ME:A - Character Creator Improvements?

@Eurogamer Mass Effect: Andromeda has some character creator problems and Bioware is mulling over possible improvements but can't confirm anything for now.

We're looking at patching lots of issues and want to strongly support the game moving forward," lead designer Ian S. Frazier wrote on Twitter last night, in response to one fan asking whether facial animations for some characters might improve. "I can't say more just yet."

One of Andromeda's areas actively being investigated for tune-up is its character creator, whose relatively limited options have upset some fans.

"Can't promise anything yet, but we're currently evaluating various options for making it better," Frazier wrote.

Last week's early access trial for the game recieved a mixed response from fans, who flooded the internet with some of the game's worst examples of bugs in GIF form.

"Many of these issues will be patched out, and most are negligible - easily forgiven as you gaze out over a gleaming, windswept icefield studded with kett outposts, or glimpse a gigantic sandworm composed of flickering black shards arching through the skies of a desert world," Edwin wrote in Eurogamer's Mass Effect Andromeda review. "But it's staggering, nonetheless, that the game made it to retail in this state."

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More information.

Soon you'll be able to blind your foes with the glare from your character's deathly pale white flesh…

If the character creation issues are about appearance, as I think they are (and not about stats), I could not care less. I never go into the details of adjusting chin size and all of those way-too-many options. Even though I play games very slowly to experience a lot of detail, that is a detail I don't care anything about.

I just choose an appearance which seems okay and go with that, and in the case of ME:A I was able to find a couple of faces (one male and one female) which looked fine.

I have not bought Andromeda because next on the list is Tides of Numenera.

Luckily a friend of mine bought it so i went there yesterday to see what the fuss is all about. The CC doesn't really bother me that much so i won't say anything negative about that. Just two things that really surprised me when i tried it.

First of all, graphically it looks very good and the combat (apart from the auto cover) is also pretty good.

Second, I have to say that the animations are indeed very bad and it honestly makes you wonder how they thought it was fine to release.

What really surprised me though, a lot more than the animations, is how very bad the writing is. A lot of reviews have talked about the quality of the writing but the animation issue always gets more attention.

I kid you not, in the first hours i actually played myself or watched my friend play, there were cases where i just couldn't take it.
You're in a conversation with some other people and it's so awkward that it makes you cringe. The quality of the writing is plain amateur-bad, in most of what i have seen. Hopefully it improves as the games goes on.

Also something with the delivery of the dialogue. I just can't explain it…..even though 2-3 people were talking to each other, it felt like they might as well not have been in the same room? Like characters lines weren't really "tied" to others replies to them?……i don't know, it felt very strange and it was very distracting.

Also……a loooooooot of bugs and fps issues.

Anyway, i just thought i'd share these two points.

Giovanni1983 said:

Also something with the delivery of the dialogue. I just can't explain it…..even though 2-3 people were talking to each other, it felt like they might as well not have been in the same room? Like characters lines weren't really "tied" to others replies to them?……i don't know, it felt very strange and it was very distracting.

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Are you talking about the pause between characters delivering their lines that is in every BioWare games?

No it wasn't just that.

In a lot of dialogues it felt like the tone of a reply was not matched with what was said before? Like reading and delivering your line without knowing what the tone of the other person was, or in what situation it was said?

I am putting question marks because it was very odd and i could not exactly spot it.

Giovanni1983 said:

No it wasn't just that.

In a lot of dialogues it felt like the tone of a reply was not matched with what was said before? Like reading and delivering your line without knowing what the tone of the other person was, or in what situation it was said?

I am putting question marks because it was very odd and i could not exactly spot it.

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Oh that. I know there is a few cases where Sara is just "too loud" in some delivery for the context (especially emotional tone response) in the early part. It happens in some of their other games too. DAI has a few cases where the NPC talking sound totally different between two sentences (like it's not even the same actor). This is the issue of recording lines individually (because of actors schedules not all matching), rewrites and just the VO director missing some cue for the scene.

There is an awful cut&paste Liara audio message in the game too (there is more than one Liara audio log, but there is one that is clearly cut&paste from previous games).

What I've heard is that the development of ME:A was very troublesome, so I guess the extreme bloat, copy&paste content, placeholder script, etc were the result of the rush to actually finish the game on time.

Age-old trick in the games industry: to add weight to your game, you must add content. But it takes time and costs a lot of money. Sooo... to add content, LOTS of content, QUICKLY and DIRT-CHEAP, just spill some simple activities all over the map, and presto! your 50+ hr game is complete and ready to ship!

duerer said:

What I've heard is that the development of ME:A was very troublesome, so I guess the extreme bloat, copy&paste content, placeholder script, etc were the result of the rush to actually finish the game on time.

