If you consider the Baldur’s Gate games as a whole, then you can feel like your particular approach to the problems of the world made a difference. But what about between games one and two? Dragon Age 2 had me fixing Avelline’s career just before she had to throw it away. I was really shocked to find out my choices didn’t matter within a single game. But when we got to Inquisition, the thing that really affected my game was that I never bought the DLC where new main bad guy was previously introduced. The fact that King Guy-from-Crossing-Jordan was still alive was nice to see, but I don’t doubt that some substitute would have moved the plot along at the same point if he hadn’t been around. If you end a game with that continues on to a sequel, whatever wide-open choices you previously had have to be reigned in and simplified in the sequel. How things turn out by the time you get to the final game of a series can afford to be a lot more wide-open.
Aside from my general skepticism about how real choice ever was in these games, this is an area where willing suspension of disbelief applies. In Fallout 4, it’s quickly obvious that having a rigidly enforced four dialogue options constrains the possibilities and make it difficult to pretend you have meaningful choices. And then slightly less quickly you notice that half to three-quarters of the choices are padding out what are at most two options. I can believe Andromeda fucked it up so that you don’t have to wait for hindsight to feel you’ve been nose-ringed, because I’ve seen it happen. And I’ve seen BioWare fuck up exactly what they’re supposed to be good at. So, I may be back in a couple days to echo these very same complaints. But for now I suspect I’ll be satisfied with the pretense that the dialogue choices are more than window dressing.
Remind me, besides deciding who to fuck, how much choice was there in ME2? Because I can’t really remember there being any real dilemmas, at least not any with any long-term consequences beyond the odd email. Any decision you had was basically right/wrong - if you made the right choices, all your teammates survived, and if you didn’t, they didn’t. Not much of a moral grey zone there.
And yet, it’s widely considered the best game of the series.
Reddit has a thread tracking many reviews of ME:A.
The overall impression is one of meh. It has its good points like combat but is considered badly flawed in enough other ways to merit middling ratings.
But did the choices actually make a difference? I don’t think so. Besides, they were almost all clear moral choices with one right answer. Of course you should urge Miranda to meet her sister. Of course you shouldn’t let Garrus shoot the traitor, or Jack kill her classmate. They weren’t what I’d call dilemmas - although doing the right thing feels good, which was, I think, the whole point.
Honestly, the color coded choices didn’t bother me that much - they were a middling idea, well executed. What I didn’t like about the ending was how casually they killed off everyone in the Citadel: Commander Bailey, Thane’s kid, the PTSD Asari, that poor orphan girl from the docks, all dead. Pretty callous for such an empathetic game.
Not all of the choices in the loyalty missions were to black-and-white easy, especially if you didn’t play the game from 1 and import your character.
Choosing to save the people in the burning refinery, causing Vido to get away often made Zaeed unloyal. This is easily fixed by having a high renegade/paragon score, but since you get him so early in the game it’s hard to have those be high enough unless you imported.
After Jack’s mission, if you don’t have a high enough P/R score, you have to choose between Jack and Miranda which one becomes disloyal. IIRC it’s basically impossible to do that unless you save that mission til the end AND have an imported character
“Doing the right thing” is technically telling on Tali’s dad, or forcing Kasumi to delete the graybox. It’s not the best for the people, but it’s best for business.
Lastly, the biggest decisions you have to make is who to send on what task during the final mission. I remember the very first time I played I sent Mordin in the too-hot air ducts, eventually killing him. I figured he was a doctor, was the keeper of the upgrades and would be apt enough at computers to do the job…I was wrong. Most of that final mission is who you like the best anyway, so it’s easy to pick Thane or Zaeed to lead team blue…those are wrong as well.
So it’s not as obvious as killing Ashley/Kaiden or the Rachni Queen…but there are some pretty big decisions in 2 to be made.
I wasn’t sure whether my purchase of Mass Effect from Amazon was just for an electronic code or for a physical copy. I expected a disc with nothing on it but an autorun that would start downloading the entire game. Well, they sent me a box alright. A box that read “Download Only|No Disc Included”. Three pieces of paper. One is the registration code, one ad for a hardcover book and a mobile app, and one piece of pure fluff welcoming me to the Andromeda Initiative and overleaf thanks from the development team. The box itself looks like a DVD box, but doesn’t even have a clippy sphincter to hold a disk.
I get the message I guess. Stop asking for physical copies, asshole. There is no shortcut to a six-hour download on release day.
Spent some time just now looking at reviews, and “meh” seems to be a good assessment, if not a bit too negative.
The vibe I’m getting is mostly “You’ll love your squadmates, it’s really pretty to look at and the combat is awesome…but the UI sucks balls and it just kinda seems like something is missing.”
I started this whole journey being really excited about the game, to being worried about it, to being excited, to worrying…and now I’m back to the pleasantly excited phase. Knowing how I do video games, I think the game puts enough effort into the things I like about ME (the relationships/people) for me to overlook the things I probably won’t really really notice (repetitive missions).
I bought the physical copy from Amazon (for Xbox One) and received a disk. No install, just an update that took about 30 minutes then I was in and making my character.
I got the Deluxe edition and downloading the extras took maybe a minute.
