Mass Effect

[CorgiShinobi]

I don't know if it was a one time bug, but I was watching a video where you're interacting with the NPC Ryder twin and the character momentarily was speaking both the NPC and Player dialogue.

 

Found it: https://youtu.be/0wquYp6itwM?t=3m50s

Edited March 27, 2017 by Atomsk88

[Mr. GOH!]

As I've played more, I've noticed the animation weirdness less. The writing remains odd, both overarching scenario writing and dialogue. For example, at one point you're able to meet a new species that does not want to kill you on sight, but the First Contact moment feels weirdly just like landing on a new world and meeting a new faction in ME2 or ME3; it does not feel like making contact with a whole new society. Within 5 minutes you're getting quests and going about your business. I mean, it takes all of a minute until everyone's conversing in English (via translators, I know, but the game doesn't really deal with that aspect). The race is also supposed to be emotive and unafraid to hide their feelings, but they just seem like all the other Milky Way races members of which are always eager to spill their life's story when recruiting Shepard/Ryder on fetch quests.

 

There's so much potential here, though; I love the idea of clearing areas and setting up colonies and helping them thrive. I've played a good deal, but I feel like I'm just getting to the actual meat of the game after the initial dozen or so hours, and a self-imposed sojourn on one of the small non-colony worlds.

[Hot Heart]

I've played a whole heap, and up to level 31, but only feel like I'm just scratching the surface...

I kinda dig how they've approached things but it's definitely a slow start, partly because you just spend so long talking to people and picking up quests. The game is packed with lots of little things and I really appreciate the attention to details with the crewmate stuff; getting follow-up emails about conversations you've had, the little comments at certain points, all the various interactions aboard the ship. I get the sense that it wants to be a mash-up of ME1 and 2, with its focus on general discovery and uncovering of the past mixed with the threat of a sinister, mysterious alien force.

The writing itself is really quite patchy. There are cool bits and the usual moral dilemmas but then there's some really odd moments. The big standout for me is Liam. The characterisation is there (and repeated constantly) but he has so many bizarre little scenes that should be simple but whizz past with you scratching your head, thinking, "What? Huh? Hold up..." And Cora. I was expecting a Miranda-like character but it feels like they don't want to repeat that so they set up this hint of tension only for her to warm to you one scene later.

I'm digging the combat now I've got more reliable ways of getting combos and switched from playing a Sentinel-like character to embracing biotic charge and all the chaos it brings, once again.

The levelling and gear stuff is really cool and allows for all sorts of experimentation and squad builds. The three-powers-only profile business is a little annoying though...

Which brings me onto the negative stuff: the game should not have been released in this state. In general, it's not as if it's crashing all the time, and there is a fucktonne of stuff in this game, but there are technical hitches and weird glitches in many places. Much, much more than in a usual BioWare game. You've probably seen a bunch of stuff on YouTube and I've experienced a few myself (along with others I've yet to upload) as well as just not being able to complete one quest... It's gotten to the point where I'm not sure if this is a bug or a neat occurrence.

Still, I find myself wanting to see and do everything and it really sells that feeling of establishing new homeworlds, new relationships and just making Andromeda a safer place.

Also, it is amusing...

 

[Mr. GOH!]

I agree with what a lot of Hottie says, although I have major quibbles with the combat design.

I have spent dozens of hours playing this and have reached level 53 or thereabouts. I have completed the vast majority of major sidequests, though I have ignored a lot of the fetch quest "tasks." I haven't reached any point of no return in the main quest, but I believe I am getting fairly close. The game has only thrown one new enemy at me in the last ten hours, and that is strongly suggested to have been a main quest-specific enemy I'll never see again.

The following contains very general spoilers; I will hide anything specific about the plot or characters behind tags, but not my general criticisms of the plot or characters.

