My Andromeda Exploration Log

Hi again! I'm at 25% completion and decided it was time to get some of the stuff in my head out of it. But I've been balking at it... because there were quite a few gripes and writing a full page of that didn't sit well with me. So, I tried to come up with some positive things to talk about with the rest. I ended up thinking about this a lot more than I'd intended and what i realized was this; the reason for my parcity of good stuff is that it was all intrinsic to the game. And there is a lot of good stuff.  Really, a lot.  And all that stuff was bound together so much that the other stuff popped out because of the difference between it and the good.  So, I'm just going to go with those things that've been rattling in my head, and see how it turns out.

Okay, I'm just going to straight up put this one at the beginning, because I'm a nerd. The Scourge should not have had the words "Dark Energy" applied to it at all. *Please remember, I'm only @ 25%, so any please hold any an all future spoilers for me. Thank you * I do appreciate the fact that this is a Sci-Fi game, and that most SF games take liberties with the hard sciences. That said, I was slapping my head when they started saying the Scourge appeared to be related to dark energy, and was only slightly mollified when they added "this does not match any current models of dark energy." That disclaimer is absolute truth. I'm not a physics major, and I'm not going to try giving a layman's lesson about dark energy, but if you would like an irl explanation on Dark Energy, Wikipedia's a good source, and the fellow at PBS "Space/Time" net show is very good at explaining complex physics. Okay, I've done my civic duty there, moving on.

The thing is... if they had said "Dark Matter" rather than dark energy, the Scourge would make a lot more sense. It still wouldn't be a perfect fit, but would be within that sweet spot hard science fiction tries for. Again, I won't try to explain why, but refer you to the same two sources.

So, I'm just going let out a breath and examine the Scourge as a "dark phenomena" in Andromeda. Which is cool because it let's me move to another point I've been wanting to write down for some time now: When examining themes behind the whole ME series, the first thing that's been addressed is "Fermi's Paradox." Simple and short, it turns the old question "Are We Alone?" into "Why Are We Alone?" (or "Where is everyone!" as the man himself is said to have exclaimed one day in the cafeteria). Quick rundown; there are roughly 400 billion stars in our galaxy. Even if you constrain this to Sol type stars, with planets orbiting in their Goldilocks zone, the shear number of stars (even within those restraints) is so large that unless life has only ever existed in our Solar System, then there should be aliens every where. Enough so that, again, unless humanity is the most special of special snow-flakes, there should be alien civilizations with technology somewhere where we could observe them. But, when we look to the stars, they are quiet.

The Mass Effect Trilogy (MET), can be viewed as a work of fiction that tries to deal with this in a pretty hard-science type of way... fiction notwithstanding. In MET most races reach the stars by finding ancient FTL tech laying around, and after that the relays themselves. We all know this is the process of the Cyclical Harvest. However, I should note some geography at this point: If you look at the homeworlds of each of the species, you can see that each of them is far enough away that even modern mass effect FTL technology it would require spending decades to move beyond their local group stars. For a galactic civilization (and one with a central governing body) to exist within the ME universe, the relays are fundamentally important to bring these peoples together. I don't remember the exact number of years off the top of my head, but humanity was able to colonize many worlds without ever meeting the Citadel Species. The Turians too, when they were met by the CS's,  had expanded far enough that they had enough colonies to fund a military strong enough to wage a galactic war, but likewise went undiscovered for a long time.  

Where am I going with this? Without the Relays the current Milkyway and (at least from what I've seen so far) Adromedan FTL technology isn't capable of moving further than a star cluster without spending a long, long time in FTL, much like the Methuselah ships the Initiative used to travel to Andromeda at the beginning of the game.

Which brings us back to the Fermi paradox. Why were there so few aliens in the Milky Way and why hadn't we met them? Because in order to circumvent the limitations of the ME FTL tech, you need the relays. Why were there so few of them? Because we only met civilizations who had managed to evolve into space-farers by the paths left for them after each Reaper Harvest. This also explains why the number of those who did is so small as well.

MEA changes the game. It's pretty obvious that Andromedan FTL tech is more or less on par with our own. General Heleus tech is said to be a bit more advanced, though not by a great deal. (I also like that it's shown that tech isn't always a straight line -the different tech groups in the game all have stuff that no one else does, even if that stuff could be built with their indigenous technology.) But I digress.

Our experience in Andromeda (which is more than twice the size of the Milky Way, btw, with 1 Trillions stars), is essentially confined to a star cluster. There are no Mass Relays (hopefully this also means that the Reapers never managed to go to Andromeda... though I'm still looking for a good reason why they wouldn't.) So, we're limited by our FTL tech, which isn't good at zipping us all around our new home.

Here Fermi's paradox lies out like it did in the Milky Way before the Relays: species were simply spread out too much to have met each other, at least within the constraints of each 50k event. In Andromeda, the Heleus cluster had the Angarans, who were colonizing it at the same space any of ME FTL drive would allow. The Kett have come from somewhere else, and seem to have done it the hard way, without the relays. Civilizations may rise and fall all over Andromeda, but still not manage to travel beyond a fraction of it.  This is why we only see two Andromedan species; everyone else is too far away (though it seems like the Kett have met other species.  I'm interested to see if we'll eventually meet more Andromedan life.)

I love that the ME Universe is that consistent, and approached things with such a fine eye to the science behind the game

Okay,now to other topics.

