We Streamed Some Mass Effect: Andromeda

That blue tentacle-headed Shrek sets off warning bells somewhere in my head.

12:25 The character DESPAWNS BEHIND THE KROGAN lol

50:12 What is going on with the Nexus in the background?

1:52:15 Metal GEAR?!

IN SOVIET ANDROMEDA, GUN FIRES YOU

Oh boy, now I'm thinking about cancelling the preorder. I was afraid that they were only showing off the combat because they were afraid to show the quality of the rest of the game. I didn't expect the rest to look this bad

The Silicon Valley guy!

What the fuck is happening with shadows during Vetra's introductory scene at 37 minutes in? The shadows are constantly moving and getting messed up on the reflective surfaces. Is it just the way GB captures video? It's insanely distracting for me.

Damn.... this looks bad.

Oooh... this... this looks real bad. The acting is awful, the writing is bad, and visually it doesn't look great to me (animations and everything else).

Oh, man. I'm disappointed. I had hoped this would be better despite technically not being a necessary sequel I was still kind hoping it would be worth playing.

This seems, quality wise, like it would have been ok 10 years ago, but it's a massive step backwards today.

That's a real shame.

Kinda getting a Francis York Morgan vibe from these facial animations :)

@wynnduffy: That looks hilarious. I'm back on board, definitely gotta get this game.

Who thought hiring the voice actor of Ryder was a good idea? He sounds absolutely awful

Not the worst game but not particularly good either. I think I'm on the same page as the GB staff here.

Seems quite bad, but not exactly terrible. I believe that Bioware can still put out much better games though.

All the jank aside, I'm super annoyed that your ship can apparently do FTL travel without the mass relays? I mean, it's only the thing the series is named after...

Did the work experience kid do the animations?

They look more robotic than the actual AI or robots.

Right.... I was curious before watching this stream... now i might have to pony up 5 bucks to try it out and hate-play it. The dialogue seems so slow it was making me anxious when they weren't skipping through the conversations.

It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure the Normandy (and other ships) where capable of FTL. That was the point of the Mass Effect core.

@aktivity: I'm like 99% sure they still needed the mass relays, no?

Edit: I looked it up and apparently yeah they do travel at FTL but that it's basically peanuts (and impractical) compared to the mass relays

Man I'm really disappointed, the voice & facial animations look pre LA Noire

This looks a lot like Inquisition and now I'm sad. Looks like I'll be skipping this one for the moment but inevitable I'll pick it up on the cheap because, you know, Mass Effect.

2:14 got me real good.

@encephalon

Less condescending, to me, and more patronizing. Like Bioware's afraid to make a game where the world doesn't revolve around the player (and they've been doing that for AWHILE, lest we forget the Child of Bhaal or Darth Revan). They almost seem scared that their player base won't like a game where their ego isn't constantly stroked and soothed in equal measure.

Having beaten Witcher 3, which does characterization and writing SO DAMN WELL, this game has an even higher bar to clear.

Yikes, this looks rough. It's a shame that such a story / dialogue heavy game whiffed on facial animations and voice acting so badly.

That how it seems to me, it like a game that is trying to make something in the same mold on a budget.

- Animation janky

- Camera can't find depth of field when moving in and out in some scenes is broken, and the camera panning across scenes stutters.

- Story is rushed, a cut scene that might have used 2 minutes to set the scene in the ME2 is now seems compressed into one minute. Wham bam thank you mam!!!!

- Dialogue is therefore rushed as well, they are tying to cover too much background in too few interactions.

- Lip syncing is poor, but I've seen worse. However when added to everything else it distracts even more.

I'd rather have seems this game in September with at least camera tricks like depth of field & panning, animation, and lip-syncing fixed. In fact, I would rather have seen this game in March of 2018, if the meant they could have reworked the script and gotten actors back in the booth to record the lines better.

Good god, yeah it looks like it has some jank, but Jesus Christ it doesn't look that fucking bad.

Wow this is the PS4 Pro?

I can see why they've been showing off PC footage up to now. Console version looks noticeably worse.

ME2 is still less phoned in, mainly because Shepherd has a pedigree by then (namely, everything he accomplished in the first game) which could justify resurrecting him instead of just recruiting a different agent. Ryder in this game seems to have nothing justifying his position other than "my father chose me". I have no idea why they couldn't just pull an ME1 and give your PC a background that established she was a badass before the game started.

