It’s not “some copper”, it’s a huge deposit. So big that it splotches a large portion of the planet’s surface, visible from orbit. Imagine that, say, Iceland was entirely covered in copper. That’d be an anomaly!
Kind of like the storm that forms the big red spot on Jupiter, that would probably count as an anomaly in ME:A.
Weirder is “a river” or “a mountain” though I assume those are either exceptionally large or unusual on that planet, like a mountain on an otherwise smooth surface or a river on a dry planet.
See, what bugged me about that is that the deposit is so huge as to be visible from space, yet when you actually mine it you get an amount of the mineral that’s the same as the amount you get when driving around in the Nomad.
Another patch dropped today. Lots of stuff for both SP and MP. Apparently the glitched quests (Nomad shields, etc) are now able to be completed, a new outfit and weapon were added, and many little fixes. Multiplayer people seem to be happy with the balance changes - powers and combos now have some real oomph to them.
Yeah, almost everything in this patch (and the previous) should have been in at launch, but, well, at least it’s here now.
The game is also 33% off on Origin. Trying to decide whether I should try it. I’ve been running the Apex app and maxed out the rewards so could collect those. Heh.
I tried the demo. Wasn’t impressed with some design decisions like menus and lack of a quick save. Or no saves during main missions.
There’s a workaround to be able to save during a main mission. Once you get past the prologue, you start getting side quests in your journal. If you need to save during a mission, you can just switch your quest marker to a side quest and the game will let you save.
Doesn’t always work, though. You can’t save in vaults, and there are probably story missions where you also can’t save, I’m not sure. But the autosaves are pretty frequent.
Frequent autosaves help me not miss having a quicksave as much, although it’s still frustrating needing to go to the menu if I want to save before conversations to try out various options.
Anyone else catch the news that the Mass Effect series is on hiatus for a while?
Low reviews and a lack of excitement over the game is being blamed. It’s not completely cancelled yet, but I don’t have too high of hopes for it…which is really sad IMO
Yeah, but I must say that I am pretty unimpressed with the articles and comments I’ve seen discussing the hiatus. I suppose it’s pretty unrealistic to expect hard-hitting investigative journalism, but I’m going to hold off buying into any particular speculations at this point.
That said, and as much as I’ve been enjoying the game, Andromeda is certainly not what it should have been. I’ve seen all sorts of speculations as to how EA/Bioware screwed the pooch in development - again, I don’t buy into any particular narrative there as to the hows and wherefores, but the game just does not live up to what I’ve come to expect from Bioware’s Mass Effect.
For me the biggest disappointment has been the bugs. More than once I’ve had to delay finishing a mission until the next hot fix. Right now if I try to even approach the place to do a Kadara mission it locks up the whole game and it’s a known bug being addressed soon. I just completed a mission I had to wait since release to do and finally did it last week.
Which is kind of why I’m confused over the fact that “Bad reviews” were one of the reasons for the hiatus. From everything I’ve read from professional sites, and especially from the average everydays, is that the game isn’t exactly what people wanted, but that game is still fun to play and isn’t THAT bad. So I can’t see why it’s soooo bad that Bioware is tanking it.
Whether or not EA/Bioware waits for a bit, any future work on ME definitely needs some calibrations. Otherwise we might just look around at what’s become of the franchise and say, “Damn, what happened here.”
I’m a bit surprised that they won’t be working on DLC. I think a couple of good quality DLCs could go a long way (such as how Trespasser did a great job of making up for Inquisition’s anticlimatic ending). On the other hand, maybe they realized they didn’t have any killer ideas at the moment and it’d be better to let it lie for a bit. Mass Effect as a property is still too valuable to simply give up, even with the backlash Andromeda got. Just… maybe next time, don’t put your C-team on it?
(I really would like if they go back to the drawing board, and the eventual sequel to Andromeda is much less open-world and more action-shooter)
Open world wasn’t the problem… the boring spaces just provider further kindle for the fire.
