Mass Effect: Andromeda - Preview

azarhal said:
Ian tweet was responding to someone who wanted to make preset #8, a black scanned face, white. The face are scanned so the skin tone range were limited to preserve that. Preset #3 has the lightest tone (I think).
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Yeah that looks a lot more reasonable than the video that Damian linked which surprised me. Assuming the skin tone slider is all the way to the left in your pic, though, it's still a somewhat limited range on the white side. But not anywhere near as big of a deal as that article was making it out to be.
 
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People worry about the strangest things...
 
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Maylander said:
Certain smaller gaming sites and such having a go at it probably won't affect much, but even PewDiePew has had a go at it by now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MEKM2amQ2E

Over 3 million views in two days. His fan base is actually big enough to affect sales.
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Will be interesting how this turns out, financially. EA had a pretty weak marketing going and now this vitriol erupted. Plus being released in one of strongest months in AAA gaming.
If it blunders, doubt they'll kill it, but may end up similar to last Deus Ex.
 
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Isn't the publisher responsible for QA? Maybe this is EA's attempt to kill off Bioware once and for all. Like they have so many others.

Adjusts tinfoil hat.
 
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Replaying Mass Effect 1 again. Started on my Xbox one cause sites said it worked great. Remembered why i hated that game, the clumsy controls on the consoles. Restarted on my pc and it works alot better. Anyway, been playing ME 1 back to back with MEA and i have trouble to find merit to the out cry on the internet. MEA is a mass effect game.

Since nobody ever will listen to me i pre ordered the game on Origin yesterday. Before reviews, based on my trial run. Ha! Eat that internet! :)
 
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Eurogamer review.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-03-19-mass-effect-andromeda

It's gripping stuff, and a reminder of the greatness of the Mass Effect trilogy - its intelligent reworkings of pulp sci-fi cliche, the taut splendour of its scenarios and aesthetic, the colour and dexterity of its writing. All that's still in here somewhere, I think. But then you pop out the other end of the mission, back into Andromeda's labyrinth of drudgery and obfuscation, and remember that you're a long way from home.
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Sounds like 'The Room' equivalent of videogames .
-Oh hi Shepard!
-I did nat hit her,i did naaht..
 
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You probably should have quoted the lede on that Eurogamer review: "BioWare's worst RPG yet".

Reviews are rolling in quickly on Metacritic now. Sitting at a 75-78 right now, depending on platform… Will be kind of shocking if it ends up under 80. I mean, this is BioWare's biggest-name series and we waited 5 years for it.

PC Gamer said it was the worst of the Mass Effects ("doesn't reach the heights of its predecessors") and gave it an 80. IGN gave it a 7.7 ("Mass Effect: Andromeda only occasionally recaptures the series' brilliance"). GameSpot gave it a 6, Polygon 7.5, Destructoid 6.5. Wow.
 
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I like the game a lot according to the 10 hour trial, didnt have any boring moments. Never saw any animation bugs that were in the viral internet videos. According to rewiews some parts are lacking however so I guess the game is not smoothed enough to please the masses. Its good or bad depening of personal tastes, thats what the wide range of reviews are telling.

PC Gamer:
Rewards dedicated exploration

Here's the thing, though: in the end, Andromeda still manages to be more than the sum of its parts. As a critic I can point to the things that don't quite work, the things that could be better, the things that should be better after 10 years and four of these games. I can also appreciate where improvements have been made, the basic pleasure of an improved combat system and a full-feeling, spectacular sci-fi world to explore.

Yet I'm also aware that when I'm in Mass Effect's zone a lot of these dry pros and cons don't seem to matter as much. This is a series that has always been good at getting under your skin, that has built its reputation on the moments when all of those disparate elements, good and bad, cohere into an adventure that feels like it's happening to you. Andromeda can still do that. It's not perfect. It's not consistent. But for a story about vast journeys and fresh starts, it also feels a little like coming home.

http://www.pcgamer.com/mass-effect-andromeda-review/
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Geek Review 98%

All in all, a fantastically good game. Coupling the space opera narrative of the original trilogy with a ridiculously expansive open world means that not only will you spend weeks and weeks on your first playthrough, you’re likely to spend weeks and weeks on your subsequent playthroughs too.

http://geekculture.co/geek-review-mass-effect-andromeda/
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The thing with mass effect is that there are no alternatives for it in the scifi-genre. There are no clones that offer the same gameplay. Hopefully EA does not kill the series but according to history that is a likely scenario. So this might be the last great space exploration game in style of Kotor/Mass effect.
 
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Rock Paper Shotgun guy has his review out, based on the full game now, and he must not have changed his mind much cause he's still savaging it. Calling it "Massive Defect"...