@wynnduffy: I just did a full renegade playthrough a couple months ago of the first game. It felt really weird and there were enough present day parallels that it actually made me uncomfortable.

Called it so hard when I said this game would be Mass Effect: Inquisition.

I simply cannot trust EA anymore, they are dead to me.

Watching this makes me think the people making this game had no fucking idea what made Mass Effect good. Say what you will about the original trilogy, but this almost seems like it's trying to tarnish the franchise as much as possible.

Just finished my 10 hour trial, MP is really fun but I'm dying to get back into the SP. Tuesday can't come fast enough.

I'm a huge Mass Effect fan and I really hope this will be good but why does the animations and characters look worse than in the last gen games? It looks like PS2 level faces and animations. It just doesn't make any sense. Is it thanks to the change from Unreal to Frostbite? I really hope the rest of the game makes up for it because ME is my favorite video game franchise.

This is all I've seen of ME:A, and the eyes look rough. Characters snapping into place in the background happens way too often as well.

I think that's the point - non-existent VA/animations are often better than bad VA/animations. The poor quality stuff instantly pulls you out of the experience (half the time when I'm looking at the human faces in this video it's like part of my brain is screaming "That's not right! Nothing about this is OK!"), whereas forming a decent framework and letting the player mentally fill in the gaps doesn't (my top two games of all times are Persona 4 The Golden and Steins;Gate, and both do that FWIW).

That said, I thought the dialogue was OK here (not great, but fine) and the VA was mixed but mostly fine, so I'd get over the visual issues eventually.

@ares42: Ohhh, they know: the "sleep with 3 NPCs" achievement, straight up marking the romance option with a heart...

Anyway, if it was any other year, I would've been bummed that Andromeda is turning out this way. But with Nier and Yakuza 0 (and Persona 5 on the way), I'm good with how 2017 is shaping up to be.

LOL. Good lord...

7mins in and I am flipping worried...

This gen kinda blows. Every sequel to a game from last gen has sucked expect The Witcher 3 and Uncharted 4.

The new definition of undercooked.

@mikelemmer:

Yeah, that's true. It's at least somewhat earned in ME2.

"We got this, right?!" - Scott Friggen Ryder

5 years... of development time

5 years worth of meme material

I assume either the model or camera was pivoted to make the ladder animation work, but the Nexus background wasn't tracked with it. It kinda makes the Tempest look like a toy that someone started waving around.

Edit: At 50:22, did the wrong subtitle show up?

you guys realise the people making this game are not the same people who made the first three games right?

This looks like FF15 levels of bad storytelling. The characterisations remind me of those in the new Star Trek movies... garbage.

Also, the AI sounds like Robert Webb from Peep Show... I wouldn't be able to take any scene where it started talking seriously.

@lamneth: From the consumer point of view, that doesn't matter. Consumers know Mass Effect and they might know Bioware makes these. If a new Mass Effect game is released, it wouldn't be unreasonable for the audience to hold it to the standards of the Mass Effect games they played before.

If Bioware felt this team wasn't up to the task of making a good Mass Effect game, they should have let them make something else.

Coming back to watch parts of this after the initial shock from yesterday and well... ultimately it looks fine (it's certainly not horrendous or abysmal) but at the end of the day it really comes off as a 'budget' Mass Effect. All the core elements are there but it's just not as good, in particular the writing / storytelling. It's kinda like a Fallout4 situation for me: it's still fundamentally this thing I like but there's plenty that bums me out.

But I'm just a part of the hate-train, so what do I know?

I want to play this game but man it does not look too great, there are way too many games to play and they are all big open world games, I just do not have the time to play mediocre games anymore. Maybe when there is a slow month for games I will check it out, but Persona 5, and Horizon I will pass for now.

I played 5 hours of the campaign via the EA Access trial. The voice acting, script and facial animations are fucking hot trash. The overarching story seems interesting and the combat is great. I'm really enjoying the game, but I would be enjoying it so much more if the above issues didn't exist. It really is incredibly off-putting when certain key characters look and sound like amateur hour nonsense.

Bioware's been losing a lot of people since Dragon Age 2. I actually don't think there's anyone left in the studio who worked on ME2, they're all gone now.

I just got done reading Cixin Liu's The Dark Forest so all this "let's be space explorers and go on a voyage of discovery" stuff is coming across as really naive and almost trite due to the head-space that book's conclusion has left me in.

Let's not be the idiotic children dancing around the bonfire...

Is that Solarian Kumail Nanjiani?