Mr. GOH!

I mean, I never understood why folks seemed to love ME:3 MP. It seems like horde mode only MP modes are not going to be very compelling in the age of Destiny.

The Oresam are even more advanced than the Carja. I think part of the explanation is that the Nora are less advanced due to the Nora's pretty conservative outlook and unwillingness to visit ancient ruins to scrounge for tech. But there may be explanations. I don't think the game really answers where all the factions come from and why they are the way they are aside from

I collected all the mugs and most of the flowers. The rewards are garbage, but I'd occasionally get something I'd need to do an upgrade. Didn't get any vantage points. I got close to a couple but couldn't find exactly which cliff would trigger them. *shrug* I like the idea that, despite these sophisticated societies with what appears to be a 15th-century manufacturing base, Aloy is running around with gear made out of smelly animal skins and adorned with rodent bones.

I never got the ancient armor, and I am at peace with that. I also ignored the lodges after the first. I didn't need that busywork in my life.

It's on in the US, just with a significantly smaller and shittier collection of games.

Nah, it's too much like the previous installments. It's Mass Effect: Inquisition in structure but written by fanfic authors. Not all of the writing is bad, although I can't yet speak to the overarching narrative. When the dialogue is badly-written, however, it's quite badly written. I had a sidequest giver straight up tell me to "follow that dot," referring to quest markers. If it was some sort of resource extraction or whatever, I would not have minded, but the quest was about going to a space station and talking to people. Edit: The uneven writing quality is exacerbated by just how much dialogue and how many characters there are. I played a good 3 and a half hours last night, and two of those hours were almost entirely cycling through three hub areas (a settlement, the scout ship, and then the main space station) talking to folks, getting quests, checking in with squad mates, and generally tooling around doing non-combat stuff. Another frustration: there's a ton of loot in this game, a la DA:I, but there is no way to visually differentiate loot containers from random boxes, rubble, or other bric-a-brac, because loot containers look like anything and are not highlighted by your scanner. You have to get very close to a container before the contextual prompt pops up. The nu-Mako is awesome, though. I hope I can mount guns on it; running down enemies is fun, but heavy weapons really chew through the vehicles armor fast.

HZD is worth $58. It sold really well, so I would not expect a price drop any time soon. Anyway, you have teenagers to befriend in a short while anyway, so it's best to set HZD aside until you're done with that sordid business. But, yeah, shifty third party sellers are shifty.

I didn't even find it to be that long of a section and the warning further contributed to me being massively overleveled for most of the remaining story missions.

Yes! It's neat but slow and unnecessary. Instead of guiding a little ship around a solar system, you pick which planet you want to visit from the map and then it animates traveling there in first person. Very strange design choice. Edit: Just to be clear, I am enjoying myself despite the many bizarre design decisions.

They made it slower and weirder to get from planet to planet. It looks good for the first time, but the transition between planets is slow.

My biggest disappointment is that they got rid of the delightfully stentorian codex narrator. It's just silence now. Edit: also, scanning planets is back from ME2. And it's worse!

Dean: Where are you regarding Sylens's warning? The lightest of spoilers: when it comes to the point of no return, there will be 100% no doubt that it's the point of no return.

Well, I guess I'm technically waiting until the 23rd since my cdkeys key is international and won't be ready until then. But I still have a good 6 hours left on the trial and I don't foresee using that all up before Thursday anyway.

Yes, sure, but some of us cannot wait because we have no self control. And that's why I still have 200 bioware points that I can never use.

There's a great excuse for the framerate: Nintendo made an ambitious open-world game for two consoles with worse specs than an iPad. Wait, I meant "explanation'" not "excuse." Nintendo should publish for real gaming systems. They could make peripherals if they want, too, I guess.

I think it's also because bioware DLC stays so goddamned expensive relative to the main game. It's crazy you can get the main game for $30 and the DLC is still $15 a pop.

Kong: Skull Island. Terrible mish mash of extremely well worn tropes.

Yeah, it was 100% a bioware game. So ME:A is only the second worst-reviewed bioware game. So far, though, Andromeda is better than the shitty Dragon Age 2.

I did find it out that the expository logs are so clumped together throughout the main quest, but it kinda makes sense in retrospect. I wish there were more datapoints unrelated to the main quest, though.

I mean, sure; Mass Effect has nothing on anime schoolchildren, so I get it. And by all accounts Zelda is a pretty great game. Too bad it's only released on shit systems. Kidding aside, the opening two hours of Andromeda have not really impressed me. Neither of the human squadmates are that interesting so far. I am fond of Kumail Najiani as the salarian director of the Nexus, but I think a lot of folks won't like his very Kumail-ish performance. I like Kumail in general, so it works for me. Edit: Also, one of the early main side characters, who is a human, uses the phrase "My face is tired from dealing with goddamned everything" as one of the first things she says. Seriously, the acting, animation, and writing for Foster Addison is truly bizarre. https://twitter.com/Nibellion/status/842294985051521024

Did you slay the stormbird? My first encounter with one was among the most intense combat experiences I had in HZD.

Played a few hours of the trial. Seems pretty decent. The initial section has some bad writing, but it's still very Mass Effect-y. Facial animation is pretty mediocre. Reminds me of the animations in Horizon Zero Dawn, oddly. Lots of flat expressions and weird eye movement choices. Very minor lore spoilers regarding some of the stuff we talked about in this thread pre-release. It's all from the very beginning of the game and is just about the background lore, not about anything new in Andromeda: Combat is more interesting, and it seems like it will take a shitload of leveling if you want to get every ability maxed out. I am playing it on ultra at 1080p, and it looks pretty good. Closeups of omnitools are real weird, though; they look fuzzy and completely illegible to the point that they don't look like representations of a usable interface. It's clearly an art choice and it's distracting. This ten hour limit thing is aggravating because I feel less inclined to read every codex entry and to explore; I just want to get the most gameplay content I can in my limited play time!