Quick Look: Mass Effect: Andromeda

I don't want to be a pissant but I hope the game is self-aware about the whole, "We're invaders from another galaxy and we're going to terraform yours and strip-mine your planets by any means necessary to build our giant space fleet of ill-explained purpose - trust us it's totally benign - also what were the previous 3 games about I forget" thing.

@humanity: I don't think Mass Effect has ever done a "Game of the Year" edition. I think the Mass Effect Trilogy contained some of the DLC (but not all, depending on the platform). Maybe things will be different with Andromeda, but I'm not sure.

Remember when Bioware released Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2 within months of each other? Maaaaaannn.

Fuck that's a bummer to hear. As disappointing as the animation and writing looked I was still pretty tempted to buy this mostly for the multiplayer, but if it can't handle high latency I think I'm out. I lost 1000+ hours to ME3MP too, but living in Australia any game without region filtering or solid netcode is kinda out of the question unless I've got a shitload of mates buying it at the same time.

Just imagining the movement in Andromeda on high ping is giving me flashbacks to trying to use vanguard in ME3 with an offshore host - legitimately unplayable. Guess I might just go back and try to get my Best of the Best banner instead.

Does this thing run on like 25 fps?

Man that texture pop in is rough

"now that you got me, what are you going to do with me?"

Remember the genophage and cool and layered that conflict was? Turian and Salarians using the Krogan to commit genocide on the Raknide and are forced to use a bioweapon to stop them after the war is over. That is a fucked up situation where every side has valid points.

Remember the Qarians/Geth conflict? Qarians had a slave race of robots who became sentient and revolted. Now everyone hates the Geth even though their actions were totally justifiable.

Remember the place humans had in the galactic community and how they weren't even on the council? Remember the first contact war and a hundred other world building details layered in conversations and in the codex.

From what I hear, ME:A has almost none of that stuff. Everything revolves around a dull central conflict with an ancient threat of evil robots (again) and some dark energy mombo jumbo nonsense.

Man...I am super happy Persona 5 is out really soon.

Just because some moistened bint lobbed a scimitar at you doesn't give you the right to go calling yourself the pathfinder.

There has to be a twist on that right? There has to be some dad is manipulating you with the dodgy AI he stuck in your head, your twin comes in to take over once you rebel against his plan thing? I don't want to play 100 hours to get to that point though :( That's an ok premise but yikes the characters/story/combat/everything I've seen looks dull. I kinda want to put myself through the torment to find out!

@pyrodactyl: what I find bad are the flirtatious dialog choices and how they are read. I get that you want to get your space freak on but every line is read like a space porno. The only thing missing is the swanky music. Where is the subtlety? We should expect better.

@niflhe: Inquisition had a GOTY edition, and that game he like 3-4 DLC packs, so I'm thinking they might bring that trend over since Andromeda is like a soft reboot for the franchise.

Do we got this?

The whole open world as a bad MMO side quest hub was the weakest part of DA:I.

Really disappointing they brought it back in full force.

Combined with everything else this is a hard pass for me.

Hope Bioware can get it together for their next effort.

@sammo21: you act like we're in a drought of games. where were you when nioh. hzd, nier, and zelda were released?

On one hand I think it's a good idea to wait for some patches. On the other hand I wonder if the general plot, characters and thrust of the story are really worth getting into.

I had 0 fun playing the ME3 multiplayer and characters and worldbuilding are my #1 and #2 reasons for playing games. I'm starting to doubt this game is offering what I am looking for.

Jank and Inquisition-related worries aside, looks good enough to play. I got 30-40 hrs out of DA:I before I bounced off, and I like the world of Mass Effect more.

@ripelivejam: If they only own an Xbox One and last gen consoles, they got zero of those games you just mentioned.

Its really weird that Persona is coming out for PS3 as well.

@ccyhd: For me, the MP became fine as soon as I started hosting all my matches myself (I have a 200Mbps connection). Before that, when I was joining games with other hosts, I'd say around half the time the matches were unplayable due to rubberbanding; albeit with a very small sample size.

I thought the MP was fun; but damn do I hate it when games decide to go P2P instead of having dedicated servers.

Holy smokes. Literally everything about this seems really poorly planned, and executed at the same level of incompetence! I was really hoping this would bring the series out of the fake-BioWare shitstorm that was ME3... but it's even worse.

What's extra sad is the framerate, given the PS3/360 era graphics (it seems they use essentially the same engine since the PS3 days, which is pretty obvious in their recent "faux-BioWare" titles)... but this is a whole new level of crap. How can the framerate not only be sub 30, but fluctuating so much that it's choppy and severely impacted by this issue in the gameplay dept as well?!?

EA, seriously, eff you!

I'm SO tired of using your shit services (Origin), your awful prices and "sales", and especially the fact that you KEEP buying up some of the best studios around... and completely destroy them, often within a year!

If they can release better games than you ever could, EA, then you should have AT LEAST allowed them to autonomously manage themselves after the purchase, and judge them fairly based on their performance/quality/sales - just see how they do! No forced release dates before the game is done, no forcing the release of a game that should not be released. You think EA would have learned that after the 10th time they destroyed a good studio.

I implore people to vote with their wallets against these practices, especially EA. If you really need to play one of their crap releases in the last year or few, buy used or borrow it if at all possible. Do not give them money. They are a scourge in the industry!

