So, Eurogamer ended up with some leaked footage of Mass Effect Andromeda: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-04-02-mass-effect-andromeda-early-gameplay-footage-leaks

That stuff is pretty early but boy it looks pretty darn good.

And that's an old build. Can't wait to play it, ME 3 is when the gameplay finally caught up with the ambition for the world building and storytelling.

Does look cool, and even at 2 years old. Can't wait to revisit the ME universe; my most anticipated game I think.

@csl316: Caught up? I liked Mass Effect 3 gameplay wise but it's pretty much when they dropped the pretence of a role-playing game and just make it a 3rd person shooter with a talent tree. Caught up makes it sounds like they sorted out the issues rather than just dropped features.

Edit: On topic this footage seems kinda cool. I wonder what that jetpack means for level design considering you couldn't even jump in Mass Effect 1/2/3

Hopefully the jetpack means more open levels again. One of my big issues with 2 and 3 after 1. Not even just Mako sequences, but the Citadel for example was never as big or cool after 1.

@hayt: Yeah, it was the best playing game. Would you have preferred that the series stayed as a half-baked shooter?

1 is its own thing, but 2 was when they begun to shift the focus to being an actual shooter. 3 is when they pulled it off, but as I recall they also expanded the RPG and customization from 2.

So yeah, they sorted out the gameplay issues by taking the best from both on the gameplay end. And on higher difficulties, these refinements made it way more fun (and extremely tense on high difficulties).

Of course, I'm of the opinion that they set out to make a shooter from the first game but just didn't hit the mark til they had a chance to refine it.

Jet packs, Krogan, barrels confirmed.

Well there is this early demo for Mass Effect 1 where you could use the Force to move and destroy stuff in the environment...

And I believe that was only '06

So, even if real, who knows.

EDIT - if the time doesn't work it happens starting around 3:20

No kidding. For a game and more importantly setting where you can be a master hacker, cyber ninja, or literal teleporter, let alone the personality control where you can be a big softy vs mass killer, it seemed very strange the only real path forward to levels was to kill everyone in a room and then go kill everyone in the next room. Hell, even the bad ass space marine would be expected to flank a dug in enemy every once in a while.

If the game is structured like Dragon Age Inquisition, I'm not sure how excited I'll be...

ME3 was definitely more of an RPG than 2. ME2 was a skeleton of a game, it had like three skills per class and absolutely zero customization, ME3 brought back some of the mod and inventory stuff from ME1 and expanded on the gunplay quite a bit from ME2.

Yeah I think it's lacking there too but I agree that it was an improvement on ME 2 in that respect. As an RPG, in those ways ME 2 was very weak.

More open levels would be a huge breath of fresh air for this game.

I was worried there'd be all new races when they said a new galaxy. Glad to see krogan are back, hopefully turians are in there too.

Considering I vastly prefer RPGs to shooters, absolutely. ME1 was the best ME game.

I dunno, Mass Effect 1 was an action-RPG, they all were in varying degrees. There were more dice rolls in the first game, but it was essentially still a third-person cover shooter with squad tactics when talking about the combat end of things. Each game had a unique focus outside of combat on customization and RPG depth as the series evolved (outside of combat, 1 being most-RPG, then 3, then 2). But they all incorporated shooting mechanics at their core from the start:

Mass Effect 1 was a fucking cool game, I hope we can agree on that, but my personal preference is the refined shooting mechanics in 3. That's really all I'm saying here. I have no beef with people that like the first the most.

Although this looks a bit too familiar, I think I would've been excited by this gameplay snippet if I hadn't played Dragon Age: Inquisition. Exploring the environments in that game didn't have a lot of narrative value and wasn't particularly enjoyable. The combat was tedious partly because the encounters were procedurally generated and played out similarly. More open levels a la the first Mass Effect or Dragon Age: Origins would definitely be a welcome change, but I doubt that that's what they're going for.

I mean, the gameplay wasn't what kept me playing those games in the first place so this isn't really doing anything for me. I'm still not even sure I want another one of those games.

...I'm still pissed off that you're restricted to playing as a bloody human again.

I really wish they had gone in another direction with this series after the first one. The way it just turned into a generic third person shooter was so disappointing to me. Some of the story stuff from 2 and 3 was pretty good, but I just loved so much what they were going for with the first. If they had just polished the gameplay stuff a bit instead of removing or simplifying all the rpg elements, this series could have been so amazing.

Dragon Age Origins didn't have open levels in the slightest. Most environments were either a town or a dungeon, with a very small handful of small semi-open areas. That's not to say anything bad about the game, it wasn't trying to be open world, but it's certainly not a game filled with open spaces.