The overarching story and narrative has so much potential and I am very disappointed with how it's ended up in muddled mediocrity. The character theme of the game is clearly, 100% about what it means to have to suddenly be a leader when confronted with unexpectedly fire circumstances, and the game simply does not develop it in any meaningful way, relegating any "meaningful" choices to a sort of who-lives-and-who-dies-and-who-shows-up-in-a-cut-scene-later simplicity. Very few of the choices you make as Ryder appear to change Ryder, the Heleus cluster, or any other characters. The game sets up at least three separate areas in which Ryder's influence and choices could have interesting and meaningful impacts, but either there is no impact or it's the most minor of cosmetic impacts.

I will get to the combat tomorrow. Preview: it's better than ME3, but the shields/armor/health trifecta needs to be rethought and holy shit there are not enough enemy types to keep encounters interesting over the course of such a long game.

 

The three areas I include are the leadership and direction of the Initiative and its colonies; the relationship of the Initiative to the Angara, and the Initiative's relationship with the Exiles. You're allowed to choose between putting down a military base or a scientific outpost as your first colony, and there is apparently no real difference between the two, although the game makes much of how the choice sets a standard for Heleus colonization going forward. The politics within the Initiative are even less impactful; like Ryder, the leaders (aside from Addison) have leadership thrust upon them unexpectedly. The head honcho of the Initiative is a paper-pushing accountant who, due to ego and inexperience, clashes with the other Initiative department heads and, possibly, Ryder, but there's never any option to confront him, change him, depose him, or any other possible intrigue or shake-up among the Initiative leadership. This would have been very interesting because, despite Tann's relative fecklessness, he's not evil or a villain, and all the department heads are, more-or-less, reasonable and potentially interesting characters. It's further baffling that Bioware chose to make the department head of colonization, with whom Ryder has the most interactions and sidequests by far, the boring, bizarre, and wooden human Addison. Although she and the other heads complain about Director Tann, there are no plots or intrigue; indeed, the rebellion against him already happened before the game begins and the department heads left are the loyalists left at the Nexus! 

I think there's more reactivity when dealing with the Angara, but the options seem to be strained relations or good relations, but the same sect of xenophobic angarans will be your enemies either way. Perhaps if you let the Moshae die, things are different but the structure of the mid-to-late game suggests that Ryder will always be allowed at Aya.

Ryder herself never seems to learn or change; I believe previous Mass Effect games (and Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition) used dialogue choices to affect how the main character responds at times when there is no dialogue option. That is, in DA2, if you constantly spout sarcasm early in the game, a lot of what Hawke will say later in the game, even is response to player diaolgue wheel decisions, will be sarcasm-tinged. It is clear that ME:A keeps track of how you respond, since there's a codex entry that's a psych report on Ryder that updates throughout the game. Yet it appears that Ryder remains a somewhat naive kid in dialogue outside the player's control (such as party banter while exploring) no matter how emotional/rational/formal/informal you are when choosing dialogue responses. [/spoiler]

I've also been somewhat disappointed in how clumsily the new setting and species have been handled. In particular, the new potentially-friendly species has a lot of quirks in their biology and social systems, and has an interesting history, but none of that is apparent until VERY deep in the game, and none of their design seems particularly alien; they look like they were designed to be cartoon characters in a human cartoon. (That's not to say the original trilogy species were all great and unique; but the new species seem even less interesting.) Part of what makes first contact narratives so interesting are the differences between the participants and the potential conflicts based on those differences; in ME:A, the new aliens seem like cartoonish humans rather than beings from another galaxy. The antagonistic aliens seem more alien (at first), but since they're immediately antagonistic, they're not that interesting  as part of a first contact narrative. The third 'species' has apparently vanished leaving only ruins and machines behind, which is fine, but, again, limits the kind of psychological or sociological exploration the narrative about them can take.

Again, there's a lot of really interesting potential in the lore about the new species; the game either ignores or it or, worse, makes it ancillary to the narrative.

