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TheCenturion posted:You know, I've played through the series multiple times, on multiple platforms, and I've never done a renegade playthrough. I think I made it as far as insulting the Hanar tourist in the first game. It's very difficult! While the Renegade playthrough is supposed to be about making harsh calls, it really just comes off as being a xenophobe and a dick for the sake of being a xenophobe and a dick. We'll see some people's first reactions in a few months but my guess is that it's not a writing style that will have aged well.
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Feb 9, 2021 15:48
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frajaq posted:that game was just depressing, in ways hard to describe There are a lot of basic failures of imagination. You're the bleeding edge of a settler project in an entirely new galaxy, but half the worlds you show up to are already settled when you show up. You're supposed to be young and inexperienced but you can never really gently caress anything up except by not doing side quests--there are no opportunities to plop a bunch of colonists on a world that looks harmless but is riddled with brain-eating prions or whatever, at least as far as I can remember. Andromeda is supposed to be an exciting new setting but all you get to meet are some dopey dog-faced failiens and the Putty Patrol Empire, with whom you are immediately and intractably locked into mortal combat with. Bioware had the chance to tell a smaller story--a new cast of characters, young and unsure, making decisions with long-term ramifications in incredibly tense conditions--and it turns into a "save the [whatever] Cluster" story because they the only stakes the team could come up with are as big as possible. Meanwhile your Starfinder GM could probably come up with something more compelling. It just feels like the writers and designers are grasping at straws E: it's also an 80 hour game that has shown you everything by hour 10, so the rest of the game feels like watching Gob Bluth pull dead pigeons out of his sleeves HaitianDivorce fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Feb 13, 2021 |
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Feb 13, 2021 20:15
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pentyne posted:Even a bad game would've been a better experience. Andromeda was just so aggressively mediocre it's hard to have an actual emotional attachment to in any way or look forward to replaying the game. My memories of my one playthrough are defined not by any line or combat encounter or setpiece but just the dimming hope that it would be good and a compulsive need to click through every quest to make sure I wasn't missing anything. Just an absolute slog. I remember hearing that there wouldn't be any DLC and feeling a mix of sadness and relief, that I wouldn't need to try and find "a good part"
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Feb 13, 2021 20:29
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Sydin posted:I mean, you could have even done something with that by making the primary conflict that you've shown up to colonize a new galaxy, and all the plum planets are already settled by natives. So do you settled for the less-plum planets that are as-of-yet unsettled and try to get along with the natives, or force your way onto the nicest planets at the risk of conflict? Make it the new paragon/renegade conceit. You don't even need to get that, ah, Lebensraum-y about it Say you land on an Angaran (that was them, right? The good aliens?) and they're like "Yeah, the more the merrier, maybe just go talk to some dudes with exclamation points over their heads and we'll see what we can do" And then the Kett show up to harvest them. You're in the way but basically beneath their notice, so they make you an offer: stand aside and let us take the Angara, or your settlement here may end up on our shitlist too. You will never be able to safely send people to live here if you don't give us what we want. What would the consequences of this be? Maybe you come back after a mission or two and the whole colony's empty, everyone gone. Or maybe nothing happens, not in the timeframe of the game, because you walked into a problem you couldn't solve with enough blue dialogue points and a gunfight Maybe there was something like this in Andromeda? I don't remember. I just think "massively powerful native alien empire" and "Murphy's Law Milky Way colonists" can go together in ways besides everyone immediately fighting and things going fine for you because you're the protagonist
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Feb 13, 2021 21:03
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Dapper_Swindler posted:yeah, the entire universe is dope and outside the reaper poo poo, it seems like it would be a nice place to live, at the very least its basicaly now but better healthcare and you boss and co-workers and possibly SO are aliens Ehh. There's a lot about it that sucks. Not in, like, a grimdark dystopian way, but in the way that right now sucks. Politics don't seem to work for anyone except people who already have power, there are huge swathes of the galaxy given over to violence and corruption which even Garrus and his buddies can't clean up, Council species all seem to be morally compromised to one degree or another, and the krogan/Council races conflict, the geth/quarian conflict, and to a lesser extent even the human/batarian conflict point to widespread systemic inequality, etc. Would it be cooler to live then than now? Yeah, probably. But for civilization expanding to a galactic scale, if you woke up there tomorrow there's a lot of dynamics that wouldn't need fresh introductions.
