MASS EFFECT: ANDROMEDA (Here be Spoilers)

[RIPPA]

Here are the Single Player changes

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Single player

Ryder’s appearance can now be changed onboard the Tempest
Expanded the range of options available in the character creator
Jaal can now be romanced by Scott Ryder
Dialogue for Hainly Abrams was adjusted to change the flow of personal information she discusses with Ryder.
Fixed issue with Nomad upgrades Shield Crafting quest
Nexus level and cryo pod points are retroactively granted
Vendors now carry weapon mods for Level 60-71 players
Vendors now sell weapon augmentations for automatic fire, burst fire, and single-shot fire
Improved clarity of descriptions for augmentations
Plasma Charge system now works properly for shotguns
Beam Emitter augmentation now causes guns to fire a constant beam with scaling damage based on the weapon’s damage per second
[PC] Added experimental support for Dolby Vision™ technology

The Nexus/Cryo Pod one is gonna be huge

[Eivion]

Will have to check the character creator out again. I like my Sara, but I wouldn't mind being able to modify her a bit. I made her eyes a bit too deep blue.

Kind of feel the Jaal addition is a bit ridiculous unless it was the original plan.

Glad Nexus Points are fixed.

I'm still waiting for the badge quest to be fixed.

[AxB]

Fairly sure it was the original plan to have Jaal be open to both siblings. Because it would have been a pretty big job to record (and animate) all the dialogue options for a complete romance, and everything else they've done, in two months.

[Eivion]

If thats the case then cool. I'm still annoyed they took the options out for some of the squad mates in the trilogy.

[J.T.]

My thoughts:

- Yeah, I encountered the Visor / Cloak issue last night when I was rolling with Stout in multiplayer.  It is pretty gamebreaking.  I was able to solo Wave 5 of a Silver Match with Kett after a party wipe thanks to the extra invis time.

 Then the gaming gods punished me for inadvertently exploiting the glitch by making my router connection burp and I got booted to the lobby..

- I also ran into the Adhi synch issue.  An Adhi grappled my Asari Sentinel in a Bronze APEX match over the weekend and it looked like it was keeping her in place by biting her on the ass rather than grabbing hold of her arm.  It did this from about twenty feet away and teleported to my location and the visual effect is even worse when there are lag issues.

- Fiends also have an annoying habit of teleporting to the tops of buildings while running at full tilt..  Looks like the 1.08 patch fixed this issue, too.

- I will tinker with the Character Creator, but I'm not doing another do-over unless the new appearance additions are compelling.  If there is proper short fade haircut and soul patch available, my OCD is going to go berserk.

- I don't want to seem ungrateful, but can we get some APEX app functionality in the game?  I'd love to be able to rename my strike teams whenever without having to go find my smart phone.

- Happy that Nexus points are fixed, but I can't believe that Earn Your Badge is still broken.  I also cannot believe that we're still in denial about the dialogue bugs.  SAM doesn't seem to bother me about e-mails that much anymore (fixed in 1.07?), but it'd be nice if he didn't lecture me about mining zone every fucking time I open the mineral extraction interface and broken dialogue prompts abound.. 

- Speaking of fixs, synching weapons with characters in cutscenes would also be a welcomed cosmetic fix, especially PeeBee and the mystery sidearm she uses that is obviously not the Sidewinder she normally carries. Liam does not use the X-5 Ghost so do not show him shooting Kett with it in cutscenes.

- It is pretty obvious that the Full Auto augmentation is for folks that miss the Cerberus Harrier. Burst Fire or Full Auto for most shotguns will improve their performance against yellow bars in the field, especially if you also use the Always On Inferno Augmentation available in the Remnant queue.  Burst Fire would also help reel in the Indra and N7 Hurricane and I honestly believe the Incisor would probably perform better if it were single shot.

- My Ryder is happily hetero, but making Jaal bi is a good fix since the only way that gay male players running a gay Scott could unlock the Matchmaker achievement was either by completing a playthrough as a heterosexual Scott, heterosexual Sara, or lesbian Sara.  You couldn't do it solely as a gay Scott.  Obviously Bioware respects their LGBTQ fanbase enough to implement the changes, so good on them.  Keep your customers happy.  All of them. Their money spends just like everyone else's.

It figures that this patch would go down just as I got access to Tier III items and crafted arguably the most badass set of Pathfinder Scout Armor that I've ever made...

[RIPPA]

http://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-troubled-five-1795886428

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I’ve spent the past three months investigating the answers to those questions. From conversations with nearly a dozen people who worked on Mass Effect: Andromeda, all of whom spoke under condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk about the game, a consistent picture has emerged. The development of Andromeda was turbulent and troubled, marred by a director change, multiple major re-scopes, an understaffed animation team, technological challenges, communication issues, politics, a compressed timeline, and brutal crunch.

Many games share some of these problems, but to those who worked on it, Andromeda felt unusually difficult. This was a game with ambitious goals but limited resources, and in some ways, it’s miraculous that BioWare shipped it at all.

 

[J.T.]

Here's a tissue now fix the goddamned Earn Your Badge bug..

If the game wasn't ready, it should've been delayed.

I'd have been good with waiting a bit longer for a more polished finished product.

