My Mass Effect Andromeda Thoughts
May. 29th, 2019 10:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
montebelloMass Effect Andromeda was reportedly received poorly at launch despite being a good game. I did read it made profits so I'm not sure why it wasn't better supported. I have now completed the game twice, first as female Ryder and second as male Ryder. The New Game+ option to start with my levels, resources, and items made it a more enjoyable experience on the second playthrough, also a much faster playthrough. Maybe I just like obliterating my enemies with my overpowered biotics though.
The number one issue with the game was bugs. I experienced crashes repeatedly on my first playthrough back when the game came out, and I lost one save file and had to redo some quests by using an older save file. Running version 1.10 now, I had exactly one crash in the middle of a fight, and that was it. Frankly the game should not have come out when it did, and the QA/test team should have done better, communicated concerns better, or their leadership should have acted, so the launch would be delayed.
This is something I feel strongly about, don't ship a product before it's ready. I believe the awful ending to Mass Effect 3 is partially due to trying to meet a deadline for release. Regardless of the idiocy of the AI question and three different colors, the animation actually looks like it was outsourced, at least in my opinion. And the bugs with Assassin's Creed Unity caused that game to be poorly received, despite it being pretty good for an Assassin's Creed game. I also work in the software world and know the challenge of convincing management to stall a release to make a better product...
On to the other issues. It became popular on the internet to harp on Andromeda's facial animations, in particular Addison the woman in charge of colonial affairs. Her voice was angry but her face was not. That actually makes the point that the voice acting is very, very good, as most (all?) Bioware games have. Much as people found it fun to mock the animations, I don't think that affected sales. People aren't buying Bioware games for the graphics, they're buying it for the lore, the character development, the story. If somebody was put off by the animations, they weren't going to buy the game anyway.
Another thing I didn't like was the lack of lore. When you played the first Mass Effect, it was so cool to meet all these aliens with so much thought put into them. Such as the krogan came from a harsh planet hence their redundant organs and high birth rates, and then the high birth rates affected their society to be highly competitive, increasing aggression, etc. The quarians created the geth, the geth rebelled, the quarians fled on ships, the quarians got too used to sterile environments that their immune systems became compromised, their ship becomes their family so it's their last name, etc. Someone put a lot of thought into these things! There was the lore of Earth discovering the Prothean ruins and the First Contact War with the Turians. Mass Effect Andromeda just wasn't up to par. First, a number of the species weren't present! No drell, no quarians, no geth, no batarians, it just didn't feel the same. The angara were ok but weren't terribly interesting. Thank goodness we still had asari, krogan, and salarians to keep things somewhat interesting.
The kett were interesting as antagonists in that their goal was genetic assimilation and domination. But we don't learn much about their past or their society. Granted, in the first game you don't know much about the geth, but you do know the quarians created them and the geth rebelled, the geth have a shared consciousness, and then you learn they're serving Sovereign. It made it that much more of a surprise in Mass Effect 2 to discover Legion and the fact that there were factions within the Geth. So the kett were interesting but we don't know enough about their background, and they were just evil conquerors. They weren't as menacing as the Reapers, they were capable of being defeated, their technology was roughly on par with the Initiative.
That kind of plays into the pacing. Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 were like books you couldn't put down, you wanted to see what happened next. Andromeda didn't have that except in a few key moments. But in my opinion, Mass Effect 1 had some of the same issues. In 2 colonists were disappearing, no one was taking it seriously, Shepard had to solve it fast! In 3 the entire galaxy was falling apart and you were the best hope! In the first game, until you meet Sovereign on Virmire, then have to sacrifice a party member, then rush to the Ilos, then rush to the Citadel, before all that, the pacing was slow. You could waste countless time driving around on planets in the Mako.
Speaking of which, the Nomad was much more fun to drive than the Mako. Driving around felt useful instead of a chore. I'd still pick Mass Effect 2's "missions" gameplay over an open world, but if you're going to have a world to explore, the Nomad was good. One annoying thing was the concept of mining for resources. Such a waste of time and busy work. But people need to remember earlier games had the same thing. You'd have to drive the Mako to a mission in the first game, in the second game there was planet scanning which was busy work, I can't remember an equally annoying thing to do in Mass Effect 3, but unfortunately the awfulness of the ending to Mass Effect 3 wiped out almost all my memories of the rest of the game, and I played it only once. Mass Effect 1 also had ridiculous inventory management, you were always getting junk to manage that you had to sell, equip, or turn into omnigel.
