Mymla posted:

Mass Effect isn't really an RPG series. You could make a case for it never having been one, but it definitely hasn't been one since ME3.

Sentinel Red posted:

Weird how you've got about 200 posts on GotY 2017 that you actually like Horizon Zero Dawn, and a mere 700+ on something you haven't even played and utterly loathe.

Why is that? Why spend so much time on something you don't like, why not talk more about the actually good game that does so much right? I'm not even disagreeing there, HZD is one of the best things I've played in the last few years. I just don't understand the mentality, I'd much rather read posts from you about emergent gameplay, cool moments picking apart Thunderjaws, what a well written sack of poo poo Ted Faro is, etc than the low effort steaming dump badposts you're constantly dropping in here.

Tenzarin posted:

I don't understand why they have so many ammo boxes around, managing ammo in ME2 had to be one of the best parts about its combat.

Arglebargle III posted:

Cythereal posted:

There are people who don't modify coalesced to give infinite ammo and planet scanning rocks?

Nasgate posted:

Drack and Vetra are the best companions because in addition to being cool, they both frequently prime targets so I can set off more explosions.

Meanwhile, Cora 100% of the time charges before my incinerate hits the target, missing the combo by a second or less.

DancingShade posted:

Krogan engineer is also pretty good if you want to be a cover hugging support caster.

Bonus points for it being a non sexy female alien ugly thing which probably triggers people

Lt. Danger posted:

I just hit what I aim at

DancingShade posted:

Krogan engineer is also pretty good if you want to be a cover hugging support caster.

Bonus points for it being a non sexy female alien ugly thing which probably triggers people

Arglebargle III posted:

So I finished the game and there's a rollover bug in Nexus level, it displays -2,400 AVP needed to progress.

LITERALLY MY FETISH posted:

My favorite pair so far is cora/peebee, because cora's a massive asari weeb and peebee just does not give a poo poo about her people.

Haledjian posted:

Guess those people are stuck in cryo forever

A Buff Gay Dude posted:

The fact that we can't elect to control squadmate powers is such a step back it ducking cracks me up that people are defending it

Error 404 posted:

I like the vintage heat sink. You still have to manage ammo but its the drat future I dont give a gently caress!

Lt. Danger posted:

I just hit what I aim at

Tenzarin posted:

How did the remnant even know what kind of ammo to leave around?

quote:

Field Repurposing
With limited cargo space aboard the arks for specialized gear, and facing unknown dangers in Andromeda, the Initiative's philosophy is 'adapt to succeed.' Colonists are required to have a wide variety of skills. Equipment and weapons are expected to perform multiple functions.

However. this adaptability is fueled by non-renewable resources like ammunition, medi-gel, and power cells. Knowing they would not be readily available in Andromeda, in an emergency, the Initiative's omni-tools can recover and repurpose appropriate resources to serve a similar function. Liquid coolant allows weapon heat sinks to be re-used; organic compounds can be refined into medi-gel, and so on.

When these resources are available, the user is alerted via an interface between the user’s scanner and their HUD.

Elotana posted:

Game bad effortpost

The way I see it there are a couple of separate but mutually overlapping central flaws.

Most glaring is polish. Open world games need sequence break testing; they didn't do it. Several quests are stuck on my journal because I approached the endpoint in a non-standard way, locking the intermediate parts from resolving, like following the scientists' path on Voeld or disabling alarms on Elaaden. More often than that I had to reload because a quest trigger broke entirely, including once or twice in a story mission (?!). And for every actual gamebreak, there's ten times as many incidents that consist of reaching an objective, triggering it, then triggering some intermediate dialogue on the way out that clearly should've either fired first or been disabled. Example: on Kadara there's a remnant vault where your objective is down a square-shaped corridor, so it's 50/50 whether the player goes left or right. Going left broke it, and required exiting down the right path to fix.

Less obvious but just as lazy are things like finding a bare and empty structure only to come back to it later to retrieve something from it (usually at the same time as a dropship of baddies). What's the point of having an open world if the player is going to be herded to things in a fixed order? ME4 mercilessly suffers the worst of both worlds in this regard because the player still feels like they're on rails, only the rails require long, painstaking driving over steep cliffs. Another example of lazy sequence breaking is duplicating characters: I was very confused when Sid wanted to meet with me but couldn't interact with her in Ops, until I realized she's somewhere else and you have to meet her there. Your sibling's up from cryo and the doctor says "you're on bed rest," then you immediately meet them standing in the cryo bay to talk about momsicle.

