Mass Effect: Andromeda

[Daehawk]

I was REALLY tired of Kalinda so I shot her . Felt good. Though thinking about it I think Ill replay and save her and lose the tech. I doubt the tech is special.

[Daehawk]

Its a little strange still that Im zipping all over a galaxy from end to end and in the first games I had to use alien tech to do that.

[Daehawk]

Ok its come time to almost got to Meridian and Im scratching my head. Not a single one of our ships have guns...none......which I find stupid in its own right. So how do we actually fight the Kett????

This must be a doozy of a fight.

[Daehawk]

I just visited Meridian and I must say it again...it is VERY stupid of the Initiative to have no guns other than sidearms and rifles. The ships should be outfitted with giant canons and lots of them. Who thought it was a good idea to go to a new galaxy with no armaments????

[Daehawk]

Im at the end game now...all these remnant ships and NOT ONE IS FIRING at the Archon!! Somebody shoot that sumbiotch

[Daehawk]

Concerning the boss bad guy and the ending.....

Spoiler:

WinTFnSAMHELL!!??? Im begging there at the end "LET ME SHOOT HIM JUST ONCE!!!!!!!!!!!"...nope not even once. The entire game and I dont think I got to shoot him once. In the end he just falls to the floor. I REALLY wanted to shoot him . I want to kill him still. WTF. Such a crap way to end it. Not to mention that splinter group didn't even help me. Why oh why did it not let me kill him. I didn't even shoot him on the ground. LAME!!!!!!

Will be happy to delete it.

[killbot737]

Concerning the boss bad guy and the ending.....

Will be happy to delete it.

Art of War, baby. Art of War!

[Grifman]

I just visited Meridian and I must say it again...it is VERY stupid of the Initiative to have no guns other than sidearms and rifles. The ships should be outfitted with giant canons and lots of them. Who thought it was a good idea to go to a new galaxy with no armaments????

Agreed, but there are so many story things that are just wrongheaded in the game (but overall, I still enjoyed it). You're right, you don't travel across light years for years and years, and then are virtually unarmed when you get there. I realize that they couldn't carry battleships with them, but each ark should have carried half a dozen frigates, as heavily armed as they could be, and the arks themselves should have been extremely well armed, so that they and their supporting frigates could fight off a major attack, especially if all the arks were clustered together for defensive purposes. That would have been a tough nut to crack for even a strong fleet.

[Daehawk]

I know and can understand it was done perhaps for story stuff. But it still feels silly and wrong. And yes I find so much just wrong with the game yet I did have a good time playing it through. Ill probably never replay it unlike the first three. Ive finished each of them maybe 4 times or 5. And I will replay them again. In fact I have already decided to try a female Shepard which Ive never done and play it as a total asshole to everyone. Ill support the humans first and foremost and let the council die and such. Ill also shoot Rex

But I have enjoyed my time playing it. Im glad it was basically free as I refused to give them money for it.

[Daehawk]

Im going through the ending now where Im talking to everyone and it struck me....I never did get an explanation of what the Scourge is. Is it some old weapon used against the Remnant in the ancient past? Is it something that got away from the Remnant and destroyed them? I dont get it. The entire game I kept thinking Id learn about it. Shame that.

EDIT: Something else never explained...the Benefactor. Guess we'll never know now.

[Daehawk]

I like this...

Archon - Cause of death - Pathfinder.

EDIT: Also that reporter didn't me me the last 'interview'

[Blackhawk]

What's the save system like on this one?

[Isgrimnur]

checkpoint autosaves

[Blackhawk]

How far apart? It seems like the kind of game that has a lot of open areas, and I find that I have a lot of trouble these days with games that require an hour at a time to play.

[Daehawk]

You can save any time any where. I must have 500 saves. There were a few missions like the companions ones that would not let me save on once I left theship.

[Daehawk]

Gotta say I never enjoyed any interaction with that woman who says "my face is tired"...After she said that in the beginning of the game it was ruined for me from there out with her. I hated her and the stuff where she was there on screen.

[Daehawk]

I just looked at my save folder before I delete it all. 459 saves and only 450 mb total space.

