Mass Effect

I kinda joke lately that if you stripped away all the tedious, boring side quests in Mass Effect: Andromeda, you'd be left with just a tedious, boring galaxy map.

I like that when I plan to pick up Andromeda the next day, I have to give myself five minutes to actually be able to start playing. Frequently, what I wind up having to do is - from where I am starting when I load the game - fast travel to the Tempest (load screen), board the Tempest and leave the planet (load scene), go through the galaxy map to another star system where the new side quest or story mission wants me to go (load scene), select the new planet and travel to it (load scene, in which you can skip, like, 5 seconds of it now, wooo!), land on the new planet (load scene), and - if doing a side quest - fast travel to another part of the planet (load screen).

To get from where I'm starting some side missions to where I need to get to, I have to often sit through six different load screens or load scenes!

What I find frustrating about the Tempest is that I actually like that they've done away with elevators and stuff. I was never a fan of how on the Normandy you have to take an increasing number of elevators each game to speak to your squad. The Tempest is open. You can just run to wherever your crew is and talk to them. Great! That's what I wanted them to do by Mass Effect 3!

...but there's really nothing to do on the Tempest, even talking to your crew. Remember how after each story mission, you'd go back to your squad mates and they'd have some new dialogue to exhaust before defaulting back to the original topics? Here, my crew has had no new conversation topics since the very first conversation I had with them! When I talk to them after story missions, they give me, like, one new line of dialogue to see where they're at, and then there's no point in talking to them.

That was such a big part of why people liked Mass Effect, I think. Getting to know your crew.

They'll have something new to say when I first approach them, but not in a conversational manner. I just press Y, they say something new, and then it's back to the same ol' topic options.

Same. Would need to hear it isn't buggy, but I would.

I think part of it is this is that, from my understanding, Andromeda is a totally different creative team, and this is their first game on the Frostbite Engine. (Or, I guess Dragon Age: Inquisition was, but I've heard that there might not have been much cross-over in information shared between the two teams.) So theoretically, if they make another Mass Effect game, it should be less buggy. But that would also extend to a remaster.

BioWare has earned enough credit for me that they don't lose all my support because of one crappy game. But they did take a hit and need to be careful. I'm still hopeful they can turn it around, given that at the time Mass Effect 1 came out, I remember feeling like that game wasn't great. Granted, it at least had a hugely engaging word, and great characters, and was not nearly as glitchy as Andromeda, but still, they did fix many of my major gripes with the first game in the second.

Still very disappointing.

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

So on a whim, I reloaded an old save file from about an hour earlier, went straight to that broken side quest, and it worked perfectly. Stupidly, even though the mission objective said, "Sweep for mines to escape," they didn't actually mean for me to spend any time actually sweeping for mines. Literally the only thing you were supposed to do is get in the Nomad and drive away. THAT'S IT! Fucking assholes...... I guess by virtue of warping to a fast travel station, after spending too much time in the cold sweeping for mines, that broke the mission, I guess.

But what's even more hilarious is...I moved onto the other side quest it gave me during that time, "Clear the Air." You have to go to a few different kett bases and hack a terminal. Incredibly, THIS MISSION IS BUGGED FOR ME AS WELL! I even quickly looked it up online, and I've literally gone to the same places the terminals are supposed to be, and they are literally not there.



FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK THIS GAME.

Yeah. I officially swapped the disc out of my XBox One (replaced it with Dark Souls, just so I can touch up on my "skills" for when I'm done with Horizon Zero Dawn and can return to Dark Souls III). I gave it one more try, and sure enough, I got two bugs in the same play hour. So fuck that.

I feel like I would still be interested in another Mass Effect game of some kind, but probably if more of the original team were involved, and maybe if it were something that either took place in the distant future of the Milky Way (like, what if it was the far, far future and new species had evolved and were taking charge, and they were maybe starting to create new AI machines that could become Reapers, but it had been so long that no one alive actually remembers the Reapers first hand, and maybe that powerful species was ultimately just trying to gain absolute power over the galaxy?), was maybe a prequel of sorts focusing a bit on the First Contact War, or took place at the same time as the events in the original Mass Effect trilogy, but were totally on the side.

But if there's a sequel to Andromeda, and it's the same team, definitely count me out.

I got random insults thrown at me on Twitter from people who love Andromeda, and if anyone liked it, great! Genuinely not trying to tell people that they're wrong for liking it. My experience has been filled with shit like this (the final straw from tonight):

I don't want an open world Mass Effect game, but they can find a happy medium. That first planet you crash on, for example, was totally fine. Still ultimately linear, but felt open. There are a couple different paths, you can explore a few things on the map, and it's all ultimately designed to gently push you towards the next story navi-point. The size of that first planet was nearly perfect to me.

I also didn't want worlds with 5 hours of side quests that span all over the map. What I kind of appreciate about the side quests in the original trilogy is that many of them, you can accomplish on your way to doing the story mission, or you discover the mission by exploring and pop up on your way.

But I do like that they continue the trend of choosing the order in which you do things, sort of. That's what I appreciate about Mass Effect games.

Look, you won't hear me defend many (if any) of the creative decisions of Mass Effect: Andromeda, but the game was not "incomplete." Star Wars: Battlefront was incomplete. Andromeda? It was just a bad game, is all. There's the tech side of it, sure. That's one thing. But on the creative side, they just made decisions that you don't like (and I don't like). They were bad creative decisions, but the game is complete. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. There are a bunch of worlds with a ton of missions to do. The combat isn't really broken. The driving isn't really broken. The menus aren't really broken. (They're all "bad," but they're not broken.)

No, the game isn't incomplete. It's just bad, and has some bugs. (And believe me - I got hit by a bunch of bad bugs, and I would agree it shipped as a broken game, but that's not the same as an incomplete one.)




As a consumer of art and entertainment, that isn't necessarily an unfair position to take. However, you should be aware of what you're buying when you spend your money, if you care that much about it. No one forced you to buy this game on day one. It's not like this is a movie released to theaters and you only have a few weeks to actually see it on the big screen before it's gone from cinemas. And it's not like you as the consumer don't have access to reviews. There were reviews before the game released that indicated the game had many problems and bugs. No one forced you to spend money on the game. Not to mention, unlike seeing a movie in theaters or buying a random song or album on iTunes without listening to the samples first, you actually have the opportunity to return the game. That's an option that was available to you because of the kind of weird nature of the video game industry. You could have traded it in after the first day of playing and realizing the game wasn't going to be to your liking.

Not every piece of art or entertainment from a major studio is going to be great or to your liking. It just can't be. But no studio here, not even the horrible EA, is making you spend $60 on a game right away. If you're really so concerned about making sure you spend good money on a good product, you have it within your power to either check reviews or wait a week or so.

You're not a passive player here, dude.

This does not put the blame on consumers, dude, even if the argument is that they didn't sell enough copies to merit another game. These companies aren't as stupid as we like to make them out to be. They know what a disaster this game has been, and I think they know exactly why this game didn't sell super well, if it didn't hit its target numbers. They aren't "blaming" consumers, but they are noting the fact that the game might not have been enough of a seller to justify rushing into another game. And given that they read the reviews and see the news and all the internet buzz about all the bugs, you can be pretty confident that they recognize that the main problem is they put out a bad game. None of your suggested "fixes" would actually fix the core problems of Andromeda. They really do have to start again from scratch. That means going back to the drawing board, and that means a long development period with a lot more money to invest in it. I would be surprised if they never make another Mass Effect game again, but given that they also have other projects that have been in development for some time now, it's more work and more money than they feel they can put in.

Hey dude, can you please try not to spin out in this forum?