The Nexus (the hub ship) arrived in advance of the four ark ships to set up before the bulk of the expedition arrives. About 80% of the 100,000 individuals travelling to Andromeda are on the arks, but that still leaves 20,000 Milky Way residents that arrived prior to the start of the game.

There will obviously be plenty of stuff revolving around the new places and people of the Andromeda galaxy, but the impact of seeing new cultures has to be seen through the lens of ones we're familiar with. I feel like it has to be just as much as about all the cultures we know adapting to the new environment as much as it's about discovering new cultures.

In the trilogy, humans were the anchor through which we learned about all the aliens of the Milky Way. In Andromeda, all the Milky Way cultures are the anchor through which we learn about everything this new galaxy has to offer.

Looks like this is just the Vanguard class that was available in the previous games.

Cool trailer, I really like the variety in the environments they showed. I was also very glad to see an almost complete lack of HUD elements. Hopefully I can turn off the way points as well and just have the little compass at the top of the screen. Spring 2017 is almost here! More Mass Effect!!

I'm a big fan of the series and this trailer looks good, but the default female face looks pretty derpy and feels off, seems like she's always a second away from smiling.

That's the first thing I thought.

Less emphasis on plain cover shooter? Good. More open levels with Mako esque exploration? Awesome. More interestign stuff to do with inventory and in general the game being more of an RPG ala ME1? Sign me the fuck up.

One thing I am a bit iffy on it like someone already mentioned. This was supposed to be a whole new galaxy to explore a brave new world, you're the pathfinder, yet we see established settlements with very familiar races. I dunno, it feels - safe and not very what's beyond the horizon like. At least how this trailer looked.

This trailer explains why there's already some milky way species already established and the basic story of Andromeda.

@ll_exile_ll: How far in advance have they said? Or any mention of how large a potion an exploration/discovery will play vs. this established colony? I guess I was just looking for a more of that wonder of discovery feeling they showed in earlier trailers.

@pezen: I completely agree... everything shown so far in this and past trailers has be very concerned for the story...

Gameplay is one thing but a strong story is what sells an RPG in my book... and so far ME:A is not putting a good foot forward on that front.

@cmblasko: I'm right there with you. I can't fathom why of all the dialogue there has to be in this game they choice that portion to be in this trailer... how did that get picked?! Who thought that it showed the game in a good light?!

Bio ware has been very quite on this game up to this point and with the little bit of it that they have shown it's not looking good. Which totally stinks...

Name me a single RPG that trailers good. I think Bioware did a great job of showing off the portions of this game without it feeling boring or drawn out. These games really only show off well when you can show off 15-30 minute chunks which are hard to do.

Abilities don't seem to have shared cooldowns anymore, that is certainly a welcome change.

My hype for this game has taken a hit from this trailer. The voice acting was cringey, adding crafting doesn't make it more appealing either and the crime scene scanning looks really dull.

This looks pretty damn good, animations look way improved not sure what people are talking about? Narrative seems odd, not sure why their seems to be a milky way population in the new galaxy if they are supposed to be scouting it? Maybe that changed that or something. I hope they bring back 3's multiplayer, i have well over 300 hours in that and still think about playing it from time to time.

You didn't need to take cover that much in 3 (depending on your class)so i'm sure it will be viable.

@ll_exile_ll: Well, that sounds really promising then =) The trailer just sorta made it look like the game was gonna be all movement and twitch shooting, but I guess they need to make it look flashy.

Thinking some more about this, I really hate how close they're sticking in terms of alien races and stuff. The closer this is to the other games, the more I'm just going to compare it to them, and it already seems like it's cannibalizing its own concept of "new galaxy to explore" by putting all the same old shit in the trailers.

My opinions may be skewed because I recently played through 2 and 3 on Insanity, and you couldn't even pop your head up without losing your shield on that difficulty. More what I meant was that it looks a lot easier to actually maneuver around and cover ground, whereas in the older games it always felt too zoomed-in and clumsy to have fun doing any of that stuff (in my case, anyway).

I agree, it reminded me a lot of inquisition, to be honest. Or more accurately, it reminded me a lot of the Division. I liked the Division but I don't think that' what I want from Mass Effect

^with you on that one. i will buy this game, but something about all the coverage i've seen is giving me bad vibes. it's like they're building something with a very solid mechanical structure and absolutely no narrative soul.

to me mass effect doesn't work without strong characterization and world building- so here's hoping it's there and just hasn't been shown yet.

tl;dr- i don't get verklempt from 'vigil' because the shooting is tight.

So is Bioware trying to make a point by making women in games look ugly?

Disagree, this looks way closer to how ME1 played, with less simplistic cover based shooting and a more active rpg elements.

If you close your eyes this trailer could be for No Man's Sky.

@dgtlty: Heh, and if you open them you'll see more variety in planets and wildlife in a single trailer than NMS's quintillion planets and their 'robust ecology'.

Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder mate.

Have they stated if this will have controller support on pc? It never made much sense to me that this was left out the old games when they were console as well.

You're not the first Pathfinder (your father was I believe) so maybe enough time has past that the various races that set out to Adromeda have made hubs in certain areas?

I'm not really a fan of that set up but as you've said everything else looks pretty damn good.

@oursin_360: I think the previous games came out on PC just before practically everything had plug & play support for Xinput. ME3 was around the time where it was becoming standard, I would assume much like DA:I it will have controller support.

@zeushbien: Beauty might be subjective, but if you want to make a character look attractive to a majority of people, it's far from a crapshoot.

I'm a little surprised to see so much praise for the reduction in use of cover. Third person cover shooters might be getting passe, but have third person non-cover shooters ever been any good?

Looks good, although the animation looked pretty choppy at the start. So long as they tidy that up and allow you to holster your weapon, I'm in.

@mordukai:

The Andromeda Initiative consists of 5 ships. 4 Arks, each controlled by a council race (Asari, Salarian, Turian, Human), and the Nexus. The Nexus is the hub world, serving a similar function as the Citadel. It has residences, entertainment, and all the comforts of the established Milky Way civilization. It is also the seat of the Andromeda Initiative's leadership.

In total, there are around 100,000 individuals from the Milky Way that are part of the expedition. About 20k per ark and another 20k travelling on the Nexus. The Nexus arrived in Andromeda in advance of the arks, before the start of the game. The reason being is that Nexus needs to get set up to support the full population. It launched in, for lack of a better word, a "travel state." Once it arrives, those on-board will transition the Nexus to its "stationary state" as more of a space station like the Citadel than an intergalactic ship. When the arks arrive, the Nexus and the Initiative leadership will be ready to receive them.

However, the population on the arks are the ones that will be scouting the Andromeda galaxy. The people on the Nexus haven't been landing on a ton of planets and establishing colonies in their time in Andromeda ahead of the arks, they've preparing the Nexus for the other 80,000 people to arrive. There will be multiple new races and there will be squadmates that are of the new races. Just because we came to this galaxy with 100,000 familiar faces doesn't mean there aren't new things to see. They can't give away everything in the trailers.

As for the settlement we in the gameplay video, if you listen to the dialogue it explains what that settlement is and why they're there: They're all criminals. They came to Andromeda on the Nexus, but were kicked out and basically dumped in the galaxy to fend for themselves. Presumably incarceration facilities wasn't part of the Nexus's design, so they just tell the criminals to get out.

The dialogue in question can be heard at the 55 second mark.

I think pretty much everything there was rad as heck and I kinda can't wait for this thing. BioWare's crazy knack for lighting is still alive and kicking.

@ll_exile_ll: Thanks for the clarification.

My only concern is that the game will just turn into another DA:I. Collecting resources and setting up camps in an MMO type maps and objectives are not something I am too keen on doing in an Mass Effect game.

Of course it has fucking crafting. And Batman detective stuff. And exploring. It comes of as trying to hard to cover all popular bases of modern gaming and that never succeeds.

I totally prefer non-cover shooters to cover shooters. Cover is boring! I definitely had more fun with the gameplay of, say, Resident Evil 4 than Mass Effect. So although the jetpack and dashes aren't exactly Vanquish levels of cool, it's nice to see some more stuff that isn't cover. Ideally, I'd want enough different Vanguard-style powers that never going into cover(and still having some variety in what you do, not just charge) was an option. Just give the enemies good tells and me the ability to dodge properly and quickly and they're more than halfway there.