"Mass Effect Andromeda feels like a game that exists because there needed to be a new Mass Effect game. It’s hard, as deeply as you explore it, to find something that shows any other reason for it to be. Despite the extraordinary opportunity of a fresh start, fresh characters, and even a fresh galaxy to set it in, this feels like a lengthy rehash of what came before. It is bad in many ways, from its madcap AI, poor character faces, dated design and most of all, horrible writing, but its biggest crime is just how unavoidably, all-encompassingly dull it is for so, so many hours."
 
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Well, as feared, that looks pretty horrible.

And, if I can't even make my aryan space soldier properly white, that really is the fucking limit. :biggrin:
 
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Stingray said:
Rock Paper Shotgun guy has his review out, based on the full game now, and he must not have changed his mind much cause he's still savaging it. Calling it "Massive Defect"…

"Mass Effect Andromeda feels like a game that exists because there needed to be a new Mass Effect game. It’s hard, as deeply as you explore it, to find something that shows any other reason for it to be. Despite the extraordinary opportunity of a fresh start, fresh characters, and even a fresh galaxy to set it in, this feels like a lengthy rehash of what came before. It is bad in many ways, from its madcap AI, poor character faces, dated design and most of all, horrible writing, but its biggest crime is just how unavoidably, all-encompassingly dull it is for so, so many hours."
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RPS hates the fact it is a Mass Effect game which would be a win for many fans of the series.
 
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Holly Avenger said:
It's a very mixed bag - from 9s to 5s, I'd say an average of 7/10 or so. Love the description of the RPS review "(no single quote was representative of this savage take down)"
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Almost all the reviews are between 6.0 and 8.0 though, just a few outliers below and above. That is still a wide range, especially for a AAA game where 8 usually means "meh, decent" and 6 means "bomb".

The Verge has an unscored review up, saying "Andromeda is a massive game with so much to do, remarkably little of which is fun. It’s often a bland and tedious game to play, mercifully punctuated by endearing narrative moments. Your enjoyment will depend on how much you like chatting with blue aliens."

CNET also has an article up, titled "Is Mass Effect: Andromeda dead on arrival?" where the reviewer said the game was so boring that he couldn't stand to play any more past the first 12 hours.
 
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All of this is good news to me since the game will be hitting bargain bin sooner than I anticipated!

I am not Bioware fan these days but I have sneaky feeling that this game isn't bad as everyone makes it out to be!

Edit: Total biscuit twitted that MEA was not created by the main Bioware team. Instead it was created by studio which was initially created to to do grunt work for the main team....

Also it seem the so called "social justice" aspect has taken over Bioware as well based on the way all the NPC (both male and female) looks etc but gamer in general still play these games mainly for "fantasy" and still want hot chicks and dudes!
 
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Facial animations are in line with the demand of the situation: plain when the conversations convey plain information. They are worked when there is more to convey.
From what was watched on streams, animations are good enough to convey emotion during emotional scenes.

Stingray said:
"Mass Effect Andromeda feels like a game that exists because there needed to be a new Mass Effect game. It’s hard, as deeply as you explore it, to find something that shows any other reason for it to be. "
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It only remains for this guy to apply the line of thoughts to numerous crowdfunded products. This will keep him busy for some time.
 
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Can we just not with the SJW conspiracy theories? They always lead to the worst elements of the gaming community thinking death threats and doxxing are somehow appropriate.
 
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I think the following pretty much sum up the low scores since lot of other games recently have raised the bar and Bioware is falling behind… and people are coming to MEA after just playing some of these games...


Games have to fit into our lives, and that’s not always fair. Mass Effect: Andromeda might’ve worked a decade ago on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, but it doesn’t work in a world that is delivering games like Horizon: Zero Dawn, Nier: Automata, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. In this reality, BioWare’s latest role-playing game is old, broken, and often boring.
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55/100

Venture Beat: http://venturebeat.com/2017/03/20/mass-effect-andromeda-review/
 
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Capt. Huggy Face said:
People worry about the strangest things…
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Their worries were expected.

As already mentioned, the character customization feature is strong and doubtless, devs want it to be used.

One way to drive people to use it was already mentioned: providing rather bad looking presets so that people who would not use the feature feel incentized to use it. A second benefit was that people who were to use it in any case do not feel fustrated by being unable to match the outputs of professional workers.

The drama over skin complexion indicates they somehow anticipated the demand.
Providing the presets as they were provided triggered a certain segment in the customer base. Which led to give more scrutiny to character customization feature.

Mission accomplished.

As for many claims that went made on this product, it was baseless. It only takes to look at one of the first human side kicks to understand this.
 
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