 

The angara as described in the codex and teased out over long conversations are actually quite strange and their society and biology are as interesting as the citadel species', it's just that the game feeds this to you in a piecemeal and offhand way or via codex entries. All that really matters to the narrative about how their biology, history, and culture interrelate is that they have big families (like, dozens of siblings), their interstellar civilization was laid low by the Scourge centuries ago, and the kett came about 80 years ago and further subjugated the remaining angarans. They're, as a whole, mildly xenophobic because of the kett conquest, but most get over than quickly since the Initiative and Ryder aren't cartoonsihly evil liek the kett. Well, except for some hardcore xenophobes whom who and your angaran party member slaughter without remorse, just like you slaughter everyone who gets in your way without remorse.

There's a particular task-quest which charges Ryder to listen to old-timer angarans talk about the kett invasion, revealing that the kett came as friends and manipulated the angara into welcoming them for a short while before proceeding to slaughter the angara. So it's understandable the angara would be suspicious at first.

Also, ME:A recycles central ideas from the previous games. It turns out the kett take alien prisoners and turn them into more kett via fast-acting gene manipulation. the game presents this as a means of reproduction, not a way to get a quick disposable army, although it is not clear if it's based on the kett's natural reproduction cycles or if it's wholly technological. The kett clearly are interested in harvesting traits from converted species to incorproate into future kett, and new kett are treated as new individuals, it seems. The kett are very interested in the biology of the newly-arrived Milky Way species and want to create husk-like hybrids (or new kett with the new traits, I guess) from the milky way species. Although there are differences, this is cleary a riff on the Reapers and Collectors in the original trilogy, although the kett are not a hive mind or bent one eradicating all life; they consider changing new species into kett a holy gift.

I actually like the new lore, though; the execution in-game sucks. [/spoiler]

 

Edited April 4, 2017 by Mr. GOH!

[Mr. GOH!]

I do not understand how spoiler tags work on this newfangled forum system.

Now, for the combat. 

My enjoyment of the combat really suffers from the fact that I had just completed Horizon: Zero Dawn with its constantly super fun and tense robot dinosaur battles. Going back to gunning down humanoids, robots, space dogs, and the occasional space dinosaur has left me feeling cold. There are a few very large enemies, but fighting them feels very similar to the end boss of ME2 with a few elements of the scripted dragon fights in DA:I thrown in. But those fights are few and far between; most enemies are on the scale of previous Mass Effect games; person-sized to small mech sized. ME:A, more than the original trilogy, really hurts from a lack of enemy variety. The vast majority of enemies in the game fall into the following groups on medium (or maybe hard) difficulty:

1.  mobs with guns and no shields,
2. heavies with machine guns and shields,
3. tech enemies with tech powers, armor instead of health and shields;
4. Snipers with health and shields;
5. Stealth guys with invisibility, health and shields
6. monsters with armor and no shields, in small, medium, and large sizes with a few cosmetic differences and elite versions of the big ones with one-hit kills;
7. mechs with shields and armor;
8.  floating robots with health and shields and beam weapons;
9. running robots that make drones that physically charge you through the air;
10. and robots that can set up their own cover.

I do not recall seeing a single biotic-wielding enemy. There are a few boss-class enemies not on this list, one of which kinda sorta uses a biotic-like power to float and teleport around, I guess. The gun-wielding mobs come in different flavors of aliens and humans, but they all function the same. Maybe some of them have grenades and others don't, but grenades do not matter due to your jetpack-dodge abilities. After dozens of hours, the variety gets very stale, and there have not even been new mixes of enemies. I mean, encounter escalation with the kett works like this: easy encounters have mobs and one or two guys with machine guns and maybe some small space dinosaur dogs. Slightly harder encounters add stealth guys and maybe a few more dinosaur dogs. hard encounters have tons of machine gun guys, mutliple stealth guys, dinosaur dogs and maybe a boss or elite monster that can one-shot you. Sometimes harder encounters just mean more waves of mobs and machine guys and stealth guys. That's it. It's even worse for the other alien races, although the robots at least are different enough from the milky way, kett, and angara encounters to be a welcome reprieve until you realize that you'll be dealing with ten robot-only encounters in a row.

