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 warboss wrote:

Eumerin wrote:


Umm...

Actually, I'm not talking about animation at *all*. I'm completely ignoring it as an issue.

You quoted the part of my post that specifically refers to animation changes and lead your own by telling me they're not just minor animation changes. I was responding to that part of your post as I generally agreed with the rest so I'm not sure why it's an issue.

What I meant is that the listed items - i.e. minor animation changes and extra voice acting - are a drop in the bucket compared to the real problem - i.e. drastic differences in the conversation trees.

I think the Krogan are the least likely race to be playable, simply as their speech patterns and general demeanour are so idiosyncratic, but on the whole, I think situations calling for hugely different dialogue trees would be fairly uncommon with the other races, and no more drastically different than a conversation where you take all the good options and one where you take all the bad ones.

Bioware are also good at getting the most out of their voice lines, often the same lines will come up eventually regardless of which dialogue path you go down, so this is already something they take into consideration.

In the most recent bioware video, there is a very *strange* sounding Krogan that sounds like the Steve Urkel of Tuchanka. He has a relatively high pitched voice instead of the lower growl we've seen. I don't know if that was just a bad choice in casting, someone forgot to tweak the audio, or what.... It can't be just that he's a juvenile or something as we've seen Grunt have a low voice despite being ostensibly prepubescent.

Day 6 of MP-Mas:

STRIKE TEAMS! This is a SP mechanic OR a MP mechanic. I posted up the "Missions" not long ago.

Some of the Missions can be played single player by the player and their own team, netting better rewards. Or they can send a Strike Team and get just the bare minimum Mission Rewards(resources for example). Or you can play them MP and get all the rewards plus a MP reward.

Day 7 of MP-Mas:



Two characters for MP that will be hands on at PAX East for the MP demo there.

Day 8 of MP-Mas:

MP Challenge system!

I like that mission system a lot. It's a nice way to create a tangible link between MP rewards and SP campaign, while not excluding those who don't/can't do MP, and while the principle is similar, having the option to actually put a team together and go and do the missions makes it a lot more interesting than DAI's equivalent mechanic, the War Table missions.

Official launch trailer.

Loving the use of Rag'N'Bone Man. If you haven't heard the whole "Human" album, I suggest it. "Human" is the title track and is what gets used here, but it's actually one of the weaker songs on the album.

To segway a bit onto what Kan posted previously:



I didn't at first notice that the Krogan appears to be using a jump jet as well as that this is a female krogan with a clearly visible face. That may explain the out of character odd voice of a krogan I mentioned earlier. I'm glad to see both actually.

 warboss wrote:
In the most recent bioware video, there is a very *strange* sounding Krogan that sounds like the Steve Urkel of Tuchanka. He has a relatively high pitched voice instead of the lower growl we've seen. I don't know if that was just a bad choice in casting, someone forgot to tweak the audio, or what.... It can't be just that he's a juvenile or something as we've seen Grunt have a low voice despite being ostensibly prepubescent.

That was a female Krogan, the voice was odd to me as well. As another person said I was waiting for it to flick its wrist.

I came to the same conclusion earlier today after I took a closer look at the pics posted here.

I LOVE the missions bit. The fact you have three ways (possibly) of handling MEA's War Table missions is beautiful.

Also, a Krogan with a jetpack. I'm sold.

Lots of youtube Pax East videos coming out from the Bioware presentations. I'm in the process of looking though some of them. If anyone sees a mutliplayer specific gameplay video or whether squadmates have alternate appearances, let me know.

https://www.youtube.com/results?q=mass+effect+andromeda+pax&sp=CAI%253D

Apparently, the MP team is having second doubts about customization



Also something that makes me excited is the fact that out of all the people who've played MP, all on Bronze(lowest difficult tier), only a handful of teams have successfully extracted.

Hell. Yes. I missed the challenge of successful extractions!

 Kanluwen wrote:
Apparently, the MP team is having second doubts about customization

Also something that makes me excited is the fact that out of all the people who've played MP, all on Bronze(lowest difficult tier), only a handful of teams have successfully extracted.

Hell. Yes. I missed the challenge of successful extractions!