[RIPPA]

JT gives no fucks

[RIPPA]

I like the part where they complain about people being in different time zones

Robert would like to have a chat with you

[J.T.]

Behold, the field where I grow my shits and know that it is barren.

[RIPPA]

Since clearly I hate myself - I think my new form of self-flagellation is going to end up being playing all the games designed on the Frostbite engine

[J.T.]

8 minutes ago, RIPPA said:

Since clearly I hate myself - I think my new form of self-flagellation is going to end up being playing all the games designed on the Frostbite engine

Clearly, I need to be brained with a brick for thinking, "Y'know?  I really should play Dragon Age:  Inquisition."

[RIPPA]

BTW - this says in more plain language that a sequel isn't happening and pretty much killed the IP

I mean I can't imagine how they are going to put Mass Effect "away for awhile" and then do another game - there was 5 years between games and this is what we got. Go 10 years and pretty much their entire audience is gone. Fuck, I will be lucky to be alive in 10 years.

[Robert C]

10 minutes ago, RIPPA said:

I like the part where they complain about people being in different time zones

Robert would like to have a chat with you

Yeah, not a lot of sympathy there from me, after all these years of trying to find meeting times that work for people spread across China, Israel, Texas and California.

I haven't worked on a project in the last 20 years that didn't involve folks from at least two continents.

[Robert C]

5 minutes ago, J.T. said:

Clearly, I need to be brained with a brick for thinking, "Y'know?  I really should play Dragon Age:  Inquisition."

It really isn't a bad game.  Not as good as the first one, but not nearly as infuriating as the second.

[RIPPA]

There are a lot of things in that article that suck (EA's love of Frostbite for example) but besides the time zone thing it seems like most/all of the Montreal folks brought things on themselves with their weird office politics and paranoia

I am really trying to not get enraged - not so much at Andromeda itself because I clearly have a good time with it - but the fact that I am probably not getting another game from my favorite thing ever

[jstout]

I still think that bugs aside, it's not really a bad game at all. And the writing is such that I'd really love to see a sequel just to tie up some loose ends. But I dunno if we'll even get DLC - why bother making DLC that basically promotes a series you're abandoning anyway? It's resources that could be better spent making whatever's next.

 

[J.T.]

17 minutes ago, RIPPA said:

I am really trying to not get enraged - not so much at Andromeda itself because I clearly have a good time with it - but the fact that I am probably not getting another game from my favorite thing ever

It may be better off dead since there's barely anyone left from the original dev team at Bioware.

Karpyshyn is there, but he's strictly there for SW content and Bungie hired a lot of the ME writers away to help Destiny 2 not suck out of the box.

I honestly don't think the new folks have a good grasp on how important this game is to the fan base..

13 minutes ago, jstout said:

IIt's resources that could be better spent making whatever's next.

Yeah, that's effort best saved for the new IP and it will turn out to better game if the staff is there on the ground floor to develop it. 

If they have intellectual and emotional stock in the IP, they will care about the project and where it goes in further iterations.  There's nothing like being on the ground floor of something completely new.

 

[Robert C]

Just got to the time zones part of the article.  Here's a hint guys.  If you can't get Lync to work in less than an hour, maybe you're not cut out for this engineering shit.

Maybe I'm being a clueless optomist, but I don't see this as the end for Mass Effect.  There aren't too many titles that can guarantee people interest like this one.  Wouldn't surprise me if Andromeda was a one off, though, and that it's back to the good ol' Milky Way for the next one.

Reading this through I can see how they had five years and still didn't get their shit together.  They got overly ambitions, and th etech readiness phase was such a mess that they got behind and never could catch up during implementation.  It all feels horribly familiar, having worked on a project that got cancelled after 5 years due to similar shit.

[RIPPA]

Yeah - thinking about it a little more

If Bioware has truly moved to this "One Bioware" format than it isn't THAT bad if they go "New IP, DA4 and then something Mass Effect"

That is WAY more tolerable when presented that way

[J.T.]

EA is also working the shit out of them.  I loathe EA as a producer almost as much as I do Activision and Interplay..

[RIPPA]

Well that kinda goes without saying

[J.T.]

I understand the need for tight production deadlines lest your project development shows signs of schedule creep, but unreasonable timelines are the bane of really good games.

I shudder when I hear dev guys say the words "ambitious goals" when talking about their upcoming titles.  Those are the games that ultimately disappoint you the most.

[Gonzo]

36 minutes ago, RIPPA said:

BTW - this says in more plain language that a sequel isn't happening and pretty much killed the IP

I mean I can't imagine how they are going to put Mass Effect "away for awhile" and then do another game - there was 5 years between games and this is what we got. Go 10 years and pretty much their entire audience is gone. Fuck, I will be lucky to be alive in 10 years.

Gotta say, Nihilist RIPPA was not a turn I was expecting.

[Eivion]

Skimming that article was depressing. I really hope it doesn't kill the franchise and that we still get DLC, but the latter seems less likely. I don't think the franchise is dead. I think even the Andromeda concept will likely stick. Its just that we won't get a direct sequel and its even further out than before now. The game actually did solid sales from what I recall. It just didn't hit the number they wanted, and the criticism itself may have been too damning. The mock critics scores are about what I rate it myself.