We Streamed Some Mass Effect: Andromeda

That krogan dude sounds like it might be the same voice as Letho from Witcher.

Maybe there will be a day one patch for the faces, the voices, the dialogue and the story?

Yup. You can tell because he only ever does one voice. Archer, Adventure Time, Portlandia, Silicon Valley, Mass Effect, who cares?

@grondoth: oh, i'm aware of that, i was more wondering if any "restructuring" of Bioware happened in the midst of the development cycle of Andromeda, like they laid off a bunch of animators for example, because even their last game, Inquisition, was better than what i'm seeing in that department

Did they forget to add animation to the eyebrows? I think this would help ease the awkwardness of the facial animation on the human characters.

@quirkwood: Yep, he's a part of the voicecast for the game!

Why does he make the falling noises when he's climbing. Serious, at 2:01:26, what the fuck is happening when he's climbing.

Even if everyone talked super normal, I have zero interest in playing this. Looks like a huge time suck with little charm. The anti-Zelda.

This isn't true, and even if it was, this game was developed by a different studio than ME1-3 was. ME2 era writers worked on DA:I, for instance, and still work there right now.

Those eye textures are lazy af. Eyes aren't just a total lack of color and a bright blue circle. Environments look good, ship and monster space truck looks good, combat looks fun. I'm good with almost any scifi story in a AAA game in this style, so I'll play through this even with crazy robot faces and eyes.

Seeing this shit play out really makes me appreciate the bar that Witcher 3 has completely fucking raised when it comes to games like this.

In fact, this just makes me really look forward to Cyberpunk 2077.

This honestly looks like Bioware farmed it out to Spiders, or possibly just spiders

Seems like gaming isn't immune from the negative effects of trying to revive a franchise after putting it to bed.

Coming off the back of playing/reading "Torment: Tides of Numenera", this opening slice just feels like a backward step. Forget facial animations--if the story, characters or gameplay aren't there to compensate then you're just going through the motions. I mentioned during the Horizon review that the open world "formula" of icon-loaded maps, repetitive tasks and throw-away story would find its way here and, based on other reviews, it has.

Similar to Fallout 4, I suspect many will play this and come to find several hours in that the magic they felt for the first three isn't surfacing. The shooting mechanics will be fine; campaign will be long; upgrades and crafting in place; various options for shagging--but the balance of compelling story and set pieces will give way to repetitive scanning, side missions, and base building. You may be able to land on distinct planets with their own missions, but who cares when you do the same thing on every one. No Man's Sky already had that covered.

Shorten the single-player campaign, add a series of co-op missions to flesh out the story with friends (raid bosses), and tie in the multiplayer to expand the value. Cut the repetitive filler--it's tiring.

@smokeytab: omg I can't stop laughing at that, bravo

I'm about 5 hours in. The game seems fine.

I don't like any of the animations or much of the voice acting, but I DO like reading Space Emails in My Space Bedroom.

Edit: ok SpaceX being the "History of early spaceflight" is maybe a little bleh.

This looks.... bad.

Made me think of the eyeline part of this video. On top of looking like dolls, the characters don't reliably orient their eyes on who they're talking to/what they're interacting with, and so the interaction/connection between characters is doubly lost. While Horizon can sometimes desync, at least their phonemes look natural and their eyelines are spot on.

I didn't mind the animations at all once Brad got exploring.

My best guess is that they are using some kind of automated system for the lip sync and face/eye behavior and it's not quite there yet and would require a lot of touching up to make it feel natural which they probably didn't bother a great deal with. That or it's incredibly rushed animation wise.

Nice work, Scott !

I can't believe some of this stuff slipped through. Especially considering it's the beginning of the game, which normally is the part that gets finished and polished up first?

I guess technically the game isn't released yet and they could maybe fix some stuff by next week, but this is what people are currently playing.

In case it's not clear, that Turian pops out of existence within a couple of frames.

They must have noticed stuff like this. They must not have had time to fix it. This game must have had some issues during development.

Also somewhere around this cutscene I came upon a bug where after I'd met the new Turian security guy, he and my two squaddies were blocking the doorway to the train so I couldn't get in. Meanwhile they were whining at me to get in. What a bunch of assholes. Ran around a bit to see if that would get the AI back on track, which it did. So I didn't have to reload at least.

Mass Effect: The Phantom Menace

So, can you buy Remnant Decryption Keys for real money (to bypass the alien sudoku puzzles)? Just wondering.

What is uppppp with this voice work? I get that the animations and lip-flap are probably both procedurally generated, but all of the audio sounds like like it was recorded with a webcam and then run through a generic mono-reverb on the 'bathroom' preset.

The combat looks like it could be kind of fun, but I don't think I could deal with the actual RPG part when all the character interaction seems so poorly produced.

