tziwen
N2
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquistion, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda
Origin: Tziwen
Posts: 150 Likes: 178
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tziwen
Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquistion, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda
Tziwen
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Post by tziwen on Mar 28, 2017 20:47:53 GMT
Is this good or not? Well.... yes and no. Observations: First, I have to say that this theme of exploration and colonization works for me. Which is nice, since I had serious problems with the dominant themes of the MET and how they were presented to us. This time, I'm ok with going along without, so far, any major criticisms. In this aspect alone, mind you. MEA and ME1MEA occasionally reminds me of ME1. I'm exploring, often in a vehicle so very reminiscent of the Mako, on new worlds which have their own aesthetic appeal and identity, occasionally picking up stuff, random and not so random, investigating odd structures etc.. The mining is extremely inefficient compared to other ways to gather minerals, and I suspect we'll have fewer such worlds than I'd prefer in the end, but all in all this is really nice. The world is also almost as seamless as ME1's was, so your sense of place is mostly intact. The world, however, continues to appear small, something I've also held against the MET. Movement between locations simply doesn't matter much. Poof, you're there. I think this is inappropriate but more about that in the worldbuilding section. MEA and DAIMEA also occasionally reminds me of DAI. Unfortunately, the first such aspect that comes to mind is not one DAI's better parts but one of its worst: collection tasks. Exploration on planets often does unveil interesting stuff, but it also unlocks a set of collection tasks like "find these 6 broken drones" or "place scanners at these 6 locations". These are optional, but there are far too many of them, and they clutter up the journal and the maps with icons which suggest something signficant but only point at chores you'd rather be done with as fast as possible. There are also collection tasks featuring unmarked sites placed partly in excessively hard-to-access areas, of which I managed to complete not a single one so far, since I suspect the reward in no way justifies the effort - even if it was just with a really nice view, for while the scenery has its appeal, it in no way approaches the impact of DAI's landscapes. In the emotional impact of its landscapes, MEA even stays behind ME1, even though obviously, the visuals are way more technically advanced. Also, why does simply going to specific places increase planet viability? That makes no sense. The secondary mission system where you send teams out is a straight copy of DAI's wartable mission system, as is the system of leveling up the Nexus, but with far less groundwork in lore. Such a system does not work well in an environment you do not already know, and "leveling up the Nexus" is insufficiently explained. The system works and I use it, but as opposed to DAI, it doesn't add significantly to the experience. Worldbuilding? Uh...what's that?Which brings me to the worldbuilding. Which is, in my opinion, MEA's worst feature by a very big margin. Did *anyone* actually think about making the world interesting and consistent? Humanoid aliens again? With primary enemies looking like barely-masked copies of the MET's protheans/collectors and your first potential ally species taken right out of the SW universe? And of course they're also humanoid. And that's just the boring parts, don't get me started about the annoying ones. There we have this giant robotic thing we have to deactivate in a mission on a planet. It is a robot and it has, by its name, a clearly designated technical task. OK, good. It also looks like a Thresher Maw made of metallic parts with three legs added. Not really inspiring, but....OK. Then....it proceeds to roar like an angry Thresher Maw. WTF?????? Believe me, things that strike you as "just wrong" in similar ways are a regular occurence. Here's another one: Pebee says the Milky Way was "so been there, done that. Well, not I, but someone did". Well....no. By the old Codex, the Milky Way was 97% unexplored and would've had enough unexplored space for a hundred plots like that of MEA. We all know why we are in Andromeda, and I don't have a problem with it, but characters need a plausible in-world motivation. Whoever wrote Pebee here clearly didn't have the faintest idea of what was plausible. It would've been better to omit saying anything at all. I mean, it isn't as if such motivation would be hard to conceive of, right? And another one: I had some talk with a character I've forgotten about how they scanned the Heleus cluster from the MW. I got some very convoluted explanation about what amounted to FTL scanning with geth tech. FTL scanning was impossible under the MEU's technical paradigm but I might've gone along with it had it solved an important problem. Well....that wasn't the case at all. It solved a non-existing problem. Planets, my dear writers, as a rule don't change that much in a million years or two that their viability is affected. So if you scanned this place from two million light-years away and got, as usual, two-million-year-old information. you actually could expect the planets to be still viable when you arrived 650 years later. They did