Give me that sweet, sweet narrative agency back again. Good writing, for pity’s sake. Interesting, believable characters, I beg you! A more nuanced and engaging plot that doesn’t devolve into a by the numbers summer action flick in the first 5 minutes of the game. Open world? Ok! But stop it with the boring busy work, points of interest should be limited to points wherein interesting stuff is actually happening.
And yeah, maybe a little more polish.
Maybe experiment with ship navigation/combat? Not necessary, but might be something innovative and new for the franchise.
Does this mean they aren’t going to put out any DLC? Because I was ready to buy any non-cosmetic DLC they were going to pump out. There was a strong hint that we would be given a chance to rescue the Quarian/Hanar/Drell arc. There was the unexplained rabbit trail about the mysterious benefactors of the project and the murder of of Jian Garson.
Just finished the game last night. Overall, I’d call it satisfying, but not on the level of the previous games. The combat was fun enough, but it suffered from the same flaw a lot of RPGs have these days; it’s too hard at the beginning and too easy later on. The jump-jets were a fun addition, but the jumping puzzles in the vaults just grated on me. The crafting system was a trainwreck, and ultimately I found that out of the dozens of craftable items, the only ones I really needed were a Black Widow, a Disciple shotgun, a PAW assault rifle, an asari sword, and the latest tier of Maverick armor. The whole “send an NPC squad to do a thing and maybe get some junk in return” system seemed like a time-sink with little reward for your effort, and I stopped bothering with it altogether after a while. I didn’t bother with the consumables at all and didn’t take any of the skills that required power cells, and I never really found that which party members I took with me mattered for anything other than dialogue purposes. (We’re dealing with asari? Take Cora. Fighting kett? Take Jaal. Remnant? Peebee. Anything that involves killing things and making them bleed? Take Drack.)
I liked the squad and the Tempest crew, but a lot of the characters were just too one-dimensional - Tann, for example, is a preening bureaucrat in over his head, and that’s all he is. The Archon is just a cackling supervillain who’s far less interesting as a character than Saren or Harbinger were. Your sibling is barely established as a character before they get turned into a damsel in distress (which I assume is true of either gender - I played as a female, and Scott Ryder was whining about how he didn’t have any combat experience and screaming in agony while tied to the train tracks/torture chair). I found myself groaning over every single NPC constantly prostrating themselves before “the Pathfinder” as if merely having the title makes them the only person in the entire cluster who can do anything meaningful or make any kind of substantial decision regardless of any actual expertise or experience in the matter at hand.
The ending of the main questline felt kind of abrupt and left way too many unanswered questions. By the end of ME1, by contrast, we know what the Reapers are, why there’ve been so many mass extinctions, what happened to the Protheans, what the Citadel is and what the Keepers are, etc. Here, the game ends and we know almost nothing. What happened to the Jaardan? Why did they engineer the angara and build the vaults? What purpose was the Scourge created for? Who killed Jien Garson? Who was the Benefactor? What happened to the Milky Way after 2186? It’s almost as if they were so certain they’d be making a sequel that they didn’t bother to tie any of the threads together.
Overall, I enjoyed it, but it definitely lacks the replayability factor of the previous games. I only recall a few points in the game where I had to make a significant decision, and I don’t think any of them actually had an impact on the rest of the game. Does it make a difference if you choose Sloane over Reyes, or make the Eos outpost military instead of scientific, or save the salarians on the flagship instead of the krogan? It didn’t feel to me like it did.
I only want to replay it to see how many NPCs I can have sex with. But yeah, the crafting system was terrible especially since there was no way to tell the difference between items.
This is the main reason the series is dead to me… and well, now dead to everyone for the foreseeable future I guess. Narrative agency is dead, Jim.
It’s just another action adventure game with RPG trappings, obtuse crafting, large, boring empty MMO areas, and writing that fluctuates from ok to terrible.
What kept you playing through? I couldn’t manage finishing the second planet.
Sorry, missed edit window. I do own the game and I have an EA vault account too, so I thought I’d get to it at some point. I do like the combat. I also hoped maybe DLC would add some cool stuff, but we likely won’t be seeing DLC for this game either now.
