People complain about a lot of things in this game. The animations can be pretty awful, the dialogue can be bad at times, but nothing makes me lose the will to keep playing more than the horribly boring, tedious, and long animations between traversing different planets in this game. I decided to count down how long it takes, and I get roughly 18 seconds between planets, which is absolutely atrocious.

I get Bioware wants to show off how pretty their space looks, and I get that this sort of makes it more immersive I guess, but it's just so horrible. I loved going around the Milky Way galaxy looking at all of the planets and seeing their different stats, but now they made it feel like such a god damn grind to get 100% in each cluster. I just got to a part where 7 new clusters opened up, and rather than being excited that I get to explore more of this awesome galaxy, I just groan, because it's going to be 15-20 minutes of mindlessly clicking on each planet, waiting for a long animation to play out, read the stats, and then rinse and freaking repeat.

This new galaxy map is easily the worst design decision in the game, I don't care what anyone else says.

I have not played it yet but from the quick look it did look like it would get grating after a while.

I wonder why it takes this long? Is it really just a design choice?

And they dont even have the decency to use Uncharted Worlds

They aren't masking load times or anything either so I just ended up using cheat engine to speed up during travel.

Dunno why they couldn't just let you scan from afar for the description and then zoom in further IF there is an anomaly.

Its awful, main reason i soured on the single player. 30 sec cutscene to go to a planet in the same system that may not even have anything. Game is such a step back in a lot of ways, things that 2 learned from 1 and 3 learned from 2 seem to be forgotten in this one. Why even bring planet scanning back just to make it even less engaging and more tedious?

The fact that it doesn't hide a load and cannot be skipped is just awful. They need to patch that. I read every planet's story in the previous game. Now I hate even having to go back to the nexus because of this.

It is one of my issues with a game I otherwise really like. There's just not that much of value in anything to do with it.

How do we know that for sure? Just honestly wondering.

Well it definitely doesn't on PC because I just fast forward through the entire thing.

Can't speak for consoles.

I cleared out a few clusters and came to the conclusion that its pointless anyway, you get way more xp from combat and you get a lot more ore from mining.

Unless there are quests related to it, dont bother.

@efesell: how do you skip it? I thought I tried every way possible maybe I'm an idiot though.

That's been my attitude so far. Doesn't seem necessary to do at all.

@artisanbreads: By way of Cheat Engine, it has built in speed hacks.

Also the planet descriptions don't say what type of star the planet is orbiting anymore. I kinda liked that in the old ones. I dislike the length of the animation but I feel like at least there isn't as many systems to look at as in the other games.

This reminds me that I miss the Codex announcer guy too. I think he would read planet descriptions sometimes, I might have dreamt that but regardless it's a beautiful dream and should have been in this game

It almost looks like they were going for an Elite: Dangerous cinematic look of flying around in space, but without any actual gameplay involved.

I enjoyed moving around the solar systems in the previous games (though avoiding the Reapers in ME3 was weird and kinda dumb). I didn't need to actually pilot the ship to pretend I'm flying. It was a nice interactive thing to do and was pretty fun. Taking out player interactivity like this feels like a step backwards.

I can agree with this, I hate the dramatic zooms on the new planet only to pull back...then have to zoom in again. Drove me crazy.

I don't mind it so much for planets, but slowly zooming into asteroids and other resources you can gather... What the hell were they thinking? As soon as I hit that button I should be immediately getting that resource.

It's dumb for the anomalies, but fine for the habitable planets. Like why do I need to zoom in and travel to an object that I'm just going to left click on and leave immediately. Waste of time. I've taken to just doing stuff on my phone while Im looking into anomaly planets.

I only watched the Quick Look and I have no idea what they were thinking. There must be a logistical reason for it because I refuse to believe they play tested this game and no one ever said "hey guys, these animations take a long time.." It's not something you easily miss since you're travelling left and right.

@humanity: My guess is they thought it would be a really cool spectacle, and fell into the design trap of putting blinders on to any dissenting opinion. From what i heard its the same thing that happened with Witcher 3's movement system. Someone up high determined that it worked. Or they spent a bunch of time making it, realized it's not that great, and didn't want to commit the resources to fixing or trashing it in favor of something more practical. Often times baffling design decisions simply boil down to not getting feedback from an outside perspective in time to make a difference, or just plain stubborness.

It should've just done this animation when you were going to important worlds (at least ones with anomalies), not EVERY SINGLE ONE.

This made me download CheatEngine, so I could fast forward it. Makes it 1,000 times better.

But, but, but.... the Galaxy Map was one of the most memorable, soothing parts of the original games. :(

The weirdest part is that even if the goal was to visually represent space travel, it still fails due to jank. The way every transition starts at the wide cluster view, then zooms down to whatever planet you're on, then flies to a close-up view of the new planet, then hitches briefly before zooming out again to a full planet view is just awful.

I'm wrapping up now and the last four hours or so have been making me actively angry because it's just one poorly hidden loading screen after the next. In fact, I would prefer a generic loading screen. It's a pretty universe and all, but it quickly becomes unbearable. I'm actually looking forward to being done with this game so that in don't have to deal with the map anymore.

As someone who actually quite liked the game in the end, the Galaxy Map suuuuuuuuuucked. Sure, it looked cool, but it was ludicrously slow.

Im enjoying this game a whole bunch but I absolutely agree. They took the worst thing about every past mass effect game and in a way that is almost impressive they actually managed to make it about 100 times worse. The best thing I can say about the planet scanning is that there is 0 point to scanning uncharted worlds because all you get is a few resources or xp.