EDIT: What they've done with those eye animations is fucking weird. They obviously realised that their characters looked dead with their totally static eyes, but they either didn't know why it was wrong, or they didn't have the engine functionality to fix it. It seems like they've just added a weird random loop of eye saccades, which is sort of realistic for a human examining a scene for the first time, but not for a human who is actually focused on something.

The eyes also aren't saccading relative to the scene like they should be, they're saccading relative to the characters own head. You can see how it's supposed to work by watching someone hold their head still and look around (the eyes make short quick jumps), and compare it to them keeping focused on a fixed point like a finger and moving their head (the eyes move smoothly to keep on target).

Even if they didn't have the resources for a proper eye director, I'm pretty sure what they should have done is made eyeline auto-snap to the closest frontal NPC or something

As others have said, for whatever reason the issues were less pronounced for me when I was playing the same areas today (in the Xbox One version). Even the acting and dialogue didn't bother me as much in the actual game as they did when I watched this livestream yesterday. Perhaps the context of seeing the beginning of the game helped? Also, maybe some of the graphical issues are PS4 Pro specific? I have no idea why it seemed so much better than I was expecting today. I've already spent about half of my ten hours in the game, and am looking forward to the full thing unlocking on Tuesday.

I was planning on going Sara, but I dunno...

This is the face they make after being asked by an ally to confirm if their father just died.
They are supposed to look sad.

That actually comes across well enough with Scott.
Sara is...I'm in the middle of a Red Letter Media episode and Robo Chic arguably pulls of a more convincing sad.

What's wrong with her face?

Are they gonna admit that it's shit?

@vibratingdonkey: She has Permanent Alyson Hannigan Smirk

Okay, did anyone else notice the eyes? Not the dull, horrifying doll eyes, everyone sees that. I mean that when they move to the side, the character does not look out of "the corner of his eye". He looks INTO the corner of his eye. The eyes slide into the eye socket. I don't think they work that way!

@vibratingdonkey:

Your dad just died

Scott: :^|

Sara: 8^)

They also slide into the frame during that scene as well like they're in a fucking comedy show. They're already talking, why the step in?

I have put hundreds of hours into the ME trilogy and I don't get a good feeling from this video. I'll probably wait for a price drop\ see how the PC version is. This sort of bums me out

It's kind of crazy how amateurish and empty games from Bioware and Bethesda, once undisputed kings and queens of the genre, look after playing TW3. Like what the hell. The Witcher was a B-tier RPG.

I could MAAAAYBE get past the way all the characters look if the writing wasn't just so bad. Hard to believe it just all of a sudden gets better 5 hours in. I will happily be wrong if it does though.

Yeah so, pretty much a Mass Effect game, but made by the B Team. Which, in all honesty, is what Mass Effect 3 was. If you liked Mass Effect you'll probably like this

Can somebody tell me when Jeff stops saying "Hmm" and starts ripping the voice acting and animation? The suspense is killing me, I'm giggling nonstop through the first 20 minutes.

I cannot separate that voice from Kumail Nanjiani. I can't suspend my disbelief here.

She looks like she's screaming inside, lol

Austin's time with it in Waypoint's footage had a lot less of this weird facial goofery, as it was a cool-looking custom character. Her lips pouted weirdly, but fine otherwise. I prefer female Ryder's voice, too, though neither are close to Hale in the charm department. She got that irreplaceable mature, warm confidence.

They are better than Mark Meer though.

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I just found out Hackett is voiced by Lance Henriksen. I had no idea.

This was my exact reaction.

From what was shown here this comes across as someone's unfinished Mass Effect fan fiction rather than a sequel. I expect better from a $60 game.

I can't take my eyes off the weird proportions on the humans' bodies. What the hell is up with the baby legs? It bugs me so much.

@mexican_brownie: It's like everyone has stubby legs and everyone's natural standing pose leaves them looking all bow legged with their knees unnaturally bent. Character models look so strange here, even compared to Inquisition.

@mexican_brownie: And the way they walk with their arms pulled back behind their bodies or out to the side like the swole patrol

@ferenz: @jibbajabbawocky: @mexican_brownie: I feel like someone accidentally gave the humans in this game the dwarf animation/build preset from inquisition. I first felt this today when I was playing inquisition, and I realized the way female Ryder's facial proportions are off look a lot like the female dwarves in that game. Y'all's discussion about the animations fits right in to this idea.

It's not a huge deal in inquisition because you can suspend disbelief because they're dwarves. In this game you're just horribly off put by how wrong they look.

I don't know what they are surprised about. The awkward pause between sentences is very Bioware. It's considerably worse in SWTOR.

@smokeytab: I ... can't ...stop... laughing.

Dragon Age: Inquisition had a pretty awesome character creator and (for the most part) great faces and animations.

.....What the fuck happened to Bioware?

Forget the 'B Team', this really looks like hot garbage. I love me some mass effect, I loved the Dragon Age Trilogy. I'm weirdly upset and concerned over this. Maybe playing it for myself will change that, but I'm really not confident in that. The combat looks okay, I guess?