You'll get all sorts trying out demos at conventions and not just experienced/dedicated players. Factor in low level characters, starting gear, a noisy convention hall, purposely trying out different things rather than focusing on the actual mission, etc... and it's not too surprising. I'm always surprised at friends that have played for years with level 20's and still don't want to go beyond silver. What do you mean by the first part?

The first part was a dev joking about the hideous color patterns people were doing.

All reports I've seen were that the missions were actually just that difficult. Some of that bit of the all sorts, etc is certainly applicable but a few of my old MP buddies were actually there trying it out and commented that it felt like playing Gold before they added in Platinum.

The cynic in me would point out that increasing the difficulty without a similar increase in rewards would encourage folks to buy packs instead of earning them in game. I thought the ME3 system (rng drops aside....fething million credit buys with no ultrarares....grumble) was quite equitable in that regard and I hope EA's greed won't swing the pendulum too far towards pay instead of play.

We haven't seen much on the rewards side of thing, yet.

And really? "EA's greed"?

Yeah. Those free maps on Titanfall being subsidized by skins and banner cards are quite greedy.

 Kanluwen wrote:
We haven't seen much on the rewards side of thing, yet.

And really? "EA's greed"?

Yeah. Those free maps on Titanfall being subsidized by skins and banner cards are quite greedy.

I don't have Titanfall 2; I do have Titanfall 1 and those maps were NOT free and they fragmented the playerbase because of it leading to the premature MP death of the game (at least on the 360). Are you really arguing that the company that brought us such consumer friendly gems as always online requirements in single player, dropping online support after 2 years for games with sequels, multiplayer passes, and pay to win microtransactions in games they have no business being doesn't engage in greedy moves at all? In any case, I posed it as a possibility to watch out for since I agree we haven't seen the rewards. Hopefully Bioware did what they could to keep the earn rate equitable as it was in ME3.

 warboss wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:
We haven't seen much on the rewards side of thing, yet.

And really? "EA's greed"?

Yeah. Those free maps on Titanfall being subsidized by skins and banner cards are quite greedy.

I don't have Titanfall 2; I do have Titanfall 1 and those maps were NOT free and they fragmented the playerbase because of it leading to the premature MP death of the game (at least on the 360).

Yeah, and when the playerbase started fragmenting with the second or third map pack; they made them all free.

They actually refunded a bunch of people on the XB1 because of it.

Are you really arguing that the company that brought us such consumer friendly gems as always online requirements in single player, dropping online support after 2 years for games with sequels, multiplayer passes, and pay to win microtransactions in games they have no business being in aren't greedy moves? In any case, I posed it as a possibility to watch out for since I agree we haven't seen the rewards. Hopefully Bioware did what they could to keep the earn rate equitable as it was in ME3.

Multiplayer pass on ME3 is what subsidized the map development for MP. They hedged their bets on it with packs and the other. The ME3 lifespan for MP was actually being forecasted at something like 6 months; they expected a sharp drop before the first SP dlc dropped.

It ended up being a huge success though. They had to divert people from the SP team to MP.

The other stuff pales in comparison to what companies like Activision or Gearbox do, yet EA is always the company people complain about.

The purpose of multiplayer passes was primarily to dissaude used game sales; the money was never intended to be mostly dedicated for actual mutliplayer expenses. I do agree though that the MP in ME3 was a big surprise success both from Bioware's standpoint (which they said at the time) and from that of players (who were largely expecting tacked on check the box multiplayer). As for the other companies, two or three wrongs don't make a right. It's possible for all three to make consumer unfriendly decisions independently. Since this is a thread about EA games, dick moves on the part of EA in the past would be the proper topic to bring up.

The more I see of this game the more concerned I become. It looks like there might be too much comedy and lightheartedness to it. It's going to be very disjointed finishing the OT this week and then playing this game.

I know the OT had some humor in it, but it was more subtle and not as overbearing as what i've been seeing here.

Don't even get me started on the animations, and how bad some of these characters look. I'm sure you guys have heard it all by now.

 Kanluwen wrote:
We haven't seen much on the rewards side of thing, yet.

And really? "EA's greed"?

Yeah. Those free maps on Titanfall being subsidized by skins and banner cards are quite greedy.

The first time I've ever seen someone defend EA with regards to their DLC and pricing practices. Sometimes I wonder about you Kan.


OT - Does it say anything anywhere about the 'war table' missions have a success/fail %? Or is it all a guaranteed success, just with different rewards depending on whether you go along or not?