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I'm not sure if troublesome is really the right word. I know that originally, they created lots of planets using procedural algo like in MEA1, but after playing that they decided it wasn't fun and went back to an handful of handmade planets. That was like one year ago, which isn't that much time to remake most of the game content.

I also suspect they rewrote a lot of the game over the last 2 years. Half the writers in the credits of the game were working on SecretIP or DAI in the last 5 years, not MEA.

azarhal said:

Half the writers in the credits of the game were working on SecretIP or DAI in the last 5 years, not MEA.

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To tell the truth, I was never a fan of Bioware's writing talent.
So I'm not sure if the end result was the product of the leave of key writers (David Gaider and others), or the actual expected quality at Bioware.

Bioware writer: Here's my masterpiece.
EA CEO: I don't get any of this. Does anyone else geddit?
PR: We can't market this, this is too sophisticated and our audience are not philosophers!
Lead designer (to writer): Dumb it down before we get fired.

<Next month/year>

Bioware writer: Here's changed script, removed all stuff 5yr old kids can't uderstand, I quit.
EA CEO: OMG OMG can't catch breath tis' so coo! This'll sell a billion copies!
PR: We can retell this whole thing with just two sentences in advertisments! Awsome!
Lead designer (to self): I need to forgeddit and concentrate on microtransactions.

duerer said:

To tell the truth, I was never a fan of Bioware's writing talent.
So I'm not sure if the end result was the product of the leave of key writers (David Gaider and others), or the actual expected quality at Bioware.

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David Gaider never worked on ME in any shape or form. They haven't lost writers (except Christ Schlerf) since starting to work on MEA and the only guy who haven't had a single BioWare game release before MEA in the writing credits is Christ Schlerf (left in 2015).

I personally find MEA to be at the same level as their previous games (campy, snark and sass, I haven't had a "but the Prize" level of bad yet). The story is a lot more about adventure than their previous games though (minus maybe DA2) and the lead younger as well (22 years old).

Some people seems to have a very different experience of Bioware writing than I do though. I always played their game for the campiness and snark…

NFLed said:

If the character creation issues are about appearance, as I think they are (and not about stats), I could not care less. I never go into the details of adjusting chin size and all of those way-too-many options. Even though I play games very slowly to experience a lot of detail, that is a detail I don't care anything about.

I just choose an appearance which seems okay and go with that, and in the case of ME:A I was able to find a couple of faces (one male and one female) which looked fine.

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Same here.

The thing about creating a character's looks is that the game should also give you ample opportunity to SEE the character. Mass Effect doesn't have that problem being it's a 3rd-person RPG as well as having dynamic cutscenes, but Skyrim, for example, almost never shows your character's face and only occasionally shows the body. That wouldn't be a big issue if they hadn't removed the paper doll inventory that Morrowind and Oblivion had. At least in those games you could physically see your character when you open the inventory, and that adds charm and "RPG-ness" to the game without sacrificing the first-person view in the rest of the game design. I hope the next Elder Scrolls brings that back.

Last thought about designing characters. I think the sculpting system, while it's more accurate and able to be finely tuned, isn't as interesting to me as the preset system. What I mean is, I would much prefer if an RPG has many presets for each body part rather than just being able to sculpt each one. This is one area where Skyrim did pretty well, and I think of something like Wasteland 2 that has a bunch of preset options that you can mix and match together. That is more fun to me than sculpting the minute details especially if the game in question has a bunch of different, unique and standout things you can configure. Sculpting by hand is just too much.

azarhal said:

Some people seems to have a very different experience of Bioware writing than I do though. I always played their game for the campiness and snark…

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Yeah, I've never understood people's positive reactions to it. OK, you've explained yours, so I get that. I suppose campiness and snark are two words for it. The two words I have used on these boards are hamfisted and hackneyed. Here are another two: amateurish and cringeworthy.

I quit playing BioWare games long ago because of the sucky writing. I mean, without good writing, what do you have in a BioWare game? Nothing for me, as I don't want to play a shooter.

Really, BioWare games have felt like, for a long time now, a high-school student's creative-writing assignment. It makes me uncomfortable just reading it.

Capt. Huggy Face said:

Really, BioWare games have felt like, for a long time now, a high-school student's creative-writing assignment. It makes me uncomfortable just reading it.

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LOL That's a bit harsh, okay.

