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Ainsley McTree posted:Despite taking place in a new alien galaxy, there were somehow FEWER species than before It's a new galaxy but all the guys from our Galaxy arrived already. The boring ones from our galaxy too. And everything is basically already done. *drops thousands of asari on you to shoot even though in theory barely any should be in Andromeda*
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Mar 10, 2020 21:36
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Taear posted:It's a new galaxy but all the guys from our Galaxy arrived already. And there are two gay companions, but all they will talk about is religion and having babies.
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Mar 10, 2020 21:38
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Oh dear me posted:And there are two gay companions, but all they will talk about is religion and having babies. The lesbian never mentions Ryder's gender, uses pronouns for Ryder, and is the one romance to never say she loves you. The gay dude's character arc is "Settling down with a woman and making babies, yes or HELL YES?" About the most heteronormative gay people ever. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Mar 10, 2020 |
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Mar 10, 2020 21:39
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I just can't remember anything exciting ever happening in Andromeda aside from I guess a couple of extremely brief moments of running from things. That's what I meant by star trek vs star wars - it felt like a slow and deliberate TNG episode, and mass effect had been way more of a star wars type series as far as having action and quips and so on
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Mar 10, 2020 21:52
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MEA has always struck me as a fearful game. Fearful to shake things up, fearful to stray too far from familiar mechanics or story beats or lore. The fact there's even a villainous bad guy is loving absurd. We just flung ark ships into an unknown galaxy in a desperate attempt to preserve life - there's more than enough conflict and struggle in that!! We don't need a bad game named "The Archon", we don't need yet another ancient precursor race that left their toys lying around These are hardly new criticisms, but the thing I always respected about DAI is that it wasn't afraid - and after the response to DA2 they had plenty of reasons to panic. I hope DA4 is similarly unafraid, even if BioWare itself has never been in more trouble
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Mar 10, 2020 21:53
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WarpDogs posted:MEA has always struck me as a fearful game. Fearful to shake things up, fearful to stray too far from familiar mechanics or story beats or lore. Bioware could get their goodwill back by just making Inquisition again in a different place even. I don't see it, I just don't. Bioware doesn't exist any more, it's been Argused.
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Mar 10, 2020 21:57
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WarpDogs posted:MEA has always struck me as a fearful game. Fearful to shake things up, fearful to stray too far from familiar mechanics or story beats or lore. yes. it is an utterly fearful game, its default stance on anything is a cringing fear of internet backlash ("but then the gifs started") zero new ideas, zero risks taken, all just a cargo cult version of previous games with no understanding of why those previous games worked
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Mar 10, 2020 22:00
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Pattonesque posted:it probably made a profit but it sold zero story DLC and put the franchise on ice for years. Not great! They're meant to be A Realm Reborn-ing Anthem. Just lol at that. Like, Bioware, it's not worth it. Let it die.
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Mar 10, 2020 22:01
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CottonWolf posted:Andromeda was bad because they went to a different galaxy and then had the vast of the NPCs you interact with be the species from the one you've come from. I think this is the most legitimate criticism of narrative part of the game. The gameplay is way better than the rest of the series and the tone of the story resonated with me, but those 2 new boring races were boring indeed.