Crafting in Andromeda was also dumb. You were able to pick up fairly good equipment along the way and it wasn't worth crafting as that would require you to go mineral scanning, and you could win fights without crafted equipment. So thankfully you didn't have to craft. I didn't bother with it the entire first playthrough, and on the second playthrough I just made level ten ultra rare weapons and armor.
The game did not have a paragon or renegade system, which admittedly was a bit 2-dimensional. You could go either way on this on which is better, Andromeda's system was an attitude, like flippant vs heartwarming vs logical. Paragon and renegade made things fun in Mass Effect 2 when you could hit the button when the icon displayed on screen and Shepard would suddenly do something different. It was also cool as to how it affected the reconstructed Shepard's face in 2, and how it opened new options in some conversations.
So what did Andromeda get right? The voice acting, as previously mentioned, was great. The ability to change classes and pick your abilities was a godsend. I never knew how fun a biotic adept could be until I played Mass Effect 3's multiplayer. For the same reason, I never knew what fun it could be to be a cloaked infiltrator and snipe away at enemies. In the original trilogy, I played through with both my Shepards being soldiers. In Andromeda you could experiment and with the improved combo system and wide variety of weapons, you could make some interesting builds. Speaking of which, the combat was great because you could approach it with such different styles of play, and it wasn't too hard and wasn't too easy (until my second playthrough :p). The combat was just plain fun.
The multiplayer, like in Mass Effect 3, was great, but not as great as Mass Effect 3. Similar to the pacing issue, the multiplayer just did not feel as important as saving the galaxy in Mass Effect 3. And with 3 they kept adding species to the point where you could play as a vorcha or a volus, and every single species had their strengths and weaknesses and different playstyle. That's one thing that the multiplayer got right, balancing the abilities of different classes. In Mass Effect 3 playing as a geth sniper was different than playing as a drell sniper which was different than playing as a batarian warrior which was different than playing as an asari adept. Andromeda did this well too, except for a few major points. There weren't as many species and classes to play as, they had weird classes like a Krogan vanguard (Krogan are biotic, what???), and they locked the classes behind loot boxes, trying to force you to spend money or grind endlessly to get that one cool Angara to play as. This was before the loot box scandal over Star Wars Battlefield 2, but it's clear that's what they were going for. They kept adding new levels (great!) but adding more and more guns no one wanted (ugh, now I will unlock those with my hard earned boxes instead of unlocking that one cool Angara I want to try out).
SAM was a great addition to the Mass Effect universe. The concept of organic life vs AI is a central theme to the original trilogy. From the geth and banned AI to the rogue AI on Earth's moon to EDI and finally to the Reapers, it poses an interesting question of the value vs danger of AIs. The idea behind SAM, to make him symbiotic to the Pathfinder, was very creative and expands again on the idea in a novel and unexpected way.
The story was really good in parts, I especially enjoyed tracking down the lost arks. I enjoyed story missions such as infiltrating the kett base on Voeld or sneaking about the kett ship attached to the Salarian ark. Exploring the worlds had its ups and downs. It was very reminiscent of Dragon Age Inquisition. It's not bad for an RPG, but as stated previously, I prefer the "missions" style (for lack of a better word) of how Mass Effect 2 handled the story.
I think part of the negative reaction to Andromeda is the mythical aspect that the original trilogy has achieved somehow. Expectations were too high for this game, as if it could live up to the original trilogy. I don't know how you follow up saving the galaxy from the Reapers with something interesting, but it would have been fun to see more of our favorite species and beloved characters. Going to a separate galaxy was the easy way out of avoiding the player's choices in the original trilogy and not having to reference events in the original trilogy. It'd be hard to go post-Reapers Milky Way but going to Andromeda wasn't great either. And people forget that the original trilogy had its flaws, and this game did too. It was still a fun game, at least for me and a number of people.