Aside from enemy variety, ME:A further erodes the foundational shields/health/armor trifecta upon which ME combat has always been based. It's weird to shoot at a fucking turian with no shields and health, as if his armor is all that's keeping him alive. I also don't feel like the different guns matter all that much against the different protections; sniper rifles destroy any protection and automatic weapons chip them all away equally. Gone is the feeling that I need an SMG to dal with the hefty shields on a mech before switching to a shotty to take down the armor. 

Some of the problems have long been in the ME games, such as the unending frustration that biotics have little to no effect on enemies with shields up or armor. I get why shields might protect one from biotics gameplay-wise and in the lore, but it's silly that armor protects you from being tossed about by singularity or pull. 

The jet packs are good, and the improved mobility allows the level and world design to be more interesting. But sometimes it just seems to easy to keep jetpack-dodging away from every attack until your shields recharge.

There needs to be a better variety of enemies and, I believe, more large-scale enemies. I'd love to take down more gunships or a shuttle with my biotically-enhanced Ryder. The Initiative might be hard-pressed for combat vehicles, but the races of aliens that have been at constant war for decades ought to have more options than capital ships and piddling ground troops. Design the vehicles like HZD robot dinos to have weakpoints and attachements that, when removed, change the vehicles' behavior. The robots' mech-sized enemy has a hint of this in that you can destroy its gun turrets, but it's not nearly as interesting as any HZD enemy.

ME needs to rething the shields/health/armor trifecta. I'd propose having every enemy aside from bots or vehicles have health. Sheilds ought to block all damage to health and armor underneath, and ought to recharge and go back up after being brought down by gunfire. Biotics ought to only damage shields at high levels, but ought to degrade armor from the get-go and paralyze baddies in armor like they paralyze health-only guys. Armor should be very resistant to most tech attacks and gunfire aside from specialty ammo/weapons and should not regenerate on most standard enemies. Armor ought to protect against explosive weapons better, too. An enemy brought down to health-only ought change its behavior and act more defensively, too. And that's just scratching the surface.

[TheMightyEthan]

The spoiler tag is the little eye icon in the formatting bar.

[Mr. GOH!]

Finished the game. I know I've ranted about its shortcomings, but I enjoyed it overall. Lots of loose ends and I'd like to compare lore notes and choices with other folks who've completed it.

[deanb]

There is quite a lot changed with the animations here, and the models upgraded a chunk. Not a bad turn around. Still to understand quite a few other bugs kicking around.

 

[Mr. GOH!]

What the hell? That's tons better. No excuse it wasn't done before release. I mean, just fixing the eyes makes a bunch of the NPCs feel a million times less robotic.

[TheMightyEthan]

I was looking really closely at comparison shots, and I think the main thing they did with the eyes is now they receive shadows from the eyelids. That goes a huge way in making them look like they're actually part of the face rather than painted on.

Sent from my SM-G920R4 using Tapatalk

[Mr. GOH!]

I read somewhere that they essentially tweaked some shaders to fix the robot eyes. The animations are much better, too, however.

[deanb]

Yeah I'd heard they'd improved the shaders to fix the eyes, but when seeing that video it was clear a lot more than that had been done (hence me posting it). I am curious to know if it's just a few scenes tweaked or the entire game. Cos It's only been a few weeks and you'd have to be crunching massively to sort out an entire games worth of animations. The cynic in me would point out you'd only have to sort out the first hour or so worth of animations so folks can easily do video comparisons and allay peoples issues with the game. I doubt anyone is going to play through the entire game to double check all the cutscenes.

Oh they also had the Asari hold her gun the correct way around now too.

[Hot Heart]

So, after a great many hours, I finished it and have tried to gather some somewhat in-depth thoughts.