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Mar 10, 2020 22:04
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Being more like Star Trek wouldn't be a bad thing but it was not like Star Trek (at least not good Star Trek). MEA is Star Trek Voyager - boldly go where no man has gone before, except after the first steps you turn around and rehash previous shows (TNG in this analogy). It absolutely feels like a cargo cult attempt at refreshing the Mass Effect franchise at times. Goons love being hyperbolic, MEA was not the worst game ever but hell yeah it was  as hell (7/10 to 8/10 in video game scoring systems  ) and had really lovely animations (but the latter have been touched up a ton). It obviously sold poorly - at least compared to whatever benchmark EA uses to determine if post-release support was worth it. With a portfolio consisting of yearly rehashes with literal gambling elements to exploit customers, like FIFA or the Battlefield games, it probably doesn't take much to be considered a failure over there. The game's main issues IMO are:
The companions were a mixed bag, some of the ship's crew were cool, some were lame (especially the Asari weeaboo and wacky rebel Liara with a stupid name) or just boring (Liam, because we needed another bland human after Kaidan and Jacob). The combat was good though, with the profile system and the jetpack mobility (and you can mod in excessive jetpack boosts which make it hilarious) and the shooting and weapons and upgrades/mods would have needed another balance pass or three, but they were mostly good too. But I can totally understand people who lost interest. The exploration gets boring after a while, the plot is weak and the variety in environments is only superficial, because you just end up fighting through similar looking remnant structures or similar looking kett bases all the time. The few distinct places show up in the loyalty and Ark-retrieval missions which are over relatively fast, then it's back to driving the Not-Mako over sand dunes for a few hours. The thing doesn't even have guns 
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Mar 10, 2020 22:08
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And yeah I know SAM the temperatures are rising when we leave the shade, you already told me 200 times the past hour we've been driving around on this planet.
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ilitarist posted:I think this is the most legitimate criticism of narrative part of the game. welcome to this brand new galaxy! you're a pathfinder, meant to explore new worlds! All the worlds are already explored! gently caress you!
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Mar 10, 2020 22:08
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Well you get to explore the least interesting part of the galaxy, the stand-ins for protheans and reapers and their SCOURGE. I mean, congrats, you managed to make the new stuff less interesting than the already boring old stuff you brought over. Or... well the game could have used more salarians 
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Mar 10, 2020 22:10
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Pattonesque posted:welcome to this brand new galaxy! you're a pathfinder, meant to explore new worlds! Also, a sizable chunk of the population has already broken off and formed a bandit planet
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Mar 10, 2020 22:44
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A bandit planet, a bandit "moon" (technically an exploded planet) and an outcast/scavenger planet. Also countless outposts, ships and satellites are scattered across the entire cluster - by the time you arrive some of them have already fought each other and ceased to exist again.
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Mar 10, 2020 22:48
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Three desert planets
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Mar 10, 2020 22:56
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It has sulfur pools and weird plants, it's not a desert planet.
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Mar 10, 2020 23:01
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The most jarring part of Andromeda was how they wrote themselves so far into the corner that Ryder's typical video game bodycount had to be like... at least a few percentage points off the Initiative's total population. 
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Mar 10, 2020 23:08
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I still don't understand the procedural generation fad...how does an industry become obsessed with stuff like that? No Man's Sky made the same mistake to even worse results, though I hear that game got better with support. It's such a meme, it'll take a hell of a lot of development to make it feasible and it's not fair to hang that on one game. What were they thinking lol
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Mar 10, 2020 23:25
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It's a way to make near-infinite content if your game calls for it so it's not hard to see how it became important. The problem is this doesn't suffice for certain games (like narrative-driven RPGs) and once you have to touch up the procedurally generated worlds or manually add a large part of the environments/interactions to begin with, procgen really doesn't help much so you still need actual (expensive) humans to do a lot of work and suddenly your "100 alien worlds" game might not be very feasible anymore. It can work very well for some games or at least elements of other games (NMS's problem wasn't the procgen), but for something like Mass Effect the most I could see is using it to do the base geometry for a few (otherwise: handcrafted) worlds - basically similar to the first game - and possibly for making random interior/underground structures. But not for the main part of the game. E: Good developers could probably figure out a few interesting things to do on procgen planets, but Chris Roberts-type developers seem to think their work is done by just making the planets. So for MEA, procgen answers the question of "how do we make all those worlds we want the player to explore" but it seems like that's the first (and for a long time, only) question they had answered, instead of the much more important "what happens on those worlds and do we really need 100 planets for that". orcane fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Mar 10, 2020 |
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Mar 10, 2020 23:49
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Im glad that I managed to fire up a three page discussion about Mass Effect after resurrecting the thread.