change, but that was for non-natural reasons, which is explained well enough and part of the plot. Congratulations, you compromised your world's integrity for no reason at all. Epic fail. Should I go on? With how the skies change immediately after you do some important stuff on a planet and it immediately becomes 50% more viable? This was awful in "Total Recall" and it isn't any better here. An enforced delay of, say, a hundred more years in cryo-sleep would've added a nice SF aspect to the plot, but no, we can't have that. It must all be as everyone's living in the same city, how else could the moron players ever understand what happening? Or wasn't it the supposed player's incapability of understanding, but rather the writers? "SF writers don't have a sense of scale" is a trope supposedly widespread, but most of them, judging from the books I read, make at least a token attempt to make things plausible. MEA? Nope. Nothing at all. Not that I find this all that surprising, since apparently the only writer ever employed by Bioware for the MEU who cared about such things left in the middle of making ME2. And another one: has anyone thought of a plausible placement of these memory thingies we need to unlock Ryder's past? I mean, well, it's obviously completely plausible to find one on a world neither you nor your father nor the AI has ever been. If it was *my* memory, I could justify it, after all memory triggers can be odd, but it's an AI's memory that, to top it all off, was purposefully hidden from me. That makes no sense at all. I just hope that the explanation of the Remnant retains some plausbility. Writing and VA:...have a disparate quality. While the main interaction scenes with major characters, while not exactly on the level of most of the MET, are done reasonably well in most cases, much of the rest is....sorry, there's no way to say this politely....uninspired, bland, generic, cheesy, campy, childish, boring, groan-worthily predictable and bare of anything that would engage you intellectually or emotionally. Among other things, I'm thoroughly sick of family stuff. As if there wasn't anything more interesting to have a conflict about in a new galaxy. As if that wasn't enough, many characters seem to read their lines from teleprompters as they appear with no sense of context. Having said that, while this level of writing is ubiquitous outside the main character interaction scenes, it doesn't have all that much of an impact once you're back from your first planet mission. And resigned to it. After all, ME's writing was always full of cheap drama and contrived emotion only loosely grounded in lore, with some notable exceptions that carried much of the stories alone. Minor annoyances:
I've already written enough for one post so I'll make this short: several aspects of the game, as a game, aren't up the standards I expect from a game that cost me 70€. Coming from TW3's and DXMD's smooth movement to MEA feels like a step 10 years back. In fact, MEA's movement reminds me of KOTOR's movement when it first came out. I replayed it last year, and it didn't feel significantly different now. It's as if they're still using the same code as then (yeah, I know that can't be). Here's a minor example: when you activate your Witcher sense in TW3, you can't climb or jump. When you activate your scanner in MEA, you also can't climb or jump. In principle, no problem at all, but there's a difference: in MEA you can't walk up steps while scanning (or at least some steps, I don't know what the conditions are), so that for instance, a 10cm step up to a platform stops you from moving, and you have to switch off the scanner and jump. That the mantle-up function is so finicky in its requirements that it's basically useless doesn't help. Add the animations and some characters' pasty faces. I guess that's a well-known complaint by now, but it's not less significant for being "just" an aesthetic feature. There is more but I have to stop now. The overall picture that emerges for me is a game that works overall, but at the same time, annoys me so often and so thoroughly that it has a significant impact on my enjoyment. I'm really tired of bringing TW3 in as a counterexample, but if you've played that, it is clearly recognizeable how much more thought went into TW3's smallest detail. Maybe it's a budget problem, but I'm hearing MEA cost 40 million. Where did all that go? Thinking about how you can make your character presets more ugly? i put a like on your post not that i agree but i appreciate the effort you put into it. Thanks for your feedback! MEA and ME1: I agree here for the most part. I'm moving ahead MEA and DAI To me this game is alike DA:I on 2 things: Crafting and engine... I don't see much more DA:I into it. But i can't blame you for thinking like that. I think i see where you're coming from and i'm ok with that. Worldbuilding? Uh...what's that? Wait ... You know what... Screw it. I agree with 99% of what you say. The only thing is that i seem less annoyed by its imperfections than you. Which is... Fine. I mean it's matter of expectations, standards and tolerence. Not that i've more/better of those than you. Just we're two different persons seeing the same situation but where i say: Not bad. I understand this ME is a test to see if the franchise still carry some weight before the big hourrah, you're more like: It's ME... Drunk and running on one leg. Your points are valid... I agree on the syptoms not on the diagnostic.