Sadly, they decided to not release the original intended DLC, and they were presumably planning on making an Andromeda trilogy, and that would be cancelled now. But to their credit they released the book that addressed the Quarian ark questions. They've left some plot points open that I hope they address in another book or books. Those issues are:
1. Who killed Jien Garson and why?
2. Who was the mysterious benefactor(s)? We can guess that it was the Illusive Man, except he was pro-humanity and multiple species went to Andromeda, and he was arrogant enough to think he could win against the Reapers. Whoever it was knew the Reapers were coming. Did the benefactor(s) travel with the Andromeda Initiative?
3. What happens with the Ryder twins' mom who is in cryo?
4. Who were the Jaardan?
5. Who used the Scourge against the Jaardan and why?
6. What is the Scourge? Specifically Mass Effect's lore is based on element zero for everything from biotic abilities to shields to Mass Effect Relays. What is the scientific backing of the Scourge?
7. How do they rescue the quarians? Thanks to the book we know what happened to the Quarian ark, but presumably DLC would have had you actually rescue the ark somehow.
8. I'm probably forgetting something.
That's my stream of consciousness of Mass Effect Andromeda at this point in time. I enjoyed it, not in contention for best game of all time like Mass Effect 2 (or 3 if the ending hadn't been so awful), but still fun. I have other thoughts but I've written enough.
The number one issue with the game was bugs. I experienced crashes repeatedly on my first playthrough back when the game came out, and I lost one save file and had to redo some quests by using an older save file. Running version 1.10 now, I had exactly one crash in the middle of a fight, and that was it. Frankly the game should not have come out when it did, and the QA/test team should have done better, communicated concerns better, or their leadership should have acted, so the launch would be delayed.
This is something I feel strongly about, don't ship a product before it's ready. I believe the awful ending to Mass Effect 3 is partially due to trying to meet a deadline for release. Regardless of the idiocy of the AI question and three different colors, the animation actually looks like it was outsourced, at least in my opinion. And the bugs with Assassin's Creed Unity caused that game to be poorly received, despite it being pretty good for an Assassin's Creed game. I also work in the software world and know the challenge of convincing management to stall a release to make a better product...
On to the other issues. It became popular on the internet to harp on Andromeda's facial animations, in particular Addison the woman in charge of colonial affairs. Her voice was angry but her face was not. That actually makes the point that the voice acting is very, very good, as most (all?) Bioware games have. Much as people found it fun to mock the animations, I don't think that affected sales. People aren't buying Bioware games for the graphics, they're buying it for the lore, the character development, the story. If somebody was put off by the animations, they weren't going to buy the game anyway.
Another thing I didn't like was the lack of lore. When you played the first Mass Effect, it was so cool to meet all these aliens with so much thought put into them. Such as the krogan came from a harsh planet hence their redundant organs and high birth rates, and then the high birth rates affected their society to be highly competitive, increasing aggression, etc. The quarians created the geth, the geth rebelled, the quarians fled on ships, the quarians got too used to sterile environments that their immune systems became compromised, their ship becomes their family so it's their last name, etc. Someone put a lot of thought into these things! There was the lore of Earth discovering the Prothean ruins and the First Contact War with the Turians. Mass Effect Andromeda just wasn't up to par. First, a number of the species weren't present! No drell, no quarians, no geth, no batarians, it just didn't feel the same. The angara were ok but weren't terribly interesting. Thank goodness we still had asari, krogan, and salarians to keep things somewhat interesting.
The kett were interesting as antagonists in that their goal was genetic assimilation and domination. But we don't learn much about their past or their society. Granted, in the first game you don't know much about the geth, but you do know the quarians created them and the geth rebelled, the geth have a shared consciousness, and then you learn they're serving Sovereign. It made it that much more of a surprise in Mass Effect 2 to discover Legion and the fact that there were factions within the Geth. So the kett were interesting but we don't know enough about their background, and they were just evil conquerors. They weren't as menacing as the Reapers, they were capable of being defeated, their technology was roughly on par with the Initiative.
