So you’d skip over the first N loot chests until you found one with Easy difficulty? And then you’d either lose out on what they contained or you’d waste time going back to get the ones you skipped?
To be fair, there are a zillion loot chests in the game and losing a few has no impact in the grand scheme of things. But it just seems like such an obvious bug should have come up in playtesting.
Essentially, yes. But over the years I’ve played the game so many times I have the loot crate map more or less memorized.
So, in practice, whenever I’d resume from a prior save, I would know that the crates in this room are Average and Hard, but there’s one in the next room that’s Easy, so I’d go do that first and then come back. Or, alternatively, when I’m getting ready to quit for the night, if I’m looking at an Easy crate but I know there’s a gap before the next one, I just save right there, so decrypting it is the first thing I’m doing when I resume.
These are the habits you develop when you know a game really, really, really well. In addition, I had also perfected the rapid button sequence on the inventory screen that “breaks” the armor limitation and allows heavy sets to be assigned to non-soldier classes. And on Paragon playthroughs, I usually took advantage of the “search the monkey” morality-point glitch during the “Lost Module” mission. Just to name a few.
It looks crazy and obsessive from the outside, but experienced gamers know whereof I speak.
ISWYDT.
The bouncy Mako never bothered me, actually I somewhat liked it. It moved like you’d expect a vehicle to move on a place like the Moon where gravity is very low. It was a feature, not a bug, and reinforced the fact that I was in OUTER SPAAAAACE!
There’s actually a bit of random chatter in Mass Effect 3 where when you walk onto the hangar deck Vega and Cortez argue about which is better, the Mako or the Hammerhead, and the Mako’s wonky handling characteristics are referenced and given a technobabble explanation.
Mass Effect 2 still has the best video game line ever:
This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight! Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class Dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb. That is three times the yield of the city buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means: Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space!
When you consider why Mass Effect: Andromeda failed whereas the original ME series is so beloved you realize it is in the writing. Don’t get me wrong, Andromeda had a lot wrong with it apart from writing but what we saw was a focus on the pew pew parts (which actually were pretty good) and only a cursory effort at a story.
I see this a lot in games the past few years. Game companies figure writing is easy, why pay for it? We all learned to write in kindergarten. No need for expensive writers and a lot of time or effort there.
And it shows. The thing is, we love ME for the story. No one plays ME because it is a great shooter.
Repeatedly, we see games with an excellent story (good writing) being embraced and loved by gamers (Last of Us, Red Dead Redemption, Bioshock, Deus Ex, Mass Effect, Witcher…and many more). But nope…the place to go cheap is on the writers (so EA invariably seems to think).
(Don’t get me wrong, not every game needs great writers. When playing Doom I am not wishing they spent more money on writing a script.)
Personally, my biggest complaints about ME: Andromeda were that the combat was repetitive, and you were encouraged to invest in a dozen different active abilities but you could only use 2 or 3 of them in any given fight.
I didn’t think the story was any worse than usual (keeping in mind that it had to introduce a bunch of new characters), except that the Remnant and Kett seemed kind of derivative of the Geth and Collectors. Mass Effect 2 is the entry in the series for which I have the most nitpicks about the story.
Confirmed: the ability to pause the game, move the camera around, and take pictures will be a feature in all three of the remastered titles.
Yeah, Andromeda’s biggest downfall was it was chock-full of fetch quests and random “scan and/or collect” this thing. I’m not a completionist by any means, but I always do side quests because I love being OP and I felt it was very tedious.
Combat was awesome though. That flamethrower was just devastating…
Countdown: two weeks from yesterday! (fidget) (fidget)
Can this game be pre-installed before the release date so I can play it the Friday it comes out? I have heard Steam has done this before. Is this a thing? What date does “pre-install” become available?
I have seen some rumors that say you can but I cannot find anything official. The scuttlebutt is a pre-download starting on May 12 (on Steam…dunno about Origin).
Again…this is only rumor so don’t hold me to that.
The Day One patch for PlayStation has already been staged (link below). You could read this as implying they’re getting all the download packages ready well in advance. Not definitive, but suggestive.
It’s $51 on Green Man Gaming. I’m tempted to grab it at that price and hope for the best. I really hope to pre-load it mid-next-week.
Note: I care because I have a small work break that Friday that would allow me to play it for 3-4 hours. Love to go “all in” when I start a new game. (Also, it appears to be 120GB +11GB patch). That’s a lot of time for me.
I just bought it on Origin and you can pre-load starting May 12 (see pic below…that is the verification screen I just got). I would expect you could on Steam too but not sure.
Really no clue about consoles.
I may be wrong, but I think Steam is just going to slap it over to my Origin account anyway. I think steam warns of the DRM and that “origin must be running” to work.
In the past that is how I have experienced games working on Steam that are from EA. That is why I got it on Origin directly. Having Steam fire up another client just bugs me. YMMV
EA has put out a custom cover art creator. You pick your companions and location and it will generate box cover art/wallpaper based on your choices. Kinda cool: