Mass Effect

[deanb]

Not their worst as of me writing this, it's still a point above Sonic Chronicles on Metacritic. (or a couple points if you play on console, seems PC sites are a bit less forgiving)

[TheMightyEthan]

Sonic Chronicles isn't a Bioware RPG. [emoji14]

[deanb]

From Wiki:

Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood (Japanese: ソニッククロニクル 闇次元からの侵略者 Hepburn: Sonikku Kuronikuru: Yami Jigen Kara no Shinryaku sha^?, lit. "Sonic Chronicles: Invaders from the Dark Dimension") is a role-playing video game developed by BioWare and published by Sega for the Nintendo DS.

 

[CorgiShinobi]

It was suppose to be an influential handheld RPG and one to give Sonic a respectable name after the travesty of Sonic '06.

 

Turned out to be average and forgettable.

[TheMightyEthan]

Wait, seriously?  What the fuck?

[Mr. GOH!]

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.

[deanb]

http://www.metacritic.com/company/bioware?filter-options=games&num_items=30&sort_options=metascore&page=1

 

If anyone fancies a gander here's their "teetering on the edge" games. ME2 their highest ranked. What's kinda odd is nearly all their DLC rates terribly, but not sure if that's a quirk of metacritic and the fact most people don't review DLC.

[Mr. GOH!]

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.

[deanb]

Yeah, was saying with Dan and Ethan earlier on twitter that with Bioware games you may as well wait for the GOTY cos otherwise you're paying through the arse for DLC. I remember with DA:O it was cheaper for me to buy the game all over again in a GOTY bundle than it was to buy the DLC. Like a big giant F-U to early buyers. And that was the era where they did "Bioware points" *spits*

[Mr. GOH!]

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.

[TheMightyEthan]

I wouldn't be waiting if it weren't for my game about Japanese teenagers.

[Mr. GOH!]

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.

[Saturnine Tenshi]

https://twitter.com/Pepipopa/status/843815610333237255

[Mr. GOH!]

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!

Edited March 21, 2017 by Mr. GOH!

[TheMightyEthan]

I thought they said they made it better, because they knew people hated it in ME2? The fucking liars!

[Mr. GOH!]

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.

[TheMightyEthan]

Can't remember where I read it, but I heard the animation described as "like some animator's pet project that the team didn't have the heart to cut".

[Mr. GOH!]

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.

Edited March 21, 2017 by Mr. GOH!

[Baconrath]

Theory: Andromeda is this franchise's New Coke

[Mr. GOH!]

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.

Edited March 22, 2017 by Mr. GOH!

[CorgiShinobi]

Got a glimpse of the multiplayer. PvE Wave Survival is okay, but it seems like it would get old after a while. Oddly, ME3's was the same thing, but I remember having a good time with it. Probably isn't for me now a days.

[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.

[Mister Jack]

 

Oy, this animation.

[Hot Heart]

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.

 

There are multiple reasons.

 

1. Nearly every game is better for having other people to play with you. There's a simple pleasure in setting up flanking manoeuvres or hunkering down side-by-side while stealing data or waiting for extraction. It's also cool to coordinate tech and biotic combos, especially now that asari adepts have Annihilation as standard, which means you're a walking biotic powder keg.

 

2. You get to jump right into the action. You were saying that the main game involves lots of wandering around, talking to people, which is true. MP means you can break that up and get straight to shooting lots of fools.

 

3. The variety. Sure, the main game gives you almost free rein on your character development, but this shows you all sorts of races and classes with different power combinations. In ME3 it was particularly great because with all the free DLC releases they began to experiment with new powers that were never seen in the single-player (like the aforementioned Annihilation, which is now part of ME:A). So you could play as batarians, geth and even a krogan who ran around with a hammer. It was also cool for checking out all the various weapons as you unlocked them. On top of that, there were some cool maps and they released "hazard" versions for an extra challenge.

 

And I will say that after a couple of games in ME:A (although, one was with almost unplayable lag), this presents a much tougher challenge, which should be fun.

 

Anyone who isn't even thinking of touching MP should still get the APEX HQ app though. On the surface, it's a little like those Assassin's Creed minigames where you send your brotherhood on missions, or ships off trading, but it does help your SP stuff. You don't have to pay for anything and it unlocks in-game "mission funds" (you can better equip your teams or, more wisely, get decent stuff in MP for yourself) as well as reward crates which will give you credits and crafting materials for the main game, which is super handy.

 

It's a bit opaque but easy enough to just get a couple of strike teams and work through bronze missions until they level up, then they'll earn some "positive traits" which increases their overall effectiveness or for certain types of missions, and soon you'll be tackling silver missions with a 75%+ success rate. Even if a team fails, they still get XP. There is the ability to gain "negative traits" but I've not seen any yet and they're probably if you send the teams on missions where they're way out of their depth.

 

It's good because you don't need to spend anything on them (real money or mission funds) and you can just check into the app every now and then, plop 'em both on some missions and check back in 1-3 hours. It allows you to earn a bunch of stuff while you can't play the game then pop over to Kandrios' terminal and collect a bunch of loot when you get back on.

 

... as for the single-player, I've only had enough time to play up to getting the Nomad but I'm liking it. Combat feels really good now that I've got a Carnifex ("hand-cannon") and there are some intriguing story hooks and potential for moral dilemmas, so I'll see how that pans out.

[Mal]

 

Wow. I knew it was bad but this bad?