Quick Look: Mass Effect: Andromeda

I came to these games for the story and character interactions. This game skipped over B-Tier right into C Minus Tier story and interactions.

These people are in a frickin' new galaxy and they just go to ho-humm cookie-cutter outposts....hell if I wanted cookie cutter I could play more No Man's Sky. Shockingly, this game makes No Man's Sky seem more acceptable in retrospect.

RIP in pepperonis Bioware

Remember when Bioware and EA were both brands associated with quality games? I feel like that's about 3 presidents ago at this point.

Man, actually fell asleep during the single player stuff. Granted i was tired but shit just looks subpar and pointless. I can't even finish well written rpg games these days, still haven't finished witcher 3 regardless of how much i love it, so the idea of getting through this seems impossible. I played each of the other mass effect games twice, and without the morality system this game doesn't even seem to have any reason to do that at all(don't think i could anyway though).

@meanstreet said:

The colours, lighting and animation in this scene makes it look like something straight out of KotOR on the original Xbox.

OMG, these were my thoughts exactly.

This game looks is like some really insane, high-budget outsider art.

Watching Ryder's running animation was driving me crazy throughout the quicklook. How could this game happen?

@gregalor: yeah, but honestly how many people watched all of that then made up their own minds? (all the while being hit by brad and jeff's hot takes on the game)

"I'm a spectre, but I'm not a spectre. But I'm a spectre... And we got this. Bro."

@jinoru: Can't know that until one plays it.

I'll pick this up when it's cheaper and (hopefully) patched a little bit. Huge fan of the original Mass Effect and ME2 (ME3 was good, too) but I just can't bring myself to care about this one.

Why would the developers put no music in the game when the music in the mass effect series was always exceptional?

Here is the comparison video between the leaked footage in 2016 and final build. I'd be curious to know what went on at Bioware Montreal behind the doors.

https://my.mixtape.moe/yugchn.mp4

Love me some T-pose!

I was up for some adventures in space. But the quality of the writing, characters and dialog agency seems questionable at best. And there's a bunch of generic filler chores like in Inquisition. Maybe I'll get it eventually as it doesn't seem all bad, but this is such a bummer.

What went on is the game fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.

Holy moly Bioware, have all your writers never talked to a transgender person or what?

They don't go around deadnaming themselves to people they just meet.

Though judging from the rest of the game and the writing, not many people on staff gave a damn.

Just have all Krogan characters and call it a day.

It's not just the facial animations, but all character animations just look really early-last gen and lifeless.

I don't got this

This is absolutely DA:I in space. But worse?

I can get past the eyes. The animations are harder, but still I could get past it. The core of Mass Effect is the characters and the universe; without them there's no game to this otherwise mediocre third person shooter franchise. With ME3 it was clear that Bioware didn't care about their own universe and that continues here. If Bioware doesn't care about their universe, then neither do I.

...Truth be told, I'll still probably give in and buy the complete edition when it's fairly cheap. I just want ME to care about itself like it used to.

These voice actors sound like they don't know when the sentences end or if it's going to be a question. Like reading a book passage in school. One take without being allowed to study the script beforehand.

I know it's mostly hyperbole, but I can't get over how fucking Mickey Mouse this game looks.

@benderunit22: every ark had a Pathfinder. They're essentially responsible for locating habitable planets, establishing outposts and research/exploring for pretty much their entire species so that's why they're a big deal. Why you specifically had to become Pathfinder is explained early on

To be honest for all the negativity aimed at this game it was this particular quick look (which was largely negative) that made me interested. The colonizing stuff and filling the world to make it a bigger world than a closed off one is very appealing.

I just reallly wish the crafting/loot was better explained or tutorialized in some fashion so people actually used it. Most streams it seems no one even bothers upgrading any loot that I've seen. I have the game preordered but it is through GMG and it isn't coming out until the 23rd for them. This is tough having to wait since most people are already playing it.

"I got this."

The performance doesn't seem great... or is that just the recording?

maybe ill give this game a miss or pick up in the bargan bin. i was kind of hoping to gt into this game, i kind of missed out on the original trilogy... i played a little of the original and enjoyed but never got back to it

Here ya go, here's a video on frame rate and frame pacing.

I did, i made up my own mind, it's really not that hard. I don't need a sea of people or the GB crew to tell me this game isn't great when there is a ton of video proof and the 10 hour trial to draw conclusions from.

I hated everything about the trial, this game is not something i want to play even at a lower price point. This sort of treatment of an otherwise really, really solid franchise is not something it want to support with my money.

Other will love it, and i have nothing against that. I don't expect every game to appeal to me.

But let people have their opinions, there is no reason to defend the game. If you like it enjoy it, if you think it looks like a burning pile of trash put your money where your mouth is.

No, because if it were it would be better than the previous games....

Really bummed that every alien is bipedal and human-shaped with the same idea of clothing in this different galaxy. What little imaginative believability there is to this universe is kinda ruined for me by that.

That is what always annoyed me about this game in particular and most sci-fi games. Almost all of the aliens should be speaking a made up language and then subtitled. It shoudl be the rare alien that LEARNS whatever is the 'human language is set to by the player.

I think it would be far more interesting if everything were subtitled. Also, I think the voice acting woudl APPEAR less shitty if nobody knew if the liner were being delivered correctly, right. They woudl only have to do voice acting for maybe ten characters, seven main character and three other who were just doing teh voices for the background aliens that canonically can speak human standard (i.e. the in game language chosen by the player.

