We Streamed Some Mass Effect: Andromeda

The voice acting is far far worse than ME3. Everything is just so awkward, like they are in completely different rooms reading off of poorly written scripts.

Visually, sure, but ME3 came out a long time ago and it doesn't even look that much worse than this.

I used to think that thing about "all the talent left Bioware" was a bit over the top, but I may have to revise my thinking on that. None of this is even up to the level I would be led to expect after ME2, or even 3, which I did not care for as much. But it at least looked pretty nice. The production values in this - the writing, animations., character design... I am frankly stunned.

This looks pretty rough.

@nasher27: Voiced by a female also? It's so strange to my ears. It sounded like a camp guy to me, ha, or Al Gore in South Park. My bad.

It looks like a PS2 game tbh.

I think I might like the gameplay itself enough to only play the multiplayer once the game drops to $10-$15, but I don't think I could handle that main game. It looks like all the bland and stupid writing from Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age: Inquisition, but somehow even more insipid and pointless. That's not even getting into all the busted AI and jank that popped up during the stream. It's like EA and Ubisoft are competing to see who can churn out the most lackluster soulless experience while still keeping the customers handing over their money and saying, "well hopefully the next one I buy will be better!"

Downloading the trial right now. Let's hope they actually address the animation issues via patches. I mean c'mon! The game went gold!

I remain pretty pumped about this game.

Dude whaaaaaaat the fuck are these animations? Holy jesus. This is straight up Dragon Age: Inquisition in space, full stop.

I canceled my mass effect pre-order and got Breath of the Wild instead after watching this. -I don't even own a switch yet. I might play this on PC when I can get it on a steam sale at the end of the year or something cheap.

Thanks for the insight guys.

This is gonna be in development for a while longer right? Cause... hmmmm

@mezza: Yeah... For me it's not simply the fact that I'm some special guy, lots of games do that. But when a game trots it out as often as Andromeda seems to, it feels like I'm being condescended to. They don't even take the time, as they did in ME1, to justify why the title of Pathfinder is worthy of respect before they slap it onto you.

I cancelled my pre-order because of this video. Will get it when its $20. The setup just seems boring.

I loved the Mass Effect games for the story and loathed DAI's design, dunno man, this game is just not for me.

I need to go back and play some Dragon Age Inquisition, I liked that game and I don't remember anything as rough as this.

You can pull someone toward you, set them on fire, and fling them 50 yards away. Who cares about the story in a game 98 percent combat

Whoops, it looks like EA accidentally got a Bioware B team to make the new Mass Effect.

I'm going to be mad if you can't turn off the fucking lens flare on PC.

Oof, this looks bad.

The characters idle as if they have incessant muscle spasms, they blink randomly and have twitchy eyeballs that focus on nothing and move with zero purpose, every animation feels like its either random or crafted in complete isolation.

Character design is either actively bad or completely uninspired, the only cool design elements are remnants of previous games. Where did all the talent go?

This looks terrible. What happened? Why are the humans so weirdly proportioned? Why does the Salarian sound so weird?

I hate how people are seemingly fine with such obvious sub-par quality and merely dismissing the issues this game clearly has because those same problems existed in previous Mass Effect games. The issue there is, we're 5 years on from ME3 and nearly 10 from the first game. Standards change and I would expect the graphics to get better, not worse, especially with the shift to Frostbite which has produced some stunning looking games. The detail in the faces is lacking (they're simply awful), the hair looks like plastic and stands out when hair actually looks pretty good in a lot of games now, the animation looks like it runs at half the frame rate and there's just a constant juddering. What Brad played is super early on in the game, which is crucial for introducing you to who you're playing as, your team and supporting cast and it seemingly flies by in a very uninteresting way and the vo really doesn't help.

I'm not shitting on the game because I think it deserves it. I love ME1 and 2 and would have loved a new game that was as amazing as those but this looks massively disappointing to say the least.

@steveurkel: I care. Very much so. I came to Mass Effect because it was a cool sci-fi rpg, not because it was just another third person shooter.

