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 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.

As Kan already said, it's only PvE coop for right now. I did hear a dev say in one youtube video interview (sorry, it was a week or two back and I don't have a link) where he said, in response to that question, that the game would evolve based on the data and what fans want. I didn't see much clamoring to add pvp in ME3 though and I personally think coop fits this IP alot better. I don't care as much about unbalanced characters as long as they're on my team earning me credits equally. YMMV.

Looks like the embargo is up, as all kinds of MEA stuff is popping up on Youtube.

With that, and the trial starting in a couple of days as well, this seems like a good to time to ask everyone to please keep any story spoilers, no matter how slight, hidden behind spoiler tags in this thread, as I imagine a lot of people (myself included) will want to go in blind, either with the trial or the full game.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/03/14/mass-effect-andromeda-review-opening-hours/

Well that sounds as bad as I was expecting.

Yawn. Reads like someone who just wants to gripe about BioWare.

Apparently you will NOT be able to visually customize your squadmates in single player unlike in every other Mass Effect game as they only packed one outfit for the 600 year journey to another galaxy. :(

http://www.thebitbag.com/mass-effect-andromeda-squadmate-customization/230560

 Kanluwen wrote:
Yawn. Reads like someone who just wants to gripe about BioWare.

Heh. Well it seems that much of my reservations that I had about this game (based on Bioware games of old) are present. So of course its just someone ranting about Bioware rather than Bioware chucking out any old gak these days.

One of the new MP kits.

Angarans are one of the new races in Andromeda.

Area affect cloak... that's new and sounds cool.

Additionally, Angara is the race that gives us "Jaal"(one of our new companions).

They look like a weird lizardcat/Prothean thing.

 Silent Puffin? wrote:
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/03/14/mass-effect-andromeda-review-opening-hours/

Well that sounds as bad as I was expecting.

Wow. This entire article was basically a Bioware Community forum post, I want my ten minutes back.

They look like Jar-Jar Twi'Leks crossbreeds, to me.

http://www.pcgamer.com/we-have-mixed-feelings-about-the-first-few-hours-of-mass-effect-andromeda/

The PC Gamer staff aren't fans either.

Heads up, the EA Access/Origin trial is now live (worldwide, I believe). Downloading overnight, and tomorrow morning, time to boldly go...

 Paradigm wrote:
Heads up, the EA Access/Origin trial is now live (worldwide, I believe). Downloading overnight, and tomorrow morning, time to boldly go...

Be careful, what with that 10 hour time limit. It counts the download time as well, from what I can tell.

Having done the same sort of time-limited trial for Battlefield One a while back, it only counts time that the game is actually running. So long as you don't have the game open and sitting on an 'X percent installed' loading screen while it's downloading, it doesn't start eating into your time (at least on Xbox with Access, it might be different with Origin on PC).

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Paradigm wrote:
Heads up, the EA Access/Origin trial is now live (worldwide, I believe). Downloading overnight, and tomorrow morning, time to boldly go...

Be careful, what with that 10 hour time limit. It counts the download time as well, from what I can tell.

Are you sure?

What I'd read earlier seemed to indicate that you were allowed to play to a certain point in the story, and then go back and replay if you wanted to. Plus, unlimited multiplayer during the preview.

Multiplayer looks good from what I can see.. not actually done it yet.

Spent a few hours in the main game, got to the Nexus, loving it so far.. combat is fluid, and fun, much like ME3, really good story so far, really like where it seems to be hinting.

Been playing it on Xbox One for a couple hours, so far its just alright. It feels more clunky and messy than the previous ME games somehow. And i'm not really getting that good old Mass Effect feel from the game. The older ones had more grit and realism, this one feels more like DA:Inquisition and SWTOR in terms of writing/dialogue/characterization and world building.

Bad thing is that it has made me rethink my stance on pre ordering. I haven't pre ordered it yet, and now i'm thinking a lot harder about it. Generally when you play a game like this in a trial and its great, the natural thing to do is throw down your money. But i'm not getting the feeling i'm playing a bad%ss game like I had when I booted up and played last years Doom or Dark Souls 3 for the first time.

Considering this is the first ME game in 5 years, I feel like I should have been a lot more impressed than I am right now.

edit: more thoughts; I also kind of feel the combat is way off from the past Mass Effect games. By including the jump packs and having very open areas it means you are often being attacked from the behind or off screen. A run and gun gameplay style isn't very Mass Effect, which has always been more tactical and slow with a lot of use of cover. Including the jetpack is also a trend in sci fi games that is getting old. Ever since titanfall and COD Advanced Warfare did it, it seems like every AAA sci fi game has just been following trends. Doom also slipped in a boost function, however it is very minimal compared to what we are seeing here.

