Mass Effect Andromeda Skepticism thread

I pity any partner that you have who has to try to live up to those ideals.

Ugly. Ffs.

>close to perfection

I suggest you play the Witcher 2 and 3.

You forgot to put Dragon age inquisition in your post.

Those are nowhere near close to perfection. They're good games though.

But yeah I agree. Please don't go too Citadel DLC about the game right off the bat BioWare. This is a mistake they did with DA:I. I want y'all to notice this:


Notice how the scene just... ends, and only does so after a strangely awkward silence between Shepard and Ashley. DA:I was full of this and the reason is because they kept making Citadel DLC-esque companion scenes where the main focus was just having a bit of entertaining banter or a pointless filler conversation to showcase how likeable the characters are. It's sweet but not worthy of being the focal point of an entire scene in a game where each companion only has about 4 scenes in total.

You can only allow yourself to do Citadel DLC when you have a Mass Effect trilogy's worth of established, fan-favorite characters to back up the need for a bit of meandering. They've proven themselves to be likeable already. Without that it just gets plain awkward and that's why I'm also afraid ME:A will end up being Mass Effect High School Years because it'll just be a bunch of meandering like "Look how cute and dorkey PeeBee is". "What's Liam doing today? Let's see him and Ryder drink some beer together".

They have gotten complacent after their success of the Citadel DLC. They need to realize you can't do something like that unless you've already built up the characters enough to make them worth such kinds of lighthearted scenes or else it'll fall flat.

I can tell this biojihadi never played Witcher3.

That's a pretty effective promo - "don't give BioWare/EA your money, give it to me instead by watching my channel."

I have to agree. This was also part of the problem with DA:I and many other modern open world games. Having a large space between areas with content is necessary. I actually believe this is exactly what DIDN'T work for me about DA:I. They had focus tested the map layout too much to know that "when player goes here, there's no content" and then they had filled every point of interest out with new content of some sort, whether it was a collectible or another quest. That got pretty stressful to me as it encouraged an OCD like playstyle. There's seriously nothing wrong with having a moment to breathe in the atmosphere. No enemies, no quests and no loot all over. Just a few miles of nothing but nature or a desolate, barren place before i reach the next hotspot. That totally worked for me in Fallout New Vegas for example and it's also why a game like Shadow of The Collossus can be so successful critically in spite of having a near-completely barren open-world setting with nothing but a few lizards and birds to interact with and very mysterious things in the distance but at the end of any horseback ride you end up in the most climactic and emotionally engaging bossfight until you're given half an hour or more again of just silence and atmosphere afterwards.

With Andromeda, I'm almost sure it'll fail in this aspect already. It will be focus tested and it will be littered with "content" becuase it's a AAA RPG from EA that is marketed as an exploration game. I just know that despite fleshing out the quests they'll fail this check anyways because nobody really seems to criticize DA:I for lacking moments of atmosphere but I firmly believe it matters and I don't think ME:A will allow for a good flow of impressions. It'll exhaust you with its systems and quests and content just like DA:I did because it's still this Kingdom of Amalur-esque design where it's all "content, content content" and time-sink design.

More importantly, the thing about atmosphere and pacing in open world games to me is where the key to literacy in game-design lies and why it's such a critical failure if Andromeda/Dragon Age are truly supposed to be story-focused. In a movie the literacy lies within shots and scenes. The way the camera pans, the focus in the shot, the use of color, the speed of movement, they're all elements that generate certain emotional responses from the audience that is then used to manipulate the feeling they're supposed to have. Open world games are meant to be a bit playground-esque but the best open-world games are designed in a way so the developer knows how to evoke certain reactions by placing things in a certain way and making the flow of exploration work so it neither exhausts you nor does it bore you.
I thought DA:I exhausted me and a game like MGSV bored me, because neither of those games created the best pacing via the open-world design as they could've. You have mechanics, level-design and art design to generate pacing via open-world game design. If done well it always makes you want to see what's next and over that hill and if it's really done well it'll reach a peak and then have time to build up tension again, like culminating the exploration of a planet in a Virmire-esque mission area where a key plot-character dies and afterwards the area is left in ruins when you return to it, but there's that next planet that has a sense of hope about it which makes it possible to redeem the loss you just encountered. Something like that and not just "find quest, do stuff, shoot things, complete, return". Given that you know when to turn down quests this is where the main campaign of Witcher 3 totally did it for me. Come to think of it I thought InFamous 1 and 2 did an amazing job at this use of an open-world setting. There was genuine emotional resonance I felt to places in the game-world that I had gone through which had then been locked off. It's the same as GTA IV. There's something poignant to me about returning to the slums you began in after you've gotten adjusted to the high-class areas later in the story and it's something that reinforces the themes that are tied to Niko the protagonist. That's my biggest hopes for ME:A focusing on new races, worlds and colonization and that it doesn't just end in a bunch of meandering or cool sequences that don't reinforce the themes that tie back to the goal of colonization.

You do realize that biojihadis always make up shit to suit their argument. I know you're one.

I'm glad that biojihadis don't dominiate this forum. People are getting redpilled about Bioware and theirs recently released shit games like inquisition. If Bioware fails with andromeda EA will flush them down the toilet. I won't be crying.

I guess you don't mind the cringe and biojihadiness of biofan and gamermaiden who fit right in with the plebs here.

I think people are free to have whatever opinion they want on Bioware games. If you don't like their videos, don't see them. It's that easy. It doesn't mean Their excitement isn't genuine.