oh dope posted:

I never beat it, and I'm not 100% clear on it's development history, but it feels like a wildly unfinished game. Everything comes across as half baked and unpolished. For example, every single Asari NPC, aside from your teammate, has an identical face. But even the stuff that does seem finished is dull as dishwater. The "story" is a wet fart. Instead of an engaging plot with trying to survive in a new galaxy and learning about these strange new lifeforms, it's just "kill the bad aliens". It's hard to tell if the game was rushed and released before it was finished, or if it's just lazy incompetence. Probably a bit of both.

The actual alien shooting is alright I guess.

quote:

In 2012, as work on Mass Effect 3 came to a close, a small group of top BioWare employees huddled to talk about the next entry in their epic sci-fi franchise. Their goal, they decided, was to make a game about exploration—one that would dig into the untapped potential of the first three games. Instead of visiting just a few planets, they said, what if you could explore hundreds?

Five years later, it’s hard to find anyone who’s ecstatic with the results. Mass Effect: Andromeda, released in March 2017, disappointed even the biggest fans of BioWare’s longrunning series. Although some people enjoyed the game, it was widely pilloried, with critics slamming its uneven writing, frequent bugs, and meme-worthy animations (our own review was just lukewarm). The PS4 version of Andromeda has a 70% on Metacritic, lower than any BioWare game to date, including the ill-advised Sonic Chronicles.

Almost immediately, fans asked how this happened. Why was Andromeda so much worse than its predecessors? How could the revered RPG studio release such an underwhelming game? And, even if the problems were a little exaggerated by the internet’s strange passion for hating BioWare, how could Andromeda ship with so many animation issues?

I’ve spent the past three months investigating the answers to those questions. From conversations with nearly a dozen people who worked on Mass Effect: Andromeda, all of whom spoke under condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk about the game, a consistent picture has emerged. The development of Andromeda was turbulent and troubled, marred by a director change, multiple major re-scopes, an understaffed animation team, technological challenges, communication issues, office politics, a compressed timeline, and brutal crunch.

Many games share some of these problems, but to those who worked on it, Andromeda felt unusually difficult. This was a game with ambitious goals but limited resources, and in some ways, it’s miraculous that BioWare shipped it at all. (EA and BioWare declined to comment for this article.)

Mass Effect: Andromeda was in development for five years, but by most accounts, BioWare built the bulk of the game in less than 18 months. This is the story of what happened.

bradzilla posted:

whoa scorching hot take there

sebmojo posted:

I played the demo after they fixed the egregious crap and it seemed fine, just meat and potatoes sci fi. Worth getting cheap.

I think making the default female face extremely derpy was one of their biggest and most easily fixable flaws.

Shibawanko posted:

Super Mario Land is a pretty overlooked classic, it's usually seen as kind of lovely because the sprites are small and it's not like a normal Mario game, but it's actually really excellent. It's the perfect mobile game: you can finish it in under an hour if you're good, it's very speedrunnable too even for an average player with some practice. It's got better music than most Mario games, memorable enemies and the superball is great and lets you pull off all kinds of moves that the fire flower doesn't offer. It's got great variety with two shmup stages and different level and enemy designs for nearly every level. Gunpei Yokoi was a genius.

SML2 was really good too but suffers a bit from the sprite sizes and slowdown on the GB.

Rock My Socks! posted:

Yeah SML 1 is extremely impressive when you compare it to every other platformer on the gameboy

Others might look better (the Warioland games are loving beautiful given the hardware) but nothing else feels like a ‘real’ Mario-like platformer since the sprites are huge and thus the camera is constantly having to move to keep up

A. Beaverhausen posted:

I'm gonna say I didnt hate Inquisitions combat. The maps are another story, but the combat I didnt mind. Also I did enjoy the story a lot, but daaaamn it was short.

a hole-y ghost posted:

I did not play Mass Effect at all, actually. Is it good, aside from this thread's description?

Rock My Socks! posted:

Was that the one where one of the worlds was in a giant robot Mario? If so yeah that owned.

Vakal posted:

When Andromeda was first announced I thought for sure it was going to be a MMO like the Star Wars Old Republic.

It just seemed like a natural fit to allow the player base to make their own character from any of the alien species in the ME universe and have degenerate cyber sex with each other.

Comfy Fleece Sweater posted:

Just lol if you think Bioware is in any shape way or form capable of delivering a decent MMO, or even a game with MMO components

*looks at Anthem*
Ohhhh... ohhh noooo, guys.... what are you doinnnnggggg

Rock My Socks! posted:

Yeah SML 1 is extremely impressive when you compare it to every other platformer on the gameboy

Others might look better (the Warioland games are loving beautiful given the hardware) but nothing else feels like a ‘real’ Mario-like platformer since the sprites are huge and thus the camera is constantly having to move to keep up

fruit on the bottom posted:

It’s their destiny.

A. Beaverhausen posted:

I'm gonna say I didnt hate Inquisitions combat. The maps are another story, but the combat I didnt mind. Also I did enjoy the story a lot, but daaaamn it was short.

FoolyCharged posted:

BioMe posted:

I like how they in the first few hours set up an actually interesting story about religious reform, papal succession crisis, military destabilization and a rising threat of a foreign invasion. Then all that gets resolved in splash screen just before the credits because you were too busy fighting discount Sauron over some dumb magic rocks or whatever it was. I can't believe they essentially recycled loving Cerberus from ME3 as the primary threat when it dragged down even the game where it belonged so hard.

AutumnDDP posted:

3D Platformers are one of the worst game genres.

Vakal posted:

I don't mind them if they give the playable character some sort of glide ability that increases the generosity when trying to jump from platform to platform.

MDK and Soul Reaver being ones that come to mind.

Literally A Person posted:

MDK has, hands down, the best manual of any game ever.

Literally A Person posted:

MDK has, hands down, the best manual of any game ever.

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/38450/manuals/Manual%20English.pdf?t=1447352480

Comfy Fleece Sweater posted:

Just lol if you think Bioware is in any shape way or form capable of delivering a decent MMO, or even a game with MMO components

*looks at Anthem*
Ohhhh... ohhh noooo, guys.... what are you doinnnnggggg

zenintrude posted:

Every Souls game - including Bloodborne - is terrible

a hole-y ghost posted:

they should re boot it as massiv effex with a drum and bass soundtrack

Shibawanko posted:

The best MMO is actually Lord of the Rings Online

Shibawanko posted:

The best MMO is actually Lord of the Rings Online

Universe Master posted:

There is no such thing as a good MMO.

QuarkJets posted:

Counterpoint: SWTOR was actually really good right until you hit the level cap. They had the best implementation of group dungeons I've ever experienced, some of the character stories were very good and fleshed out, their open world stuff was SWG-level excellent, and they kept more bullshit MMO mechanics to a minimum. Like, that game had way fewer MMO mechanics and felt like more of a good singleplayer game than DA:I somehow.

With SWTOR they did a super great job at solving most of the MMO experience, but then the endgame was just standard MMO fare, because making a non-grindy MMO endgame that people actually want to stick around for is a hard problem or something. In fact I think SWTOR's goodness may help explain all of the Bioware games since then have sucked? Like they put all of their remaining talent on SWTOR permanently and everyone else was like "how does i make game" and that's the story of how Andromeda got made

basic hitler posted:

SWTOR is straight up okay if you 100% ignore any MMO systems and just play the story content. Pay like $15 or whatever a month until you've played all of that, then just log off and forget about it until a year passes and theres more content to do hopefully.

BioMe posted:

Seriously though why are MMOs so bad? You'd think we'd have the technology.