PC version also haunted. You got lucky.

I had only some super-minor issues as well (PS4).

Played 40 hours so far on a non-Pro PS4. The underlined I experienced, the strikethrough I did not experience. From Brad's review:

I could fill the entire space of this review with nothing but the bugs I ran into, which tended to affect practically every aspect of the game, from conversations to NPC animations to quest logic, sound effects and dialogue triggers, combat encounters, character collision, crashes and infinite loading screens, and more. Some quests refused to complete when I satisfied their conditions; on the other hand, one particular early-game quest I'd already completed kept reasserting itself as my active quest hours later. One relatively major quest line disappeared from my log entirely, never to be seen again. The game occasionally thought I was in combat on my ship, where combat isn't even possible, and popped up the combat UI and visibly recharged my character's shields.

NPCs get stuck in the wrong animation, teleport around during conversation scenes, clip through scenery, or snap into T-poses so often during cutscenes that you just learn to start ignoring it, provided you can stop laughing.Characters talked over themselves with a second line of dialogue triggering on top of the first one.Dialogue about your exploits will occasionally contradict your quest progress and at one point a character referred to a quest as both complete and in progress in the same conversation. One of the rooms of my ship frequently failed to load as I walked by it, making the doorway look like a gaping hole into deep space. Enemies frequently get stuck in the world, preventing you from advancing quest progress. Quest-critical talk prompts would occasionally just refuse to work until I quit and restarted the game. A couple of times, quest scripting and cutscenes broke in such spectacular fashion that words don't do justice to the chaos (though you can see one of them embedded above). I could go on and on (and on)

And now for what I have experienced:

Not a glitch, but frame rate in open areas with lots of scenery and enemies can get pretty rough.

The motor sound on my vehicle has gone in and out.

I've seen enemies in large environments falling from the sky as I approached them.

In one very small room, one of my party members stood in the same space as an NPC, clipped through them, and blocked my view of them.

No one talked over themselves, but several times I've been trying to have a conversation with an important NPC while another NPC talks as though you were just walking around the room.

One mission required me to be in a no oxygen environment, so the game forced me to wear my helmet for the story. When I was done with the mission, the game refused to let me toggle my helmet back to off. To fix this, I loaded an earlier save. It was an optional mission, so I'll perhaps return to it another time. Maybe it will be fixed, maybe it won't happen a second time, or maybe I just will skip it.

Other than that, the game has been mostly fine. Hopefully things stay that way. This is in no way a two star game for me, but it sure would have been if I ran into all the issues that Brad did.

@shivoa:

That's a bummer to hear. I certainly had to quick-load a few times to fix quest script errors, but otherwise it's been relatively solid. I just wish the supporting cast was more memorable--BioWare games have historically had fantastic characters.

I'm still digging it, I think the 75 or so it has on Metacritic is fair. It's mostly just disappointing in the context of being a Mass Effect game.

I have played 57h sofar on the PC (20 of those probably are multiplayer) and my experience pretty much lines up with Brads. I wouldnt call it a trainwreck however, its about the same bugexperience i had with Witcher 3, Inqusition, the previous Mass effects etc. on launch and its better than any Bethesda RPG. I dont understand what all the fuzz is about.

Sofar the worst offender in the ME series is ME2 which had an horrible savecorrupting bug that destroyed 20-50hours of gameplay for players. But i guess thats all forgotten now because that game has "interesting characters".

I've played around 30 hours of ME:A on the PC and haven't really run into any bugs. I had that weird double person bug for a few seconds when conversing with a character that self-corrected fairly quickly and one time a quest reminder wouldn't leave my screen but a quick reload got rid of that. Other than that it's been okay. Well, the first day I played it it crashed on me twice but I think that was because I was trying to push my fairly old laptop to run it on not potato settings and stressed it enough to crash the graphics card. Once I gave up on that dream and just set everything I could to minimum it's been fine.

I've read through an embarrassing number of comments on Brad's review, with people talking to themselves about how their experience on their platform has been perfect. The opposite comments, talking of the bevvy of problems on the commenters platform, are just as plentiful. Thus, one might deduce that all the versions have about similar likelihood of turning sour at any given point. Some get lucky. Some don't.

I feel as though Brad may have been particularly unlucky--or some of those bugs may have been addressed in the week before the official release.

Where I totally agree with Brad is with respect to the story and characters. The cynic in me says that some EA exec decried that they couldn't include direct continuity with a franchise that is 10 years old, but they still had to ape the basic narrative elements of the original trilogy.