[Daehawk]

I just got back to this thread to check something . I saved anywhere and all the time. It has unlimited saves far as I saw. There are some places like the vaults and on certain missions you cannot save at all in. Most times you can save anywhere.

Dec 18. Seeing that is sad and bothers me. Just 10 days later I rushed my wife in to the ER with a stroke and 6 days later she was dead. While playing this I had a good time. She knew I did. She paid the $5 for the Origin Access. I had NO IDEA what was coming or what would happen. None. Yet I feel bad for that same reason.

[Blackhawk]

I'm trying, but I just can't get into this. I'm still on the first world (although I'm ready to leave.) The thing that holds me back is that I'm really in the mood to explore worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and boldly shoot them. And yet every time I play I find myself stuck with an hour and a half of talking to twenty different NPCs about pure fluff topics. When you're not in the mood for an hour of semi-relevant converasion, it's a pain to make yourself launch the game.

And the crafting is... awful. There are so many menus, so many subcategories, and no information with which to make decisions. So I want a sniper rifle. I can build six or seven different ones, but there is no meaningful way to compare and decide which one would be best. It just leaves me crosseyed.

[Suitably Ironic Moniker]

The game got better after he first 5-7 hours. It became less hand-holdy, and opened up some more quests to follow. I would just ignore most of the BS collection quests, and avoid any non-party member conversations amongst your crew. The “writing” in this game started out at “atrocious,” and raised itself to “decidedly sub-par” after a while, so it does get better. The crafting does not.

[Blackhawk]

Yeah, I read something similar earlier. Treat it like a linear RPG rather than an open world exploration game. Go from story mission to story mission, only do the stuff in between that really catches your attention.

[NickAragua]

This appears to be on sale on Steam for 10 bucks. Pretty sure I'm going to grab it, but I wanted to see if anyone had any incredibly compelling reasons why I shouldn't.

[Daehawk]

Nah go ahead. I found it ok and finished it. but it is not a mass effect game.

[Max Peck]

In a lot of ways, Andromeda feels like an Ubisoft open world game. I pretty much enjoy all of Ubisoft's offerings, so that may have something to do with my enjoyment of Andromeda but it's not everyone's cup of tea.

[El Guapo]

It's definitely worth it for $10. It's a good game, it's just not amazing.

[NickAragua]

It's clicking with me pretty well, so far. I like the increased focus on exploration, it kind of brings back the feeling from the first Mass Effect, except the rover physics are a lot better.

After setting up the first colony, I found out some work crew was planning to administer electro-shock therapy to the killer robot guys to try to get control of them. That's fine, I think, I'll just loot the rest of this area and finish up some scanning then get over there. Then I notice this big countdown timer in the top right of the screen, and it's at 30 seconds. I didn't make it an a bunch of the work crew guys got killed. Whoops. This brings back flashbacks to that Deus Ex game, where the guy kept bitching at me about the ongoing hostage situation, while I took my sweet time exploring and looting the HQ. Those poor hostages.

"So how come these guys got killed? Records show you had a two minute time window?"

"Uh, well, the, uh, robots, killed them. But hey, check it out, I found a couple of pounds of raw cadmium!"

A good time, overall, although, my face *is* tired.

[JCC]

I still think that aside from its buggy launch ME:A gets a bad rap. The story was fine albeit not as compelling as the narrative in the first 3 games. But at least it had an ending that didn't make me want to hurl a controller at the TV (hello ME3)! And I thought it had the most fun combat of all 3 games. I think they probably should have tried to make the aliens/worlds more "different" than they did to make the mass exodus away from the known universe more interesting. But, I would be fine with a sequel set in the same place. I am also fine with a sequel back in the original universe. My Sheppard lived, so I am happy to get to play as him again if that's the direction they go. I am just glad the series isn't dead.

[NickAragua]

Yeah, I'm having fun so far. Running into a few bugs here and there, mostly characters clipping through each other during dialogue, but nothing show-stopping. The main complaint I have is that most of the dialogue animations are kind of boring and static, rather than in the original trilogy, where these things were pretty dynamic and characters would have different poses and actually make gestures. That, and there were a couple of dialogue scenes where some random NPC would be standing next to my guy with one of their arms clipped through my chest.