Yeah, I've been able to look past a lot in this game so far, but those long travel animations are a bust.

@donchipotle said:

You've got to be kidding?
That's the best part.

Sadly I am not.

I don't mind it at all. One of the things I've always hated about space fiction stuff is how close together they make everything seem. If anything, I wish it took longer and give a real impression of how far apart everything really is.

But then, you do have to have some suspension of disbelief since with no mass relays, it should by all accounts, take generations to travel between solar systems like they're doing

Regular FTL drives are a thing has no one listened to Codex man in the past.

It is masking a load.

Remember in the Quick Look how Brad pointed out that there's a ton of windows on your ship? It's all there to look at space. The view changes to whatever planet or asteroid field you are currently orbiting and it looks pretty cool once you notice it.

However, I don't know that it's worth the 20 second load time over the course of the game.

@indiana_jenkins: If it is it is only on consoles. You can totally speedhack through the entire animation and not hit a point where a load trips you up.

I did read those. FTL drives are fine in-system, but still pretty damn slow on a galactic scale. Even with them, it would still take years to go between solar systems as far apart as they're shown on the galaxy map

I dunno I feel like they have generally established in franchise that the EZ powered drives can make that sort of travel within clusters reasonable enough.

Otherwise basically everything stops working in the ME storyline.

It doesn't bother me that much, but yeah, if I could skip it I would. However, it does make me want to ask a scientist 'if this ship took this long to get to these planets, how fast would the ship be going?'

Its not masking a load. Loading up an savefile on another planet goes faster than those travels.

I have no problem with how long it takes to travel but the odd zooms and and general ugliness of the sweeps is not great. It feels like its something quickly put together for an testbuild. Only having 3 lines of highly generic info about the planets you scan aint exactly a good reward either.

@mems1224: Yeah, plus you finish a Nexus mission by doing it once you scan fifty of them. They put all the scanning on the actual planet instead, so you do it with the Nomad. I think the only disappointing thing about the scanning is that it doesn't actually bring you anywhere. On the one hand, it's fast so I'm happy about that, but Mass Effect 2 did something great by giving you an actual side mission with a somewhat interesting location. I'm not sure how I'd feel about that with this, though considering how much content is already there. At this point, I'd have already finished the first Mass Effect and half of two and this is 100 percent-ing both.

To be fair, once you've accept that FTL travel is a thing, you pretty much just have to go with whatever the game presents. Otherwise you get stuck in the weeds of relativity and the breakdown of causality (if the speed of light is invariant, then FTL travel implies you'll see effects happening before their cause; if the speed of light if variant, then there is a fundamental difference between the Mass Effect universe and our universe, so you can't really make any safe assumptions about how stuff works).

I think the worst thing is the massive amount of missed opportunities. I'd classify the Galaxy Map as a "What were they thinking?". That being said, I actually like the effect of the travel animations when you speed it up by 4x with Cheat Engine, it's painfully slow at normal speed though.

Judging by this thread I should've made a whole new thread PSA about the Cheat Engine speed hack rather than just post it in one of the other threads on this forum.

I wouldn't mind the galaxy map if it worked a bit better. In most instances, it tends to be very jittery when zeroing in on the new planet/asteroid or whatever the spacial anomaly is. It's very distracting. I know that they wanted to make something that was visually pleasing while also hiding the fact that they are loading in all of this new planet assets, but it just looks poor in action, at least to me imo. It honestly makes me long for the old galaxy map. At least it worked relatively quickly and looked good, if utilitarian. This galaxy map tries to put aesthetics over usability and I think it falls short.

But, if it actually worked and didn't look like it was chugging badly, I might be more forgiving of it overall. I don't mind hiding loading and all that, I just want it to not look like it's struggling to load new planets.

Speaking of maps - on the pc, the regular on-world map is really annoying too. You can press M to open it, which is nice... but then to close it, you have to press escape twice. It's surprisingly pretty annoying. What's with this game and maps?

You don't have to accept whatever is presented just because one thing doesn't conform to what we know to be real. In sci-fi, very few franchises are purely based on reality. Instead, they start from a blanket assertion, and derive rules around how that affects everything else, which logically is limited by that assertion and by the rest of the universe they establish from the start. In other words, in writing a sci-fi story, you start by setting rules for how the universe works, and then everything else derives from that. If you can't work within the limitations you establish in your own universe, that's just shitty writing.

@shadow: What are they doing differently though? You only used the Relays to go between clusters before. That isn't done in Andromeda.

@efesell: Oops, my mistake. I was confused. I thought I was looking at the andromeda galaxy in the map. It's confusing to look at. I didn't realize that I was only looking at the Hyperion Cluster, which thanks to the black hole in the center of it, is basically cosplaying as a galaxy.

I think the galaxy map transitions are a bit grandiose for what can be accomplished on the map. I'm not sure how many systems there are in the game (don't tell me), but in all the systems I've been to so far there's been only a half-dozen or less objects. I don't think it's that big a deal.

I don't think it's masking a load, at least not for the entire transition. People have used GeForce Ansel to pause the game and take screenshots of the Tempest mid-transition. It's actually just the bridge that flies around, not the entire ship.

The Tempest can travel 13 light-years a day. It would take about eight hours to travel from our solar system to Proxima Centauri. As far as I know, the game doesn't say how far apart the star systems are, but it is star cluster. It stands to reason that they're all closer to each other than we are to Proxima Centauri.