[1:04:28] Fuck you, video game.

Boy, Bioware seems really determined to keep that shit-tier RPG streak they've been on for over half a decade going strong. I'm willing to bet there was plenty of publisher insistence to keep things "familiar" for Mass Effect fans, but there's no excuse for garbage writing in games where the story and characters are supposed to be at least half the draw.

Not if you are running on a proper PC.

Something something "cinematic"

RIP Nu Bioware

Pretty sure it's on Frostbite, and outside of some bad facial textures/animations the game is absolutely gorgeous.

@wynnduffy: Ahh yiss.

It seems like because the game has some issues people are critizing everything about it. Things that previous Mass Effect or Dragon Age games did but no one critized then. Like the helmet dissapearing in cut scenes that is nothing new.

"Direct-to-video" seems a little harsh. This might be the Saved by the Bell: The New Class of the series.

Meaning trying to keep the same spirit but not the same things that made the original popular.

@ripelivejam: You assumed my intent . I've platinumed Nioh, I'm close to platinuming Horizon, etc, etc. My point was even if Mass Effect is a massive disappointment for me I have Persona 5 coming up...so no, I didn't act like that ;)

Sure its not like those games are 5+ year old or anything .Have some standards

Except that for the most part it totally is the same stuff. Swap out the Normandy for the Tempest, Citadel for Nexus, Spectre for Pathfinder, Milky Way for Andromeda, and the list goes on including your "friends" that fit all the races that were on your team in the original trilogy. The only thing I see different here is that the story is lacking, some characters are one-dimensional, and the dialogue is middling to awful. Feels very direct-to-video to me.

lmao this game is fucking trash. The "all the talent left bioware" generalization has never been more entirely true.

@eskimosnow: Sitting here thinking the same it seams to run like ass. Not even 30 fps. And animations seam to be looping multiple times in the same conversation.

It might be 30fps but then it is a uneaven framepaceing. Something is going on.

And it sucks i was hoping the streak of good games would continniue...

I only made it 15 minutes in up to when they started talking about how colonizing worlds just results in MMO-tier quests. I could put up with weird presentation if the story and characters were worthwhile. After the stream and this Quick Look I'm just done. Glad to hear some people still like it I guess.

Direct-to-video / Mass Effect: Return of Jafar is all that need be said.

@sammo21: good on you for being able to power through these releases then! my plate couldn't be more full.

The animations are something else. I'm playing Fallout 4 at the moment and these seem no better than those.

So two things: Why is the framerate so bad and why are the facial animations so poor? Like, Mass Effect original, a game from literally 10 years ago, looked better than this in regards to the facial animations. And the environments don't look that good to warrant such an abysmal framerate.

Because the industry has moved on since then. Mass Effect hasn't apparently.

Y'know... the "direct-to-video" comparison actually makes me less negative about this game. Now that the shock of the, err, issues has passed, I can see the nuggets of Mass Effect goodness behind the unintentional comedy, poor writing, and baffling streamlining of systems (not to mention making ammo mods consumable, what the fuck, let me use my beloved freeze ammo with impunity please). It's a spinoff that never needed to exist, so I'm not terribly overconcerned if it's not up to snuff. Mass Effect is 1-3. Everything else is gravy.

Plus, the horrid and monumentally stupid ways people are acting in regards to this game and its devs have made me automatically more sympathetic towards it.

Am I the only one who thinks the combat has taken a huge nosedive? Yay jump jets, but that's the only "improvement". The game has fallen so far tactically. Soft cover just means you can act more like a bullet sponge. The three-defense model (shield, armor, barrier) which forced players to utilized the correct skills/weapons to overcome hard enemies, has boil down to spam powers and shoot through defenses with zero regard to what defense it is.

The hallmark and strength of every Bioware game is how they revolve around your companions both in terms of story building, but also in terms of combat. You aren't suppose to have every power at your disposal ... you are suppose to have weaknesses which are covered by your companions. Now you have almost no control over your companions and instead are given every ability swappable on the fly. Your companions are little more than combat drones.

So the reason Pathfinders are special is because they are the only ones that know how to play Sudoku?

The Archon talk sounds exactly like how Corypheus is in Dragon Age Inquisition if you made his introduction a couple of hours earlier.

Boy, having a trans-woman deadname herself is sure one way you can go Bioware. Jeez.

Secretly glad this seems like bargain basement Mass Effect, as I can safely skip it till it drops in price, continue my playthrough of Nier, and the play some Persona. But really it's just a big old bummer to see, even coming from someone who like Inquisition.

Agreed very much with this. A huge part of Mass Effect was developing your squad and then using their powers to take down enemies. Creating a super-soldier that has all abilities/classes could be fun, but at the loss of building up your companions, taking the right mix of people, and using their powers jointly seems like a bad trade-off. Especially since switching powers mid-combat seems more of a hassle than it would be worth tactically, compared to evaluating a mission and picking the right crew based on what you're doing, where you're going, and who you're fighting.

Mass Effect Trilogy was like $5 a week ago on PSN, I should've just gotten that.

This game looks rough. Every character is too young and hip and too happy for a space epic where they had to flee a galaxy for fear of being eradicated.