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

It gets worse when you remember that they could use their suits' ME fields to lower their mass when they jump, making it even easier to jet-pack up there. I tolerate some amount of gameplay gimmicks in my games, but at least make them seem plausible rather than "This obstacle you could get over in real life is blocking you, so fight waves and waves of enemies because we want to pad out this mission!"

Speaking of which, I think there were a few too many Remnant drones to fight here. It could get tedious fast. However, I'll be patient making my final opinion in this regard because they said they turned off music to be more cinematic*, so maybe with some fight music to pump me up and superior combat skills to those shown in the video I'll find it less tedious.

*Can't believe they think it would be more cinematic without music. Like... do they know why stories have soundtracks, or...?

Other than that:

I agree with others who have stated there is way too much hand-holding for a mission that should be well past the tutorial stage. Not ideal.

And I dislike Peebee even more now. Not just her cringy banter, but the fact that she lures you into her dorm/escape pod just to jettison it onto a hostile world that she knows full well Kallo doesn't think he can retrieve you from, all for selfish reasons. What the hell?

Yes, I have a big problem with someone who so casually risks other people's lives for her own gain. If this was something she did on a mission with pretty much no danger, it could be seen as funny. But onto a freaking lava planet where even from the cutscene it doesn't look like they should have survived at all, and there's a 50% chance of landing in lava? Nope.

Now, I can live with Ryder keeping a cool, level head and dealing with the present problem, I really hope there is a conversation after this mission where you can get very angry at her for doing that. Or kick her off the ship permanently, since she basically volunteered for that anyway

Ugh. Wish they showed someone else's mission, but at the same time, it might be better not to since I'll likely enjoy them more.

I'm disappointed we still haven't really seen much of the dialogue wheel. In fact, we've only seen it once.

As for gameplay, it looked okay, but was hard to judge since I had the urge to grab a controller and take over from the demo-er the whole time

Lastly, something people will probably yell at me for for being "minor", but it's completely unimmersive for me: At one point, Peebee says "Voila!" In case people are unfamiliar, that's a French word and in this context it basically means "There we go!" or "Got it!".

I find this unimmersive and am once again disappointed because the devs need to remember their own lore, in this case about translators in Mass Effect. Peebee, or Garrus, or Wrex, etc. are not speaking English. They're speaking in their own languages that are then translated. So there is no instance in which we should be hearing a French word come out of Peebee's mouth, because the program would translate whatever she said in an asari language into the closest English approximation. Even if she was literally speaking French, the translator would just translate that, too.

I don't actually like being this negative, but I didn't find a lot in this video to get excited about, sadly. Show us dialogue!

To be honest I don't see a whole lot of the "There is your goal, these are your tools/options, find a way to accomplish your goal" in games in recent years other than Bethesda games, which tend to be mechanically extremely shallow games these days.

That's not to say that there is no choice of course but I find that games like The Witcher 3 and many of the resurgence of cRPGs from Kickstarter all tend to follow the pattern of:

> Go to location on map and do the thing the quest wants you to do
> There will be dialogue along the way that will alter how the quest plays out in one of a couple different ways
> You might be able to make a stealth check to bypass some enemies if the game has a stealth skill

Notably we didn't see the second one on the list but they also specifically noted they edited out the dialogue from the video. I've also already noted my opinion about stealth systems in the game, and if included it wouldn't have more depth than Skyrim's and Fallout's stealth system which is fairly awful and would be rendered completely pointless by Tactical Cloak's existence.

Every game I've played that can be classified as a shooter, especially those that are based around cover, have rooms of "Well this is obviously a shooting gallery". I don't think we'll ever find a way around that, because cover just has to be given in the game unless you want to render it useless to use in the first place in which case people will complain about that.

I think that it would have been better if they featured a different side mission from start to finish with all dialogue included, that way we could have seen exactly how the different options play out. They could have also used a mission not bound to be quite as focused as a loyalty mission that's part of the open world rather than what I suspect is an area specifically designed for that mission and that mission alone that looks like your standard connection of shooting galleries in a typical linear shooter.

True, the "find your own path/solution" approach can also be very formulaic, no question. It always depends on the tools/options you give people... MGSV did quite a good job there. Of course, over the course of a 50 hour game, every mechanic will get stale t some point, that's why switching it up can be a good thing. If that's what MEA will do, then this one mission might not be an issue.

As I said before, I agree, they should have chosen a full side mission - dialogue and all - to give a better picture, IF missions like that even exist...

Thinking about games and their design I actually find that stealth focused games offer the best variety in approach: MGSV, Dishonoured 2, and Deus Ex all have plenty of ways to approach any given situation. Of course all of those games also feel like they hate you if you attempt to actually do anything other than stealth, even though they technically offer it as an option.

To be honest I get them not wanting to spoil a loyalty mission but I don't get why in that case they wouldn't have just picked another side mission and showed the full thing including dialogue. Dialogue options are a pretty integral part to the whole RPG half of the gameplay, as well as allowing for different approaches which is something we're all after in these games.

They keep telling us things like "That's only for that mission. It's not like that most of the time.", but then they never show us the example where it's like what they say it's like. Even if we assume for the sake of the discussion that what they're saying is 100% true, they have to know that many gamers will automatically assume the worst which is thinking that the entire game is exactly like that mission.

In either case it feels like marketing has dropped the ball on this one.

Exactly... and I really don't get it. As I said, tt would only make sense to do it like that if a) you actually have nothing better to show - most likely because you have no build of the game you are 100% confident in (day 1 patch) - or you are bull sh*tting people with your marketing... and I highly doubt BW would take that risk... not with this game, which is very important to them as a company.

Caios‏ @caiostheslayer
One thing really annoying about IGN's mission video: Not yelling at PeeBee for risking your life like that. >

Ian S. Frazier‏ @tibermoon
You can. The video edits out all the dialogue wheels there for brevity and spoiler prevention.

I can suspend my disbelief for things like space magic biotics, but slamming down like that in an escape pod and living...I call shenanigans.

Do those things not have some sort of landing protocol? Or at least some thrusters to soften the blow? My god. I mean, I was just in a car accident 2 weeks ago and my back is still messed up.

Well compared to the very few dislikes they got with their last two gameplay footage, it is definitely worth noting.

Oh Destin definitely sucked at the game, and it didn't help. Even though youtube is a toxic place, if something looks good they will acknowledge that.