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Penny Arcade - Comic - Comprehensive
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Comprehensive
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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Yeah this triggered my OCD as well :x
Clearly, this idea drained the last scraps of color from the franchise.
Synthesis ending
I think it was supposed to come out before they played it.
Eh. I've found it to be a perfectly okay game. I definitely like ME2 and 3 better but MEA has been fine. Certainly not disastrous.
It is a perfectly fine game. But perfectly fine games are not marketed and hyped as the successor to a name brand like Mass Effect. EA and Bioware doubled down on the name brand recognition to be able to move more units than they could have with some brand new Science Fiction IP. And that is fine. But if you are going to leverage the cache of an established Franchise, you need to live up to some basic expectations of quality established by that Franchise. Mass Effect Andromeda completely failed on this front.
Anyways, here's my play experience so far:
Hours 1 - 5: Combat is neat. Character design is alright, but why isn't there more viable hair options for my black character? Scars were better in Dragon Age Inquisition too.
Hours 5 - 10: I can't tell if I'm noticing these facial animations more because of the Internet, or if they really are that bad. Oh hey, is that Salarian Prismo from Adventure Time? This EoS Vault is pretty cool, that was a lot of fun. I've got all my party members already except one? Wow. I have so many research points!
Hours 10 - 20: I'm glad I'm on this planet full of aliens, I barely ever notice any bad animation now. Combat is still a blast, but these "Profiles" I can switch on the fly seem pointless... I'm pretty much just sticking to the same abilities. Oh, yeah... crafting and research... hrmm.... I'll do that later. Guess I should return to the Nexus and watch some memories and talk to a bunch of people.
Hours 20 - 30: I have 100% Viability on this new snow planet, and some of these fights were crazy. I'm not sure if the morale dilemma choice made any sense, but... alright, sure, whatever. Let's go back to Eos and mop up there. Oh, neat, things changed here? Cool. I have 100% viability here now but still stuff to do? I should really do research...
Hours 30 - 40: Wow! These new eyeball changes and whatever other tweaks they made with this patch are phenomenal! Oh, cool, Liam wants me to go on a Loyalty mission, I remember this from PAX East. Oh man, that was still a lot of fun, even though I saw a lot of it already. Definitely some of the best writing in the game. Oh, I'm level 30 now? Guess I'll start researching and crafting now finally... I'm not really sure I want to change anything... I'm still wearing the same kind of armor I had since the start of the game, thanks Deluxe Edition DLC. Another one of these big boss fight Remnant things? Ok. Sure. Let's up the difficulty to Hardcore, Normal is a snoozefest now.
I have a lot of other thoughts, that's more or less my experience though. The first 20ish hours of gameplay is filled with a lot of uncertainty about things, mostly because the pacing is so slow and you have all the human animations to deal with, etc. But once you get into the swing of things, it's a solid game.
There's also a lot of stuff that's poorly documented.
And some that's just bizarre.
Like how in a multiplayer lobby, triangle is Inspect Squad, when your cursor is on the main menu on the right.
But if you cursor over to the player slots it becomes Vote Kick Player.
What I DO care about, and what sinks Andromeda for me, is the extremely regrettable writing. I don't think I can be nicer than that. When BioWare gets the story and characters wrong in a Mass Effect game, that's a real blow. I went back and played through ME1 and 2 to see if it was just my nostalgia holding Andromeda to an impossible standard, but no. The writing in this game is just bad. : (
This is basically what Jerry says on the podcasts. They poke fun at the graphics complaints, but he says he mostly doesn't notice or care. But he definitely cares about the writing. In the last podcast I listened to, he talked about how he was seeing the matrix code behind the character interactions/dialog, because it just failed to be convincing as a thing that was actually happening.