I'm going to be honest, I thought Mass Effect sucked, I didn't bother with 2 beyond a few hours and I didn't like it either. I recently tried to play it again on PC and I still didn't like it, but I was curious with a whole new reboot to see if they would make the series into something I think is any good.

However all my issues with the series aside, I keep hearing everyone saying "this looks really nice".... what? The environments look no better than Mass Effect 2 on PC, there is barely any difference, especially with the interiors, they look like for like, I seriously thing they just took assets from previous games.

Bioware have been been good at level design, everything is so copied and pasted, the environments are barren, static copy and paste wastelands with a few poorly animated NPCs walking around. The lighting is really harsh as well, there is barely any handcrafted detail to any thing, it's like the PS2 era of level design in HD. You go from a level in any modern game and compare it to this, you'll see so much impossible detail in the other games, then you see these and they're horrible.

How can any one think this game looks good unless their only experience of Mass Effect is on a 360?

Okay animation woes are founded and understandable but this is too much.

It does in ways look quite a lot worse but the outdoor areas are definitely a huge step up

Overall I would take the less jank of ME2, #GameOfTheGeneration

This is getting crazy. I've only started reading up on player thoughts since yesterday and I already can't take the sheer ridiculousness of the negativity.

Does everyone get to start their own thread about why they hate or are too cool for mass effect? Am I next???

Like how far are we from just hearing 'This looks like a PS2 game!'

The environments are stunning, and the lightning, ice/water/fire effects look gorgeous. Some of the characters resemble those possible in older tech, and don't exhibit the same level of quality compared to said gorgeousness, but saying it looks no better than ME2 is fantastically hilarious for the wrong reasons. C'mon now.

DA: I was unbelievably beautiful at the time, and still looks lovely. Better in some aspects.

Man..... this is starting to get silly.

Can someone post that PlayStation 1 looking video of Shepard talking to Wrex and and mention how Andromeda looks worse than that? I would if I could but I'm on mobile. Thanks a bunch.

Either this is some kind of satirical commentary on the extreme reactions the game has been getting, or you're serious and you've left the land of reason behind.

Yeah, sorry, I can't even really come up with a way to justify this one. Animation? Yeah it's rough. Faces? Yep they can be pretty dead. Models? Pretty bad in some spots. But I've put a good 200-300 hours into replaying mass effect 2 on the PC without any mods to enhance the look, and it doesn't pull off the environments that Andromeda does.

Source: I just replayed ME2 a month ago.

Yes we needed another one of these threads.

Oh c'mon...

Wow. Yes the models and animations are bad, but everything else looks really good.

A negative Mass Effect Andromeda hot take? What a new and original concept

Hyperbole needs to be banned from human speech for all eternity. I'm preeetty tired of it being the go to form of discourse for humanity these days.

I'm at least happy that even with the hottest takes being thrown around most of us can come together and agree that this is some bullshit.

Then whatever you have to say next is invalid.

Mass Effect was one of the best games I had ever played up there with KotOR and Final Fantasy 7. It didn't age all that well but I loved every minute of my half a dozen playthroughs of that game.

Do we need yet another thread on this?

Sounds like ME:A is the Dragon Age 2 of ME.

Ridiculous

Naw, i just played a bit of mass effect 2 in 4k with texture mods and reshade.....this looks way better beyond the character models. Backgrounds, textures, and lighting are 100% better.

I heard the graphics on this was crazy.

A flawed gem?

Seriously though, Dragon Age 2 certainly has many issues, but this things it does well are fantastic. It's a refreshing change of pace and scope compared to most other Bioware games / RPGs in general.

I'm of the mind that if that game had 18 months more development time, it would be considered a seminal classic.

I still think DA2 is pretty incredible for something made in like a year.

The face issue aside, it's definitely one of the best looking games of this gen. It would easily make the top 5, maybe top 3. Too bad my trial hit the stopping point in singleplayer I'd love to keep going.

@nagafen: As someone who recently replayed ME2 nooooooooooo it does not.

Also, I think playing through both it and DAO in the last year has given me the realization that Bioware games have NEVER had good character models/animations.

I think you might be comparing the models to todays standards. Back in the day DAO animations and models were just fine given the scope of the games. It just seems like Bioware has not taken any steps to improve that aspect very much. I started to notice it around Mass Effect 2, Shepherd's run was just so strange, and his smiles were creepy, but I had hoped when they moved to the Frostbite engine that it would improve, but it seems not so. DOA: Inquisition did the smart thing where they kept the camera panned out during unimportant conversations, which might have given them extra time to dial the animation in on the actual important ones. Not that Inquisition is much better than Andromeda in that department, just slightly. Maybe the frostbite engine just aren't very good when it comes to facial animations, or maybe it's just too cumbersome, so it's too much of a hassle. Who knows.

