Kotaku: The Story Behind ME:A's Troubled Five-Year Development

Well, then you were lucky.  First week for me, I would try and use biotics and fall through the floor, then have to force quit the game.  I would finish missions and go to talk to the NPC to end the mission and be killed during the conversation, with the dialogue wheel up, by something that was not on the screen.  Had to force quit the game.  Then Origin would think the game was already running, so I would have to force quit Origin as well.  Enemies in walls and rocks that either killed you or prevented you from finishing an area because you couldn't kill them.  Couldn't fight any type of fiend monster because they freeze and go into some type of t-pose and I would just be shooting what amounted to a statue until the HP was gone.  The game would stutter and drop FPS dramatically on the Tempest for no reason.  It wasn't Arkham City game breaking bad, but it was the worst I've seen since and greatly took away from my enjoyment of the game.  One day I just rage quit and didn't touch again until the next day.

This is before any demerits for story, quests, or any of the normal things you rate games on.

Also, like I said in my other post, I'm not scoring trusting that something is going to get fixed or by what I think the game may be if and when it gets fixed.  I'm scoring the value of what I was sold at the time I'm writing the review.  

 

Yeah, I had all of that. Still have in some instances, I'm sure, since I don't think they fixed that particular issue. In the facility with the Moshae, there's a lift. If you approach it with your weapon drawn, be damn sure you aim right at the button. Otherwise you perform a melee attack that makes you fall through the floor, landing you in some inaccessable room that can only be left by reloading.

Also the being attacked while talking. By some critter killing you, which, by the way, shows how useless most of the companions really are. They keep firing at it without landing a single hit, even if it's just some one hit bug on Eos. The latter certainly influenced my rating of the game. The former not so much.

I really shouldn't even bother with this, but I kinda feel like doing it anyway. Breath of the Wild has one of the (probably just the, to be honest) most well-designed open worlds in gaming supporting one of the best open world interaction systems ever made. For starters, it's quite beautiful, leveraging a vivid aesthetic to display a number of interesting and visually pleasing locales, but more importantly, its visual construction actively enhances exploration. Where Andromeda just has nice-looking locations filled with stuff, Zelda has environments that were built to actively usher the player towards interesting content. You'll never be hopping between waypoints because the game always gives you clear visual points of interest, so there's very little sense of gamification. Add onto that an environmental hazard system without an obnoxious AI that reminds you of it every minute.

More importantly, they ways you traverse this world are far more numerous and engaging than running, jumping, and driving. Managing your stamina while sprinting and climbing is a constant and rewarding challenge that, when coupled with gliding and shield surfing, leads to a simply satisfying core movement loop. In Inquisition and Andromeda movement is mostly just a means to get from quest to quest; by itself, the movement isn't an incredibly fun experience. In Zelda, the movement is the game as much as anything else is, and you can have fun just running around.

On top of all that is an interaction system that actively works with open world to provide more varied, complex, and fun scenarios than just about any adventure game out there. You're using bombs, time-freezing, weapons, magnets, ice, balloons, and much more to mess around with the sandbox Nintendo provided you. Andromeda has good gunplay, but that's about it


. You'll always be doing essentially the same few interaction loops: jumping, shooting, and slinging simple powers. In Zelda you're leveraging the environment, weirdly intelligent AI behavior, and a toolbag of physics manipulating items. That could just mean that you sneak in at night using your glider and rain arrows from above or it could mean getting an enemy to kill itself with a box that you froze in time.


And you do realize that Zelda is a children's fantasy game right? The cartoon aesthetic wasn't an accident. The characters are deliberately written as simple cliches because that makes it easier for children to understand and identify with them. The story is simplistic too because frankly, not every game needs to be a long-winded RPG with dialog spilling out of every orifice.


There's so much more I could bring up, but I've known from the start that my words are wasted on you, so I'll keep it at that. But yeah, this is why Zelda isn't getting hammered by critics. It's got genuinely interesting game mechanics and no one gives a shit about cartoon characters because that's the point.