Yeah, I’ve got the PC version. Figures the conversion to digital would be slower for consoles. But you are still required to have an internet connection, right? It does say the game will be playable at 42%, which is a thing I’ve previously seen on the Battle.net server. I wonder if this assumes that you will be playing only from the beginning, and not from some mid-game save already on your computer.
I wouldn’t have got the patch or the extra goodies if I wasn’t online, but I think it would have run. Actually for some reason it didn’t connect to the Bioware server right away within the game itself, because my first customization wouldn’t upload. But it seemed willing to let me start the game without saving my stuff to the cloud so I suspect it’s optional.
When I got the game sufficiently loaded, they decided my NVidia drivers were not up-to-date enough. Then it turned out that NVidia is no longer in the business of just letting anonymous jerks download their drivers. You have to set up an account with them. But I got the game running. My substandard processor does not seem to be hampering the game at all. When it first started up, it seemed to assume I could handle high settings at my monitor’s maximum resolution. When I restarted the game later, it seemed to have decided I was overworking a hamster on a wheel over here because all the settings mysteriously went down to Suck. I told it to default back to Ultra at max resolution, and my computer proceeded to run the game just fine.
I haven’t gotten to the real exploration yet, and I am having to start from the beginning because I noticed that the face I modified from the default cornrow-hawk female had obnoxious spiky purple eyeliner that was not obvious in the modeling interface.
So far, I haven’t seen much reason to believe my dialogue choices mean much. There is no forced morality anymore, unless this Kirk-on-the-left/Spock-on-the-right thing is being kept track of. I’ve generally been Spock when it’s about my problems and Kirk about other people’s problems. We’ll see how that works out.
I can see why people are complaining about the animation, and the sound, and the acting. I mean, my reaction isn’t so much “bad lip sync” as “wow, Freelancer has not aged well”. But it’s not bothering me very much.
I am incensed that there is not only no Quick Save, there is no save for long stretches. You fucking bastards. You want Mass Effect to become one of those fucking games, with marathon segments that I have to redo from scratch if I want to try something different? Where I have to make decisions in dialogue that you assure me have future consequences but I’m not allowed to save just before I start a conversation? Did I wake up in the former Soviet Republics? Is this to keep me from noticing that nobody responds differently to any of my dialogue options?
I’m wondering if the moral of ME Andromeda, along with Batman Arkham Origins, is to not allow development of a sequel by a subsidiary in Canada, or at least one in Montreal. Throw in Borderlands The Pre-sequel and it expands to not letting it happen anywhere. (Borderlands was developed by 2K Australia.)
I’ve decided to reboot and start playing the original Mass Effect, 2 and 3 before coming back to this. If they haven’t patched it substantially by then, I’ll probably put it on the back burner and check in on it around Christmas. Hoping for a CDPR enchanced edition treatment.
I mean, don’t get me wrong - it’s not Batman: Arkham Knight. It’s not broken. But it’s failing its’ potential.
Been playing a bit so far, finished up the main quest for the first planet (Eos). Really reminds me a LOT of Dragon Age: Inquisition so far… the central story is a bit lacking, it’s a lot more about going out and exploring everything.
The animations are pretty lackluster, though. Lots of times when speaking to NPCs they’ll just stand there stiffly, and then twitch slightly at the end of the conversation. And there’s a lot of potato faces.
In the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, I discovered the joy of the Biotic Slam with the Asari Vanguard. The nice thing about the Asari was that her power melee was a 360 degree biotic blast, so I could mitigate the insanity of tear-assing across the battlefield into a cluster of enemies by immediately slapping everybody a second time (and the wide dispersal helped with how lousy I was at aiming heavy melee). Then if I got lucky I could immediately zip across the battlefield to slam somebody less crowded. When my luck ran out, I often wished I could cloak my way out of there.
I think Andromeda may make this dream a reality. I have been playing as an infiltrator, but it appears that nothing is stopping me from putting points into Nova, which is similar to the 360 degree attack, until I earn my way into putting points into charge. And the cloak seems to be more effective at mitigating aggro in this game. Now, apparently Slam is designed to combo with Incinerate, so this isn’t really a takka-max build. But I only get three slots and I’d rather be able to switch between my two favorite combat modes - slamming and sniping - than be doing optimal damage. And I like being able to cloak if I have other things to accomplish in the battlefield besides beating asses. Seems like a real sweet spot for my play style.
The visuals are pretty. The combat is good if you can accept that it’s more FPS than RPG compared to the original trilogy. (Like how DA2 was more of an action game to DA:O’s strategy play).
The animation is rough, and the facial expressions make me wince on occasion as bad as they are but I’m liking the game. It’s not as bad as many of the reviews are making it out to be, I think some of the reviewers are really nitpicky.
It is bad because the characters, both design and animation, are not as good as the original ME which is almost 10 years old. I haven’t played enough to know if it is a good game or not yet, but I’m very curious to find out how some of these things got passed by QA.
I’m not sure if it’s good or bad, but I do know that this game is much less for me than the previous games. Less RPG and tactical combat in favor of more fast-paced third-person shooter, less well-constructed main story and characters in favor of more open-world exploration… I get why they did these things, and a lot of people will probably like them, but it really takes away from what I enjoyed about Mass Effect. I think I’m about at the point where I’m going to cut bait on putting any more time into this.