Firstly, real mess of a game technically-speaking. It's a huge game, that's for sure, so some of it seems inevitable. However, there are plain dumb things like finding out that the helmet I'd been using (researching and crafting) every ten levels, fucks up when you get to level 60. Rather than going VI, VII, VII it goes, uh... VI, VII, VI, VI, X. There are so many oddities with the crafting that I'm not sure if they're bugs or not. For one, some of the blueprints are just unlocked for you after each ten level increment but it's not immediate. So if I wanted a new Carnifex, I might have to go somewhere first and then come back and see if it appears. Later, I discovered that the chestpiece "brand" I'd been using just stopped appearing anywhere in the menu (the Pathfinder one, no less) so I switched to the N7 one. It turns out I could research that all the way to level X, which is generally reserved for when you get to level 80... except when I had to switch helmets, I went for the N7 and that was only up to VIII. So annoyingly inconsistent.

That's in addition to the pop-ups for loot that linger there, the occasional freeze on the galaxy map (they added a skip feature for going between planet now, thankfully) and the audio bugs in the Nomad. There's probably all sorts of things I'm forgetting as well.

And the Nomad is... not actually that fun. I get people loved/hated the Mako is equal measure and, I don't know, the Nomad feels like the current Labour Party approach of pleasing neither party. It has no weapons and it's not that fun to drive, especially since a) you have to monitor this switch between 4WD/6WD depending on how steep the surface is, which links to b) there's only really one fun environment to drive in because it has lower gravity. Plus, it's not even one of the "core" worlds.

No, the core worlds are mostly boring open spaces or frustrating sets of mountains where you might have to drive a long way to get round them since your 6WD can't quite manage the incline. Nor is running over enemies that fun or a valid tactic. From what I can tell from elsewhere, however, is that people do enjoy driving round and finding beautiful views. Different strokes...

Also, I think the game suffers for its semi-open-world approach. In some ways, it feels cool to discover areas and stumble across new quests/objectives but those quickly become a repetitive case of driving around, spotting an enemy outpost then killing everyone and scanning/destroying a thing. Then you go somewhere and someone thanks you and you get some viability points that are good early on and then completely useless once you've done the major stuff. I'm probably being far too reductive, since it's a staple of RPGs but rarely does it lead to anything significant either gameplay or storywise.

And, overall, the story feels... odd. As GOH said, with meeting the Angara for the first time, it's like encountering a new faction rather than entire species. The same goes for the whole game in some sense. At the beginning, it feels like it's supposed to be some desperate struggle for survival as the Milky Way races enter a whole new galaxy but then you see that the actual Nexus (new Citadel, essentially) arrived long before you and you step into some interesting politics and the aftermatch of issues they've already had that suddenly feels like more "business as usual". There's not the same atmosphere of struggle or dire circumstances that push people to tricky situations. I was hoping for a sort of Battlestar Galactica thing and instead I got something closer to Star Wars' Outer Rim.

However, it's all the crew-related stuff that really shines. They're not the most interesting of ME casts (they're possibly the most boring actually), but I really grew to care about them and they really benefit from the advances BioWare have made here. Lexi's a really good addition for how, as the ship's doctor, she brings it all together. In the Codex she keeps a little psych profile for you, and you can even get insight into crew morale plus there are some really nice scenes regarding other characters.

In particular, with Jaal and his discovery about Kett exaltation and then how you react to it with him, in turn.

Some of the others feel like BioWare knew they couldn't rehash what went before, which isn't exactly a criticism. Drack seems like Wrex except he's actually even older and feels himself way past usefulness, Nyx is not as strait-laced as most turians, Liam tries to get involved in everything, etc. Peebee is your asari interested in the mysterious Remnant technology, except she's far more lively and outgoing than Liara ever was. In fact, she's probably one of the standouts and has a really good voice actor. If anything, BioWare still knows how to get good performances from its cast.

And in many ways, they are front and centre. Most of the time, you'll want to keep wandering the ship or seeking them out on the hubs because you'll encounter some new conversation. The most significant stuff will come after each major mission (like in ME2 and 3) but you'll also get all sorts of snippets here and there. So much that you'll want to try different combinations of squadmates to hear how they mesh, e.g. Drack being a krogan and Cora having worked with asari huntresses have a friendly rivalry over their differing combat prowess.