Case in point. A lot of hyperbole and hand waving in order to christen Breath of the Wild as anything resembling a great game.

You do things to do things... hmm, sounds like what most people call filler in other games. Almost no story is good and terrible cartoon characters are the point... not even sure where to start after I stop laughing. And the bland world design... forgiven because you can hang glide and chop down trees. Totally bland world with no lore, story, or worthwhile characters, but I can do random things! 10/10.....

God forbid Ubisoft, Bioware, or Bethesda do any of that. They'd be crucified even worse than they are. But the almighty Nintendo can not only do all that, but they can butcher Zelda in the process and be praised for it. Utter and complete bias that perfectly shows the hypocrisy in these "reviews".

Bland world with no lore, story or worthwhile characters.

I mean if you get rid of the "no lore" then you basically just described Skyrim which got almost universal praise even on consoles where modding couldn't fix the game's shortcomings.

Maybe, though I'd argue a few characters are interesting at least. Ut that proves my point more... Bethesda has been roasted lately for the things Zelda is being praised for. If you roast Skyrim, Breath of the Wild is even crispier under that fire if you are being objective.

Sure they can Nintendo been geting a free pass since Sony started making consoles and games. No matter how ass backwards the company is or lacking in features a Nintendo game or console is they will get a free pass because it's Nintendo. Notice how most Pokemon games get rated a 9/10 even tho they are just a copy paste of the same game from the 1990s? Let anyone else try that and watch that dev team get a 4/10 rating

Call of Duty gets destroyed for being a copy and paste. Yet Pokemon, gets away with it?

So why are you chopping trees or taming a horse or hang gliding? Just to do that? If you like that, fine, but you lose all ability to criticise any other game for having tasks or quests that might not directly feed into the story.

If you hand wave away a lacking and poor story for Zelda, then you cannot criticise Bethesda or Bioware when they are objectively offering more in terms of story.

If you hand wave away Zelda's absolutely dreadful characters or dialogue, you lose all right to criticise Andromeda's characters and dialogue. At least Andromeda is trying to provide deeper characters.

But beside all that... you've done nothing but prattle on a out Zelda honing mechanics into something damn near revolutionary, despite Minecraft, Far Cry, Arc, And Elder Scrolls have all done and done better. Maybe I have just been exposed to more games, because Zelda doesn't do anything better than the dozens of games it blatantly apes and it is painfully obvious. You sound like the niche MGSV fans that thought that game was the pinnacle of open world gaming too..... no.

EDIT: just to prove it more...

Ubisoft: what do you mean I have to climb this tower and find stuff?! Stupid!
Zelda: these towers are the pinnacle of game design to give you a vantage point

Bioware: what do you mean I need to collect flowers... give me a break!
Zelda: 900 koroks? Fucking awesome way to engage me in your world!

Bethesda: this cave is similar to every other cave and I only use the same abilities... lame.
Zelda: 120 shrines with many repeating puzzles? Nintendo really knows how to fill a world!

Do you want me to continue ecposing the blatant hypocrisy and destroying BotW with such ease? I can.

Haven't played Breath of the Wild but he has a point. Certain games get praised for the same thing others get shit for.

Man, I don't know about that -- I far prefer the sci-fi setting and story to fantasy but TW3 was a much more engrossing game for me to play than MEA. Maybe the key word there is "dark": maybe you're right in that I subjectively prefer darker tropes, and MEA was just too "lighthearted and fun" Star-Trekky for me to really get into it, while TW3 had enough drama and angst in it to keep me interested, even though I typically prefer the ME setting. But TW3 had a lot of written content that MEA did not, and that the OT had much more of. As others have said, it is hard to compare these games bc Geralt has a fixed face and MEA has a custom face on a new and unfamiliar engine to the team, so we can't expect the same # of cutscenes and level of detail in cutscenes to be there...but I think that might have been a factor for me. Talking to people in MEA felt really boring, where in ME and TW3, anytime you talked to someone it had some kind of cutscene with animated people, instead of the head-bobbing zoom-in thing, where most of the time it feels like you just ask people questions about Andromeda and they answer them.