The main character's face does not look right at some spots, but that's really my only complaint. It's kinda disappointing given that they're on Frostbite and this is still happening. The faces on the Battlefield games look great. Obviously Mass Effect has a whole lot more talking in it, but I would have liked to see them fix that since I often don't wear a helmet during dialogue in Mass Effect.

Max Payne 1, 2 and 3 as well as Vanquish are the best third person shooters out there and they're non-cover based. Resident Evil 4 and 5 are better than most cover based shooters and even Mass Effect 2 and 3 when you're playing a Vanguard not bothering with cover is a lot more fun.

@colonel_pockets: The faces in Inquisition are just as bad, they're never gonna get better. Until Dawn can use real actors and create in-game copies of them that not only look accurate, but good. I'm aware that bioware sometimes base faces on models, and I think those models have reason to feel insulted. My Shepard has never looked better than with a Recon Hood on in ME3.

To be fair, everyone looks better in a Recon Hood, those things were cool.

@dharmabum: Her mouth looks like a completely separate animation from her eyes and forehead. Makes it look like moving clay.

This trailer provides little information, so take my reaction below with a grain of salt.

I am both invigorated and concerned. A lot of things in this heavily edited trailer point many fingers at Dragon Age: Inquisition's general gameplay and exploration. The one thing that frightens me is the prospect of running around the world getting annoyed at random encounters, because that side quest you're on does not involve this tenth pack of spider bees with three legs and five mouths. It also seems to lag behind the Witcher 3 in terms of general character animations during dialogues-- brings back memories of abyssmal camera angles and stock animations they had in ME3.

Anyone remember Diana Allers (the reporter played by Jessica Chobot) "sultry" walking animation? Now that was a heap of slag they always tried to hide.

This looks really really good but like many says a trailer will never show the important stuff in a game like this. Faceanimations that seems to be everyones gripe i have no problem at all with, Mass Effect 1 is still the best Mass effect game and its not because of the face animations.

What i dont want it to be is arena fights and monster closets. The fights and places should have a meaning behind them or it will just be a soulles Destiny shooter.

No, there are many studies that show this not to be true. Beauty is almost universally recognizable trait and it can be somewhat described by mathematics. Some studies even show that babies react differently to attractive people.

In Mass Effect, at least Asari should be beautiful, since their deal is that they appeal to all species (due to the mono-gender aspect of their race).

No, they shouldn't. Asari don't have to fit with - western, human - ideals of beauty to be considered attractive by other races - or even plenty of humans; as the way beauty standards can vary so dramatically from culture to culture, era to era demonstrates, there's plenty about what we find 'attractive' that really is entirely arbitrary, even if that's not true of every single 'attractive' attribute - and nothing about the lore says that each individual Asari has to be attractive in any case--just because you physically can mate with someone, doesn't mean you have to be attractive to them.

At any rate, this is about women in general, and I'm honestly massively chuffed that BioWare seem to be designing their female characters without the primary consideration being, 'Is she hot?' It really shouldn't be a big deal, but it is, because - as this whole discussion demonstrates - it's still incredibly rare for major female characters in games to be allowed the same diversity of appearance as their male counterparts, who've always ranged from traditionally attractive, to average, to outright 'ugly'.

Anyways, I'm so, so stoked that Mass Effect is back! Spaceships, vanguards, awful facial animations, oh my!

I hate to nitpick but the faces seemed really weird. Some of the animation seemed really exaggerated too, something I've noticed in the little Inquisition stuff I've seen

Why is it That, as bioware games have better visuals and have better animations than the games that came before, that the bad animations seem more obvious then ever before.

While playing mass effect and DA:O the animations never bothered me, but recently going back and looking at DA:I and mass effect 3 and now this, it all looks super crazy and weird to me.

Is it just a case of poor animations? because the combat animations look pretty good so far.

The contrast is just bigger, I think. They have gotten better at most everything. Even the faces, as crazy as that feels to say, are probably better now than in Mass Effect 1 even though they look all wet and weird. But some parts have advanced much more than others. The environments in Inquisition are all beautiful, lovely places with great, contrasting and saturated colors. And then these weirdoes with shiny mustaches do ugly run cycles across the screen in front of that amazing landscape. And have a lot of zoom-ins on their faces for the conversations. And at some point even have to be romantic to each other within the confines of these animations.

The first 3 mass effect games were some of my favorites(except for the obvious poop ME3 ending) from last gen but for whatever reason Im not all that hyped for this. It looks fine but its just not doing it for me right now. im pretty bummed that it looks like you're still going to see a bunch of humans and the same aliens as before. i was hoping for more of a stranger in a foreign land kind of thing since its a completely new galaxy

@ll_exile_ll: Thanks for the explanation.

There is discussion between species ( I think in ME3 ) where members of different species talk about Asari. All of them see attractive traits unique for their race in Asari that others do not notice. This is to hint that Asari have ability to seem attractive by some sort of manipulation.

There is lot of data supporting that beauty has strong universal standards and things like babies preferring pretty faces show that it is not tied to culture or era. With men, there is wider range of what is considered to be attractive due to the sexual dimorphism and its effect on the human evolution. Still most game male characters that are meant to be likable, look kind of the same (most likely due to marketing studies) .

People just naturally like watching good looking people, that is why TV, films and video games are filled with good looking people. There are exceptions like men can be ugly if they are funny or if ugliness is used for dramatic or comedic effect.

Yeah I think a lot of the best TPS don't use cover really. There are some good cover shooters and Even some of those games have them but I personally think it makes for a better game when it isn't the focus. I do enjoy Gears and even would say Winback is an underrated game, but for me Max Payne 3 is the best third person shooter mechanically (really every Max Payne game has been my favorite in their eras). Resident Evil 4 was incredible when it came out (5 is a good game as well).

At this point it has gone past that kind of point I think when cover is a big deal at all. Even games like GTA, that do so much more, just have a cover system in their game. I'm playing Battlefield 1 and it automatically leans for you which is even a cover system really simplified. I think that mechanic being inventive in any way made games focus on its use for years.

Vanquish is a good example because it does actually have a cover system but it doesn't just focus on it. Pretty forward thinking for where shooters went. Really fun game.

Yeah, I know about that conversation, and I generally dismiss it as the drunken speculation that it is 'cause it's a theory that really doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Any such manipulation wouldn't work via hologram, video, or indeed in pretty much any scenario where a given individual isn't in the same room as an Asari.

To get back to the point of the discussion: there's also plenty of data supporting the idea that, while certain aspects of physical beauty are pretty much universal - symmetry is pretty much always favoured, for example - the majority of our construct of 'beauty' is, in fact, based on arbitrary cultural standards, that have developed over time to give men a far, far easier ride when it comes to their appearance than women:

http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/health-and-human-body/human-body/enigma-beauty/

http://www.medicaldaily.com/history-body-image-america-how-ideal-female-and-male-body-has-changed-over-time-360492

What you say simply isn't true of male characters, not to nearly the same extent as female characters--even accounting for this supposed 'wider range', which is simply a justification for men not to get as much shit over their appearance as women do. You're not seriously going to argue that men are judged to anywhere near the same extent as women on their appearance, surely?

And no, TV, films and video games are filled with good looking people because American culture demands such--television and movies produced in other countries frequently present a far wider range of beauty. (They also sometimes present a still-narrower range, demonstrating again how arbitrary and culturally-determined beauty standards can be.) Besides, while you - and, undeniably, a great many other people - may enjoy having your entertainment stuffed exclusively with people who fit the western ideal of beauty, for other people, it can feel like this:

https://mic.com/articles/111228/how-western-beauty-ideals-are-hurting-women-across-the-globe#.eEHSKJBc0

It's a shitty, unfair status quo that's designed to benefit men at the expense of making women feel like crap, and I'll happily celebrate any subversion of it. Heck, even if it was determined entirely by evolution - which it isn't, not even slightly - I'd still celebrate any subversion of it, 'cause women still wouldn't deserve to have to put up with this crap.

No. Nobody designed anything. It evolved into what it is. It also gives different handicaps and advantages to different sexes. It is in core of human nature and you can deny all you want because some ideology says so.

All I am saying nobody wants ugly women in games. They can virtue signal that this not the case, but if they were given the (private) change they would choose pretty over ugly.

Looks like Mass Effect. I hope the writing is good and that there are still at least some remains of the "RPG" part of "action RPG" in the game. Everything else is tertiary. A bit of a nitpick, but this trailer is very generic in its editing and soundtrack design, I expected them to do better for the first gameplay video.