This is an example of Peebee actually commenting on my relationship with Cora, when I think I'd already flirted with both. I think this is also an example of how annoying it is when dialogue cuts off because of mission dialogue... except it's Peebee interrupting herself, which might actually make sense.

It's also neat when you get those little character-tailored bits during missions. Some of it's mostly minor, but it all speaks to each character's perspectives, and then there's the more noticeable things like having Jaal with you whenever it's heavily Angara-related or Peebee when dealing with Remnant. Most of the time I just stuck with Cora and Drack though, except for the loyalty missions.

Ah, the loyalty missions are the real highlight of the game and also why I'm inclined to think it's a better approach than all that open-world stuff. Like the ME2 stuff, these are well-crafted mini-episodes within the larger narrative except all of it now feels more relevant to the bigger picture and a few of them feature some major choices. Most bring some sort of gameplay twist if not some enhanced character insight. If the game were a series of lengthy missions given that same increased focus and managed to mix in little moments tailored to the squadmates you choose, then it would be perfect. It's here where things really feel like they matter as opposed to reaching waypoints and scanning things to make a viability number go up.

And then there's the combat. I know GOH had his criticisms, and in some ways they are valid, but I enjoyed it for the most part. It does suffer from a lack of variety in some respects but I think the real problem is that the hyper fast pace somewhat harm its RPG approach. Only one on rare occasion, for a particular type of fight I won't spoil, would I switch between the same 3 powers I used nearly all game (Biotic Charge, Incinerate, Energy Drain) and even then it was only 1 of the 3 powers I changed. There's just no need for it, even on Hardcore difficulty. I believe the developers did ME3's multiplayer and that narrower focus with powers there has carried over somewhat. I mean, it's nice that you can go all sorts of different paths and there is plenty of room for experimentation but, maybe so it doesn't punish the more casual players, you never need to switch it up (I had probably overlevelled somewhat for some sections though). I never needed to control the battlefield or infiltrate an area to find a better vantage point when I could just dash around, picking off the weaker enemies and exploding everything. Combat arenas are usually large enough that you can work with whatever approach you prefer. I tried to take the methodical approach but I've always been a vanguard that gets stuck right into the chaos. That said, it is super fun...

Mostly, its shortcomings link back to the open-world thing. There are, like ME3, essentially 3 enemy factions but it doesn't provide enough variety for such a long game. If they'd put the main focus on contained missions, they could craft setpieces (some of which appear in the loyalty missions) with memorable fights and mechanical twists. Having no control over which powers your squadmates use isn't terrible in practice (I think it's wise to focus the level ups on combo triggers/detonators though), and they generally fufill their role pretty well, but it does remove a tactical level to proceedings.

I dunno. I can't say there's anything "wrong" with the combat but with all the welcome RPG stuff there's a level that's missing there, I feel.

Anyway, now to throw myself into the multiplayer, I guess... even if they've ruined the krogan melee and the tactile satisfaction of it.

[Hot Heart]

I'm still working with shitty weapons, and the new enemy types just aren't quite as fun as the old factions of Cerberus, Reapers and Geth but multiplayer is still a ton of fun in short bursts. The different classes definitely stand out a lot more this time, actually. I've just been going between an asari huntress and krogan vanguard lately because I think the unlock packs are a little shittier this time with too many consumables & not enough characters, weapons or weapon mods, as well as seemingly favouring certain classes. I've got turian soldier a few times now and male sentinel but never the female one.

 

Anywhoo, some videos of gameplay. The newer more agile manoeuvrability is neat for the most part, but I think it still makes some firefights kind of a mess. I think the better battles are fought on wider, flatter planes... like the extraction rounds.

 

I think silver might make for a tenser challenge, and I think teams learn to function better rather than chasing kills, but I'm not going to attempt that until both my skills and equipment improve...