Just finished the game today. I loved it. Quite a lot of small problems, but nothing that really affected my enjoyment of the game. For me, personally, 9/10.
Just finished the game today. I loved it. Quite a lot of small problems, but nothing that really affected my enjoyment of the game. For me, personally, 9/10.
'lots of niggles' pretty much defines the game, really. The overall package is fun, and if you enjoy open-world exploration, then it is pretty fantastic, but there are plenty of small niggles that hamper my enjoyment. There's more than a few bugs which aren't game-breaking but pretty annoying all the same.
I'm not even finished yet, but I like the story. The combat is also fun, even if I wish I had more than just three abilities. Mid-combat switching of favourites just isn't feasible most of the time.
My thoughts on the squad...
Drack. Is. The. Best. He's tough as old boots, but beneath that he's just the biggest sofite.
Vetra is sharp, smart and can sass with the best of them.
Liam rubs a lot of the other chracters up the wrong way, but he's not a bad guy. Bit quick to judge, and he hasn't quite found his way yet, but he means well.
Jaal is my bestie. Honest, but never cruel, he's practically impossible to dislike.
Peebee has committment issues TO THE MAX. Like, wow, so much. She gets over it, though, and her sparkiness is extremely endearing.
Cora was really quite a surprise. Thought she would be a hardass, but she's actually quite a gentle soul.
Might as well necro the thread, now that news has came out that all the haters got what they wanted, and the future of the Mass Effect franchise has been completely shelved by BioWare, and EA has begun cannibalizing the studio and pulling staff to work on Star Wars Battlefront 2 or whatever. Not sure if this game ends on any kind of cliff-hanger or any hint of a sequel, but either way it's not going to happen apparently
The future of Mass Effect wasn't shelved. It was thrown outside along with everything that made the series good at the end of Mass Effect 3.Originally Posted by Vyk
Which is where the biggest problem with Andromeda lay. I, like so many other fans of the trilogy I've spoken to, just didn't care. The ending of ME3 burnt down, spat on, and destroyed the franchise. The game itself was largely excellent, and had some really incredible and satisfying conclusions to most of the character and story arcs that we had been following throughout the series. So, no reason to return on that account. Everything else? Blown up. The writing and villains became laughable, the universe itself fundamentally altered and changed, and player choice was eliminated.
The old universe I knew was dead. If I thought about it at all, I saw Andromeda as typical industry money-grubbing. "They'll buy anything with the franchise name on it". Just like Square and Final Fantasy (except that Square has been right so far). I didn't care about it. They threw away Mass Effect with that ending. And they chose to stick with that ending, to support it, even though it destroyed the entire series.
I am a hater of Mass Effect 3's ending. But I'm not a hater of Andromeda. I just don't care. And, from a lot of the old fans I've talked to, I'm not alone in that. It's not a continuation of the story, universe, or ideas we loved. It's a spiritual sequel at best, done by an unproven team and a studio that demonstrated that it has no understanding or love for the work that they had created. "I'll buy it at some point, when it's on sale" is one of the single most common statements I've heard about it. It's something which evoked mild disinterest, and nothing else.
For those who enjoyed it, I'm sorry that you're losing whatever future it might have had. But, to me, it was never something I was invested in. If they wanted to continue Mass Effect, they should have gone back and given it something to continue from. For a new game, a new idea, a new execution that shares some familiar concepts? Yeah, that might be worth a look at some point. But it's not Mass Effect. And from what I could tell, it wasn't being made by people who loved the original game.
Nor were the handful of trailers I saw particularly impressive. Flash and cliché, without substance. No new aliens nearly as creative as the old ones. And none of the spark of characterization that made me love the original series.
I just find it really hard to care. Mass Effect has been dead to me for years. This announcement didn't change that any more than the Andromeda announcement did.
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I think that's an odd way to frame it. Haters would've had absolutely zero impact in any decision made to do this.
Andromeda received significant amounts of bad publicity when it launched due to amount of glitches and bugs. I would suspect this was a major contributing factor to the game having relatively poor sales and Metacritic score. Relatively being the key word, of course, but presumably it fell a long way short of the targets that were set for it.
I liked the game and I'm disappointed by the news, but I'm just going to reproduce what I said in my final post.Whether that's a result of Bioware smurfing up or EA demanding the game be rushed out we can only speculate, but it comes down to one simple principle: Actions have consequences. Haters? No. Whoever green lit this for sale, happy to take money from customers despite knowing what state it was in and hoping to cash in on the brand name is responsible. And it's a damn smurfing shame all round.