I feel like the writing staff on Andromeda understood what made the original trilogy special (e.g. there's a pretty awesome Elcor knock-knock joke told in the Nomad), but they seemed crippled by trying to start an original story-line that still evokes every element of the previous three games.

The most glaring bugs I've encountered on PC so far are the banter in the open world. Sometimes a team mate would respond to a question or statement before they even asked.

Also has anyone else gotten really long load times? Sometimes it's lightning fast but other times (often right after a game over screen) it takes about two to three minutes to load back in.

I've played 22 hours on PC at ultra graphics and I've not had the same strange animation problem. Using female preset 1, the asian, with some modifications and she looks and animates good.

The game just sucks.

No it doesn't. It has flaws but it doesn't suck. People are overly critical. The combat is fun, the exploration is good as any other open world game. The characters and story may not be up to previous ME standards but better than the vast majority of games still.

There's been some weirdness here and there, but nothing I've seen comes close to what Brad has. Either way, even if it was the most polished game ever it would still be a bummer. It is definitely not polished.

Just finished at around 55 hours and 93% on PC (Win 10 x64 i5-2500k R9-290X) settings auto/high. I experienced the following that Brad saw:

• NPCs temporarily loading into T-poses during in-engine cutscenes (not as bad as Brad)
• NPCs teleport around, get stuck in wrong animation, clip through world
• Enemies clip through world and disappear, causing permanent combat
• NPCs, enemies, and squadmates occasionally fall from sky as they load in
• Escape pod failed to load for a long time, leaving PeeBee in open space
• Infinite load screens
• Crashes to desktop
• Tons of model and texture pop-in
• Texture flickering/z-fighting
• Quests that refuse to complete
• Quests that refuse to let me accept them
• Being attacked during dialogue
• Dialogue overlapping
• Dialogue failing to play (subtitles show)
• Dialogue ending early

I had problems with that and i think its an online server problem.

PS4 version definitely haunted.

Best example: I was in the research area of the ship, Jaal was at one of the consoles. As I walked by, he announced that he was in the tech room, which I could see he clearly wasn't. Thanks to Gil, I decided to put my poker skills to the test and call Jaal on his bluff. I hit the prompt to speak to Jaal, and at this point I'm almost certain the game responded to my challenge with a hearty "hold my beer", because I then get transported to the tech room as its geometry and textures are slowly loading behind me. I have to wait a bit more for Jaal to load in, but he shows up and we have our conversation (albeit with stilted animations for Jaal).

That's the first time a game ever pulled a double-bluff on me.

@rethla: Hmmm so does that mean if I wasn't connected to the internet it won't be an issue? I guess I can see that, my internet is really bad.

The ps4 version looks especially bad from what I've seen. Playing it on PC was mostly fine. I ran into one glitch where a door wouldn't open so I had to reload, and another with the nomad spawning in a vault and that's about it really. I didn't get any t-poses so I'm probably on the luckier end of things.

Bioware has stated they are adressing the serverside issues and it hasnt been a problem for me the last couple of days buy if you are still experiencing issues playing offline should solve it.

Almost done with the game, playing on the ps4 pro and didn't have anywhere near the amount of problems Brad had. I'd say the worst were like 3 crashes and a few times where the person I was supposed to go to for a quest didn't load in. In those cases I left whatever planet or area it was and came back and it worked every time. Also had one kind of important conversation with PeeBee for her loyalty mission stuff where she didn't load in so I couldn't hear anything she was saying and had to kind of piece it together from Ryder's responses.

I never even saw a T pose but did see a lot of stuff of npcs kind of trying to run to wherever they were supposed to be when I walked by and looking really goofy. I'm sure every platform has the same bugs but some people just get lucky.

I played the PS4 version and I never had anything like what Brad experienced. I suspect I was especially lucky, since I had very few technical issues in general, but I think Brad got it worse than most.

Playing on PS4 Pro and havent seen stuff like that either... mind u im only 2 hours in. Worst I saw was briefly one of my characters was in a pose holding a gun but there was no gun in his hand during a cutscene.

There is probably something very specific that breaks the games scripting but that not everyone will actually do. Could be a corrupted save or hitting a button at rhe wrong time when a cutscene triggers, basically stuff that needs to be play tested thoroughly before release.

ghosts cant eat

The only issue I had on a PS4 Pro was the game locking up (not exactly freezing, but I couldn't move my character, and couldn't access the menu). This would happen when I had to hold a button prompt on something and the game's queued up cutscene wouldn't play, or when I tried to speak to an NPC and was a little too far away when the camera would try to swing in for that over-the-shoulder view. Never had any issues with floating characters or T-poses.

