Mass Effect: Andromeda

[Bhazor]

For me its because its validated what I've been saying for years that the series is gash. Best part is definitely seeing all the journalists like John Walker who heaped praise on the original games back pedalling and saying "Yeah the originals weren't that great and I am deeply ashamed of saying it was the best written story in gaming." Alas it took a full 9 years for people to accept I was right all along.

[HappyTree]

I was definitely still playing KotOR in my head when playing ME. Maybe we all were.

[Bazooka]

It could be worse, even if this is shit it will be a diamond compared to Jade Empire, the worst sin Bioware ever committed.

[Urinal Cake]

why am i enjoying watching this game get rubbished everywhere? i never played any mass effect games or have anything invested in it, or anything against it, but for some reason i am compelled to read bad reviews and watch those clips of it being bad, just sitting here thinking 'ha ha good' when it makes no difference to me whatsoever. i guess i like seeing things fail. like looking at a carcrash or something i dunno. good post

me too kittens. me too. i think the great disappointment in the reviewers are tangible despite efforts to remain neutral. it's not like fallout 4 either which was ultimately 'good enough'. it's innocent fun in this day and age[nb]except for that lady animator[/nb]

[Jerzy Bondov]

Hopefully with all this negative coverage the price will drop through the floor and I will be enjoying a big, faintly rubbish space epic for fifteen pounds by the end of the year. Everybody wins.

[Bazooka]

Again, who gives a fuck about the story which seems to be a big complaint.

This guy sums up the problems of cutscenes/story in games perfectly: http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=game_stories_suck

I spam the skip text/cutscene button unless it will make a difference.

[HappyTree]

If you are a gameplay-only kind of player then I think Mass Effect is the wrong game series to pick.

[Bazooka]

If you are a gameplay-only kind of player then I think Mass Effect is the wrong game series to pick.

Is it though? If you have been playing games for 20+ years you have pretty much experienced every story there is, especially if you have played tons of RPG's.

[lazarou]

I'd say ME3 especially is one of the better 3rd-person shooters of that gen, even if you don't give a toss for the story. The multiplayer alone was surprisingly excellent.

Anyway I just got a notification from Gamefly that they posted out a rental copy of this (it was in my queue from a while back), so looks like I'll be checking it out sooner than I expected. I'm not expecting a lot, but we'll see. If I wrote everything off from random clips of janky animations and terrible writing I'd never have played half my favourite RPGs.

[Lemming]

Is it though? If you have been playing games for 20+ years you have pretty much experienced every story there is, especially if you have played tons of RPG's.

That's reductive, even if I agree that 95% of videogame stories are atrociously bad shite.

Game stories might mostly suck ass, but the real strength of RPGs is world-building. Fallout (by which I mean F1 and F:New Vegas, not so much F2 or the Bethesda-made ones) games have pretty standard, serviceable stories, but the real appeal is the world, people and factions they illustrate. In the first Fallout you can go and talk to peasants and farmers and get an eight hour long lecture about how their irrigation system works and what they trade with the other towns, which is ace, and I don't believe the world could be constructed in the same way in any medium other than a videogame.

Morrowind is another good example. If you really want to, you can read every in-game book to study Daedric language and architecture and then walk around each town in the game and actually determine which race/culture constructed the town, which other cultures came along later and built around the existing area, which Daedra/Aedra they worshipped, etc. Again, the actual story of Morrowind isn't hugely interesting - there was a fight inside a volcano centuries ago and you may or may not be the reincarnation of one of the participants - but the world-building is where the real creativity lies. What's also great about Morrowind is that every fantasy race in the game is ridiculously nationalist, racist and hates every other race, so you get different answers to the same question depending on who you ask, and the game never really suggests who's right. Again, I don't see how the world could be created in this level of detail in any medium other than a videogame (or a tabletop RPG, but the whole point of computer RPGs is to recreate that feeling).

Maddox is stupendously wrong about a lot of things, and that piece about videogame stories is another one for the list. His closing argument that all that matters is the actual game, not the unnecessary story tacked on, is an argument I've seen a lot but it doesn't make sense at all to me. Sure, in a lot of games there's no story and no need for a story - eg. nobody gives a fuck about Crash Bandicoot as a character, nor the world he inhabits, and all that matters is the platforming that makes up the game - but to suggest that all videogames should adhere to this as ridiculous as suggesting that all movies should be blockbuster action movies, because I'm here at the cinema to watch amazing things happen on screen and if I wanted a story I'd read a book. Just because most videogame writers seem to have absolutely no talent and so few games have actually succeeded at telling interesting stories doesn't mean that we should just give up and return to the NES era when the game was all gameplay and all the story you got was in the manual. I mean, I see and agree with the point that the majority of videogame stories are shitty sub-blockbuster stories that keep interrupting the gameplay and taking you out of the game to force you to sit through a terrible cutscene, but his suggestion that the solution to this is to do away with videogame stories and "focus on making a good game" is insane. The solution is to figure out ways to integrate story and gameplay, surely.

This ramble has nothing to do with Mass Effect, but I just felt the need to defend videogames as a medium for good pieces of fiction. I also talked almost exclusively about Western RPGs, there's plenty of adventure games and a couple of JRPGs with good stories/worlds.

[Thursday]

Is it though?