Well let's be honest, the decision of whether or not to delay a game to fix major issues or release it is always the choice of the publisher. Maybe it was the development teams fault it wasn't ready to go on time, but they weren't the ones who said sure, release it. And I can guarantee the developer knew it wasn't ready and I'd bet someone there probably tried to tell EA. But I doubt they or most triple A publishers actually care most of the time. We live in a preorder culture where review scores and criticism rarely matter for big franchise games. That there's been such a backlash against Andromeda, particularly in terms of sales, is downright rare.
That's one side of the coin, but I'm going to play devil's advocate and say perhaps Bioware missed several deadlines already and kept smurfing up. EA may have reached the point where funneling further time and funds into it would've seen the project making a significant loss unless it gained an unfeasible number of sales. Either way it's a business decision, and either way someone smurfed up.
While this is true, I would think that handing such a big project to a studio that hadn't built a game of their own before was not necessarily the best idea either. Missed deadlines and mistakes would kind of be expected.
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I might buy that if it weren't for the fact that the same thing happens to experienced dev teams all the time. Dice aren't exactly new to development and battlefield 4 was released completely smurfed to the point they had to stop development on dlc to get all hands on deck to fix it.
And honestly, knowing what I do about ea, and particularly how they view and hire and fire competent staff, the less inclined I am to buy the developer being the biggest part of the problem. I also doubt that their projected sales and profit margins were so narrow they couldn't wait the extra month or less if took them to actually fix some of those more noticeable issues. In fact, I'd even argue that if it was going to dip into loss territory for them they would have been better off delaying it because reputation has value too. And it's not like they couldn't afford it. They're making more money than ever.
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This was also their C team. The only thing this team has ever made before was the multiplayer for ME3. Then they just gave them a whole game? That was an odd move. The cannibalizing news I read though was a very speculative piece from Kotaku.
Anyone have more sources? I haven't seen anything other than that. Sounded more like they'r ejust moving people around but there may have been more news I missed.
I'm personally not buying the 'waiting would've hurt their sales' argument. I get it, but I mean I would have been happy waiting another month or two for it to be polished and complete. There's never a good excuse for rushing out an unfinished product. Sure, some people will complain but those people are impatient.
The number of patches is amusing though. Dragon Age: Inquisition ended up having 11 patches in the course of about two years. Mass Effect: Andromeda is currently on number 6, and it's been what, over a month?
I don't have any special knowledge about it really but moving people around to work on other projects is pretty normal in triple A gaming. Hell, firing a bunch of people once a game is done or contracts are up is pretty normal for ea. There are so many people trying to get into the industry that people are pretty much disposable to them.
I got that info from The Know. Who probably did get it from Kotaku. It was really just more fuel against the idea that there will be another Mass Effect. Since the team is effectively being disbanded. Though, if we're going to quote anecdotal evidence regarding how our friends and social circle feels about the game, everyone I've spoken with have felt the criticisms were a tad on the ridiculous side. Only one game-breaking glitch happened, and all it needed was a check-point reload, and a loss of 2 minutes of gameplay. Everything else was Bethesda levels of humorous glitches. And people generally had fun with the game overall. And also those same people enjoyed the entirety of the trilogy, with no lost love over the ending. Disappointing maybe, but didn't shatter any overall enjoyment. My girlfriend enjoyed Andromeda so much she immediately began a second game the night she beat it, and got about half-way through her second playthrough before burning out and moving on. And she's played the trilogy straight through about 4 times since I met her 5 years ago. So it's almost a yearly thing. The ending hasn't stalled that passion at all. And while most people I know are not that in love with the series, I don't personally know anyone who loathes the ending or Andromeda as much as what is depicted in pseudo-journalistic video game articles, or here on random occasions from this community. I remember one person on here expressing the hyperbole that the ending made BioWare the worst developer of the last generation. Which is ridiculous, and I can safely say I only rarely come across opinions even remotely similar to that
Last edited by Vyk; 05-14-2017 at 01:44 AM. Reason: Attempting to sound less snippy
I honestly think it's a good game. I would temper my initial score somewhat: some problems are more obvious on a second playthrough (which I'm in the middle of now). But, I'd still give a solid 8/10, personally.
I'm not surprised that there's no sequel in the works right now: I always expected it would be at least a good couple of years till they started making the next one. I WOULD be surprised if this turns out to be the last Mass Effect game. It's one of their flagship franchises at this point, along with Dragon Age. My prediction is that the next Dragon Age will come out in a few years' time, with a new IP either coming out beforehand or within a year or two after, then another Mass Effect a year or two after that.
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