Cyanide

I had this experience yesterday. After wiping twice, I found out it was actually pretty manageable if you come at it purely as a hit-and-run/war of attrition type affair.

You're already overqualified for Naito's four minute strip down to his ring attire, as well as the begging off his opponent routine. Tranquilo, indeed!

Can I lay claim to EVIL's chair spot? I'm also amenable to the black mist role if it's already spoken for.

This is something that has been bothering me, for similar OCD reasons and the fact there are SO MANY GUNS to try. I started out emphasizing sniper rifles as an infiltrator, and now I'm wanting to be able to mix it up more so I re-spec'd with assault rifles and pistols... but am I really going to deprive myself of the joys of shotgun rushing? I probably just need to commit to whatever is most versatile (again, ARs and pistols), and save weapon experimentation for multiplayer. Likewise, you have access to SO MANY POWERS, and it's intimidating to just manage my skill point distribution at this point, let alone actually maximize stuff by swapping them out and selecting appropriate profiles. Again, should probably just commit to something, like two profiles with three powers each, and save the testing for multiplayer. I get what they were going for with the ability to tailor Ryder to your specific play-style, but boy can it be an overwhelming process at times. Also (and now I am just bitching), delving deeper in R&D: I noticed there are level caps on the blueprints that you need to expend research points on in order to acquire the ability to use your resources to craft weapons. At that point... why not just fucking level cap gear, and excise all the tedious crafting bullshit entirely? I'll admit that it's general crafting fatigue in gaming for me, but man would I just like a system where you only had to sell your salvage/resources for credits and be able to buy whatever and mod as necessary. (And, of course, you could probably play the game without crafting one single thing, but the merchant stock is definitely lacking, and necessitates a hell of a lot of leg work to survey your options.)

So, ran into my first particularly nasty set of bugs (and I ain't talking about rachni): Before this, Drack was in his normal location, and a convo with him led to me being teleported to the galley (where he was supposed to be), and his new conversation tree got triggered as I left the room (rather than entering it). And then the doubling. Similar teleporting issue happened with Vetra in the same instance.

Just got through this as my first biggie. Ah, the classic ME Kantian vs utilitarian morality gut punch - how I missed you.

This. There's a point in every ME where you just go "boy, that sure is a lot of sidequests I've accumulated," but the sheer amount of legwork to cross everything off your list in Andromeda is staggering. And it all just keeps piling up. In the realm of other recentish, massive open world games, I put 90ish hours in MGSV, and 100+ in FFXV, and I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up dwarfing both of them (without even factoring in multiplayer).

My biological father wasn't really a part of my life growing up, but as a kid I knew he was tall, traveled a lot, and had red hair. So I gave serious consideration to the possibility that he was The Undertaker, and may have put this forward as fact on more than one occasion to try and earn neighborhood cred.

This is one of my major anxieties in playing a ME game I don't know like the back of my hand for the first time in forever. Everything will go to shit and I'm gonna have to be all "alright, Gil - let's make this thing happen."

Kesh is definitely in the running for my favorite character so far in Andromeda.

IIRC, you're on PS4 too. At the Skills tab, go to the power you want to equip (under Combat or Tech or Biotic) and use Triangle to assign power to one of the three current loadout slots. This took me a long time to figure out last night after going through Skills and Profiles and everything else.

Updated thoughts (now with positivity!): This thing still has the beating heart of Mass Effect well in place. I got on my ship and started meeting squadmates and doing sidequests in the stops along the way for my priority mission and it all feels really right. Sidebar: am I the only one who will always prioritize just about every alien squadmate over your human comrades? By and large the humans have always been the pits for me, especially the button-up Alliance types, with only Miranda/Jack/Kasumi hanging with the extraterrestrials in my original trilogy power ranking. I've met humans before, dammit; give me something new and shiny (and scaly and with tentacles). I'm actually really warming to the new combat system. As others have alluded to, I do miss the charge melee from ME3, but maybe that'll come in with future upgrades. I've always controlled my squad's powers through the original trilogy (and was frustrated to no end when they could still pop up off defensive skills in ME2), but seeing the fluid engagements of my squad in action without all the Power Wheel "pauses" is really something. They also seem to do pretty well for themselves overall. Given the more frenetic combat, I'm really digging the move back to ME1's individual power cooldowns. Good not to have something with a big cooldown period choke off all your other offensive/defensive capabilities for 20+ seconds. When you start off just in the ships and among the bulkheads and whatnot, I was like, boy, this thing could have easily been done last-gen. But once you're out in the open world and moving effortlessly with your jumppack and the Nomad and everything is so massive and beautifully rendered - yeah, this is some next-level shit. Also, I was a few beers in after playing for a few hours last night, and I had this wonderful, dopey moment of realization that almost moved me to tears and maybe reoriented me on the whole game. Basically, I loved the original Milky Way trilogy, and I had to leave that behind in moving to this new Andromeda game, where things are all different and nothing's the way I thought it would be and I thought all this shit would already be set-up and now I have to go and learn all this shit on the fly and... wait... wait... We are all Pathfinders.

