Unfinished: Mass Effect: Andromeda 02/22/2017

where the fine looking aliens at?

i'm ready for ryder face

That pun.......?

@bathala: Drew's letting it all out before he goes

Oh my....

That's like a Vinny dad-level pun there.

Punning your way out the door eh Drew? I see how it is...

.

If this game is like Inquisition that is not a good sign at all!

Probably will just read a wiki and give this a go once it comes out.

That pun made me smile.

That pun is a crime.

Pun = Groaned, then totally approved

Alien Sax Time?

I'm so worried about this game...

Some initial thoughts:

1. Man, that AI voice at the beginning is obnoxious.

2. I'm worried about hearing the idea of Inquisition being the "blueprint" for gameplay. I thought that game was really uninspired. Well made, but wholly boring. Particularly when Brad says that it's possible to grind out all the skills. That means a lot of content. Which based on BioWare's recent model, is probably going to be a lot of boring fetch-y stuff.

3. I agree with Jeff that the character models look bad.

4. A little worried about the story at this point. I think a Mass Effect version of the Star Trek "five-year mission" thing could be really, really cool. But all this talk of it being set up as "Wait, what if we're the bad guys?" seems like the least interesting way of handling that story. It's the kind of idea that a high-schooler would come up with while saying "That's like, deep, man" when it's actually really, really not.

5. Auto-dialogue quest acceptance . . . uuuuuugggggggghhhhhhh. One of the worst part of ME3. Why did they bring that forward of all things?

5. On a more positive note, the combat does look good. Maybe they finally figured out how to do third person action in a way that isn't an endless string of future corridors.

I wonder how good of a starting point this will be to jump into the Mass Effect world? Never played any previous games.

The combat looks cool, but I'm kind of with Jeff that the faces look odd. Don't know how to describe it, but they look off.

love you @drewbert

Can't really tell much by this. It does look good so far though.

Remember when Mass Effect was about being a super space agent trying to deal with galactic issues with some discretion and finesse, and not just "kill all the bad aliens" ? Ye, me neither....

Believe the hype.

Yeah that's one of my worries. Considering the standard that Witcher 3 set for having an open world with a so many well written side quests I REALLY hope the side quests in this aren't just simple fetch stuff

well that's basically the difference, right? conceptually inquisition and witcher 3 are pretty much the same; it's just how they handled their quests. i know a lot of people don't seem to have faith they will be, but if the majority of quests are as (subjectively, mind you; personally felt witcher 3 was a slog) well-written as witcher's are and not mostly mmo-style fetch quests then there shouldn't really be a problem with the new format.

i did quite like inquisition though i also fell off that one after awhile.

Game looks dope. Never played the original trilogy, but I bought it last year on PS3 for like $5. Tried playing 1 and it's rough as shit. I kind of want to try 2 & 3. I know if I play this I'll never go back to those older ones.

Pun game strong

Burned out pretty hard on Inquisition 50-60% of the way through that game, so hearing it's like that is...troubling. If they can make the content more meaningful rather than merely more plentiful that would change the equation.

Mass Effect for me has always been 50% the story having slices of choice and 50% a fairly straight forward battle system between story bits. Its a bit soon to tell and we have not seen a lot...but what they are showing feels stale. No snappy dialogue on display in the cutscene not real spectacular battles. I'm a bit underwhelmed at what they choose to show and I hope the good bit are being held back.

My worry is they spent so much effort trying to make it a better 'shooter/rpg' hybrid; i.e. play nice mechanically. Meaning not enough time on a snappy story with the choices to resolve or push through interpersonal conflicts with people you meet along the way.

Time will tell, but I hope these reveals start showing off how much fun or how thrilling it is to play.

I'm galactically ready, but I'm still not convinced this isn't Inquisition in space. At least the gameplay looks more fun.

Shepard.

Wrex.

Shepard.

I will miss Drew's deck puns.

All i heard was "Perfomance was a little chunky", will wait till release to see if i get this lol.

@kibles@start@lawgamer: I love you guys.

I still haven't played Mass Effect 3. It's not that I don't want to play it, I just waited so long to do so that I'd need to replay 1 and 2 to remember what the hell is going on. I love the series, but I don't have that time to invest.