Been playing on Xbox and while it does have a few glitches (mostly npc's quickly resetting positions) it's no where near what you see in the quicklooks or that video on UPF. Granted I'm only halfway through yet so maybe things will change.

From what I've seen it looks like the PS4 version of Mass Effect Andromeda definitely has some ghost problems.

70+ hours on PC and no bugs to speak of. Twice it failed to load and I had to restart the game.

i played the game for 40 hours and i got the feeling i am playing a mmo. just go to person x press E go to person Y press E again rinse and repeat. Also i you never encountered the strutting bug 50 hours in your probably lying .

I think the rather divisive nature of the bugs at the very least indicates that the game isn't the dumpster fire some make it out to be. I've said a number of times, it's definitely not polished, but I have had virtually no bugs to speak of that impact gameplay. I don't for a second think that the bugs aren't happening (as there is plenty of proof) but I don't think it's fair to a) say it's a trainwreck; or b) act like people that say they haven't encountered bugs are lying or whatever else is heavily implied or outright stated in the review comments.

The only major bug I've encountered is a main mission quest marker that was "stuck" in a doorway on Voeld (no matter which area you were in, the quest marker was pointed at the door, suggesting their was no way to continue). Turns out the marker was merely in the wrong place and the game could continue after I had found the people I had to talk to in order to continue with the main story line, but not after I googled the issue and found the bioware bug forums.

I also encountered a few minor bugs (one t-pose, some enemies flying in the air after leaving an incoming shuttle, one quest that made me have a helmet voice all the time afterwards until I restarted the game). Still less bugs than DA:Inquisition had after like five patches though, but it saddens to me that people have drawn the short end of the straw and are encountering a shitton of bugs in their version of ME:A. The fact that these bugs are present in this game is...not good.

@soulcake: Yeah that's the first time I've seen that and I've beaten the game. Go ahead and call people liars some more; sweeping statements like that are so useful.

I've put in around 30-40 hours. Seems like I can't go an hour without a full on game crash when I have to load the entire game for one reason or another. I've had a pretty identical experience to Brad and I'm also on PS4 and only played after official launch obviously. It's rather upsetting because I really enjoy the gameplay, even if the story leaves a bit to be desired compared to the Trilogy. I still think, without all of the bugs and garbage it would be a better RPG than most, but the constant crashing is really starting to bother me. If it was just open world Skyrim jank (like the T-Pose), I would be fine with it, but it's been near unplayable at times with all of the close app crashing for me.

I'm playing on Pc and that whole angara (ice) world is populated by creatures stuck in the t-pose; which for them is sitting upright like a puppy. It's nice, cause they pose zero threat unless you get up in their face. That's the only instance of a bug coming off as charming. All the other stuff does feel like a haunted house now that you mention it. I mean, just yesterday my character was facing a datapad and talking about it to one of the companions. All the sudden he fucking turns his head around and LOOKS AT ME. Here's a picture I got slightly after where he's looking upward, but ryder (if only for a few seconds stared into my soul). He's also become a floating head ghost thing which was really funny for a while, before I reloaded the game. I kinda miss ghost ryder.

PC version. 45 hours in. Still haven't seen any significant jank. Still having a good time with this game.

I recognise the criticisms as valid but even if it is all downnhill from here I feel as if I've had fun with this game and in this game world.

PC version, and it's so haunted that I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

As an update to this, I've now played the game for over 60 hours, and finished the campaign. After I wrote the above, I had one scripting error that occurs in a particular area if you go left instead of right. If it happens, the game continues the quest-line, but one objective remains incomplete. A quick save reload before the problem fixed the issue. I've also read that the helmet glitch described above goes away after you save and reload, but I haven't tested that yet.

Overall, I didn't have many issues with the game, other than the general "it's not as good as Mass Effect 2" feeling that's causing so many people to fall into a sea of hyperbole and dissatisfaction.

Played a little over 100 hours of it on PS4, and not much issue. I got lucky I guess. There were issues, but nothing so major. I haven't actually run into the T-pose glitch, but there is a T-pose armor hanging up in the store on the Nexus, which I found funny.

After about 40 hours on ps4 I can't really relate my experience to Brads review, which is odd because I usually find myself agreeing with him.

I think that comparing it to a Bethesda RPG is not an fair comparison. Bethesda RPGs have so many more 'moving parts' than bioware games.

referring to buggy games as "haunted" should be the defacto terminology.

@n1nj4d00m: thats what people always say about those game but its not true. Just because they have ai moving around everywhere glitching in the enviromemt doesnt make it an advanced clockwork world. Its just copypasted shit like everything else and nothing is interacting other than jankily shooting on sight at everything.