Not impressed so far. Hope the character animations and faces can get spruced up before release. That voice acting though...man. I'll keep my fingers crossed but my expectations are sadly pretty low at this point.

This doesnt look great. I will probably still get it eventually but man do the character models look terrible..

I'm really annoyed by how everyone wants to hate this game before it's out. It's just the ME3 and EA hate train pulling into town. Pathetic.

@justin258 said:

You're correct. Dragon Age Inquisition is definitely more polished, and the voice acting is considerably better.

I can't bring myself to watch this, too late to turn back now. I'm good with the cartoony to long the it suits the tone.

Mass Effect needed a shot in the arm.

Looks like it got a punch in the face.

On the contrary: I'm concerned BECAUSE I hold Mass Effect as a franchise to a ridiculously high standard. A standard set and justified by 3 fantastic games, and this, from all the gameplay I've seen (coupled with the total lack of real AAA promotion) looks shoddy.

Another franchise I didn't respect as much can get away with being rough around the edges or trotting out a "LET ME STROKE YOUR EGO, OH CHOSEN ONE" narrative, but I expect better from Mass Effect.

I'm willing to overlook a LOT because I love Mass Effect so much. But this is really straining my limits. I think I understand how Star Wars fans felt with Episode 1 now.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still excited to get my grubby nubbies on this (at some point... this will not be a day one purchase), and it seems that there's a lot to like, but large swaths of this feel like a Mass Effect knockoff rather than a true entry. Like a direct-to-video mockbuster called "Massive Effects".

Waiting for the mod to shave his fucking face. #CleanFaces

Ooof as a Mass Effect fan this isn't instilling me with confidence.

I really, really want to be excited for this game, and I probably will eventually play it. But man, this does not look good. It's not just the animations, I could get past the animations. And it's not just the voice acting, I could get past that too. It's the writing. So much of the writing and dialog in this is stiff and unnatural. There's quite a chunk of the game in this video, too, so it isn't an isolated thing and these appear to be major characters you're talking to. If you think that I want to feel this way about what I've seen of the game, you're just mistaken. I really want to like this game so much, it just sounds so fucking awesome on paper, but what I've seen makes me feel like there's a ton of wasted potential in this game.

Even the writing wouldn't be a huge problem in other games, but it's obvious from this video that many hours of this game will be spent talking to people.

Again, I'm going to play it eventually and maybe I'll change my mind. I hope I do. But realistically, I can't spend $60 on what I've seen. Persona 5 is coming out, I'm just now wrapping up Zelda, I could play Horizon in the interim time or one of dozens of other things.

My wife got home from work while I was watching this and within 5 seconds she said, "So is this, like, a 'budget' Mass Effect game?"

As for the Krogan voice... There was a female Krogan in Mass Effect 3. She sounded appropriately gruff. When the lady Krogan in this video opened her mouth, all I could think of was Bronson Pinchot in Beverly Hills Cop:

@justin258: I don't know. I'm finishing up the trilogy and I think ME fans really over-rate a lot of the parts of the series, especially in 1. All of the conversations were dull shot-reverse shot and filled with one dimensional characters until about 10 hours in. The combat is stiff and borderline unplayable. Shepard is one of the dullest protagonists in video games. The human faces look in the exact the same style as the original trilogy, just with softer edges. The original trilogy is filled with graphical and technical glitches and bugs.

This stuff in Andromeda doesn't look great and there is a lack of drama, but I'll take an average Mass Effect game over a lot of other recent games like Horizon.

Though my favorite in the series is 3 so maybe I'm just stupid.

And Rorie with the game guide demands. Love it. Saw that there was a seventh class and wasn't going to let anyone overlook it. That's great.

EDIT - If I had to guess as to the story, Cerberus or some similar entity sabotaged the other alien Arks.

Oh Pytheas and Zheng He? Those are some pretty impressively in depth names in the history of human exploration.

Hooo boy. What a mess. They really shit the bed with this one.

