Peebee's Loyalty Mission - First 17 min. (IGN) [SPOILERS]

Hmmm...i didn't go through the entire 20 page romp, but my impressions was that everything looks good. But the dialogue and voice acting? A bit too happy-happy joy-joy for me. I understand that Sara is a cadet/rookie?...but eh with what is going on, it doesn't feel like the character is taking these tasks seriously. I guess what i'm saying is atht for somebody to be the leader of this squad, she seems like she's a teenager.

I understand the dev's stated this would be a more light-hearted affair, but we don't need to go into rated "G" zone type dialogue.....Yeah this clip doesn't represent the entire game, but I hope the dialoguw and banter at least when it comes to Sara and Peebee improves and again maybe this is just part of their character "young and spirited?"...idk, but it just felt a bot off for these scenes....and Sara's facial expressions in the beginning?...eh...we're back in derp mode....


Honestly tho...everything else? The visuals look great animations aren't too bad and folks are complaining about generic robot enemies?, but that has been a staple for just about any ME game or any sci-fi joint for that matter. We already know the enemies will be varied. My complaints so far tho is just the cheesy dialogue and it just feels out of place here.

Since there's a lot of back and forth about DA:I again I just had to think back long and hard about what it is about that game, so here's the skinny:

First off, MMO-time-sink design was indeed awful. DA:O has a lot of low-effort quests too in Denerim for example. You go to a board and check boxes to assing yourself to a series of quests that have barebones context. Then you go to a house or bring up the map of Denerim and travel to the isolated locations containing the quest objectives. It's very focused and quickly done and completing a quest is always satisfying in some small if it's in an RPG where you get XP or loot from it. In DA:I however these kinds of quests are thrown at you, not just when entering the hub area, but in every main exploration area that you'll likely spend 50 hours in in total you'll just find these types of quests thrown at you from all sides... for 50 hours total. That amounts to a lot of boring filler that doesn't stimulate you intellectually in any way, only the sights and the combat can do that job for you... but it just didn't click for me. The combat was a lot of holding down the R2 trigger for 10 minutes at a time, watching that Barrier meter go down so I knew I had to switch to the other mage and re-apply it or something. Make Sure Cassandra had her Guard up so we wouldn't wipe, but when this gameplay goes on for maybe 10 hours at a time before you reach the next point of going to a story-driven scene or something, the game just starts to bore you to tears and when that feeling sets in you realize, as you're playing, that you're not enjoying yourself. In the end the game is tainted by that feeling to me. I could always escape some of ME1's boredom by rushing through the main quest and skipping dialogue and not do whatever I thought was boring but I was never forced to do inconsequential fluff if I didn't wanna for several hours. DA:O, which I'm playing right now also keeps me engaged by having neatly scripted areas and combat encounters the entire game that always take me to the next part of the game somehow. I know I'm exhausting content and I'm never thrown back to someplace where I know there's nothing left and I'm not forced to traverse through half of it to reach the next meaningful objective. Because the game-design is focused like that the companion content is also very well balanced just as it is in ME2 for example.

I just don't care for the excessive amount of meandering there was in DA:I because the main plot had zero sense of direction due to having to compromise so hard with exploration zones that were full of side-quest litter, just so I could raise some arbitrary score called "power" to do whatever I actually wanted to. It ended up being a series of one-off character vignettes that unlike ME2 actually felt more like ME1-companion quests in that they only had one cutscene sometimes they just required you to go to a location in The Hinterlands for instance and defeat a generic boss-enemy and then some choice, but it felt like the meat of the story at times. Then once you went to the main story mission it was like ME1's Noveria, Feros or Ilos but just like an ME3 mission instead so it was completely linear in exclusive maps but there was no sense of link between the hub, the exploration areas and then the main-quest area, and most importantly, no buildup at all. Each main mission just shows you showing up in the middle of some big moment as if a huge amount of levels and cutscenes had been cut from the game. The time skips were super jarring.

All in all it just felt lacklustre to me. If I can tell a game has flaws and those flaws really hamper my enjoyment as I'm playing it then it turns into a bad lasting impression, and such is the case of DA:I for me. There you have it. Over and done with.

For ME:A, particularly the statements about the "lighter tone" and "there's huge stakes BUT we didn't wanna make it too urgent" and "It's about the characters" nonsense just confirms to me that ME:A is another by-the-numbers game where BioWare has bit off more than they could chew, end up making a really stitched together main plot because half the buildup couldn't be made when the budget was spent on designing the exploration areas instead and crew dialogue will be all endearing but ultimately bland on some level because the loyalty missions are actually just DA:I/ME1-esque companion quests and you'll spend hours upon hours just traveling on planets with zero sense of urgency but despite of that there's not enough atmosphere or something pulling you into the fiction to really make you care enough to do that sort of filler shit.

Isn't this a problem with the open-world concept?

Not an issue in HoS and B&W.

Remind me what those acronyms mean, again, please?

ME:A has the potential to avoid that pitfall since we know Archon is not the primary goal. The single thing that keeps me interested is the new setting and therefore a new premise - we aren't saving the galaxy this time. I really want to see what that looks like. 

It's good advice about not pre-ordering, except I actually want the pre-order stuff. I wonder if it will be part of the deluxe edition even after release... then I could wait.

I was actually watching something last night that was talking about Mass Effect 1, and some of its shortcomings in terms of writing and gameplay. The short version is that a lot of sacrifices were made for the integrity of the world. ME1 exists for the sake of building that universe. If Andromeda achieves something similar, I'll walk away quite satisfied. 

I didn't feel like the narrative saw any benefit from the game being open-world. I've said this so many times. 

Dude, no matter whether I'm playing as Inquisitor, Sera, Bull or Tactical Cam you HAVE to hold down R2 at all times to make basic attacks or make time flow. On PC you have to hold the mouse button down, and you'll do this 10 minutes at least per combat.