Currently, I've got Havarl cleared out (except for a couple of random scavenger hunts without waypoints, which I'm not going to bother with), and am working on Round 2 of EOS. Fought the giant robo-tripod thing, for which I actually had to use some of my consumables - although I wish I'd used disruptor ammo instead of cryo ammo. Oh well. Most fights, I can just plow through with my Black Widow sniper rifle and N7 Eagle pistol, but this one I really had to reach deep into my pockets and get the shield rechargers going - normally I can take cover to recharge my shields, but I was struggling to find cover against the giant robo-tripod, since it's so high up. But I got it in the end.

Now to clean up the Kett and move on to another world.

[Daehawk]

The Kett and the Kazon come from the same low rent baddy hospital I think hehe.

[NickAragua]

Heh, guess they're from the Star Trek school of alien design. "All right buddy, here's your forehead props. Get out there and knock 'em dead."

[NickAragua]

There we go. Hit a corrupt save bug, lost about two hours of gameplay. Fucking annoying. That'll teach me to save while driving in the Nomad, apparently.

[NickAragua]

Ok. Cleared out EOS. For some reason, fighting the tripod robot was much more of a huge pain in the ass. On the plus side, Cora and the Krogan dude are pretty great against Remnant Nullifiers (the mid-sized tank guys that put up shields). Their love of charging into melee forces the Nullifiers to drop the shield, letting me get in shots on their glowing red light with the sniper rifle.

Now for a trip back to the Nexus, and then on to Voed... Voel... the planet where the Angaran resistance guys are.

[NickAragua]

Finished this up today. 85.4 hours, according to steam.

Enjoyed flying around the galaxy, exploring new worlds and shooting random assholes in the head. Dialogue was pretty good, although to save time I wound up space-bar-ing past a lot of the blathering where it's just some dude phoning their lines in with a monotone voice. And also, kind of weird for an Asari to be using baseball metaphors. Combat was fun enough, although I settled into one style that worked and just went with that for most of the game. Got some multi-player in but it's just a horde mode and I don't really care about loot boxes, so I got bored of it pretty quickly. Also kind of wish there was more than one new friendly race introduced.

Ending was pretty good, although in the lead-up, I was about ready for the whole thing to be over as there are a couple of missions that have you hop across multiple planets, including having to land (and watch the long-ass landing animation) and take off (and watch the long-ass takeoff animation).

I built a sniper dude (similar to my Shepard from the trilogy). Black Widow (VIII) sniper rifle with double mod extension, the augment that recharges shields when you empty your clip, and 3x kinetic coils. And then a barrel mod for +damage, scope for +accuracy, extra thermal clip and "shoot through walls" mod. Took any unshielded bastard out with a single headshot, two shots for the armored/shielded guys. As a backup, I had a nasty pistol that did almost as much damage per shot as the sniper rifle, and an assault rifle.

Basic tactical approach was to park the Nomad a hundred or so meters out, then just ping people in the head until everyone's dead. Ammo was never a problem, except for maybe during the game intro. Occasionally, the game throws you into enclosed spaces, which is a problem for a dude whose primary weapon is a sniper rifle, but that's why I have Drack and Cora on my team.

Storyline thoughts:

Spoiler:

Went with Cora for romance, even though girls with buzz cuts normally don't do it for me. Go figure. It always feels weird as all hell (either creepy or "hell no") to hit on my subordinates, so I avoided it for the most part.

Kind of wish the sister/sibling had a bigger role to play.

Made a deal with the traitor kett guy.

Saved the Hyperion with everyone surviving (well, mostly everyone). I assume that if I just plow through the main storyline without stopping to help every random Tom, Dick and Harry, a lot more people die in that final confrontation.

Kind of hoping the effects of terraforming are somewhat limited - feels like it'd lose the frontier feeling. But I suppose it's a moot point since we're unlikely to revisit Andromeda any time soon.