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Mar 1, 2021 22:51
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The Wiggly Wizard posted:Is it lazy writing or an intentional motif that almost every loyalty mission is addressing Daddy Issues of some sort? Mordin and Garrus plus the two DLC squad excepted. Mordin's mission with Maelon is one in which he's the bad dad and Maelon is struggling with squaring what he was taught as Mordin's student and seeing the impact of their work. Garrus' is about trying to do what Shepard did--assemble a team to kick rear end and do some good in the galaxy--and figure out what to do after it blew up in his face. Both are less direct than, say, Thane's or Samara's loyalty missions, but in their mentor/protégé conflict they echo the parent/child struggles which undergird the series. I would not at all be surprised if the reason Zaeed and Kasumi were cut, after they nailed the squad roster down, was because they didn't hold as tightly to that theme
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Jun 6, 2021 17:18
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Wingnut Ninja posted:The ending of the suicide mission is basically a daddy issue in reverse, with you having to kill a baby reaper. The "Collectors = Protheans" thing didn't resonate with me much when I first played the games ten years ago, but I've been thinking about it lately and I think the baby Reaper and the info Javik drops on the Protheans help tie ME2 as a whole into the broader ideas of intergenerational conflict the series works with: Javik makes it clear that the Protheans were not an especially nice people. Hierarchical and imperialist, their plan to defeat the Reapers was to sacrifice everyone in their cycle so Javik could build a new Prothean empire which would have subjugated everyone else for the sole purpose of warring against the Reapers. But they, and their vision for galactic society, failed. If ME3 is about trying to resolve the conflicts of the galaxy to face down the apocalyptic threat of the Reapers, ME2 is about clearing away the wreckage of past generations. The Collectors are ghostly or demonic--their invasions inflict something like sleep paralysis on their victims, Sovereign dogs you like Nemesis, they have horrible bug eyes and bloated heads, and I think the codex even refers to them as "nightmarish." Characters point to their fate as one that humanity could easily share, a past that could recur. So the Suicide Mission could be read as not just a high-stakes military operation: it''s got the ring of an exorcism to it. Shepard goes to the heart of the galaxy to cleanse away the stains of the past so that, in ME3, something new can happen. (That resolving the personal issues of your squad mates increases their odds of survival plays into this too: what, in a story about a haunted house or exorcism, drops your odds of survival more than unfinished business?) The baby Reaper's Terminator face isn't from a lack of artistic inspiration: it's an international reference to a nightmare future already coming to be that must be avoided
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Jun 6, 2021 18:45
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Stanley Tucheetos posted:It really is odd how the people who created the entire financial system of citadel space get left out with zero power. If anything they should be one of the dominant species. They should have a huge merchant fleet and thus an equally powerful navy to protect it. It's not like you need ground forces to win a war when you can just bomb planets into submission with an orbital bombardment. We know that they have the technology since they have that one dreadnought that puts the Destiny Ascension to shame along with a few reapers. There's totally a version of Mass Effect out there where "dumpy little dudes who happened to have built the galactic economy" are on the Council, but it's not the version released in 2007 where they're competing for spots with "lizards who are Q and also James Bond," "velociraptors but the Roman empire," and "pansexual psychic commandos"
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Jun 7, 2021 03:54
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DaysBefore posted:Are there any good Mass Effect books? Wouldn't mind seeing what they got up to with the expanded universe. I know the CS Goto one is hot poo poo Isn't Karpyshyn the guy behind at least a few of those? A buddy talked me into reading one of his SW EU books and it felt like I was reading the dullest possible recap of a brainless video game. I'd give anything by him a pass
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Jun 14, 2021 19:47
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Android Blues posted:I think the intention of Synthesis is generally meant to be, "everyone becomes immortal perfect cyborgs and nothing hurts", but it's all so poorly explained that it's easy to take something else from it. I think it could be an excellent ending if the foreshadowing were better and if the in-the-moment explanation of it was better. The divide between the conception underlying ME3 ("throw back the apocalypse by resolving the setting's underlying injustices--the krogan genophage, the geth/quarian war, and ultimately the creator/created divide") and how it was ultimately executed ("uhhhh I guess the Citadel is over London now and also here's this twerp in a hoodie to lecture you on how Joker's hat really needs to be soldered into his face") is wide enough to pilot the Normandy through