Yes.

You play it to shag your crew. That's the point of Bioware games. I mean the shootings alright, but you wouldn't play it if it had no story/lore/context

[Big Jack McBastard]

GOTY AAA

A death knell over on Metacritic as it gets a dreaded 75 from the critics, well at least the user reviews are putting it about right at 3.8.

[Bhazor]

GOTY AAA

A death knell over on Metacritic as it gets a dreaded 75 from the critics, well at least the user reviews are putting it about right at 3.8.

I remember when the Star Trek game came out they called it a Mass Effect rip off and now Mass Effect is ripping them off. A perfect circle. Very zen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSyyAnLNj8U

[HappyTree]

There are loads of games for loads of different types of people. Some even like gameplay in some games and stories in others! Me perso, I don't enjoy FPS gameplay so I now that Andromeda seems to have focused a lot on the shooty bits I'm far less interested. That was never the pull for ME, for me anyway.

[Big Jack McBastard]

More of the glitchfest.

[Mobius]

I choose the default character face (can't believe the amount of people moaning their character isn't pretty enough and none of the NPCs are bangable!) and lets face it glitches were some of the best bits of Skyrim and Fallout so on that basis I'm convinced, this is going to be my best game.

[HappyTree]

I've just finished LA Noire (after leaving the final case undone for over 2 years, looking at the date of the last save! Where does the time go?) and it's probably my favourite game world ever in terms of wanting to actually be there. I mainly like Sci-fi and fantasy worlds to much around in, but this depiction of 1940s LA is so beautiful and coherent. Every car is a masterpiece. What happened to design?

But anyway, I think one of the things that makes it feel so convincing is that the faces were scanned in from real people. And some of those people were no oil painting. I investigated one of the random crimes on the map which was some pervert taking pics of a late middle-aged woman sitting on a bench. A real woman. Her real face. Mo-capped brilliantly.

Yes, this was the game that revolutionised facial animations. That was arguably the whole point of the game. And sadly that tech seems to be lost now after the devs went bust. But wow, it was so great to see a variety of faces, of beauty and ugliness, of exciting and mundane. It was real.

[Barry Admin]

When I think of LA Noire, all I remember is Limmy's excellent impression of it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7SnuScpp-3w

lazarou, please let me know how the multiplayer is, I absolutely loved the ME3 multiplayer and was soloing it recently.

[mobias]

Dear me this looks bad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zUilV_oemg

[Bazooka]

Dear me this looks bad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zUilV_oemg

Great youtube comment:Paul Allens Card: "Mass Effect: Andromeda, directed and produced by Tommy Wiseau."

[Big Jack McBastard]

It's fallen into amber territory on Meta, 74 now but the Chinese bots have been in to boost the user score to a thumping 4.1 oof.

I tried watching a stream of it last night and despite the somewhat amusing shittalking commentary it was so dull and uninteresting (and ponderously plotted) that I tuned out after about half a mission and when I came back Kumail Nanjiani was doing his normal voice next to the woman who's face doesn't move and who looks like she was hit with Homer's make-up shotgun. I meh'd so hard I nearly broke my 'ehhh' gland.

[Thursday]

This anger towards it is looking weird now. I'm on Andromeda's side again, it looks like it's basically alright.

[brat-sampson]

It's just... *HOW* do they have worse facial technology than 10 years ago?!?

HOW?!?!?

[HappyTree]

Less money, average talent, publisher not arsed.

[Bhazor]

Is it worse? Or is it just exactly the same as it was 10 years ago?

I mean Mass Effect always had stiff animations and long... breaks between lines. Its just you never noticed. But I did.

[HappyTree]

I chose Fem Shep and so had the best voice actor in the business for 3 games. Admittedly that is a hard act to follow!

[HappyTree]

http://www.pcgamer.com/ex-bioware-animator-responds-to-mass-effect-andromedas-animation-woes/

Over the past few days, various game animators have pitched in their experiences with major animation projects to lend perspective to the criticism, explaining how animation is done at Andromeda's scale, who does it, and why comparisons to other games are often bunk. Animators, according to animators, are hardly the final step in the RPG animation process.

[Mobius]

I'm really enjoying this. Feels like a Mass Effect game alright. Can't wait to get properly stuck in and go off exploring.

[Big Jack McBastard]

They're already flogging it at 25% off in some corners. Gotta be some heads rolling for this, is Bioware going to the game mass grave in the sky with Bullfrog and Maxis?

[Lemming]

Origin's refund system gives you a 24 hour window from first launching a game, which means I've decided to try and play this for free by beating it in under 24 hours and then cashing in the refund. It adds a level of tension, as £49.99 hangs in the balance if I can't beat it on time.

So far it's about par for the course for a Mass Effect game - boring missions full of cover shooting that you have to slog through so that you can play dating sim with your crew-members. The cast of characters is fine, nobody extremely annoying (unlike ME2, where personally I found every single person except Tali insufferable). You have almost no control over the plot and 80% of the dialogue options seem to be your character saying the exact same thing and getting the exact same response no matter what you pick, but that's also a trademark of the series.

The animations and overall production values are pretty dorky but they don't account for the tidal wave of sheer hate the game is getting across the internet. I'm honestly not sure how even people who could tolerate Mass Effect 3 are bashing this.