!

I will try and work up a proper review this week sometime if you still want one.  ^^

With the slow progress I'm making on ME 1, ME Andromeda will drop down to $5 by the time I'm ready to play it.  I'd read your review if you wrote one, but then again I'm trying to avoid spoilers for the entire series at this point. lol. I just found out that Mass Effect is means by which everyone travels thru space, I thought it was just a catchy name for the series.  

At least I won't have to wait for a game of the year addition to go on sale. I think YouTube is the real driving force behind all day one sales for video games. There are so many YouTubers and twitch streamers now that the rush to get their own content out asap results in everyone buying the game at the same time and then unanimously complaining about it all while generating hype about the game. And then 2 months later all the hype is gone and the game goes on sale for $20 off to get the stragglers that don't want to pay full price.

Its a shame what happened to this game. I bet it'll be in a humble bundle some day.

It really is. I think I only experienced one of those catastrophic bugs. But the game play wasn't the problem IMO. I actually enjoyed the combat a lot... more so than the previous 3 games. The fact they got that working right in such a short time is amazing, and maybe they shouldn't have been dissolved into other studios looking back on it now that I've had time to cool down from the utter disappointment. They were just told to make magic happen after fumbling around on a lost cause for 90% of the allotted time. You'll most likely enjoy the play through now that you know not to expect very much out of the game. It has the potential there, it just never comes to fruition. You never really bond with the characters like you can with Wrex, Tali, and Liara, and you never really hate any of them either. God I despised Kaidan just because hes voiced by Carth Onassi, just add two floppy bangs to his head and its the same character.

Just about every choice you made in the first three games had consequences, even the smallest things. In Andromeda its like all your choices were pretty pointless, and the two major ones were pretty unoriginal and predictable. The Renegade/Paragon system missing also was a mistake. I liked how tilting too far one way, gave you even more dialogue options for that personality if you invested skill points in charisma. Like he said, the dialog is terrible and the story wasn't very good. It was a game that mechanically was great but story was was awful, which made it worse having a predecessor that set the bar really high. Romancing was totally watered down. You really had to talk to an NPC a lot in the first games and pick the right dialogue options to get in their pants, but in Andromeda, you just pick all the dialog options that have a heart icon on them and have a connection as awkward as Padme and Anakin. I guess that was the mystique of BioWare's early games. I remember playing KOTOR through many times, every time I discovered something new by doing a different dialogue sequence. I don't think I ever seduced Bastila until the 3rd or 4th play through and was blown away that I could do that, or when I made Zaalbar kill Mission, or when I got banned from Manaan for the rest of the playthrough. Stuff like that made it worth playing through multiple times.... with Andromeda, you feel like you've seen it all in 1 go.

On ‎1‎/‎19‎/‎2018 at 10:14 PM, Sledgstone said:

Its a shame what happened to this game. I bet it'll be in a humble bundle some day.

And since it'll only be on Origin that Humble Bundle won't be worth buying.

I still haven't beaten the story yet but I've not run into any of the catastrophic bugs that continually get mentioned. I've seen quite a few of the shitty animations that were placed in the game though (and believe me they are worse when you see them in person, video's don't do them justice).

Honestly, there's a lot to like about the directions Andromeda was going in. The worlds were beautiful, combat was actually a joy (I really enjoyed the combat system though I wish they would of implemented the old cover system from 3, this new one sucked balls), while I initially hated the move from classes I actually liked how they implemented character progression (the ability to pick and choose you're powers/abilities at will was freaking amazing), while almost all of the NPC companions are pretty forgettable Drack is the one thing great that came of them (I don't care what anyone says, I love that old grumpy krogan to death. He's pretty much Wrex but 100's of years older and crankier), and while the story was fucking horrible (and it's the reason I still haven't beaten it yet) the ideas and direction were not horrible just poorly developed. I get why studios want to got to these big, open world games that allow us to explore but it's obvious that it'll never work the way they want (look at Destiny, not as open world as we were promised (in both games) due to engine limitations and tech limitations) and the fact they spent years trying to figure this out instead of delivering a great game is heart breaking. I honestly like how ME3 did it's exploration and I wish they'd of kept that for Andromeda, I could care less about having a huge planet to explore. Give me a contained area that has a set reason for me being there and I'll be happy (and it'll let me avoid driving these shitty vehicles BioWare keeps designing).

It sucks that this game was pretty much a piecemeal of what the studio could throw together in 15 months. I blame EA for a lot of this and while the original trilogy will forever be a favorite series of mine its easy to tell just what EA made BioWare do between 1 and 2 (the major shift in the battle system, the implementation of the ammo mechanic (which is still retarded, the in game lore explained why this was not fucking necessary in 1 (and don't give me the bullshit that was retconned in when 2 came out)). BioWare's biggest problem was pulling the original ME team off of this to develop a new IP and handing it to a studio that only ever did background work. Had the original team been left on the game this would of never happened (sadly we wouldn't be getting Anthem if they did stay with it though). It's also a kick to the balls knowing that we'll probably not see another Mass Effect game for year or at all.

Sadly the days of us getting well thought out, developed games from BioWare has come and gone. We'll never get another KoToR, Neverwinter Nights (this is still one of my favorite games to date), or Mass Effect again (while probably my least favorite of the original trilogy I still think 1 was better developed then 2 was). I never played the original Dragon Age so I can't add that in but I heard it was on par with KoToR (I've only played Inquisition which has gotten a lot of hate from fans but I actually like it). EA has watered the studio down and while it sounds like Anthem will be a return to form I can't help thinking that it'll be another Destiny (sorry I've grown extremely pessimistic with the industry as of late. Good games are few and far between in the AAA category and it saddens me considering what the old days were like. Yea, I'm old and nostalgic. This trend of catering to the ADHD generation of gamers urks me. I miss the days when games were made as passion projects, not just paychecks).

On 1/20/2018 at 0:13 AM, DeathscytheX said:

I don't think I ever seduced Bastila until the 3rd or 4th play through and was blown away that I could do that, or when I made Zaalbar kill Mission, or when I got banned from Manaan for the rest of the playthrough.

I seduced Bastila in my first play through. I didn't know Mission could get killed off tho. I am still shocked by the amount or ways KOTOR could end. Like this ending with full dark side and turning Carth evil is great:

I do want to play through the game again someday just to make Carth kill his own son.

11 hours ago, Strider Hiryu said:

(sorry I've grown extremely pessimistic with the industry as of late. Good games are few and far between in the AAA category and it saddens me considering what the old days were like. Yea, I'm old and nostalgic. This trend of catering to the ADHD generation of gamers urks me. I miss the days when games were made as passion projects, not just paychecks).

I blame graphics. Back in the day like in this old KOTOR clip, the game engines, graphics and cut scenes were so much simpler (advanced at the time of course but still simplistic in regards that rendering a scene completely via the engine wouldn't result in horrible mouth movements matching up with dialogue because the graphics wouldn't represent realistic mouth movements anyway.) that the focus on the game could be put entirely in the plot line and alternate plots based on decisions. Now all AAA games means "best graphics ever", "visually impressive" and "play with friends (so they can see the skins you bought from loot boxes)" and it seems like plots, writing and dialogue all gets thrown to the side.

Oh man. I remember seeing that clip before now. I completely forgot. That game can be so messed up.