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Jun 15, 2021 03:18
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Sentinel Red posted:Kasumi Goto and Tali’zorah vas Neema, famous morally grey psychopaths. I'm convinced that, for all the fluff, Kasumi's a successful thief because she's a psychopath who murders all potential witnesses. She's got about 20% too much jokey Joss Whedon in her combat barks for me to think she's doesn't just love killing
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Jun 15, 2021 12:36
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Pattonesque posted:ME3 shoulda given you a batarian squadmate imo, would lead to cool conflicts, quality worldbuilding, etc. Especially if he gets the blade gauntlet the MP batarians got That is, low-key, something I really dig about the MP in retrospect, and how I feel like something's been lost with its excision--the notion that every culture and class you can play in has been brought together to fight by both the awesome sweep of events and the heroism of Shepard and crew. Under how many other circumstances would you see quarians side-by-side with geth, or batarians and N7 marines?
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Jun 16, 2021 02:00
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kilus aof posted:They will actually triple down and have half the next game take place in Andromeda. The appropriate time-frame Broware will decide on to gloss over their endings will be in the Andromeda-Milky Way Collision something like 2 billion years from now
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Jun 23, 2021 05:19
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a pipe smoking dog posted:I forgot you had to stay still to aim, and that you couldn't roll dodge the lasers. I died about 3 times before working out you needed to stand still, book it to the other side of the cliff and then just stand still again, before running back in the other direction. Then I died a fourth time because the game glitched and wouldn't let me shoot the final shot. There's a preview of the game floating around that shows off that exact mission, but with Cerberus troops instead of Geth and a longer turret sequence. It seems to me that that it took them a while to lock in plans for that bit, and not everything made the cut.
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Jun 27, 2021 13:55
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Taear posted:If they'd said the Presidium had low level indoctrination powers it'd explain so much about the Council. It's a shame they never went that way. Ten years ago I might have thought so too but since then a pandemic happened, and my government's best response to global warming is "maybe we'll try and hit this much easier target much later than every one of the experts tells us we need to" People with institutional power probably just give themselves brain worms getting into those institutions, in this century or the next or the last
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Jun 30, 2021 22:39
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Psycho Landlord posted:No it's still bad writing imo but it's not utterly random like some people keep trying to pretend it is. There are at least two other spots in the game where Cerberus shows up, the characters are like "we have no idea what Cerberus was doing here, but we're gonna find out!" and then the answer is backfilled in the Codex, if at all. What probably happened was that gameplay designers figured players had more fun with Cerberus than with either the Geth or the Reapers, and so designed levels around them, and the Codex writers had to fill in the gaps. It's another example of a kinked up production pipeline creating a weird experience in ME3
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Jul 2, 2021 16:52
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Outpost22 posted:Where can ME4 even go from here? The Galaxy's either a static, immutable utopia (shut up) or a hellish wasteland devoid of the infrastructure that made the galactic community possible. Take the end of ME3 as a chance to end the Citadel's hegemonic control over galactic politics and pull an Alpha Centauri--oh hey we lived through the apocalypse and the future is no longer the Reapers' but ours, but where do we go from here? Turns out "we" don't really agree
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Jul 4, 2021 00:35
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hard counter posted:
Perhaps it's a sort of purification that the underlying narrative of ME3 is working toward as old prejudices are burned away and a brighter future is built. As Lt. Danger has pointed out, the name of the Crucible isn't just a big proper noun Hudson + co plucked out of thin air
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Jul 9, 2021 18:47