Combat. When I first started playing combat underwhelmed me. I'm afraid that any "whelm" to come hasn't reached me yet. The jump pack is cool. It really is. It's fun and I can see that there would be lots of uses for it. However, the game never really goes into that. Jump up. Execute attack. Then jump back to cover so the bajillion kett that just opened fire on you don't manage to find the bullet with your name on it. The new cover, where you automatically edge as you move around bends is more than a pain. A big one. even trying to turn from left-to-right while undercover feels awkward, and doesn't work well. Also, dashing from cover to cover doesn't seem to exist.  If someone knows how to do this, please let me know.  And vaulting doesn't work as well as it did in the last two games.

All in all, the combat systems that came from the polished, dynamic fights of ME2&3, hasn't really delivered on a new battle paradigm (sorry jump pack ).

In all honesty it reminds of Mass Effect. The first. ME1 was the first shooter game BW put out, and the combat showed it. Your basic fight went: grab cover. Knock your buddy npc out of the way because he grabbed it first. Spend time shooting (how long depends on how high your level is). Most of you enemies will be nice enough to pop around at about assault rifle range, but unless you're out on the world map, sniping's not going to be a great boon. You can do it, but it's mostly for the "boom! headshot!" feel than a real tactical reason. Finally, all the nearby bad guys are dead, so now it's time to leave cover and hunt down the stragglers. Don't bother grabbing cover again; these guys will jump around, move around corners (not that they're not really shooting doing while doing all this) and your job has basically become to track these guys down and strafe the area with enough bullets to finally knock them out. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The reason I bring it up is that while, yes, this game's fight mechanics and AI are good enough that the comedic scenario above doesn't take place, it still... for lack of any way to otherwise describe it, I would say it doesn't know what to do with itself, and that as a player I can feel that. Combat can take place at any range, but if you've got a decent enough amount of space (and cover) to snipe, your enemies don't act like they know how to deal with that. If you get closer, they get smarter, thank goodness. They'll (mostly) use cover more intelligently, and just about any battle that doesn't wind down quickly will eventually see them try to spam fire and swarm. Notice I've not mentioned the jet pack in this AI activity? Jump high, grab cover, and they won't do anything different from regular cover tactics, despite the fact you know have the high ground on them. Jump up and do a melee hit? Boom! Looks awesome. But you might as well call this tactic "grab aggro," because that is what you're doing. And, you definitely need to love melee, and you better have that sword/guantlet and shotgun ready. You're going to need it. The thing is though... I've yet to see a combat situation in the game where this was necessary. It's fun, don't get me wrong, but I think I'll stick to my cover and watch the enemies pop up for a nice head-shot.

All the above doesn't really bother me (well, mostly.) Combat works even if it can be frustrating from time to time. And like I mentioned, ME1 was similar. In fact, I would go so far as to say the ME1 and MEA are almost twins in this regards; it's obvious that the team was trying to shake up the combat experience, as well as other stuff from MET, rather than rely on the more mature ME2/3 mechanics.  I can see from that perspective, why they decided to try not to revamp the ME3 combat system, but attempted to go in a different direction. So, it's sort of like they went back to square one. So, for now, it's fun, it doesn't detract from the game, in my opinion, and I'm already looking forward to the next game, where they can fully put the polish on.

Hmm. More to say, but I think I'll break off here for now.

Enjoy your posts! Keep it up!

In regards to the Fermi Paradox...

So, I am not sure I understand the logic of this.  Say that there are some large number of planets in the perfect zone for life (ie, life as we know it).  This does not account for the many other factors that are needed for life, , in addition to things like the type of star and the orbital dynamics of the planets that are in the right "zone".  There are also specific planetary (ie, on the planet surface) things that likely contributed the formation of life on Earth, like plate tectonics (via degassing and creation of the atmosphere, high energy environments in mid ocean ridges that may have been where amino acids started combing in interesting ways to form the building blocks of life, the diversity of environments that come with shifting plates, etc).  But even if we narrowed the number of planets down further based on these types (and other comparable types) of planetary dynamics, there is also the aspect of time to consider. (isn't there?)  Life likely existed, or will exist, or does exist on many planets.  But given, for example, 30 billion planets in the right zone for life and with the right planetary dynamics to support it, what is the probability that life on those planets is at a similar technological stage as ours at the same time?  I would imagine this greatly reduces the number of planets. 

Or maybe that is already factored into the concept?

IN addition, there is also the fact that it is extremely tricky to identity terrestrial bodies around stars (because the stars, and their gobs and gobs of light, are what we observe and the planets around those stars are mostly inferred by other means). Thus, if there is alot of life out there, we are not technologically advanced enough to see it. We can't even "see" the planets yet.

Also...I am not convinced that we fully understand the means for life on other worlds.  After all..our sample size for 'planetary life' is exactly one. Ecologists and biologists still can't full explain the spatial patterns and drivers of the biodiversity of life on this planet.  Think of how complicated the definition for a niche is, for example (ie, Hutchinson niche).  The niche of any species is defined by a HUGE number of variables...and on top of that, the ability of any species to be present in any place is also a matter of random chance, history, interactions with other species, etc. And this is just carbon-based, DNA-based life.  Other forms of life may be totally different. 

So I guess...do we really have the foggiest idea where life could/should exist out there? And if we don't, then how do we know the probability of life given any number of planets (ie, if we even actually knew how many planets there were in our galaxy)?

OK, I guess I am blathering now, but this is fun to think about!

You arent the first to ask about switching sides in cover. Or the first to assume you cant do it. The combat definitely is nuts.

And

Free tip with no spoilers, when you get to H-047c hold triangle to leave the planet.