The interface and crafting system is just obnoxious for no reason. Why have two separate research paths for levels 1-5 and 6-10? Why even HAVE underleveled gear in the crafting menu? Why put the crafting, loadout, and appearance menus in three different places on the Tempest? Why make two of the three research trees totally useless for biotic characters so that Adepts/Vanguards are awash in Heleus/Remnant tech and carefully husbanding Milky Way tech?

Lack of polish would be fine if the structure of the game was ambitious. But it's just a cut-down Inquisition. There are five fleshed-out locations: Eos, Voeld, Kadara, and Elaaden; half credit each for Havarl and the low-g planetoid. Inquisition had twice as many and was developed in half the time! The worlds in Inquisition didn't also come with conspicuous optimization cheats like the ten-second doors of Kadara or the pointless breaking up of the Nexus into four different maps (two of which are mostly duplicates). There's very little actual exploration because so many of the fetch quests are sequence-locked. Almost every question mark you come across is just a generic Remnant site with a wave of baddies and a couple of chests. The vault puzzles are nice; why not have more of them at the monoliths or random remnant sites? As it is the monoliths are more annoying versions of the rift battles in Inquisition because Inquisition let you immediately close the rift once you beat the wave of baddies instead of platforming around to scan for goddamn space-runes.

The overworld galaxy is actively annoying on top of boring. While being able to tab-skip (part of) the ponderous, slow transitions is nice it's still the worst in any Mass Effect game; ME2 functioned similarly but at least it was snappy and not a pointless timesuck. The game flow of approach -> scan -> tell-don't-show some elaborate river system or hyuuuge (actually not huge) mineral deposit has no hook beyond ticking up the completion counter. My favorite was getting XP for scanning a very conspicuous crater, at which point you learn that it may have come from an asteroid impact! Really earning that XP. APEX missions are a riff on the War Table from DAI but lack even that dynamic's basic flavor; at least Inquisition sorta gave you multiple choices about how to resolve something.

I could forgive both polish and structure if there was a creative story being told. But here it's not even Mass Effect: Inquisition. It's Mass Effect: Voyager. It tries to hang a soft reboot of the original by flinging the ship into the unknown but since they're not actually interested in telling new stories and want to rehash old dynamics it ends up as a sterile and weak. Once you get past the prologue, the Nexus kicks on and is almost immediately functional on the exact same level as the Citadel, complete with reporters, bartenders, and PA announcers. The game never recaptures the sense of "holy poo poo, things are hanging by a thread" in favor of racing right back to the comfort zone of ME1. Only with no depth, because all the peripheral species are waiting for DLC and have been replaced by the single angara/kett dynamic which also never really generates any heat since it's a weaker version of the Collectors in ME2.

The main characters might have brought salvation but most are written like they drew one to three traits from a sack and then geared all the writing around it (another trait shared with Voyager). The few characters that do work are because they echo established Bioware archetypes. I can't blame them too much for filing the serial numbers off Wrex, but at the same time, they had the same temptation in ME2 and managed to write Grunt, who was different but still compelling. Jaal is the only one who comes out with any depth and that's mostly because he's the cipher for learning about the angara. He's inoffensive but never really compelling. Your crew are even more blatantly thin sketches. I was half expecting a ~spiritual~ Chakotay episode for Suvi. The story and loyalty missions are just... okay. Mostly since it's the only part that shows a modicum of effort. But there's still not as much to them as there was in ME2 or ME3. Half of them are set up exactly the same way: linear fights ending with a single decision of "do I kill whoever's giving them a hard time."

There's so little reactivity or creativity that this would be a mediocre game by 2012 standards.

In conclusion: Wait for the DLC. Hopefully it won't involve Kallo kidnapping you and turning you both into salamanders.

A Buff Gay Dude posted:

Lots of words to say "this game loving sucks"

remusclaw posted:

I don't know, at this point you have to have written at least as many.

A Buff Gay Dude posted:

Tenzarin posted:

How did the remnant even know what kind of ammo to leave around?

Avalanche posted:

The real problem with the game is that it plays way too much like PS3-Xbox 360 era Mass Effect and everyone was expecting a lot more with a new console generation aside from "There's a Z axis now and the player can jump!", prettier textures, and multiplayer that is basically a copy/paste job of ME3 multiplayer. The game is just simply dated.

ME:A would of probably received review scores in the 90s if it was released in 2014.

A Buff Gay Dude posted:

Aw, wittle baby mad his game is total poo poo?

Ineffiable posted:

Was this game really under development for five whole years? There's a big difference between actually coding and developing the game, and just building up ideas between other game projects.

Elotana posted:

My guess is they tried to take the Inquisition open-ness to another level, which resulted in unmanageable sprawl, then spent a year rushing the parts that were farthest along and kludging them into a game.