MP Impressions

Well I just pugged bronze for about 6 hours today. Got my female adept to lvl 14. I'm liking it so far. Enemy spawns seem harder to predict. Guns and powers feel a bit weak considering its bronze :/ needs wood difficulty tbh. But I'm extracting and there's the joy of buying packs just to get trolled by rngesus.

I think my powers might actually pop more frequently in the SP TBH. Or maybe it just feels that way because in SP there are a lot fewer of them and they are often at a decent distance. I had to use my weapons so much more here. But this might be due to many factors. It reminds me of when I started a new round after hitting 20 and promoting. On here we have garbage weapons. But then I had to use solid weapons to make up for the low levels and lack of powers. So those first chunks of levels (at least till 7 or 8) were filled with slower recharge, limited powers (maybe one or two) and lots of ammo being used. At least this doesn't feel entirely unfamiliar but it's far more challenging to do when everyone is new, the maps are new, the foes are new and weapons are pretty much garbage. Before there were always a few in the group that had much higher levels. The highest I was with might have been 10. So basically a run of low characters with minimal powers, crappy weapons, and good times. Plus side, in that situation you HAVE to think more tactically.

I haven't been able to trigger fire combos on shielded enemies in either SP or MP. (I've used Incinerate -> Shield Drain and Incinerate -> Overload, both of which work on unshielded and armored enemies.) Have to bring the shields down first.

Three hours in to my trial so far and there are a few issues that I see. I was the host for two of my games and EVERYTHING was in slow motion foe most of the match. Played off host with friends and it was like and office supply store with all the rubber bands. I had fun on a few matches after peak hours, and with a more reliable host.
Unlocked Kroguard and the Asari Adept to name a few, not too many weapons but all in all I am enjoying it. If I could figure out a fix for my hosting issues I will probably enjoy it a lot more.

I see you play on all platforms.  Have you played on both PC and XB?  Was one better than the other?

Right now just playing on PC. I know having a small manifest is making things very different than ME3MP. It does feel good to be getting new toys again, but the grind in this one is going to be a lot longer. I haven't seen anyone say much about the host lag so I'm waiting on some more info, and more play time to really give an opinion on MEA

Consumables seems to make a considerable difference, far more than I thought. I say more than I thought because I equipped some Level I Cryo, which I fully expected to be pointless, and I actually extracted, which was new. I was even able to prime the ball thing on the... um... (Adjutant? No.) for a cryo explosion, which was actually handy and helped.

After five hours I'm starting to get used to things, really - jumping and aiming, and so on. I think I'll like this game. I think I'll like it.

You have a melee.

That's it.

To make say a Krogan Ninja™, you would have to make all of his POWERS be melee attack chains or hits. and once again, melee and health are on opposite teams because I have no fucking clue why anyone would ever think that's a good idea for a krogan.

Chaining is gone and Heavy has been replaced by JMelee, because apparently being able to dodge and super mount was not enough, and you have to also emphasize playspace domination with rocket melee because guys we spent a shit ton of money and time on this jetpack thing and by god, you are going to use it, whether you want to or not.

Which is really kind of ironic, super emphasis in this here jetpack super mobility thingie, but then here we also spent all the money and man hours we could have spent on playable SP races on the Mako 2.0, even though everyone has jetpacks, even the Pyjak. Pyjetpack.

Schizophrenic design incarnate.

I think realistically given time and money constraints, the best you can hope is a krogan with three *literal* melee powers, unless some serious money gets poured back up the pipeline from MP profits after launch.

You're making me sad.

It was a rocky start but it got pretty good after the 4th hour by then I was pretty comfortable with controls and familiar with the enemy types as well as a sort of layout of the maps. It could have been better but honestly it is enough for me to keep hope as patches start to roll out, we need to consider how buggy MP was when it first came out, while I have had some issues with rubberbanding and disconnects it hasn't been enough for me to be furious with. The game is tough at first and feels all wrong but after a little practice bronze actually starts to feel like bronze. I think a lot of the salt is coming from people that thought they were going to hop right into gold or silver and got steamrolled. In time it will only get better, or they'll patch it and we'll lose our shield and health gates again lol.

Overall, I loved what I've seen so far. While playing, I kept thinking of how different it is to me3, but it was still
so fun. As soon as my demo ended, I preordered. I'm pretty sure I'm going to put in a lot of hours in this game.

Tried playing some multiplayer but got disconnected so many times I gave up trying to marathon a few hours of MP. I did manage one full game extraction and a wipe on a wave 6 where everything lagged to fuck. The movement feels sluggish, the turn speed is off and everything feels a bit cramped which may be more to do with the FOV. I don't like this type of cover system at all, but hopefully it will get better as I get used to it (I found this more of an issue in SP though). The HUD and character selection screens have already been mentioned, but they are not improvements over ME3 at all. At this moment in time I'm on the fence as to whether I buy this game or not. I have no idea why they cancelled the tech test because this thing they've given us in the trial isn't a polished and finished product.