The Hammerhead was awful! I used to quite like the Mako but the Nomad is really tough. If it had a gun it would be good for taking out the enemy camps rather than getting out to fight every single time, but it's a minor quibble.
Just took down my first Remnant architect. Just when you thought the game couldn't get any more Inquisition-y...
Had a quick run through with the hi-def package in. Nice, but has its issues with amd processors So far, I haven't got out to fight (it's been in hazard areas) so I've just been running everyone over.
Interesting the original Mass Effect doesn't support 1920x1080 screens. BUT if you use the configuration tool in the main launch menu it seems to work from there. How odd?
Great. My game is stuck on a black loading screen but it won't actually start up again. I can hear sounds, music, and occasionally my squad's voices, but I can't do anything. I can't even load the main menu to start my last save. Any time I've tried restarting the Xbox One or taking the game disk out, I just keep coming back to the same black screen. That's just over 40 hours then. EDIT: I'm back in after half an hour of messing around. The game gave me the same black screen again a couple of hours later, so I'm just avoiding that particular side quest completely now. I've also found enemies keep spawning in mid-air, and I've suddenly noticed a few more glitches here and there after the two bad ones. I'm on Kadara.
Possibly. I've been doing side missions on that planet today and it's been quite glitchy, but luckily nothing as big as I had before. I was paranoid I was going to lose my save game. All the missions before that there had hardly been anything. Oh the Tempest lags a bit as well now I think about it. Doors not opening as quickly as they should, or even being open before I even get to it. Nothing horrible, just a bit odd. How long is this game supposed to be? I'm slowly reaching the point where I could play the first 2 games in the time it's taking me to do Andromeda.
The original Mass Effect is my favorite, and Mass Effect 2's de-RPGing and railroading never sat well with me, even if it's probably go the objectively best gameplay of the series. So when Andromeda started, I thought it was well poised to become my second-favorite game of the series - the storytelling and scope of the first combined with the shooting improvements of the second. But the more I play, the lower my estimation of it gets. It's not the mediocre animation (though it's not as bad as everybody says). It's not the writing. It's the poor arena design (this is a cover shooter, where's my cover?), the bugs (I'm out of combat and not on a priority mission, why can't I save?), and the stupid encounter design (Dragon Age II's enemies teleporting in was a bug, not a feature, guys...)
OK, I caved and took the plunge. In short: it's nowhere near as bad as half the internet claims. That said I think my primary criticism is that the game is very inconsistent. That's across the board, from writing, to technical performance, to voice acting and yes, to the procedural cut-scene animations. Some of it's fantastic, but then some of it is fecking awful and I think that contrast in the real reason it's been so noticeable. To illustrate the point, take a look at the facial animations on Bethesda's games. They're pretty stiff and mediocre right? Not terrible; they do the job but still, they ain't fooling nobody. And yet none of this got flagged up in either 'Skyrim' or 'Fallout 4' as damming evidence of shoddy game design. It's just an accepted quirk of those games, which is acceptable because it's consistently stilted. With MEA it goes from the carefully keyframed and nuanced animation of Peebee's introduction scene, to the awkward procedurally generated animation of a rando NPC with the starey eyes, expressionless face, ramrod stiff neck and lipsync that has way more "lip" than "sync". The performance issues are bugging me as, while I have a middling gaming PC by current standards (because I'm not about to spend a grand on a sodding graphics card every few years) and yet I was able to get much better visual results on higher settings on DAI for a minor performance trade-off. Here, it's stuttering and lagging even on low with most of the post-processing switched off and it only gets worse the longer I play. Also: the character creator is almost heartbreakingly restrictive. My Ryder just doesn't feel unique. The baffling part is that the CC for DAI was fantastic. I'm on the fourth planet now (not counting the prologue) and I'm starting to notice some quest bugs, so I think I'm going to leave it for a while and wait for the patch they've been promising. Don't want a repeat of previous Bioware games where I was forced to replay 20+ hours. It's not really a cover shooter anymore though, at least not in the "corridor full of suspiciously convenient chest high walls" sense. It takes a bit a getting used to (MP is good practice for this BTW) but it pays to learn to use the jump, dash, hover and ground smash functions in combat. Cover is mostly for reloading or dealing with overwhelming firepower.
I'm playing on the second-highest difficulty, so everything is overwhelming firepower. (I actually started off on Insanity - my last run of ME1, as well as my ME2 and ME3 runs, were all on Insanity - but gave up before leaving Habitat 7.)
I do notice it is seemingly becoming less stable the further into the game I get. I'm on an Xbox One S.