I also think it's weird that you'd complain about the open environments of Inquisition and then say you want environments like Mass Effect 1. Perhaps not all the side content in Inquisition was great (though I would certainly say some of it was), but at least the environments were open, varied aesthetically, and had plenty of things to do within them. Mass Effect 1's open environments were barren wastelands with practically no associated content and hardly any unique aesthetics from planet to planet.

I love Mass Effect 1, but the uncharted worlds, while a great idea, were executed terribly. If the Adromeda dev team learns from some of what the Dragon Age team did with Inquisition (both good and bad) in terms of constructing and building content for large explorable areas, I think the game could turn out well. Trying to emulate ME1 in this respect, however, would be bad.

The environments and open world style content of Inquisition certainly paled in comparison to things like Skyrim and The Witcher 3, but I still think it was much better than other open world type content Bioware had attempted previously. Hopefully they continue to get better at delivering that type of content if that is a direction they keep moving in.

@ll_exile_ll: I'm aware that neither Mass Effect nor Dragon Age: Origins had fully open environments, but compared to the largely linear and combat-heavy levels of Mass Effect 2 and 3, they were more open. That said, I should've specified that I was referring to areas like Noveria and Feros, not the uncharted planets (sorry). If I remember correctly, Noveria and Feros had hubs and several branching paths that you go through to complete main objectives or optional objectives and side missions.

In the same way, most of the areas (e.g. Denerim, Orzammar, Ostagar, the forest with the elves) in Origins were hubs and the "dungeons," for lack of a better word, were connected to them. These areas were often populated with actual characters that you can talk to and quests with consequences and some narrative backbone, even if some of those quests had generic objectives like locating a missing person.

Eh, looks like more Mass Effect. I think the series had it's time and they should have just moved on. If the multiplayer is like 3's i may check it out.

Mass effect 2 was the perfect balance of gameplay and story. 3 had great gameplay and really fun multiplayer, but they toned the RPG mechanics down way to much. For example not being able to actually talk to most the npc's when you wanted to and getting quests through random ambient dialog you couldn't hear was fucking TERRIBLE. They also didn't really deliver on the promises of all the different branching choices made from the first 2 games.

I got nothing positive or negative out of those clips and I don't see enough evidence to jump to any conclusion about open worlds. I will at least agree that making a game in the style of DA:I would be a big misstep.

Okay, I get what you mean now. I guess I was a bit confused because they've been so upfront that they are trying to return to the idea of exploring wide open planets like Mass Effect 1, only with a bunch of improvements. Since that's one of the few things we actually know about Andromeda so far, I was taking that as a given and I just assumed you were commenting on that concept.

As I recall KOTOR was the same way, and I imagine that Jade Empire was as well? In fact the first mass effect is structured basically the exact same way as KOTOR, with an introductory section, then giving you the choice of three planets to go to, with another mission opening up after completing 2 of the main missions.

The "hub" structure of having a central area with branching paths is kind of cool, but I always thought it seemed a little bit like a concession to financial reality - how can you capture something a bit like Amn or Baldur's Gate in 3D without scaling up your resource unsustainably. In that respect the first Dragon Age felt a lot more like a Baldur's Gate type thing to me, although admittedly on a smaller scale. The structure felt a little less like following the spokes on a wheel and more like genuine exploration, albeit in a slightly less well put together world.

@ll_exile_ll: You know, I think I shouldn't have said anything. Basing a complaint on a brief gameplay video of what could be an outdated build and a comment a developer said nearly two years ago was not a good idea. Despite my cynicism, I love the Mass Effect universe and I really want Andromeda to be as good as it can be.

@thomasnash: That's actually pretty interesting. I've never played any of the Baldur's Gate games, so I had no idea they were similar in structure to the first Dragon Age.

They're not exactly the same, but there are some similarities. In DA:O you spend the first half of the game going to places in the countryside, but you're sort of always building towards going towards the capital, which is the seat of power of your enemy. Baldur's Gate is the same way, in that you roll through Beregost/Nashkel/Bandit Camp/Cloakwood before going to the City of Baldur's Gate, where Sarevok is based.

The main thing that made me think they are similar is that the places you go to (generally) feel like they were designed as places first, and then populated with stuff. In Mass Effect it feels like the mission was designed first, if that makes sense. This is sort of sensible given the narrative, and generally leads to a more action-focused game.

There's a lot of story beats that are similar as well, but I think they could legitimately just be called Bioware tropes really as they certinly appear in more games than just BG and DA:O: Seeing a mentor/authority figure get murdered by a bad guy you'll take down later; needing to get political allies to rob support from said bad guy etc.