The 900-page backstory to Neal Stephenson’s GURPS campaign? Naturally. Imagine you didn’t even get a bunch of people selected for mastery of their subject matter, but just whoever was willing to go. Then coop them up for years. They’ll be wearing eachother’s skin.
In the old Mass Effect games a journey between solar systems often involved a series of jumps to points in between. That was because of the network of Mass Effect relays. Now that there’s no relay network, why the hell are we hopscotching around the map still?
As you’ll recall, in ME 1-3, we were hopping around the galaxy, but we were also scooting around the clusters at a much more leisurely FTL speed. You’d hit the relay to the Artemis Tau cluster, and from there, you’d cruise around Athens, Knossos, Sparta, and Macedon under your own power.
In the Andromeda galaxy, all of the gameplay takes places in the improbably well-populated Helius cluster. There’s even a comment in the codex somewhere about how the Tempest’s drive is designed especially for fuel efficiency so we can do extended scooting (so we don’t have to stop at fuel depots any more often than we have to use the bathroom in the game).
I’m not sure that explains it. The way I understood it, and made sense of it, is that each mass effect relay was linked to a limited number of other relays. Those relays were placed around stars, and a number of those stars were conveniently parts of clusters of useful solar systems which you could reach by non-relay FTL technology from the system with the relay. The relay system made sense of not actually going directly from one system or cluster to another. The indirect routes taken now make no sense if there is no system of relays. You could make sense of it by saying that you need to cruise by systems to refuel or discharge your eezo core, but most of these systems unlike the ones with mass effect relays would not have established places to refuel and restock. That’s a good reason to make the ship more fuel efficient, but that does mean even less reason not to take as direct a path to your target as possible.
But, yeah, in the Milky Way you generally didn’t get more than four useful solar systems in a cluster. This one had seven according to magic Geth intergalactic NowCast technology. I haven’t finished, but it looks like that’s going to turn out to be the result of Remnant technology that The Scourge somehow interfered with.
Mind you, at some point I had a different idea of the timeline whereby the Remnant tech was installed sometime after the cluster was scanned from back in the Milky Way. Now I think it goes something like this:
-600 years - Andromeda is scanned from back in the Milky Way
-300 years - The Scourge occurs. The Kett invade sometime after that.
0 The Initiative shows up, The Scourge fucks shit up
0-1.166 - An insane amount of shit happens in about 400 days
1.166 The Hyperion shows up
Mind you, it’s not clear how much time we’re supposed to assume is passing during the game, but it’s arguably an insane amount of shit being done not just in a short time, but by mostly by the crew of one ship. But that’s kind of how video games work.
Oops. I misunderstood your question, as I interpreted “hopscotching” to be just a flavorful term for moving, but now I realize you meant the lines on the hud that trace an indirect path from relay to relay in ME1-3, and inexplicably do the same in MEA when travelling from system to system in the cluster (which did not occur in ME1-3).
I wrote it off as a mistake that will eventually be patched, but I may be too optimistic.
I agree with your timeline, as I understand things, but I’d add, for clarity, a line at the top: -??? Remnant civilization (probably?) creates several “golden worlds” in Heleus cluster.
For those who’ve finished the game, I have a question.
[spoiler] Was there ever any point (that I missed) where the gender of “your” Shepard, that you get to specify when creating your MEA character, had any relevance? I did get 2 or 3 conversations with people about Shepard, but noted that there were no gendered references to Shepard.
I was kinda hoping we’d get a nice message from Meer/Hale passing the torch in some way. [/spoiler]
I love how I go to scan a planet and Suvi reports an “anomoly on sensors” and it turns out the anomaly is some copper. You know what would be an anomaly on a random planet? No copper.
There’s some neat funny things in the various computer terminals and datapads for anyone who’s bothered to find them too - including references to badly-phrased eBay listings, a 3D printer that’s malfunctioned and is filling someone’s lab with Lego bricks, and Nigerian mail scams.
There’s an annoying bug on Kadara where, every time I fast-travel to a specific forward station, (I think it’s sulfur springs) I get the same bit of dialog about “that’s the camp of the raiders who took the satellite.” Despite that the mission has been completed, the raiders are all dead, and so on.
Oh, man. I had to pass that spot like ten times in a row for some stupid reason or other I don’t remember. Drove me nuts. There are a few other places that do that, too, like the bodies you’re supposed to scan on Eos.
I’ve been having a blast playing both the campaign and multiplayer. In single-player, I’ve been researching my uber build for face-rolling insanity. It’s kinda hard to know what’s good, this early on. Timelord Soldier isn’t an option in Andromeda, so it’s not the no-brainer it used to be. Also, I’m used to playing games that are at least a year old when there’s already pretty much a consensus on what’s the most OP.