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Post by smilesja on Mar 28, 2017 20:55:28 GMT
On a smaller note I'm getting real sick of tw3 it's not flawless
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peabuddie
N2
You did good, kid.
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquistion, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate
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You did good, kid.
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Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquistion, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate
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Post by peabuddie on Mar 28, 2017 21:10:41 GMT
Here is synopsis of MEA's story.
You travel for 600 something years to a new galaxy. Once there you go on a massive killing spree. In the end the world looks prettier.
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Post by Lebanese Dude on Mar 28, 2017 21:48:23 GMT
Here is synopsis of *insert CRPG here"'s story. You travel to _____ . Once there you go on a massive killing spree. In the end ____ looks prettier. FTFY
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Post by maximusarael020 on Mar 28, 2017 22:50:04 GMT
No comment? Does that mean everyone agrees, or that I should start talking about gay representation. I've heard that's a super-important problem... The tone of the game is far too cheery and optimistic for the situation the Arks are in, and that hamstrings the writing in a lot of places, but some of it is just awful no matter what... but you pretty much hit the nail on the head with all your points. I thought the VA wasn't that bad the camera angles and animations really hurt the VA, but some characters like Gil seem like they're reading directly from a script. Suvi's accent was a bit too much too, but overall from the inner circle at least I thought the VA was pretty good considering the limitations by the setting/writing. All the other VA is pretty hit or miss. Sloane was the weirdest to me her VA didn't match her badass Pirate Traitor Warlord Exile persona she had been given/built up. Well, I'm just going to point out that Suvi's VA is Katie Townsend and is actually from Glasgow, Scotland, so here accent is authentic. I don't think the tone is too cheery and optimistic. The Hyperion shows up 14 months after the Nexus. Everyone that came on the Nexus has had plenty of time to give up on the Arks, so when the Hyperion shows up they should be pretty happy, especially when the human pathfinder shows up and within like 5 minutes fixes one of the Golden Worlds and sets up an outpost, starting to release people from Cryo. This is when it gets exciting for those people, when hope should finally be rising.
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Post by alanc9 on Mar 28, 2017 22:53:48 GMT
Didn't we have complaints about Leliana's accent back in the day?
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Post by surelyforth on Mar 28, 2017 23:19:39 GMT
Didn't we have complaints about Leliana's accent back in the day? Of course we did.
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timebean
N3
It's just a game, folks...
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquistion, KOTOR
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timebean
It's just a game, folks...
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Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquistion, KOTOR
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Post by timebean on Mar 28, 2017 23:47:40 GMT
How did I not see the damned Total Recall shoved into this game??!! That is one of my favorite movies of all time (ahem, the original with good ole Arnold). Shit. Ancient alien technology = start the reactor by placing your hand on the console = world is all good. How the hell did I miss it? Good call. My new theory is that this entire game is a dream that EDI programmed for herself to feel more "real".
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Post by Deleted on Mar 28, 2017 23:58:51 GMT
I am liking the light-hearted nature of the game, and I love how lore is introduced gradually, and is narrated through character interaction rather than endless codex entries in Inquisition. I also like it that it is easy to follow the story and that each planet has planetary story, the main story and optional Sidequests.