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a pipe smoking dog posted:James is a top tier squadmate and I've always struggled to understand the hate I think it had a lot to do with how, pre-ME3, he was positioned as the stand-in for new audience members. People took this to mean he was a dumb grunt in a bad way, imagining i guess Jacob if he had a head injury. I've really liked him this go-around too
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Jul 10, 2021 20:39
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Cythereal posted:I'm bored at work, so I've been looking at the early marketing for Mass Effect and what was initially revealed. Some interesting discrepancies versus release: Let's take a second to appreciate how this concept hasn't been capitalized on in the era of phone app tie-ins and boosters for $$, because it's not hard to imagine how an unscrupulous company could crowbar players into avoiding FOMO and getting optimal endings by buying them It's not hard to imagine why this didn't make it very far, though. Players hate setbacks and feeling like they're losing out, almost as much as producers hate paying for things players won't see. It's hard to imagine BioWare at any point in its life cycle really committing to this
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Jul 16, 2021 16:19
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Polaron posted:There's a conversation on the Normandy with Liara where she's calculating how long it will take the Reapers to complete this cycle and she concludes that, while it may not take as long as the Protheans did, it's still going to take quite a while. Yeah, I always got the impression after Thessia when the Asari councilor talks about "measures for the continuity of civilization" or whatever it was a blow not because it means everyone's about to be exterminated tomorrow but because it's the inflection point where the character of the war goes from "immensely challenging but with a light at the end of the tunnel" to "the center cannot hold"
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Jul 18, 2021 18:50
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Zore posted:Eh, I dunno if that's true. The military isn't painted in a great light considering the whole 'Cerberus is a spinoff of one of their black ops projects', Kaiden's backstory, the ME3 trial etc. It will never cease to amaze me that BioWare managed to accidentally forecast fear of the deep state in ~2007 Anderson and Hackett's incorruptibility in the face of a wildly overgrown military-industrial-espionage complex is less a sign of fascist sympathies and more a call for a Space Carnation Revolution IMO e: extremely based of BioWare to construct a narrative wherin elections don't matter vis-a-vis the Council member choice. Cerberus gets to all of them eventually! HaitianDivorce fucked around with this message at 20:12 on Aug 25, 2022 |
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Aug 25, 2022 19:59
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| # ¿ Apr 24, 2024 15:24 |
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There are two issues I remember from my one Andromeda playthrough on launch more than half a decade ago: 1) The writing is really dull. There are tons of ways to express "Mass Effect is exploring brave new worlds," and the writers whiff on all of them. ME3, for better or worse, tries to wrap up the central conflicts of the setting--the Geth/Quarians debate, the genophage, and the place of synthetics in galactic society. Andromeda does nothing to replace any of these core ideas. There's nothing interesting about the new Andromeda societies and no real narrative to link together everything that happened. Everything, from the backstory to the main quest, is just "and this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened," without anything interesting to sink your teeth into. Without a solid thematic core, the characters are similarly just bags of backstory that never manage to pop. Despite the fact that the game is about starting over in a new galaxy, there's a huge number of callbacks to the original trilogy, like Conrad Verner's sister and Saren's mentor, that serve no purpose other than to let you know the writers also played the originals. 2) The gameplay is a slog. They tried to bring back the open worlds of ME1 with the quest density of Dragon Age: Inquisition, so completing quests on the map puts you into the Ubisoft mini-map trance. Setpiece missions are uninspired--there's nothing as cheesy and audacious as "set off a nuclear bomb in the bad guy's headquarters," no gut-punches like Thessia, just nothing that holds my attention. And the gunplay just isn't fun. The limited amount of research points disincentivizes experimentation, so you're likely to find one solid loadout and stick with it the entire game. The multiplayer-inspired "three powers at a time" setup is restrictive and how-swapping between kits had too long of a cooldown to really work in combat. The last addition to the combat that I can remember, the jetpack, was a death sentence on Veteran difficult. The whole game is just an incredible misstep. I can't think of any reason to recommend it unless you're absolutely desperate to Effect some Mass.
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Dec 23, 2022 20:48
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