Origins just had the terrifying dead eyed stare that you couldn't escape from in any of your created characters.

Yeah, it was also a "silent" or text based protagonist. So he/she didn't really feel alive to begin with, as it was more left to your imagination. But again, I feel like it was all passable for a giant 2009 game.

It looks fine in the most, it's just that we know from plenty of other EA games that the Frostbite engine can do so much more with faces and animations so the presentation here is an unforced error. Also this wouldn't be getting so dunked on if the rest of the game made up for the technical shortfalls - that's where they could have saved it and previously have (maybe ME3 was "least bad" but this series has never been about technical prowess).

ME2 looks fine (here back on a GTX760 so I suspect I could prod it further today to get a slightly clearer final look/maybe something interesting around 4K, assuming the film grain shader doesn't break at very high res):

But also was a fan of cut-scene animations being somewhat broken and bugs with geometry:

The next person to start a hyperbolic Mass Effect bitch thread should have a mild electric shock come up through their keyboard. Can we make this happen?

yeah I'm with you there.

I think the issue with this game is comparables. Mass Effect's goofy movement etc didn't look as off back in the day because their competition wasn't much better.

But I feel like everyone else got a lot better and Bioware stayed about the same with animation. Heck the faces were a ton better in their own DA:Inquisition two years ago than this.

One look at the set pieces though tells ME:A is a much newer games than the previous three ME games though. Kinda easy to lose sight of that when being distracted by Ryder face.

I don't think this offers much in the way of conversation other than jokes or anger, which is probably the definition of a troll.

That exact comment was made in the stream archive's comments. I really want the hyper-powered PS2s that these folks seem to have. Must have been incredible to own future tech at console prices.

Here's a comparison between Mass Effect 1 and Andromeda if anyone is interested: (early game spoilers for both games)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eTK5YPSIc0

(I tried to embed but it seems there's some issue with it showing up, sorry.)

What game with lots of NPC's are powered by the frostbite engine that also happpens to have excellent facial animation?

not excellent but inquisition has much better character faces, i get they can't mocap all the faces but they can still get proportions right.

@tothenines: Which Frostbite engine games don't have good facial results?

Battlefield Hardline is a good example of this engine in 2015 with emotive faces. Mirror's Edge Catalyst last year showed clear results (even if the game as a whole maybe was more of a miss, the facial anims were good right from the first moment). Same with Battlefield 1 - not seen much of that game but a quick scan of the campaign indicates the in-engine facial animation looking totally fine.

Like, this engine seems very capable.

I haven't played it, but from the looks of it, yes it does look disappointing visually, but mainly when it comes to the human facial/body animation and textures (it does look more in line with last-gen). And, some moments in the video from the quick look like when Ryder was talking to the female squadmate, and it had this hazy blur over the screen, which just looked broken. Otherwise, I imagine it looks better overall. The dialogue coupled with some of the visual issues, while it doesn't make me think that it looks like a PS1 game (that's hyperbole), it does concern me.

And Pong has a better story!

That is quite simply an insane thing to say.

@shivoa: Maybe, maybe not. It could be that it's really cumbersome and time consuming when it comes to animating faces. I never played Battlefield hardline, but I'm not sure how much dialogue there is compared to a game like Mass Effect. I'm not making excuses, I just think it's strange that a developer like Bioware have gotten even worse at this particular thing after switching engine.

@oursin_360 for sure. Though that game is not particularly impressive when it comes to that either, but it is better than Andromeda I'll agree on that. But they also made the work load considerably smaller by only going for the cinematic dialogue for only the most important of conversations. I haven't heard that Mass Effect does the pan out camera view as well.

I think Mass Effect 2 had the strongest art direction, but nah son.

Cmon man. I mean left paddles arc was pretty good. It really hit me when he just wanted to stop playing, after right paddle left him simply because he always hit the pong ball in the worst spots. Its not his fault that he had a tendency to jab the ball at the end of paddle, that's just kind of how it went. But once they started to introduce the infant paddle and how he wasn't the real father, it really just went overboard. Weighing all of that out, I think Pong still has the better characters but I think ME: A has hooked me more story wise from the trial I've played.

Hey hey, PS1 games had better graphics than this. Haha! Boom roasted! High five!