In multiplayer, I ranked up a human female and a turian soldier both to lvl 20, rank X. It was frustrating, what with the charger still being my best gun, and my skills being mediocre. I was always ranked 3 or 4 out of 4. It seemed like even crappy asari adepts less than half my level were consistently doing better damage than I.
Then I thought, hey! I can be a crappy asari adept! I’ll be the crappiest asari adept in the whole damn game! So, now, even though I miss my biotic attacks at least 50% of the time, on top of frequently firing just after someone else has just killed them, I’m actually doing really well. I just hit level 20 (rank IV), and I’ve consistently come in 2nd or 3rd, with a few 1st place runs.
Another annoyance, although it’s likely to be hardware-specific to me, is that my PS4 keeps having trouble reading the disc. I don’t know if I got a somewhat dodgy pressing, or if the drive in my PS4 is failing, or if this is a more universal problem. I can hear the drive working hard to try to access the disc, then failing. The only solution is to reboot the system. It’s really annoying because it means that I can’t reliably leave the game loaded and the system in rest mode when I’m done and instead have to completely close the game instead, which really increases loading time.
Does any one know if what I’m about to describe is a bug or not? I’ve noticed this strange phenomenon only when scanning around remnant vaults, but strange blocks appear on the ground in some spots. You can even jump on them but after turning the scanner off, you fall to the ground.
It’s been driving me bonkers because I figured that maybe they were quest related in some fashion. I’ve scanned each block I’ve found from every angle I can think of, but am getting zilch as far as any sort of functionality.
For all I know, it’s the equivalent of a CD check on PC. I doubt it’s reading much off the disc. Look, I was a PC gamer long before I ever had a console (I’d say about a decade) and I might have bought the game on PC if I could get myself to spend the money to build a new box. So believe me, I have long experience with dealing with all sorts of wacky DRM schemes on the PC side.
Well, is the disc reading negatively impacting your gameplay? Does it happen when loading areas, or randomly?
It just seems weird to me. If it IS a disc check… it just boggles the mind. I haven’t played console games in a long while, but it just seems so unnecessarily archaic. I thought once you installed the game, you could just store the disc somewhere, not that you’d have to manually swap it every time you’re playing music CD’s in your 1999 boombox, nevermind possibly experiencing issue sn game because it’s trying to read stuff off of it while playing.
Until I tried the human vanguard. Turns out that there’s a heck of a lot of aim assist with melee in this game, somewhere between 45 and 90 degrees, it seems. Where as with the adept I had a lot of trouble hitting with my lance, I can reliably melee in this game.
And with the vanguard, weapons are all but pointless - you just want a shotty (or pistol) for the melee modifier. I have frequently topped gold missions in the past couple of days. I wish I had known to start with the vanguard.
And my campaign build is going nicely so far on my insanity run. Only had trouble with a destroyer, but I was able to adapt and take it out a bit more slowly. I haven’t hit an architect yet… that will be challenging.
I came up with the build I’m using pretty much on my own because nothing I saw so far felt quite right, although I did get some tips here and there that I incorporated. Then once I was done with it, I noticed like 3 people had posted videos of essentially the same build over the previous two days.
Soldier profile, using armor with the damage mods (angaran something - can’t be researched but when you pick it up you can start building it), and relying heavily on the adrenaline fusion mod. Skills are: Turbocharge, Charge, and Cloak, and pick up all of the passives from each tree. You can ignore any choices that reduce cooldowns, as the adrenaline mod takes care of that.
I run with a Dahn with the bio-converter mod (the Piranha should work, too, but the Dahn is strong and fires fast with the mod), and I keep an angaran sniper handy.
It’s a fun build - fast-paced and hard to kill. Makes insanity easy except for single bosses, and even those go down fairly quickly with some tactics.
I finally got around to doing the last mission. Overall, I’d say that although I prefer science fiction type RPGs, this one didn’t do the Inquisition thing as well as Inquisition did. I have nothing but my impression to back that up with. Although space is in principle a much bigger scale than a couple of regions of one world, it just didn’t feel like I had accomplished as much. Well, the sequels need room to expand the stakes, of course. But if you scale things up to the interplanetary level and it somehow feels less epic, that suggests there’s just that much less story there.
But, overall, great game. Money well spent. A certain mystery teased in the game seems to be saved for DLC. Since there isn’t the rigid moral choice system, I think I’ll skip replaying as an alternate version of the main character. I didn’t even mess with the system of switching your core class apparently on the fly. I couldn’t find anything I’d rather have than the ability to see targets through cover, particularly since I maintained piercing mods on all my weapons. Well, except I’d rather have a new Pathfinder if I try a different romance option.
[/spoiler]