Eumerin wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Paradigm wrote:
Heads up, the EA Access/Origin trial is now live (worldwide, I believe). Downloading overnight, and tomorrow morning, time to boldly go...

Be careful, what with that 10 hour time limit. It counts the download time as well, from what I can tell.

Are you sure?

What I'd read earlier seemed to indicate that you were allowed to play to a certain point in the story, and then go back and replay if you wanted to. Plus, unlimited multiplayer during the preview.

I was mistaken. It only includes play time. However you do only have ten hours total play time.

My first thoughts:

The character creation is bad. You can go with the standard faces or custom your own. Customising your own, however, is limited to picking one out of 9 presets and then doing some basic tinkering with them. For example, you can change the skin tone however the range of tones is determined by the initial skin tone of the preset face. So if a face has darker skin as standard the lightest tone available for that face is darker than for a lighter toned face. And I wasn't able to make an identical skin tone to the stock ryders from any of the presets judging by the character creation screen. They all seemed slightly more tanned, at best. There are no eye shape variants you can select, only varying the eye position and iris colour, no eyebrow shapes, no mouth shapes beyond lip size, mouth width and position. Compared to previous Mass Effects, it is not very good.

I prefer the Mass Effect 3 cover system. Sticking to cover means you don't accidentally walk off it into peoples fire and I found the Mass Effect into/out of cover controls better for moving from cover to cover.

A couple of hours in now, enough to have at least some initial thoughts. Now I'm not looking at this critically at all, I'm coming at it from the angle of someone who just loves ME as a setting and a series and is ridiculously excited to leap back into that universe. So that's the caveat to all this.

- Character creation I'm torn on... On one hand, after DAI spoiled us with an amazing customiser this kind of feels like a step backwards, but working from presets does mean a lot of the work is done for you, and you're not going to accidentally end up with a character that looks totally outlandish because you've moved all the sliders at random or anything. I would like to see more variety in the presets, and some options for eye/nose/mouth shape rather than just moving them around, but you can at least create a decent-looking character, which really is the goal with stuff like this; I'll be looking at this face for 50+ hours, I don't want it to be giving me nightmares or making me puke!

- Story is off to a good start. No spoilers, but I've just reached the first bit of actual exploration after the pretty scripted first area, so I look forward to seeing just how explorey things get now I'm freer. The world design seems very good, the opening planet is not like anything I've seen in a game before, so you do get a real sense of an unfamiliar, unexplored frontier. Maybe it's just me, but when you touch down on that planet and see flora that no one else in that universe has seen before, it feels awesome.

- Combat is certainly different. The jetpack mixes things up a lot, but I am enjoying that so far, the original cover-shooter system was nice but the greater mobility means we should see less rooms full of chest high walls and have some more dynamic gunfights going on. The new powers seem nice and varied, I've had some good fun with the Biotic shield that reflects damage back (definitely going down the biotic route with this initial run, I think), and while I've not unlocked the more advanced stuff yet, there seems to be some very interesting new powers to play with eventually.

The cover can be a bit finicky at times, but that could be just because I'm used to more rigid systems, I imagine a few more hours and it'll seem perfectly natural. I do like it being less standardised, it makes positioning and manoeuvre a lot more important whereas before, basically snapped to cover meant you were safe unless the enemy are firing from above.

- Can't say much about the story yet, but I've not taken an immediate dislike to any of the characters; the first few squad-mates have some nice dialogue and they seem to have avoided a lot of stereotypes (though the politicians are all still gits, of course! Sadly no option to interrupt-punch anyone yet...).



All in all, I'll say it's great to be back. The tone, aesthetic and style is still very Mass Effect, but it also feels like something new... I have high hopes indeed.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:



I was mistaken. It only includes play time. However you do only have ten hours total play time.

I got less than five hours worth of play time before I was informed that I would need to buy the game to continue. As far as I can tell, it was due to hitting a specific point in the story progression. And after that happened, I was unable to play a restart or reload. Multi-player mode is still available, though.