I feel Angara are more different from humans than MW races were. Nothing will ever be cheesier than Asari.
(Shrug) different strokes for different folks.
Love the game so far and don't feel endlessly frustrated and confused like with Inquisition. I prefer smooth sailing like that, and slight silliness to the emotionless drone of Inquisition.
I prefer the presence of the story all the time to its absence for most of Inquisition, or to the game of "connect the texts randomly scattered around this area to the main plot if you wish!"
I like it that characters always talk to me, rather than going for hours on end in Inquisition with only picking straight to codex texts,
As for animations and character looks, well, we traded shiny skin, plastered lashes and hair for better hair and flatter eyes. Overall though, an improvement on Inquisition as far as I am concerned, because pale shiny skin and ladies/hair were worse imo than flat eyes.
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Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age Inquistion, Mass Effect Andromeda
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Post by RadQuinn on Mar 29, 2017 0:56:48 GMT
Is this good or not? Well.... yes and no. Observations: First, I have to say that this theme of exploration and colonization works for me. Which is nice, since I had serious problems with the dominant themes of the MET and how they were presented to us. This time, I'm ok with going along without, so far, any major criticisms. In this aspect alone, mind you. MEA and ME1MEA occasionally reminds me of ME1. I'm exploring, often in a vehicle so very reminiscent of the Mako, on new worlds which have their own aesthetic appeal and identity, occasionally picking up stuff, random and not so random, investigating odd structures etc.. The mining is extremely inefficient compared to other ways to gather minerals, and I suspect we'll have fewer such worlds than I'd prefer in the end, but all in all this is really nice. The world is also almost as seamless as ME1's was, so your sense of place is mostly intact. The world, however, continues to appear small, something I've also held against the MET. Movement between locations simply doesn't matter much. Poof, you're there. I think this is inappropriate but more about that in the worldbuilding section. 100% agree with you on the mining front. It's outrageously inefficient. MEA and DAIMEA also occasionally reminds me of DAI. Unfortunately, the first such aspect that comes to mind is not one DAI's better parts but one of its worst: collection tasks. Exploration on planets often does unveil interesting stuff, but it also unlocks a set of collection tasks like "find these 6 broken drones" or "place scanners at these 6 locations". These are optional, but there are far too many of them, and they clutter up the journal and the maps with icons which suggest something signficant but only point at chores you'd rather be done with as fast as possible. There are also collection tasks featuring unmarked sites placed partly in excessively hard-to-access areas, of which I managed to complete not a single one so far, since I suspect the reward in no way justifies the effort - even if it was just with a really nice view, for while the scenery has its appeal, it in no way approaches the impact of DAI's landscapes. In the emotional impact of its landscapes, MEA even stays behind ME1, even though obviously, the visuals are way more technically advanced. Also, why does simply going to specific places increase planet viability? That makes no sense. The secondary mission system where you send teams out is a straight copy of DAI's wartable mission system, as is the system of leveling up the Nexus, but with far less groundwork in lore. Such a system does not work well in an environment you do not already know, and "leveling up the Nexus" is insufficiently explained. The system works and I use it, but as opposed to DAI, it doesn't add significantly to the experience. Also agree with you on the 'busi-work' missions. There were too many that had such little impact other than completion. The planet viability system wasn't explained properly or enough. What I get out of it is that we know that area 'x' on this planet is a great spot for viability, so as long as you explore that entire sector you should be able to sustain an outpost on the planet. I also linked the experiences within the vaults to the viability. In the dialogue they all talk about how fixing the vaults are going to make the planet a better place, whether it be less radiation, more sunlight, etc. I think it's kind of a weak story but it's what they gave us. Worldbuilding? Uh...what's that?Which brings me to the worldbuilding. Which is, in my opinion, MEA's worst feature by a very big margin. Did *anyone* actually think about making the world interesting and consistent? Humanoid aliens again? With primary enemies looking like barely-masked copies of the MET's protheans/collectors and your first potential ally species taken right out of the SW universe? And of course they're also humanoid. And that's just the boring parts, don't get me started about the annoying ones. There we have this giant robotic thing we have to deactivate in a mission on a planet. It is a robot and it has, by its name, a clearly designated technical task. OK, good. It also looks like a Thresher Maw made of metallic parts with three legs added. Not really inspiring, but....OK. Then....it proceeds to roar like an angry Thresher Maw. WTF?????? Believe me, things that strike you as "just wrong" in similar ways are a regular occurence. hahaha, 100% agree with you about the Architects. I just shook my head in disappointment and disbelief that they could have been that lazy about the design. The Kett and the wildlife are boring and unimaginative.