^Same. Even on the Tempest which seems a bit weird, no? Incidentally, is anyone else having a hard time becoming attached to the non-squadmate NPCs? The game seems to want me to be best mates with Gil, but I'm just not feeling it. Suvi seems a bit undercooked as well. As for the squadmates themselves: I'm already pretty much sick of Liam. It's like they crossbread Kaiden's histrionic fussing with Jacob's smarmy arrogance. I have no idea what that bit of business with him and Jaal was supposed to be about. Cora feels like Ash-lite, which is odd since Ash was fairly "lite" to begin with. That said I am digging Vetra and Peebee. Drack too, but then Krogan are always fun. I suspect part of the problem is that between all the previous Bioware games, they've come up with so many distinctive characters that they've about exhausted most major archetypes and one can't help see the new cast as a pale imitate of one or more of the others. Yeah I'm just playing it on normal for the first go-round. In the past I've found the higher difficulties only make the enemies more bullet spongy, which I find more tedious and frustrating than challenging. At least until I have a ridiculously levelled up & geared character that makes normal combat trivial.
I like Gil but otherwise I agree. Some of those supposedly profound moments get lost as you have no idea what the hell is supposed to be happening. The whole Liam/Jaal thing is utterly meaningless. Cora should be interesting as your rival but she does nothing. The rest are fine but then the missions get very repetitive. Hard to show interest when nothing really changes.
Yeah the thing with Cora was so weird in that your rivalry with her lasted exactly one sentence and then it was all fine. Indeed, that whole part of the prologue felt like they were furiously rushing through it as they realised people would have been playing for several hours at this point and still hadn't gotten a ship. I feel like it could have done with a little more room to breath given what happened. To be clear though: I don't dislike Gil per see, he's just sort of 'there'. I can't shake the feeling that it's like running into someone who seems to know you but you're totally drawing a blank, but are going along with the conversation anyway out of politeness despite having no clue where they're coming from. With Gil I think I'm at the point where they're about to invite themselves over for dinner and I'm deciding whether I should fake a stroke or just leg it and hope for the best. Getting a similar vibe from Suvi, which is slightly compounded by the fact her character model looks a bit off-putting. Maybe the issue is that the developers are trying to cram into one game all the bonding and character investment we had with the previous cast while forgetting that was grown over the course of three games. It's easy to forget that in ME1, most of the NPCs were fairly two dimensional and it wasn't until ME2 that most of them came into their own. Maybe it's that presumption that's bugging me. DAI handled this better as they managed to craft several memorable new characters, mostly by not trying to force you to feel a certain way about them. The only weak link there was Vivienne, though that wasn't a fault in the conception or execution so much as she was simply under-utilised. The exact opposite problem really.
Loving this game. So I've got this fusion mod that recharges all my powers every time I kill someone. I've got a tactical cloak, and a Black Widow V. And I'm dropping raiders whole platoons at a time: headshot, cloak, jink, scope, headshot, cloak, jink, scope, headshot, cloak, jink, scope... One got a little bit too close so I lit him on fire and then cut him in half with an asari sword. And I got mad at myself thinking "This is both way too easy and way too fun. Shouldn't I be using assault rifles like literally everyone else in the galaxy?" So I made myself a fancy Avenger V with four mod slots and augmentations and took it pirate hunting. Emptied a full clip into the first guy I saw (Kett annointed). And the fucker just stood there and laughed. Like I was tickling him or something. Emptied my entire thermal clip and all of my spare rounds and it just barely got through his shields. Assault rifles are rubbish. M-98 Widow: Because having to shoot someone more than once is just plain silly! Black Widow: "Nice shields! Be a shame if something happened to them!" Also: Liam is pretty much the most annoying character in Mass Effect history. I tried bringing him to Kadara, and all of his crosstalk dialog is just him being a whiny bitch and Vetra telling him to go suck it.
So I'm really, really bored of jumping around scanning for glyphs and solving silly sudoku style puzzles. As well as that, the last vault on Elaaden was a doozy. I can see why I really don't want to do the other scanning side-missions that I have. The main story is getting really interesting though.
The little mining minigame they added is awful. "This is a mining zone, drive around really slowly until you're over a really good spot!"
OK, so I decided to hold off on the SP until the next patch because I noticed a steadily declining rate of performance and and increasing number of side-quest bugs...and now the MP is bugging out too. About 1/4 of the matches end in a CTD (once at 5 secs before extraction!) and just recently, the audio just goes silent. Also noticed some weirdness with the APEX strike team thing. This is probably the most bugs I've ever encountered in a Bioware game at launch and that's saying something! Which is really annoying since under all of that is a really good game trying to get out. It's an Avenger...that's the entry level assault rifle so of course it's rubbish, even upgraded. Also helps if you put points into the relevant combat skill. Makes them *way* more effective. You do know you can just bypass the sudoku lock things, right? You just need a Remnant core thingy and you usualyl get one of those in almost every high level container. I've accuminated like six of them so far but haven't bothered using one yet. Personally I like a little puzzle solving. Adds a little variety to the gameplay. I tend to just leave it running as a drive around normally, and if I happen across a spike, I'll fish around for a bit until it peaks. Methodically trying to scour the area seems a bit pointless since I've yet to run into a situation that I desperately need a certain mineral. But then I've learned from experience to hold off on crafting until the current gear starts to noticeably dip in effectiveness. Also helps that I dismantle most of the loot I pick up rather than sell it. So far I get way more cash from the sale of junk than I know what to do with anyway.