How MEA reminds me of Kingdoms of Amalur so far

Blast it. You know when you're going to copy paste a link and you end up erasing your entire post? That just happened so I'll give you a less impressive argument.



I've recently purchased Kingdoms of Amalur, a game I played the demo of back in 2011 as a promo to ME3 to unlock that shitty armor, and I didn't think much of the game back then but I recently bought a used copy and it's kinda enjoyable. However, I make this post because I've picked up on a few things where I find it to be similar to Andromeda. I also know that part of the Montreal team that is making Andromeda are former leads on this game in question. I've noticed three things that give a distinct deja-vu to the KoA-developer's style that has influenced MEA:

• The UI design (or just the implementation)
• The 'approach' to RPG
• The facial animations across cinematics and conversation segments

Cinematic animation:


Systematic animation:


Try comparing the way these characters talk to what we've seen of Andromeda, both the TGA footage and the 4K trailer.

Another thing is the UI design. Across both games it looks a bit... amateur somehow. One thing is the way it looks if you are to take still images of it. MEA looks decidedly more cartoony to me than the trilogy, and when you see it move it's as if it's missing a few transitional animations or something. It just appears kinda pop-in like most of the time and when it does move it looks a little jittery.

Lastly there's the approach to RPG and this is where I kinda had found just the right words and a nicely concise paragraph for it but then I deleted it by accident and CTRL-Z apparantely does nothing on this board when that happens so fuck it. All you need to know is that the decision to move to free-form class-building in MEA seems like a thing KoA strongly incentivised too, becuase it has the traditional high fantasy RPG classes like Warrior, Rogue and Mage but allows you to freely switch between them both in equipment and weapons and especially the combat is handled deliberately to make you try out mixes of rogue gameplay with mage gameplay and etc.

Anyway, I just picked that up about this new Mass Effect game. It not only has 2-3 (and some that left) leads off of 38s studios that made KoA but is now defunct, working at Montreal, but it also seemed some of 38s studios' design philosophy to the action-RPG has carried over to redesigning Mass Effect in its fourth entry.

What do you think?

EDIT: Replaced example #2 because the former was shit.