The Early Impressions thread.

Trial hasn't unlock for me yet/10

No spoilers but the opening is just way too slow paced, I was actually getting bored.

and it is suffering from many games suffer in an open world environment.  Lots of space making it easy to get lost and nothing to really do.

Don`t like the scanning tool as I feel that I have to keep switching from scanning to weapons to walking and back to scanning as I may miss something.

More:
neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=232153923&postcount=619
neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=232153991&postcount=895
neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=232154171&postcount=896
neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=232154171&postcount=896
neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=232153907&postcount=19456

Than being said, I get that people have different tastes so it doesn't mean more straight forward streamlined games are bad or that you have bad tastes. I just disagree and I'm giving you a hard time for fun.

Cheers

Lemme approach your thoughts from a different angle. 

It's entirely possible the game will pick up and become a lot better later on. That's just speculation I know, but if people back in the day were allowed to demo the first 3 hours of Kotor 1 and ME1, they probably wouldn't be impressed either. The few few hours of KotoR 1 especially are rough. I hated that first planet. So who know, that might happen for Andromeda.

I'd imagine that's because it's barely upgraded yet.

All right, I played through the entire prologue twice so I'm just going to put down some ramblings before I drift off to sleep. First off, the custom character creation for Male Ryder -- what happened here? Not enough options anywhere. Facial hair and hair options, what's going on? Do I need to verify files? Are they hiding some beard/hair styles as preorder bonuses somewhere? Somehow the one buzz cut manages to look worse than any of them ever did in the OT and the other short crop option looks like you are regrowing after the school nurse went at you for spreading a bad case of lice. The skin textures also look really weird on custom Scotts. I was playing on the Ultra preset and the skin/lighting made a custom Scott look like he was in his mid to late 30s. The Lady Ryder options are much better across the board, but still way too limited. CC feels like a major step back from what we're used to.

As far as how the game runs, very smooth for the most part though for some reason the game hangs when I go straight to 'exit to desktop' from the pause menu and I've got to go into task manager and kill the process. Animation hiccups are really noticeable in conversation, there's something really off with the eyes on everyone, and a lot of times limbs twitch for no reason. There's also a lot of clipping. And god damnit fuck the Avenger. The KB+M interface is horrible by default. The mouse acceleration is not good and is on by default, make sure you turn this off! About halfway through the first prologue run I just gave up and grabbed my 360 controller. It's very obvious this was the experience they had in mind when they designed the game. The jet pack/dash didn't really 'sing' for me until I went for the controller, the experience is not as fun with a KB+M. I'll revisit this once retail release comes around and I have more time to dither around with settings and key bindings.

Let's see, what else... the sound design is better than what I expected from the footage. Guns could stand to get a little more oomph to them, but the drop ships and the environment sounds are all pretty great. The environments themselves are a different story. The cryo bay in the Ark Hyperion, well... we've all seen it. It's not going to wow anyone. Not sure why we're still using fluorescent tube lamps in the 2100s. I did find the info wall to be a nice touch, especially when I asked it for a mission status. Walking around and meeting the characters who accompany the pathfinder team planet-side for the prologue was cool, they all have a little flavor text. Very nice touch. Space and the scourge look impressive, they gave you camera control for the loading screens (in the shuttle and the tram) and you have those loading screen conversations back!

On to Habitat 7 itself. I'm not digging the design of this planet so far or the look of remnant tech. Can't quite put my finger on what it is, but while the planet does look strange and foreign I can't help but feel like if not for the remnant tech it might be better suited for a fantasy setting. In fact those curling, glowing plants feel like something I saw in the starting area of Amalur. The map itself feels like a series of corridors with a few small alcoves for 'exploration', this is pretty standard for the series and tutorial levels so I'm not too fussed about this. The prologue is really long if you take your time poking in all of those alcoves. There's no real time crunch, but Liam will get on your last nerve telling you to forge ahead. Speaking of Cora and Liam die a lot. Cora gets herself in some bad spots using charge. Liam seems to do a better job of dealing damage, but can also find himself in some bad positions / dead. It was almost always one or the other in a downed state at that last big fight at the door, even when I was bouncing back forth and laying singularities down for them and detonating with throw. This was on normal difficulty. The squad AI feels lackluster, like you need to be more involved in what they're doing and where they're doing it. Without the Power Wheel to give them a little direction on positioning and power deployment I feel like the squadmates are just vestigial limbs at this point. Maybe this will get better as they level and their damage/health scales.

Combat itself is fun. Enemies do come from a lot of sides and push up pretty aggressively (to a limit) and they aren't that sponge-y if you're using your powers properly. (Individual cooldowns are great!) I really missed playing like a biotic god and the cool downs mean you can prime/detonate pretty often in combat. The automatic cover does take some getting used to. 3 hours in and I'm still not snapping to cover as quickly as I'd like in some situations or getting out of it in ways I want to. This feels like a downgrade right now, like a slightly improved take on ME1's lousy auto cover. I'm sure my opinion will improve as I learn its idiosyncrasies like I did ME1's.