 Thargrim wrote:
The more I see of this game the more concerned I become. It looks like there might be too much comedy and lightheartedness to it. It's going to be very disjointed finishing the OT this week and then playing this game.

I know the OT had some humor in it, but it was more subtle and not as overbearing as what i've been seeing here.

There will be a definite tonal difference, but I for one am in favour of that. ME3 ramped up the tension over and over and over until by the end of it, the fate of the entire galaxy depended on you. Likewise in ME2, everything you do in the game is geared towards getting your squad though the Suicide Mission intact. Personally, I'm looking forward to getting the chance to explore at a more leisurely pace, at least initially. I want to get a bit of Star Trekking in before the 'end of the world' stuff starts building up.

I'd also guess any of the darker, impending doom stuff will tie directly to some big plot points they won't want to spoil in the trailers or early gameplay footage.

 Paradigm wrote:

 Thargrim wrote:
The more I see of this game the more concerned I become. It looks like there might be too much comedy and lightheartedness to it. It's going to be very disjointed finishing the OT this week and then playing this game.

I know the OT had some humor in it, but it was more subtle and not as overbearing as what i've been seeing here.

There will be a definite tonal difference, but I for one am in favour of that. ME3 ramped up the tension over and over and over until by the end of it, the fate of the entire galaxy depended on you. Likewise in ME2, everything you do in the game is geared towards getting your squad though the Suicide Mission intact. Personally, I'm looking forward to getting the chance to explore at a more leisurely pace, at least initially. I want to get a bit of Star Trekking in before the 'end of the world' stuff starts building up.

I'd also guess any of the darker, impending doom stuff will tie directly to some big plot points they won't want to spoil in the trailers or early gameplay footage.

I don't mind a good bit of well-placed humor. My favorite part of ME3? The entire Shore Leave DLC, because it was so perfectly done.

 Kanluwen wrote:

A MP intro movie that can be replayed? Not that I'm complaining, but does that seem odd to anyone else?

I have a feeling that the "Intro Movie" is going to be something like an intro from APEX Forces, explaining why there's multiplayer strike teams and the like.

Exactly. This is nothing new coming from ME3.

Even with microtransactions tainting this, they the coop in ME3 was very fun. The good news is they removed the taint of this stuff affecting the single player.

Is there any PvP in the multiplayer? I generally only find microtransactions overly unpleasant when its a pay to win thing vs other players. When its co op vs AI then I tend to not care as much. And if the microtransactions help fund more content, in the same way Halo 5 did (which got a ton of great updates) then it isn't the most concerning thing.

I'd love to see this game get plenty of love and support and patches from the developers post launch. I don't think we'll see another Mass Effect game for a good while after this one. Hell it took 5 years just to get this one, and even then the animations, and all sorts of other things are dodgy as hell. Who knows what would happen if EA had them pump out a shallow game every year or two like they will probably do with SW battlefront series.

Pending how well Andromeda does, I'd not rule out another ME by 2020 or so. Bioware have another new mystery IP coming out next year (which I imagine we might hear about at E3 this year), Dragon Age 4 almost certainly is in the works and a 2019 release would put that 5 years after the last one, so it's feasible they might have rolled back around to ME for 2020.

That is unless they're putting out a Star Wars title, but off the top of my head they're one of the few EA studios that aren't currently working on one.

 Thargrim wrote:
Is there any PvP in the multiplayer? I generally only find microtransactions overly unpleasant when its a pay to win thing vs other players. When its co op vs AI then I tend to not care as much. And if the microtransactions help fund more content, in the same way Halo 5 did (which got a ton of great updates) then it isn't the most concerning thing.

There is not PvP.

I'd love to see this game get plenty of love and support and patches from the developers post launch. I don't think we'll see another Mass Effect game for a good while after this one. Hell it took 5 years just to get this one, and even then the animations, and all sorts of other things are dodgy as hell. Who knows what would happen if EA had them pump out a shallow game every year or two like they will probably do with SW battlefront series.

They've already said that they want the MP to last until the next game in this new trilogy. Considering that Mass Effect 3's multiplayer is still fairly consistently in the top 20 of games played on Xbox Live(think about that for a second...how long has it been since ME3? how many big triple A titles have we seen since then?), they know they're good to go.