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Mar 11, 2020 06:13
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The most telling thing is that we're still focused on BioWare's 2nd latest disaster and not its most latest, Anthem. That poor game can't even muster outrage in its players
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Mar 11, 2020 06:48
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WarpDogs posted:The most telling thing is that we're still focused on BioWare's 2nd latest disaster and not its most latest, Anthem. That poor game can't even muster outrage in its players I would need players first
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Mar 11, 2020 07:07
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Pattonesque posted:it probably made a profit but it sold zero story DLC and put the franchise on ice for years. Not great! honestly yeah this is andromeda's problem is EA just loving shut down andromeda when they could have done dlc and fleshed things out there's plenty of examples its better to just commit to a release and follow through with dev time but EA is not on that andromeda got like 6 months of hotfixes and then just shut the gently caress down, EA and Bioware was stupid
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Mar 11, 2020 10:47
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HIJK posted:I still don't understand the procedural generation fad...how does an industry become obsessed with stuff like that? No Man's Sky made the same mistake to even worse results, though I hear that game got better with support. It's such a meme, it'll take a hell of a lot of development to make it feasible and it's not fair to hang that on one game. Game development is an expensive and by all accounts soul-crushing process, providing a method to effectively simulate the thousands of man-hours it takes to generate prefab assets probably seems pretty enticing within that context. Not all procedural generation is that overt, either. Horizon Zero Dawn for example uses procedural placement for things like terrain, foliage and audio cues.
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Mar 11, 2020 11:05
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One older use of procedural generation was saving memory. Like Elite games had huge galaxy in a very small file cause all of it was generated on the fly. Later you had the same with Daggerfall. Mind you, this is not the case of the world being unique for each player, it's just that whole towns and dungeons and space systems were generated from a seed which is just a number, probably generated from another seed. You can say that it shouldn't matter today but games like Elite Dangerous still simulate a huge galaxy with billions and billions of stars with a lot of detail. There are many systemic games like Diablo or Space Rangers or Din's Curse and so on where actual geography doesn't matter that much and so it can be easily generated just so that replays don't become repetitive and you don't just remember where to go.
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Mar 11, 2020 11:28
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orcane posted:The companions were a mixed bag, some of the ship's crew were cool, some were lame (especially the Asari weeaboo and wacky rebel Liara with a stupid name) or just boring (Liam, because we needed another bland human after Kaidan and Jacob). The combat was good though, with the profile system and the jetpack mobility (and you can mod in excessive jetpack boosts which make it hilarious) and the shooting and weapons and upgrades/mods would have needed another balance pass or three, but they were mostly good too. I feel like if the companions/general shooty system of Andromeda had been in Outer Worlds the latter game would actually have been pretty good. Andromeda's fault isn't the systems, it's the setting and the waste of it all.
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Mar 11, 2020 12:16
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since we're talking about andromeda, might as well drop this in here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D12n35evy0Y
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Mar 11, 2020 12:24
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drkeiscool posted:since we're talking about andromeda, might as well drop this in here After all this talk of Andromeda, I installed it last night, just to see where I was on my playthrough and if it would grab me. I uninstalled it 10 minutes later. Ugh. I love the Mass Effect Universe, I love (for the most part) open world games, and don't even mind the tedium in DA:I. But this game just sucks the life right out of me. It just looks like it's going to be endless tedium and when I look at the in-game menus to see my quest log, and it's just a huge list of poo poo and I didn't even know where to begin. I'm also one of the few people who loved the side quests/explorable worlds in ME1. I know they were just fractal maps with pretty skyboxes, but those pretty skyboxes did a fantastic job of making me feel like I was really there.
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Mar 11, 2020 12:33
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I ran it with mods that vastly improved the experience (super mining probes that can suck everything out of a mining zone in 1-2 hits, car improvements that make it fly/boost much longer, jetpack power and duration increases, cutting down the door animations on bandit planet and the take-off and landing cinematics to the minimum, replacing all loot with money and adding materials/mods/augmentations to vendors) but that's a PC-only thing. In ME1 I only had to increase my inventory size to 500 and enable the console to upgrade the Mako engine Although after playing better games, DAI is also pretty insufferable without mods to me now, so there's that.