Also, Andromeda seems to have ZERO fun with aliens. The first few games had fun with the ElcororHanar. That what I wanted, I wanted them to double down on making aliens really weirdly alien.

I'm 4 minutes in and surprised they've not mentioned the framerate yet, it's absolutely atrocious. I'm not just jumping on the hate bandwagon, I'm really excited for this game and I can look past weird animations and stuff, but christ that framerate is absolutely terrible.

Looks like you need to upgrade your laptop because you don't have the minimum specs to run it, but I bet they're running it on something decent here....christ.

Yup. I wanted 90% if the aliens in teh new game to be just a cool as the Elcor or Hanar. Heck, even the elegance and chill superiority that the Asari had in past games has been stripped away.

It cannot be just me that noticed that now all Asari, Krogan, and Turian character just act like typical humans. It not they they are even hidden behind being "cyphers" for human interactions to certain ideas...they just act, speak, emote, and think like humans. You could take the lines of dialogue form Turians and Asari and just make those character humans and NOBODY would notice. They might notice that Krogans were somewhat more brutal, but they are more frat-house "dude-bro" than alien.

I'm a AAA game facial animator and this game gives me a wonderful warm feeling of job security

@the-nanomachines: how so? If anything, this game proves there are studios out there who give Rupert from accounting a shot at it.

@bavelb: because hopefully the absolute shredding this game has got from everyone on earth will gently encourage more studios to shell out some money on someone who is actually good at it.

Although I would love to play a major franchise release made entirely by people with only the barest grasp of what they're doing, it would be hilarious.

Another more advanced Yahg-like race would have been cool too. I understand that if in live action sci-fi they'd still be mostly bipedal but I was thinking it'd be more imaginative in this medium.

Having 'relatable' aliens is a necessary evil if you want a coherent story, though. 'Arrival' is cool because those aliens are truly alien and inscrutable, and that builds the foundation for the story. ME can't build a whole story around interactions with a pile of tentacles that speaks gibberish - though it would be nice if the new game mixed in some weird Elcor or Hanar-type race to give the player more of a feeling that they were truly in a new and strange universe.

@the-nanomachines: From your perspective, what could have been done better, from a technical standpoint? Cause I wanna know what went wrong here.

What a tragedy!

@whatshisface: Well it's not for me to dunk on other people's games (they're hard to make!) or assume anything about their processes but... a lot of this does look like the audio files were fed into faceFX or similar auto solving program and the raw results were just slapped straight into the game without anyone really taking a look at them, with the eyes and lids being driven by a script that just adds random motion over time. Like a robot would do. If they DID do performance capture on a lot of it, this again looks like just the basic results from something wildly out of date like faceware. It kind of looks like what you get straight out of mocap with no polish, people really don't appreciate the vast amount of work that goes into editing mocap data to make it seem even slightly presentable. Which, when you have what I imagine are very tight deadlines and a publisher who won't listen, just batching hundreds of lines at once and going 'eh it'll do' is probably your only real option.

End of the day, there are no bugs here, nothing went wrong. Just rushed work.

Not to say using auto solving programs is bad, the idea of hand animating every line of dialogue in an RPG of this size is as close to an impossible task as you can get, but when games like Witcher have done such outstanding jobs with comparatively small libraries of animations, stuff like this stands out. Especially in a game that's more than half about talking to people.

Edit: My pet hate with this negative coverage of this game is people asking if the animations will be fixed in a patch. Like oh yeah let me tweak this single xml value and suddenly the art is good. Idiots.

@monkeyking1969 said:

Mass Effect has universal translators, the aliens are speaking their own languages, they're just being translated in real time by technology.

As for it being more interesting if they were all subtitled, Bioware did that for star wars knights of the old republic, trust me it's actually less interesting that way. You just end up listening to the same sounds over and over again, while waiting for the next line of subtitles to show up on screen or; you just save your time and sanity by hitting the skip dialogue button every time you finishing reading a line or two of dialogue like it's some kind of awful Q.T.E.

@undeadpool said:

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

See, now that's what I call SUPER IMMERSION! It's very real. In fact, it's how 90% of all kids smile in their school photos... very realistic!

I give it 9 out of 10 "best shop on the citadel" awards, in the facial emotional resonance category!

@the-nanomachines: It was not my intent to make you shit on other people or their work. I just thought that maybe you had experience with issues similar to these or had behind the scenes knowledge about triple A development. And you brought up things that didn't even occur to me.

Anyway, thank you for your reply!

Booooooo Boooooooooo ! Boooooooo-urrrns

This is not what I need right now. And... the jank in this...

Look at those protesters; it's like the crowd in a racing game... but a foot in front of you. Game looks dated.

You can hear the difference between to optional dialogue and generic dialogue so much, the transition is terrible.

i will agree i want some more alien ass aliens, but at the same time there's the whole argument that maybe sentient life anywhere kinda ends up being the same design regardless just because of evolutionary tendencies. in my experience the best realized sentient life that ALSO wasn't a typical bipedal design were the mulefa in the His Dark Materials series which have a diamond-shaped design and use seed pods essentially as wheels for locomotion. i'm sure there's plenty of other examples outside my experience.