☑ Bad character model proportions (Salarian, Krogan and Turian legs are janky compared to the original trilogy)
☑ Wooden, childish dialogue
☑ Jarring character development
☑ Messiah protagonist
☑ Stiff facial animations and idle animations (in stark contrast to the cut scene animations)

"....we got this" - EA

Yeah, it seems like they are steering hard into the KOTOR roots, but nothing in the Mass Effect fiction supports this kind of fawning. Like you'd need to implant EDI into a Reaper enhanced Yahg to get close to a being so exceptional that trained experts would be falling over themselves waiting for them.

Or my personal fave bit of trivia is this somehow involves the Cerberus Network report of a lone survivor of DC1938, a garden world with a high krypton atmosphere, rescued by the MSV Kent...

@captainthunderpants: Half agree with you, but part of me thinks that more than anything, it's people anticipating the worst rather than actively wanting the game to fail. Speaking as someone who played and enjoyed all three games (endings and all) but still considers himself a casual fan, EA's weird handling of this thing has reeked so badly of apathy that it's become contagious. At no point have they seemed excited at all to tell me about this thing, and at some point, amid so many amazing games coming out amid so much enthusiasm, I just stopped waiting for the weird clouds around this one to clear.

I really do hope it's good, and maybe I'll come back around to it if it pulls a Doom and makes everybody suddenly lose their minds once it's out in the wild. But right now, I just can't find the wherewithal to get excited about something that makes even its publisher just kinda shrug its shoulders.

This game appears to drive the Mako into the uncanny valley and then rolls it, hard.

I mean, this could still be pretty okay, but jesus fuck people weren't kidding about those faces.

I'll still probably give this a shot at some point though.

the internet running at its optimal state, obviously.

graphically and animation wise this is no different than the other mass effects, maybe a bit sharper. if you were looking for some changes or updates, maybe i hear you a bit, but they're acting like this is an utter disaster/shitting the bed moment and it really isn't.

ftr i personally feel the faces are fine.

I love ME1, but I haven't played it since it came out 10 years ago. I doubt it holds up now, but at the time, it was dope. I suspect that's where most folks' thoughts on it come from.

I don't think any of us started off wanting to hate this, but what I've seen of ME:A so far doesn't reflect the leaps and bounds that other games have made in the subsequent decade.

lots of luck with that

@billyok:

I guess I expected more from the Giant Bomb comments. Oh well.

they're still better than most of the internet! still not *that* much better, but i'll give them that.

@ripelivejam:

For someone who once lectured me about differences in opinion, I appreciate that you ascribe mine and other's poor impression of this game as jumping on a hate train.

That's totally fair and yeah, this stuff is unimpressive, but I fear that fans will treat this like The Phantom Menace as though we can 1UP that disappointment with a disappointment we can call our own. If that makes sense.

People forget that TPM was a mostly fine movie, but a handful of flaws and fans declare it the worst movie ever. It's this weird phenomenon that fans want to show their dedication to the original trilogy (both Star Wars and now Mass Effect) so much that it turns into a competition as to who can hate the new thing more.

@captainthunderpants: People stay on topic and generally aren't nasty to each other. So there's that at least? But yeah, GB's comments are guilty of piling on sometimes. This is one of those cases, though I sense more dejection than glee after reading them all.

Regardless. I hope you have a good time with the game regardless of how it's perceived and I hope it takes me by surprise. Maybe I'll check it out once I dig out of this Yakuza rabbit hole I'm in. (Anyone need to borrow 52 billion yen?)

Damn what a bummer, I was really looking forward to some good space ranging but this didn't draw me in at all...

Every character's walking animation looks like they just pooped their pants.

It looks like everyone's spine is too low to the ground relative to their legs that the inverse kinematics make them squat walk.

It's really interesting to me to watch how people accuse people of jumping on some sort of a train, whether that's a hate train or a hype train or something else. Sometimes people just come to the same conclusion after weighing their options. What I see right now is just some of us being bummed out. That's okay.