That kind of plays into the pacing. Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 were like books you couldn't put down, you wanted to see what happened next. Andromeda didn't have that except in a few key moments. But in my opinion, Mass Effect 1 had some of the same issues. In 2 colonists were disappearing, no one was taking it seriously, Shepard had to solve it fast! In 3 the entire galaxy was falling apart and you were the best hope! In the first game, until you meet Sovereign on Virmire, then have to sacrifice a party member, then rush to the Ilos, then rush to the Citadel, before all that, the pacing was slow. You could waste countless time driving around on planets in the Mako.
Speaking of which, the Nomad was much more fun to drive than the Mako. Driving around felt useful instead of a chore. I'd still pick Mass Effect 2's "missions" gameplay over an open world, but if you're going to have a world to explore, the Nomad was good. One annoying thing was the concept of mining for resources. Such a waste of time and busy work. But people need to remember earlier games had the same thing. You'd have to drive the Mako to a mission in the first game, in the second game there was planet scanning which was busy work, I can't remember an equally annoying thing to do in Mass Effect 3, but unfortunately the awfulness of the ending to Mass Effect 3 wiped out almost all my memories of the rest of the game, and I played it only once. Mass Effect 1 also had ridiculous inventory management, you were always getting junk to manage that you had to sell, equip, or turn into omnigel.
Crafting in Andromeda was also dumb. You were able to pick up fairly good equipment along the way and it wasn't worth crafting as that would require you to go mineral scanning, and you could win fights without crafted equipment. So thankfully you didn't have to craft. I didn't bother with it the entire first playthrough, and on the second playthrough I just made level ten ultra rare weapons and armor.
The game did not have a paragon or renegade system, which admittedly was a bit 2-dimensional. You could go either way on this on which is better, Andromeda's system was an attitude, like flippant vs heartwarming vs logical. Paragon and renegade made things fun in Mass Effect 2 when you could hit the button when the icon displayed on screen and Shepard would suddenly do something different. It was also cool as to how it affected the reconstructed Shepard's face in 2, and how it opened new options in some conversations.
So what did Andromeda get right? The voice acting, as previously mentioned, was great. The ability to change classes and pick your abilities was a godsend. I never knew how fun a biotic adept could be until I played Mass Effect 3's multiplayer. For the same reason, I never knew what fun it could be to be a cloaked infiltrator and snipe away at enemies. In the original trilogy, I played through with both my Shepards being soldiers. In Andromeda you could experiment and with the improved combo system and wide variety of weapons, you could make some interesting builds. Speaking of which, the combat was great because you could approach it with such different styles of play, and it wasn't too hard and wasn't too easy (until my second playthrough :p). The combat was just plain fun.
The multiplayer, like in Mass Effect 3, was great, but not as great as Mass Effect 3. Similar to the pacing issue, the multiplayer just did not feel as important as saving the galaxy in Mass Effect 3. And with 3 they kept adding species to the point where you could play as a vorcha or a volus, and every single species had their strengths and weaknesses and different playstyle. That's one thing that the multiplayer got right, balancing the abilities of different classes. In Mass Effect 3 playing as a geth sniper was different than playing as a drell sniper which was different than playing as a batarian warrior which was different than playing as an asari adept. Andromeda did this well too, except for a few major points. There weren't as many species and classes to play as, they had weird classes like a Krogan vanguard (Krogan are biotic, what???), and they locked the classes behind loot boxes, trying to force you to spend money or grind endlessly to get that one cool Angara to play as. This was before the loot box scandal over Star Wars Battlefield 2, but it's clear that's what they were going for. They kept adding new levels (great!) but adding more and more guns no one wanted (ugh, now I will unlock those with my hard earned boxes instead of unlocking that one cool Angara I want to try out).
SAM was a great addition to the Mass Effect universe. The concept of organic life vs AI is a central theme to the original trilogy. From the geth and banned AI to the rogue AI on Earth's moon to EDI and finally to the Reapers, it poses an interesting question of the value vs danger of AIs. The idea behind SAM, to make him symbiotic to the Pathfinder, was very creative and expands again on the idea in a novel and unexpected way.