From my experience so far, the XP/level ups/skill points come pretty fast and furious once you're in the heart of the game, and I don't see that changing too much given the sheer volume of sidequests I'm acquiring. I spec'd the same way as you (Infiltrator/Scout Sniper type deal), and already I'm pretty diversified across tech and combat. Also, you'll reach a mechanic in a bit that sort of incentivizes having an array of different skills and proficiencies. Welcome to t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶u̶c̶k̶ Andromeda!

On the Nexus you talk to somebody who says that other than the four main arks (human/asari/turian/salarian), the quarians were supposed to be coming along but had some technical issues and were going to be late to the party (and they were supposedly taking along the hanar/drell/maybe elcor/etc.). And I was like, well, fuck, is that a total cop-out for them not to put them in this game at all? And this makes it sound like that is in fact what happens, and goddamn is that shitty.

Yeah, I never played Dragon Age, but I've seen some of the BioWare comments reflecting that a lot of the stuff in ME:A was basically "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"ed from DA:I. So that would make sense as to why it may be jarring to me but already mostly familiar to others!

And now I'm furiously working on headcanon where Maelon has somehow acquired the "uplift" designate yahgs from that base on Sur'Kesh and has snuck them aboard the salarian ark...

My no-shows: Get that a lot of the more recent stuff wouldn't get much love, but I think The Hunt is eventually going to be considered a classic foreign film on the back of a truly visceral and heartbreaking Mads Mikkelsen performance. Was hoping it would sneak in here. Shocked Battle of Algiers didn't show up at all. From the same period, I think both High and Low and The Bad Sleep Well are underrated gems in Kurosawa's body of work.

Redux sure is a prime example of "yeah, that definitely should have been cut." Very surprised at how early it dropped as well. Definitely curious how the rest shakes out now.

Fuck if I want to sound like a Gamergater type, but there is like one unambiguously white skin tone in at best (and setting up my female twin, I couldn't tell if that was supposed to be a white or Asian palette), with like at least a half dozen gradients for medium to dark brown. So, #checkyourprivilege. But no, the whole character creation is a joke; I don't know how you make something demonstrably worse in moving to the next generation of hardware. All the male hair styles across the board are ridiculous, using the same shitty textures they've had since ME1. How the fuck can you not have just a clean buzzcut, instead of some sun-baked patch of incipient hair loss? All the facial hair is absurd - I just want my Tom Hardy stubble, goddammit. No facial feature options aside from just adjusting what your preset face is rocking. And unless I missed something major, apparently you can't change eyebrow color? And it isn't automatically linked to your hair color selection, either? Other major gripes from my couple hours played last night: One of my great loves of the ME series was the power wheel - that beautiful respite from the chaos of conflict that let you stop time, survey the field, and coordinate all your attacks. And evidently that has been sacrificed at the altar of BUT JUMPPACKS and MORE SHOOTBANG. Holy shit I was braced for the worst when I heard crafting being bandied about so much, but they are really just going full bore in recreating ME1's inventory management issues, huh? And somehow jamming it together with the ME3 multiplayer consumables system in the process. Good lord. Lesser issues: The last name conceit worked with Shepard, but the fact that you have a famous father and also a twin along for the ride sure makes the endless barrage of Ryder with no disambiguation just sound silly. I get that with a bunch of voice actors you can't just jam in a bunch of preprogrammed first names like any sports game from the last decade, but the fact that your twin gets referred to by their default first name while you're just "Ryder" does strain credulity. All that said... it's still Mass Effect at the end of the day, and I can't wait to see where it all goes.

The top four title matches and probably Ishii/Yano vs Omega/Fale are gonna get a watch from me. Don't sleep on some of the 4/4 card stuff, either: LIJ defend the trios belts against Tanahashi/Ricochet/Taguchi, and also a weird-ass pairing of Ishii/Beretta taking on Omega/Fale.

NCfOM was my #9, and TWBB was #12, so I definitely bear this out. IIRC, Guild rules had Joel listed as director and Ethan has producer early in their career, until they had X amount of collaborations (or the rules changed) so they could share credit.

Pleasantly surprised at how close Kenny got to the upset. Appropriate to get SD and NXT semis (and then a head-to-head) given the general inclinations of the board over the last year.

The predictable won out in the final outcome, but that was one hell of a fun and lively brawl to get us there.

EVIL has looked great throughout and I'm really high on him now. Bummed he went out to Fale, who really just seems like a monster for Shibata to overcome in the finals at this point, but stranger things have happened. The main was like watching my dad get beat up. The pasting each other with stiff shots routine has really run its course for me, and Shibata has some of the worst fighting spirit comeback movements going - like he can't wait to spring back up off whatever, and look as absurd as possible heading back to the mat. But Ishii looked great once again, and at least got a warrior's death. I loved him busting out new stuff here and in the Omega match in trying to catch his opponent off-guard and one-up them in the process. I wasn't hugely invested in him winning this, but he's such an easy guy to slip through the cracks with the booking as of late, it'd be a shame if he just went back to tag filler status. Maybe he'll end up challenging Naito after all (since both the finalists seem slated for heavyweight shots), but we'll see.