There's a lot of loot in this game, but at this point it all looks like crafting junk. Not really feeling it, but maybe as I get to know what all these parts do I'll be excited about UNIVERSAL TRANSFORMER, MINERAL ##, or BASIC AR STOCK. Come on, this is an RPG. Tell me at some point in this game I'm going to kill an enemy and pry a weapon from his cold, dead hands! And what's with the Kett using weapons that look so typical in form to the Milky Way. Why not give these guys something more unique? 2.5m ly away and we're still looking at vaguely collector-ish enemies with 'organic' looking assault rifles/shotguns/etc. Hopefully this game has some surprises up its sleeve later on.

Couple of other miscellaneous thoughts ... The scanning mechanic... man. I am really not enjoying this thing. I guess the saving grace is that the the compass lights up and tells you when there's something nearby to scan. I don't really like these horizontal compasses and much prefer a mini-map style, and this light up mechanic doesn't really give you a good indication of which direction you should be looking for this scannable thing. The UI as a whole could use more work. There are too many nested menus. I miss the old days of CRPGs where your character was all there on one screen, feels like there's a lot of wasted real estate. The music hasn't won me over yet, I am going to give the score another listen tomorrow morning on my jog and see how I feel about it.

I know I sound like a Debbie Downer but overall, for me, Mass Effect has always been a series that is greater than the sum of its parts. When I break everything down I can find a lot of faults (clearly) in certain aspects of the game, but when I'm playing I'm just happy to be in the ME universe again. I gotta keep an eye on the time so I'm not wasting all 10 hours so far ahead of release. YMMV, but I feel like if you're enough of a fan to be a member of this forum, you're going to like this game even if you don't agree with some of the decisions the devs have made.

I had a positive experience so far, though not altogether positive. I'll share a few of each:

Pros:
-excellent gameplay, possibly my favorite 3rd person combat system
-lots of dialogue and reactivity from other characters. they'll notice when you do something and react appropriately
-skill trees are a dream for an old RPG fan

Cons:
-unwieldy UI
-at times cringy dialogue -- "my face is tired" ... what? Or a completely green solider yelling "speedbump" when driving over a sentient being, because apparently taking a life means nothing to him after a day in combat
-dialogue options are a bit like "yes, probably yes, sarcastic no but really yes, and Hell, yeah!" <= exaggerating but so far I don't feel like my dialogue choices have consequences beyond flavor (nowhere near as bad as Fallout 4 mind you)
-scanning. It's ok at first but the more I play the more it seems to me like it's potentially worse than ME2. especially planet scanning, it takes forever

Had no issues with it until I got to a planet and the fps plummeted. I'm still on 780ti, sli. Could run that with Witcher 3 in 4k ultra (except the hair stuff) with 40fps. I've lowered it to low quality and 1020p in ME:A and it's still got problems when i run and turn on the planet. So i've stopped for now, until I can figure out what the problem is.
But yeah, the planet scanning is... Annoying.

I'm five hours in so far I like it more than I dislike it but my opinions are still mixed.

So like of course, the cc was dreadful even the measly few options we have don't look all that great. My character looks good in cut scenes most of the time but not all of the time and that annoys me.

I'm actually really enjoying the combat and gameplay in general it's probably better than any of the previous games, no issues on pc either it runs great and I have only seen two bugs so far and they were just like minor combat bugs that didn't cause much of an issue.

I haven't gotten to do much exploration yet (I think that comes soon tho) I have done a few side quests, so far they are much better than Inquisition but still not as interesting as in earlier bioware games. It's only the first few areas though maybe later quests will be better and at least it's not Inquisition level side quests.

The writing is a bit cheesy and over the top in places, lots of wise cracks, lots of over the top speeches that are supposed to be inspiring but just come off as pretentious like mass effect was always like that and it's fine in small doses but I think they went a bit too far with it. Still, everyone has a lot to say, squad mates comment on what is going on constantly and the voice acting is great.

Facial animations are what we have seen in all the footage released, most of it is kind of bad but passable, some of it is just really really bad. There is also really annoying instances of clipping and other graphical glitches that are just really distracting. 

The plot is interesting enough so far, like the entire premise was kind of ridiculous but we already knew that, some of the characters are just more compelling than others and the farther I get into the game the more interesting the characters I am meeting become.

So yeah, mixed opinions but I am enjoying it and I imagine the game will open up a lot more now I habe finally learned how to do everything.

I played up to the story gate and it had me thoroughly hooked from the very beginning.

I have no idea what type of insanity people who say it starts off slow are suffering from.

Liam is light-hearted. 

Casual Ryder is hilarious.