I'm messing around with the trial again since I REALLY want to like this game and the CC is pretty bad. I was able to (start over and) make a good looking character based on someone else's hard work and some tweaks and she looks a bit less like a wooden puppet in cut scenes and dialogues and the eye issues aren't so brutal, and they patched some I think, but most female and even some males just don't look right and the game has a bazillion cut scenes and dialogues so it's hard to ignore.

Giovanni1983 said:

I kid you not, in the first hours i actually played myself or watched my friend play, there were cases where i just couldn't take it.
You're in a conversation with some other people and it's so awkward that it makes you cringe. The quality of the writing is plain amateur-bad, in most of what i have seen. Hopefully it improves as the games goes on.

Also something with the delivery of the dialogue. I just can't explain it…..even though 2-3 people were talking to each other, it felt like they might as well not have been in the same room? Like characters lines weren't really "tied" to others replies to them?……i don't know, it felt very strange and it was very distracting.

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It is truly amazing how bad the writing and dialogue delevery are, at least early on. It supposedly gets better. But I'd agree, the main reason I stopped with the trial my first time was I couldn't take any more of the eyes, the animations in cut scenes, and the brutally bad dialogues.

I've also encountered many times when dialogue just cuts off for no reason on top of the many times dialogues wipe each other out. Compared to DAI where banter, dialgue, etc were well triggered and everything is pretty much perfectly placed and paced, in ME:A it's the complete opposite - it's a jumbled and disjointed mess of monotone brutality.

Improving the CC would be nice but I can't see how they can fix the dialog, mostly brutal voice acting (kind of an insult to voice actors to call it such, really), brutal cut scene animations, etc.

Having now attempted to deal with inventory and selling to a vendor, I'm hoping cleaning up the UI is one of their top priorities. It's bad beyond the usual "we don't care about PC even though it's the dominant platform and design for console/controller only" bad.

In so many of these games the UI is terrible due to consoles/controllers and can only be salvaged by modders in the end. You would think at some point the game designers would figure this out. Sure, many will put up with the garbage but it's not that freaking complicated to do an inventory UI (obviously since modders can do it up in their spare time) in a game where doing up the hundreds of hours of voice, content, etc that take up the bulk of dev time. It'd be nice if they gave us a choice in these games. Do you want a functional UI or a cutesy UI that shows you next to nothing and you have to scroll endlessly where mouse wheel may or may not work depending on the alignment of the stars.

DAI had the ambient dialogues cut off too, I often got party banter cut by triggering stuff in it to the point that when banter started I just stopped walking. DAI have less ambient dialogues/banter than MEA does, so it doesn't happen as often in it though.

Capt. Huggy Face said:

Really, BioWare games have felt like, for a long time now, a high-school student's creative-writing assignment. It makes me uncomfortable just reading it.

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They were like that since the start. BG1 and BG2 have quite a bit of it, I think people just don't remember it much because it's not all voiced. I laugh through all the romances scenes in every of their games, lol.

And perhaps I shouldn't be so harsh. I do know writing fiction isn't easy. But it's hard not to criticize when The Witcher 3 was released not long ago.

Now, I haven't finished the game and have spoken against it, overall, on these boards. Some of that is down to my personal preferences, as I have grown weary of most ARPGs in recent years. After gameplay, I'm a character-development guy, and, well, The Witcher doesn't excel there, either.

But in dialogue it does excel -- believeable characters with their own voices, such a rarity in gaming. TW3 is probably the best example of good writing amongst the games I have played. After TW3, Bloodlines is a good example.

Capt. Huggy Face said:

And perhaps I shouldn't be so harsh. I do know writing fiction isn't easy. But it's hard not to criticize when The Witcher 3 was released not long ago.

Now, I haven't finished the game and have spoken against it, overall, on these boards. Some of that is down to my personal preferences, as I have grown weary of most ARPGs in recent years. After gameplay, I'm a character-development guy, and, well, The Witcher doesn't excel there, either.

But in dialogue it does excel -- believeable characters with their own voices, such a rarity in gaming. TW3 is probably the best example of good writing amongst the games I have played. After TW3, Bloodlines is a good example.

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I think while everything you said is true, i think it is harsh expecting Witcher 3 standards in dialogue in games for the next 2 console generations(~10 years). Witcher 3 eviscerated the standards in dialogue in other games and put itself like 10 notches higher. The only game that could surpass it Cyberpunk from the same people.

I was cool with BG 1 and 2, with some exxeptions here and there. It's been a while, but I think I could add Arcanum to my short list above. PoE, while a bit windy at times, was fine. I didn't like the overall story much, but there were a couple of decent characters in DA: Origins.