Quick Look: Mass Effect: Andromeda

Quite the echo chamber going on in here, feels like I'm on gamefaqs instead of GB.

Surprise, surprise, the framerate and graphics are considerably worse in game then in all the press footage we saw.

Are you saying this glorious 4K PS4 Pro game (which EA desperately avoided showing off at almost every point of development) is not quite looking up to that 4K YouTube reveal video? *extremely shocked face*

It's really weird seeing a Mass Effect game where the combat looks better than the dialogue and story stuff.

But I'll probably pick this up on sale later in the year when things get a bit quieter. I bet there'll be some nice texture mods eventually to fix some of the bad looking character models.

My face when people treat facial animations like they're the end-all-be-all of a Mass Effect game.

I don't know what it is about the negativity that's bothering me with this game, but it's really bothering me. Yes this is not a perfect Mass Effect game, it has a lot of things worth critiquing. But this doesn't feel like critique, it just feels like unbridled hate.

@turboman Here's the clip you want.

The voice acting and dialogue for those protesters around 25:00 is utterly embarrassing, so bad.

It has decent graphics, like an HD remake of a PS3 game. Not terrible, but certainly not competing even with single-console exclusives in 2017 like Horizon Zero Dawn and such. But given that, how do you explain the terrible performance? Sub 30 FPS with large variability and low minimum framerate is just not acceptable in 2017 for a title like this.

However, it's not just the terrible faces and animation though (or, I disagree that it's only the facial animations, if that's what you meant to say)... it's everything. There is weird lighting, or lack thereof. There are tons of bugs with shaders, which are already hacked in it appears, sometimes working and sometimes not... and either way, they don't look great... they mostly look weird.

Keep in mind that making space itself beautiful in a video game is not that hard... indie (or, much smaller budget) titles do it all the time - the human eye is much less attuned with, and critical of inaccuracies with, inanimate objects. What's hard is getting human faces and facial/body gestures and movement to look natural. And that is where this game fails hard, but it's not hard to see the general incompetence all over the place.

I would be very surprised if this was truly on "Frostbite", even though they say it is (they say all their games are now, it seems... or at least, most. Games that are very different in basic technical ways. No doubt they share a TON of code at EA, as they should, but they take it way too far and it keeps them from innovating as much as the competition currently).

Keep in mind that EA plays VERY fast and loose with their brands - BioWare itself is a great example. EA thought it would be a great idea to just buy a brand/company, with a very good reputation, and proceeded to rename almost all their developers with the BioWare name, forgot about the quality part, and drove the brand into the ground almost immediately.

They treat Frostbite the same way... All that means is that Frostbite is so generalized or customized for each game that it doesn't even matter what they call it... Because I see VERY CLEAR indications all over the places that they reused lots of assets from previous ME titles (almost all of the general assets, for sure), and not only that, they're SO similar that they have to be assets running on the same engine... which, yes, they call Frostbite, but they have made that brand meaningless.

I like this game. I don't have nostalgia for the past versions.

I'm trying so hard just to find some footage that doesn't make my heart sink after watching it. Some of you people are complaining about those who are complaining, but I don't remember having to smile when my uncle stomped on my birthday gifts.

The "direct-to-video" comparison is apt. Some people will like it because they REALLY like Mass Effect, but as someone who was a casual fan that thought ME2 was the sweet spot for the series for reasons beyond facial animations, I'm not on board with this. There's not enough new or noteworthy enough in what I've seen and heard, and it comes across as the milking of a franchise rather than the building of one.

@doncabesa:

"If the popular opinion is different from my opinion, it's a hiveminded circlejerky echo chamber!"

Or, it's just a popular opinion.

Sorry for the multiple posts, I'll just leave you with this... he's VERY gorgeous! Right?

Sure it may be the most disappointing game of the year, but whatever. I am looking forward to playing it.

@zombievac said:

@doncabesa said:

@zombievac said:

[...]

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

Sorry for the multiple posts, I'll just leave you with this... he's VERY gorgeous! Right?

well my point was more about the planets (only seen 2 so far in the trial) and the stuff that isn't character creator (which is horrendous) monsterdom.

Yeah, my post came off dickish. I apologize.

I've never loved the gameplay of Mass Effect - for me it's only been about story and setting. Technically, it's been pretty shaky all along. My problem with the footage I've seen so far has been with the dialogue and character interactions. Some real SyFy movie-of-the-week stuff going on.

The basic storyline of ME has always been somewhat cliche, but executed well. This looks cliche, but stale.

@zombievac:

That guy is about to start break dancing in his PePe Jeans sweatshirt and British Knights.

Jeff: "a- who is your... bro?"

I feel down about this just because it feels like there is zero creativity... I don't think I have the patience for the same thing again.

@humanity said:

This may not be / have been an issue for you or where you are situated, but the DA:I GOTY edition (disc version) just had a paper insert in the case with download codes (the game on the disc was the same vanilla game from the standard edition) - so, depending on where you live it I believe there was a window of time where it was actually more inexpensive to just buy the vanilla DA:I and buy the DLC separately. YMMV; for me it made the DA:I game of the year edition an utterly worthless upgrade.

Well I never actually played those. At time of release I got Inquisition and strangely got really into it but the DLC wasn't out yet. When it did finally come out enough time had passed where I simply wasn't in that mindset anymore and that game was so intense with some mechanics that it seemed daunting to get back to it. That said, every time there is a PSN sale I always see the GOTY or Collection (however they call it) on a real steep discount.