I may just end up reading a brief Wiki entry on the plot up to 3 and downloading a Shepherd profile to get through it. We'll see.

I enjoyed watching this video. I liked inquisition a lot. Everything's coming up Milhouse.

Gameplay looks solid to me; so it all comes down to the writing and whether the characters are likable.

There's no indication of how that will go yet, but that's not surprising. These are gameplay videos.

I'm gonna miss Drew's puns :(

This was not as informative as I hoped it would be. Oh well.

I totally blocked that out. That was infuriating! Add to that the stupid scanning mini-game, the fact that you had to complete nearly all the boring side missions to get the best ending, and the awful journal. That, to me, was probably the worst part about Mass Effect 3.

For all Mass Effect 3's flaws - and there were many that had little to do with the handling of its ending - combat certainly wasn't an issue, and the footage of combat here looks pretty exciting. I never played Inquisition, or Dragon Age in general, so I have no reference point for that. I'd imagine the transition is similar to Oblivion vs. Fallout, the former being a game I absolutely couldn't enjoy while I sunk three weekends of game rentals into Fallout 3 (the last game I ever checked out from a Blockbuster!)

What I want to see more of is how they handle quest distribution (one of Mass Effect 3's worst qualities, if not the worst), the personalities of these characters, how this universe is markedly different from our own, what the actual story of this game is rather than the impetus for it.

Also, to the point of The Witcher 3, that game was very much a game littered with fetch quests and plug-and-play scenarios, folks just seemed to miss it because they loved the characters and the world so much. But the setups and executions of most side content was the same, and it was especially apparent if you often completed the side quests as they opened up before getting back to the main story content like I did thanks to a few early side quests that were marked as failed simply because I'd progressed too far in the story and didn't want that to happen again.

For me, Mass Effect 3 didn't always have bad side quests it just had horrible signposting for what you could do and what you wanted to do, and you would just have dozens of quests in your log with no real way to follow them naturally or recall where you picked them up from.

Doesn't look promising. I'll pass and get it when it drops to $20.

Thank you Drew, ha ha :D

They sure as hell seem to be dancing around showing actual gameplay this late into the dev cycle. "Captured in engine; representative of gameplay" seems like the shadiest kind of marketing spin speak. I'm not optimistic about its technical performance at launch.

That aside... this looks focus tested all to hell and seems kind of soulless. I loved the Trilogy but Andromeda seems to be taking way too many cues from Inquisition for me to get excited. Maybe the combat will elevate it (Inquisition had one of the most boring combat systems I've ever played) but the structure seems to be hewing way too close to Inquisition's slog.

I hope I wind up being wrong and it's GOTY material, but nothing I've seen so far has given me any confidence.

Drew yelling that "the Mako was fine/awesome!" from the control room, shouting down ignorance as if defending LEGO Island's pioneering voicing of Lego characters.

From the bottom of my heart, I will miss you Drew.

@sloppydetective: Absolutely play 2 before you quit. It is a big enough departure from ME that you might enjoy it. Combat is more polished, story a bit more interesting, and the overall experience just more focused on one objective that Makos sense. I personally really have fond memories of playing ME but it is quite rough to look at and some of the combat elements are not as developed as 2 or 3. Truly, try out 2. It's worth it

yea....but at least they didn't make a Kevin Sorbo Andromeda reference I guess...sigh I really don't get all the mass effect 1 hate here in the comments. Such a better game than 2. An actual RPG as opposed to a crappy shooter. Sigh.

Two questions: Can my female Burrito Rider have a same sex relationship? Do I have a fish tank in my quarters that I can collect new fish for?

I'll definitely pick it up at some point but with the Switch, Zelda and Horizon coming out. I just don't have the time.

That's some smooth ass framerate

Can I fuck the lady Turian

Looks like the PC version if I at to guess. Looks nice and running very smoothly. I personally like the look of the combat.

Hate to say it, but you got the worst possible version of Mass Effect. The PS3 version was ported years later by a contract company (even the 360 version ran like crap). Even so, ME1 is probably my favorite in the series, but it does have a bit of a difficulty cliff if you don't spec and equip properly. We posted some suggestions for another duder who was having similar issues recently.