The story was really good in parts, I especially enjoyed tracking down the lost arks. I enjoyed story missions such as infiltrating the kett base on Voeld or sneaking about the kett ship attached to the Salarian ark. Exploring the worlds had its ups and downs. It was very reminiscent of Dragon Age Inquisition. It's not bad for an RPG, but as stated previously, I prefer the "missions" style (for lack of a better word) of how Mass Effect 2 handled the story.
I think part of the negative reaction to Andromeda is the mythical aspect that the original trilogy has achieved somehow. Expectations were too high for this game, as if it could live up to the original trilogy. I don't know how you follow up saving the galaxy from the Reapers with something interesting, but it would have been fun to see more of our favorite species and beloved characters. Going to a separate galaxy was the easy way out of avoiding the player's choices in the original trilogy and not having to reference events in the original trilogy. It'd be hard to go post-Reapers Milky Way but going to Andromeda wasn't great either. And people forget that the original trilogy had its flaws, and this game did too. It was still a fun game, at least for me and a number of people.
Sadly, they decided to not release the original intended DLC, and they were presumably planning on making an Andromeda trilogy, and that would be cancelled now. But to their credit they released the book that addressed the Quarian ark questions. They've left some plot points open that I hope they address in another book or books. Those issues are:
1. Who killed Jien Garson and why?
2. Who was the mysterious benefactor(s)? We can guess that it was the Illusive Man, except he was pro-humanity and multiple species went to Andromeda, and he was arrogant enough to think he could win against the Reapers. Whoever it was knew the Reapers were coming. Did the benefactor(s) travel with the Andromeda Initiative?
3. What happens with the Ryder twins' mom who is in cryo?
4. Who were the Jaardan?
5. Who used the Scourge against the Jaardan and why?
6. What is the Scourge? Specifically Mass Effect's lore is based on element zero for everything from biotic abilities to shields to Mass Effect Relays. What is the scientific backing of the Scourge?
7. How do they rescue the quarians? Thanks to the book we know what happened to the Quarian ark, but presumably DLC would have had you actually rescue the ark somehow.
8. I'm probably forgetting something.
That's my stream of consciousness of Mass Effect Andromeda at this point in time. I enjoyed it, not in contention for best game of all time like Mass Effect 2 (or 3 if the ending hadn't been so awful), but still fun. I have other thoughts but I've written enough.
no subject
Date: 2019-05-30 11:51 pm (UTC)Leadership should have acted. I guarantee that QA found all the items you're talking about. But someone went, "Oh, that's not a priority."
Game Devs are always bitter when they read forum complaints. QA are always vindicated.
no subject
Date: 2019-05-31 04:22 am (UTC)Yeah I figured but wasn't sure. Also I don't have experience with supporting so many systems at once, PS4, Xbox One, and PC, so I'm not familiar with how often a bug is limited to one system vs multiple systems. Though they're on the same Frostbine engine so I'd think most bugs would be present on all systems. It was way too easy in Andromeda to hit a crash until like version 1.04 or so, they had to have known that was there and someone stupid didn't ever play the game or believe his teams.
My previous project spent five years in development and then management just HAD to release it. The developers said it wasn't ready, the test team said it wasn't ready, our immediate leadership said it wasn't ready and was overruled because higher leadership had to have a "win" in 2011. "win" being make the target date of sometime in 2011, and it was released in December. It was disappointing cause you knew the users were disappointed with it and it got a lot of flak, when we just needed like six more months to put some polish on it. Five years development, give me six months or even just three months more isn't asking too much. Especially with a dev team that's proven that they can get things permanently fixed fast (vs a team that breaks software as they fix it) and a test team that's proven that they can find both the obvious bugs and the hard-to-get-to bugs.
With Andromeda it's a little weird cause I read somewhere that EA was willing to let the release date slip, and Bioware said no and released anyway. That seems unlikely to me given the two companies' reputations. If true, it makes me question what was going on. I hope whoever made the call to release before it was ready lost their job, they lost a ton of sales due to those bugs getting in the wild, and Bioware patched that game to be working well within a few months.
no subject
Date: 2019-05-31 02:27 pm (UTC)Unfortunately, that need for a "win" sounds like investor pressure-- those SOBs really need to be better about their long game.