Here's another one: Pebee says the Milky Way was "so been there, done that. Well, not I, but someone did". Well....no. By the old Codex, the Milky Way was 97% unexplored and would've had enough unexplored space for a hundred plots like that of MEA. We all know why we are in Andromeda, and I don't have a problem with it, but characters need a plausible in-world motivation. Whoever wrote Pebee here clearly didn't have the faintest idea of what was plausible. It would've been better to omit saying anything at all. I mean, it isn't as if such motivation would be hard to conceive of, right? And another one: I had some talk with a character I've forgotten about how they scanned the Heleus cluster from the MW. I got some very convoluted explanation about what amounted to FTL scanning with geth tech. FTL scanning was impossible under the MEU's technical paradigm but I might've gone along with it had it solved an important problem. Well....that wasn't the case at all. It solved a non-existing problem. Planets, my dear writers, as a rule don't change that much in a million years or two that their viability is affected. So if you scanned this place from two million light-years away and got, as usual, two-million-year-old information. you actually could expect the planets to be still viable when you arrived 650 years later. They did change, but that was for non-natural reasons, which is explained well enough and part of the plot. Congratulations, you compromised your world's integrity for no reason at all. Epic fail. Should I go on? With how the skies change immediately after you do some important stuff on a planet and it immediately becomes 50% more viable? This was awful in "Total Recall" and it isn't any better here. An enforced delay of, say, a hundred more years in cryo-sleep would've added a nice SF aspect to the plot, but no, we can't have that. It must all be as everyone's living in the same city, how else could the moron players ever understand what happening? Or wasn't it the supposed player's incapability of understanding, but rather the writers? "SF writers don't have a sense of scale" is a trope supposedly widespread, but most of them, judging from the books I read, make at least a token attempt to make things plausible. MEA? Nope. Nothing at all. Not that I find this all that surprising, since apparently the only writer ever employed by Bioware for the MEU who cared about such things left in the middle of making ME2. And another one: has anyone thought of a plausible placement of these memory thingies we need to unlock Ryder's past? I mean, well, it's obviously completely plausible to find one on a world neither you nor your father nor the AI has ever been. If it was *my* memory, I could justify it, after all memory triggers can be odd, but it's an AI's memory that, to top it all off, was purposefully hidden from me. That makes no sense at all. I just hope that the explanation of the Remnant retains some plausbility. Writing and VA:...have a disparate quality. While the main interaction scenes with major characters, while not exactly on the level of most of the MET, are done reasonably well in most cases, much of the rest is....sorry, there's no way to say this politely....uninspired, bland, generic, cheesy, campy, childish, boring, groan-worthily predictable and bare of anything that would engage you intellectually or emotionally. Among other things, I'm thoroughly sick of family stuff. As if there wasn't anything more interesting to have a conflict about in a new galaxy. As if that wasn't enough, many characters seem to read their lines from teleprompters as they appear with no sense of context. Having said that, while this level of writing is ubiquitous outside the main character interaction scenes, it doesn't have all that much of an impact once you're back from your first planet mission. And resigned to it. After all, ME's writing was always full of cheap drama and contrived emotion only loosely grounded in lore, with some notable exceptions that carried much of the stories alone. Yep, writing was so unsatisfying and the voice acting felt rushed and like it was put into production without someone checking it. Every person had some sort of issue that was in no way different than either any problem that's been in the Mass Effect world. A sister in need of help? Really? The Miranda/Orianna storyline was just too appealing to not steal? I agree that the other games had some sort of notable experience or drama that carried the other bad ones, but I felt that even that was missing from this game. Minor annoyances:
I've already written enough for one post so I'll make this short: several aspects of the game, as a game, aren't up the standards I expect from a game that cost me 70€. Coming from TW3's and DXMD's smooth movement to MEA feels like a step 10 years back. In fact, MEA's movement reminds me of KOTOR's movement when it first came out. I replayed it last year, and it didn't feel significantly different now. It's as if they're still using the same code as then (yeah, I know that can't be). Here's a minor example: when you activate your Witcher sense in TW3, you can't climb or jump. When you activate your scanner in MEA, you also can't climb or jump. In principle, no problem at all, but there's a difference: in MEA you can't walk up steps while scanning (or at least some steps, I don't know what the conditions are), so that for instance, a 10cm step up to a platform stops you from moving, and you have to switch off the scanner and jump. That the mantle-up function is so finicky in its requirements that it's basically useless doesn't help. Add the animations and some characters' pasty faces. I guess that's a well-known complaint by now, but it's not less significant for being "just" an aesthetic feature. There is more but I have to stop now. The overall picture that emerges for me is a game that works overall, but at the same time, annoys me so often and so thoroughly that it has a significant impact on my enjoyment. I'm really tired of bringing TW3 in as a counterexample, but if you've played that, it is clearly recognizeable how much more thought went into TW3's smallest detail. Maybe it's a budget problem, but I'm hearing MEA cost 40 million. Where did all that go? Thinking about how you can make your character presets more ugly? Yes, movement is so terrible. I'm baffled how they get it that wrong. I have heard TW3 references a bunch but I've also heard from people who know more about this than I do, that it's difficult to compare the two games. One is a full on RPG and the other isn't. It's easier to create lasting and great looking cuts when there is only one scene that can be seen; same issue with dialogue. Overall I feel the same you do; the game is fine but it has so many annoying characteristics. This could and should have been the game of the year.Comments above. ^
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Post by Ieldra on Mar 29, 2017 8:14:55 GMT
Wait ... You know what... Screw it. I agree with 99% of what you say. The only thing is that i seem less annoyed by its imperfections than you. Which is... Fine. I mean it's matter of expectations, standards and tolerence. Not that i've more/better of those than you. Just we're two different persons seeing the same situation but where i say: Not bad. I understand this ME is a test to see if the franchise still carry some weight before the big hourrah, you're more like: It's ME... Drunk and running on one leg. Your points are valid... I agree on the syptoms not on the diagnostic. I guess what annoys me so much is the fact that most of these superficially small concerns indicate a writer's lack of awareness of their subject matter I find plainly inexcuseable. If you were aware of the time scale along which a planet develops, you would never make a mistake like requiring FTL scans to ensure a planet's viability, supposing you actually get over the hurdle of being able to scan planets from two million ly away in the first place. If you were aware of your fictional world, heck, even if you just thought about plausbility for ten seconds considering the MET games, you would never give Pebee those lines. I complain about many things, but most are forgivable from my perspective, even though I may hate them. The one thing I can't forgive is lack of awareness of your world and the rules, fictional or inherited from the real world, by which it works. In DAI, they compromised their world in my opinion by the way they reinterpreted the Qun, but while I may dislike that they did that, it's clear to see that they didn't do it casually. They were aware that this would be a possible problem and tried to give you an in-world explanation. DG also said there was a lot of debate about it on the team. You can see this kind of attention in many places in DAI, and I respect that a great deal even though I sometimes didn't like the decisions they made. In MEA, this was clearly not the case, simply because people aware of their world wouldn't make these mistakes in the first place. This is the main reason why DA games are still pre-order games for me, while ME games aren't.