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Mar 11, 2020 12:45
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chaosapiant posted:I'm also one of the few people who loved the side quests/explorable worlds in ME1. I know they were just fractal maps with pretty skyboxes, but those pretty skyboxes did a fantastic job of making me feel like I was really there. I wouldn't say I loved them, but pretty much same. Despite the awful terrain and copy/paste modular mini-dungeons, the atmosphere did it for me I guess. A handful of them even had genuinely really interesting bits of world-building attached to them, to go with the pretty skyboxes.
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Mar 11, 2020 14:18
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chaosapiant posted:After all this talk of Andromeda, I installed it last night, just to see where I was on my playthrough and if it would grab me. I uninstalled it 10 minutes later. Ugh. I love the Mass Effect Universe, I love (for the most part) open world games, and don't even mind the tedium in DA:I. But this game just sucks the life right out of me. It just looks like it's going to be endless tedium and when I look at the in-game menus to see my quest log, and it's just a huge list of poo poo and I didn't even know where to begin. I think Andromeda is fine, even great, when it sits back and gives you a big dungeon to fly and fight through (preferably without the stupid puzzles of the vaults). The movement is good, the combat is fun enough, and the environments are generally pretty. But it's so drat rare that the game does that, much preferring fetch quests and pixel hunts with a dozen loading screens involved.
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Mar 11, 2020 14:21
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Cythereal posted:I think Andromeda is fine, even great, when it sits back and gives you a big dungeon to fly and fight through (preferably without the stupid puzzles of the vaults). The movement is good, the combat is fun enough, and the environments are generally pretty. Andromeda's loyalty missions, which were like this, were on average decent and some of them were quite good They're just a fractional percentage of the game
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Mar 11, 2020 14:28
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Pattonesque posted:Andromeda's loyalty missions, which were like this, were on average decent and some of them were quite good
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Mar 11, 2020 14:38
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Sylphosaurus posted:Iīm still not sure what the gently caress Liamīs loyalty mission was about, despite playing through it once.. Liam felt like he was the most schizophrenic in implementation. Is he a Cop on the Edge? A laid back bro? Weird goofball? Pick a mission. He'll probably be one of them.
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Mar 11, 2020 14:42
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Sylphosaurus posted:Iīm still not sure what the gently caress Liamīs loyalty mission was about, despite playing through it once.. Liam purposely revealed appallingly sensitive state secrets of existential importance to a rando for specious reasons your two options to call him on this are to say "don't worry about it" and "oh, you!"
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Mar 11, 2020 15:17
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Liam's entire thing is trying to be an unconventional diplomat, with varying success. E: I mean once the player reaches the Nexus and his loyalty arc actually starts. orcane fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Mar 11, 2020 |
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Mar 11, 2020 15:18
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Andromeda never motivated me since the main protagonist is just so fuckin' lame. Scott/Sara Ryder start out boring and end up boring. The only remarkable thing about them is their dad and the parasite he implanted in their brain.
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Mar 11, 2020 15:47
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orcane posted:Liam's entire thing is trying to be an unconventional diplomat, with varying success. Mutinously shooting the first alien we could try diplomacy with, very unconventional.
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Mar 11, 2020 16:05
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Who is that supposed to be? Joke's on us anyway, people shot kett and angara weeks before we even thawed
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Mar 11, 2020 16:11
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orcane posted:Who is that supposed to be? You see a Kett pointing a gun at your colleague on the first planet, remind Liam that you should not use your guns first, he promptly uses his gun first. I metaphorically sent him to the brig in my first playthrough so only attended movie night on my second. They really shouldn't have gated that behind so much bullshit fetching.
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Mar 11, 2020 16:28
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