The cover systems seems to have a very notable problem. If you're behind cover, there doesn't seem to be a way of changing which direction your weapon is pointing. As an example, if you're behind man-high cover, then obviously you want to come out behind the cover just far enough to let your weapon fire unhindered. If your weapon is pointing to the right, and you want to fire from the right side of the cover, this isn't a problem. You can shoot and leave about half of your body still protected. But if your weapon is pointed to the left, then you need to bring your entire body out from behind the cover or your shot will be blocked.

The tutorials are sometimes poorly arranged. For instance, when driving the Nomad for the first time, I encountered a very steep hill while on the main road. One of my companions suggested putting the Nomad into 6-wheel drive to climb the hill. After fumbling for a bit, I figured out how to activate that mode (Left Bumper on Xbox One). A little while later, I encountered another steep hill. This time, I got a pop-up panel explaining how to activate all-terrain mode (i.e. the aforementioned 6-wheel drive).

You can change your orientation for left and right. On standard keyboard controls it is alt. Took me a while to figure it out. The tutorial tells you about it after quite a few firefights, which is really dumb as you needed to know prior to that. Why they didn't have it automatically change your orientation just by you moving like in previous games I have no idea.

I must admit I'm not a massive fan of the Nomad. It's no worse than the Mako, but I still don't find it particularly fun to drive around. Though to be fair, I'm not a huge fan of vehicle segments in this sort of game anyway, and it does the job of getting from A to B adequately enough.

@Eumerin: I've also hit that point after about 3 hours (I got another hour-ish out of going back and going through a whole bunch of conversations I'd missed), from what I can tell there's nothing stopping you starting a new game from the main menu, or loading a previous save.

Also, be sure to check out Alec Ryder's quarters and especially the terminal, there's some very cool stuff there...

Can you guys confirm whether or not the squadmates have no customization options? Also, if you've played multiplayer, has the difficulty changed for gold level games? If so, have the rewards been adjusted accordingly?

Sadly doesn't look like there's any option to change companion appearance, only weapons and skills. Which is admittedly a shame.

I watched a bunch of videos online yesterday and I don't know if it's a side effect of streaming (streamer audio overriding in game audio) but the sound effects don't seem as meaty. A good example is the violent bubble bursting sound in ME3 when you set off a biotic explosion.

Has anyone seen any mention of mod support? With Unreal 3, the original trilogy was pretty malleable in that regard but I have no idea if the Frostbite engine is mod friendly.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Paradigm wrote:
Sadly doesn't look like there's any option to change companion appearance, only weapons and skills. Which is admittedly a shame.

Thanks. At least the weapons are (and I wasn't aware of that as I don't recall it being mentioned previously).... This feels to me like the change in ME3 where you suddenly stopped being able to holster your weapon (because they needed the RAM on the xbox for the stupid kinect features and then didn't want to make other platforms different). They had their reasons for both somewhat and It's not a deal breaker for me but it certainly takes some icing off of the top of the ME cake. :(

 Paradigm wrote:
@Eumerin: I've also hit that point after about 3 hours (I got another hour-ish out of going back and going through a whole bunch of conversations I'd missed), from what I can tell there's nothing stopping you starting a new game from the main menu, or loading a previous save.

It was giving me the option to either go to the Xbox Store and buy the game, or back out. There were no other choices.

It's no longer doing that, however. And based on the message I got when I started it up earlier this evening, I suspect that the multi-player also falls under the ten hour limit (unlike what I stated above).

FWIW, that's what I read last week. There is a dead stop in the single player campaign that you can't pass but the multiplayer is open for the full 10 hours.

This is probably going to be very subjective to personal tastes, but how does the game feel in terms of 'emotive connection' with the characters? The previous three games really engaged you with your squadmates and important NPCs and built up are rather personal connection between player and characters - however from what I've read elsewhere, it seems MEA is looking rather shallow at the moment. I've had read that characters seem to dump their whole life story on you in seconds, rather than build it up over missions.

With that in mind, for those of you who have trialed it, how is it looking so far?

It's honestly hard to say at this point, after 3-4 hours of a game that's been estimated at 100-odd hours to compete satisfactorially... Having been through (I think) all the available companion dialogue so far, it's fair to say the emotional connections aren't exactly there yet, but at the same time, that's at most 2 actual conversations per character, one of which is pretty much them explaining who they are and what they're actually doing here.

There's nothing at all yet to suggest that won't come in time. I've not taken an immediate dislike to any of the characters, and at least some of them seem to have genuinely interesting histories and personalities. There's no James Vega successors here!