Maybe something like that will happen with Andromeda down the road? To be honest, I'm a little burnt out on huge open world romps at this point so I'm not in any real hurry to get it (quality of the game itself completely aside). Thats probably why I enjoyed NIOH so much, because they just had missions you went on. I loaded that game up, selected my mission, beat it, and felt satisfied for the day by meaningfully progressing forward.

Looks like a fun game to pick up for like... $20... on sale... didn't think I'd say that about a mainline Mass Effect game, but here we are.

Bioware's been a B-tier studio for the last 6 or 7 years, I'm kind of surprised the whole internet has gone crazy because they've released another B-tier game.

@redhotchilimist: hahaha, I marked that one specific clip on qlcrew this morning. Thanks.

Honestly, I just want to go back and play the original games after seeing this.

Bummer.

Why would you trash such an amazing franchise with such a subpar release?

That dialog. I don't think I'm going to romance ANY of these dip****s.

As many others have said, the faces and animations are less than ideal but for me they aren't a deal-breaker as long as the story is engaging. However, it seems like that isn't the case as most of the dialogue I've seen doesn't seem great.

The most disappointing thing for me, however, might be that it just feels like a Mass Effect paint-by-numbers. You have your Citadel, Normandy, Mako, and Spectre equivalents, whilst all the supporting cast seem like duplicates of the same characters from the original trilogy but with one element, like their gender or species, changed. Although I'm sure they feel more fleshed out by the end it just makes you miss the old characters you built an attachment to. They took the series to a whole new galaxy where none of the old rules needed to matter anymore and yet they made something that feels samey. But these risk adverse design choices are a problem in the industry at large.

That said, there is still enough here for me to want to play it but it just seems less essential than I'd have liked it to be and I hope it gets better. Jeff's comment that it feels like a film sequel where none of the main cast came back seems apt. No returning favourites. Hacky replacement characters. Completely new location. Is this the Mass Effect equivalent to Tokyo Drift?

Since Mass Effect 3, all Bioware has done is a Star Wars MMO and Dragon Age Inquisition, both of which were probably off the radar for a lot of Mass Effect fans. For a lot of people, this is a sudden surprise.

I'll just wait until this game is on sale for $30.

Amazing!

A lot of people are crying "echo chamber" on Andromeda reactions, but on this site alone, we all have access the same 4 hours of unedited footage. That's not how bandwagons work.

So, this is annoyingly framy/stuttery, but neither Brad nor Jeff mention it, I think it really might be just in the video and not in the game, hopefully they'll say something ng about that in the comments or on the Bombcast. Looking forward to the Digital Foundry verdict on the perormance.

Maaaaaaaaan. I'm not going to pretend every bit of the original ME trilogy was filled with well-written prose or anything, but everything I've seen in Andromeda has been some real amateur-hour sci-fi schlock that I haven't been able to get excited about at all. "Direct-to-DVD" is a good way of framing it.

When something is objectively bad, it's okay to hold the popular opinion

I'm not sure I would call Gears a "damn good cover shooter" anymore. That series was wonderfully novel when it debuted all those years ago, but Gears 4 in comparison just feels clunky now.

It seemed like written and made by committee

So is it ever explained why cat people in another galaxy speak English?

Ok, so I haven't really been following the game's pre-release coverage too much other than skipping through a gameplay trailer and what's on Giant Bomb. But is it ever established what exactly makes a pathfinder so great and why it has to be you?

From what I've seen in the first stream, everything seems to be in disarray and then you walk in and people are like "hell yeah, now we can get shit done." From the dialog, it doesn't look like you're the man (or woman) with the plan, you usually have no clue what's going on, I've seen no indication of special training and you simply inherit the title from your dad?

I mean, I get that this is a video game and you being the central character of the story is obvious, but I just don't understand why the pathfinder is such a big deal.

@wynnduffy: That's super interesting! are there any articles documenting the exodus?

I'm curious what some of the original pitches for this game were. I recall it going through some big changes over the course of development.

@brad Hey Brad, lots of people in the comments talking about the framerate in this video, but i'm not hearing too much from you guys in the video (I have skimmed, admitting I could have missed you comment on it at some point).

Other footage of the game looks much smoother than what is on display here. Could it be on PC, or is there an issue with the video on this site?

I liked mass effect 1 and 2, I liked Dragon age: Origins. I played 1/2 way into kotor a few years ago.

Since then we had dragon age 2, which received its criticisms, but I still tried to like it, however it wasn't anywhere near origins, and I tried inquisition which was just... bad.

They made an MMO which couldn't hold its playerbase and went free to play quickly.

Mass effect 3 had an awful ending but the game was decent, but they just lost their magic, they don't have the DA:O ME1/ME2 talent in their studio anymore. Looks like we lost another one to EA

I think it was explained in the first mass effect, but its been so long it might have been 2. I only played the first 2, was waiting to be able to afford the shadow broker mission in 2 before i got 3 and then never did.

I will play this eventually, despite its obvious faults, i love mass effect too much, in the meantime, i'm going to replay at least 1 and 2. I will try and fail to play a renegade because i always wuss out.

Going to have to say it again.

This game does not look good. At all.