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tziwen
N2
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquistion, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda
Origin: Tziwen
Posts: 150 Likes: 178
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Post by tziwen on Mar 29, 2017 10:08:26 GMT
Wait ... You know what... Screw it. I agree with 99% of what you say. The only thing is that i seem less annoyed by its imperfections than you. Which is... Fine. I mean it's matter of expectations, standards and tolerence. Not that i've more/better of those than you. Just we're two different persons seeing the same situation but where i say: Not bad. I understand this ME is a test to see if the franchise still carry some weight before the big hourrah, you're more like: It's ME... Drunk and running on one leg. Your points are valid... I agree on the syptoms not on the diagnostic. I guess what annoys me so much is the fact that most of these superficially small concerns indicate a writer's lack of awareness of their subject matter I find plainly inexcuseable. If you were aware of the time scale along which a planet develops, you would never make a mistake like requiring FTL scans to ensure a planet's viability, supposing you actually get over the hurdle of being able to scan planets from two million ly away in the first place. If you were aware of your fictional world, heck, even if you just thought about plausbility for ten seconds considering the MET games, you would never give Pebee those lines. I complain about many things, but most are forgivable from my perspective, even though I may hate them. The one thing I can't forgive is lack of awareness of your world and the rules, fictional or inherited from the real world, by which it works. In DAI, they compromised their world in my opinion by the way they reinterpreted the Qun, but while I may dislike that they did that, it's clear to see that they didn't do it casually. They were aware that this would be a possible problem and tried to give you an in-world explanation. DG also said there was a lot of debate about it on the team. You can see this kind of attention in many places in DAI, and I respect that a great deal even though I sometimes didn't like the decisions they made. In MEA, this was clearly not the case, simply because people aware of their world wouldn't make these mistakes in the first place. This is the main reason why DA games are still pre-order games for me, while ME games aren't. The whole opus lack of longterm vision: Everybody did their thing on a side and then they were put together... It's not always working. I appreciate you took the time to articulate those concerns. You did more for the franchise than most of us here. DDa is still a buy, mmainly because of Derrah and Laidlaw... But we'll see.
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Post by PillarBiter on Mar 29, 2017 10:34:08 GMT
Kinda unfair on the world-building. If MEA does anything right it's world-building. There is a steady flow of information about your surroundings with plenty of mystery throughout it all. The PC is capable of talking to both local and initiative personnel to understand the context of their situation fairly consistently. You actively take part in "literally" building the world and ambient/triggered dialogue is consistently updated to reflect those changes on and off-world. I Your comments regarding it don't really make much sense. Aliens will always be humanoid. This is simply a matter of consistency in gameplay and art design, especially for a species that is part of combat. What you're asking for is unfeasible. Given that evolution is locally bound, if you had no issues with humanoid aliens in the trilogy then you shouldn't have issues with the ones in Andromeda. Regarding the giant robot thing (Architect), a little thought into it and you would have realized the implication from its name that it's the one that burrowed all those giant chasms. It's a robot. It's not going to speak. It's going to make some noise. Your comment on Peebee is nonsensical. That's her opinion and her opinion only. Just because she said it, doesn't make it true. We all know why BioWare ditched the Milky Way so there's no reason to make it a bigger issue than it really is. Your comment on the Remnant Tech efficiency is not remotely scientific. In fact the Remnant's entire premise is being far more advanced than ours. Even so, the example of the air being clearer is probably the easiest one to explain. Air purification does not take much time at all, with visible changes happening as fast as one rain shower. The geth scanning bit is the only one that is somewhat understandably odd. The game stopped the explanation at "this is geth tech" so I took it for what it was, just like how I took people using space magic as scientific in the trilogy. what this guy said. Also, the writing? I don't know what games other people played, but the MET was just as B-movie as this game was. And it was glorious for it. Mass effect shouldn't be a literary masterpiece, it should be a sci-fi rom-com, since that's what it has been since day 1. Oh, and also: as much as I love TW3, that had major issues at launch as well.
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Post by mmoblitz on Mar 29, 2017 11:16:57 GMT
Well said OP.
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