Game Informer Reports Bioware is taking a break from Mass Effect

Don't expect DLC

Basically EA ruined a great company, got rid of all the good quality writers, brought in Social Justice panderers who couldn't even do that right (see trans character reception in DAI), and then after the newbs produced poor reviews, shifted them off to other studios to do some soul searching.

 

At the risk of sounding like a naive optimist/apologist, I'll wait until there's something a bit more concrete than some 'unnamed sources close to Bioware' to start worrying

And if it does turn out to be true? Well, as much as I enjoy the game, a bit of time to reassess things might well be a good thing. I'm more inclined to blame EA for the technical issues, as the patches suggest to me that had they not rushed Bioware to get it out, it might have been a lot more stable, but there's definitely some writing and content issues that are presumably all on Bioware.

(The Kotaku article cited in the Game Informer link mentions that ME:A was made by a team that had only done DLC before, which would explain a lot tbh.)

 

rip Vanquisher 2017-2017

 

Why even nerf guns in a PvE game?

 

I guess they want gold mode MP to be a little harder for some reason, idk

 

I guess they thought if they just slashed the credit rewards people would notice.

 

Because they want people to use different weapons I guess. It was to the point where the Vanq in MP is the best weapon in any situation and it was stupid to take other shit.

Altogether, this was an incredible update for MP. It's viable to do something other than melee spam. Man, I've said this a lot about the game, but I can't believe they released MP as it was.

 

So ... what EA's been doing for decades at this point? It's not like this is the first time they've bought a company that was producing solid content and proceeded to run them into the ground.

 

So finally taking a break off Persona has got me to come back to this.

Hitting Hunting for the Archon now, doing all the sidequests first.

I still genuinely like this game, honestly disappointed if the news of the series being halted is true. Yes, the dialogue is weak the story so far has been a tad cliche but something about the game charms me. I hate the loading times, can't do one of the missions on Kadara because the latest patch made the whole section unstable but something about it makes me want to keep playing all the way through.

 

I wouldn't go that far. The difference between 1.05 and 1.06 is 90 damage. Still really good, it's just that it's not miles ahead of every other weapon in the game anymore.

 

No need to be dramatic. EA been doing for decades. The SJW wasn't them though.

 

EA only just started putting women on the cover of FIFA games, lol...

 

Bioware officially announced that there will be no further single-player patches or content for Andromeda. I think it's a shame, to be honest; I would never have said Andromeda was perfect, but I've had a lot of fun with it - I'm on my third Ryder - and I was looking forward to seeing the plot continued in future installments, whether DLC or sequels. Apparently at least some of them will be covered in tie-in media, but that won't be the same.

 

That's unfortunate. Andromeda really was one of the best Mass Effect games, I felt, right up there with ME2. It's only real flaw was the shoddy cutscene animations, everything else was above average to exceptional.

 

It looks even shittier for Bioware that they're dismantling Bioware Montreal and caving and not finishing and patching the game than that it was mediocre and had a bad release in the first place. Fuck that and fuck them. I liked the game well enough, not enough to try and pretend everything was "above average to exceptionl" (other than combat mechanics - that shit was perfect). Goddamn I wanted the Quarian Ark DLC

That being said, Dragon Age 4 when?

 

That's mostly what I meant. Combat, the meat of the game, was bloody fantastic, easily the best in the series by a country mile.

As for other aspects:

The writing wasn't spectacular, but it was competent enough, and it struck a decent middle ground in terms of focus between ME1's grand space opera and ME2's character-driven sequences. Only real negative on the writing is that none of the crew except maybe Drack were standouts in the same way Garrus and Wrex were. On the whole, the writing was above average for the ME series.

The RPG mechanics were exceptional as well, with fantastic degrees of flexibility backed by just enough structure to not leave you paralyzed by indecision. Balance was pretty good across the board for all the builds I've tried as well, with it taking actual effort to make a build that can't be made to work at least passably.

Exploration was, in my book, the best in the ME series to date. The on-foot maps were just the right size, and the Mako Redux was basically perfect for its role, taking ME1's Mako and ironing off the rough edges to make a fantastic vehicle. The ship exploration was rather one-note, but still much tighter and better focused than any other game in the series. Only real issue with the exploration at all was the constant cutscenes when navigating between planets. It was pretty awesome the first time, but it got old pretty quick and using some other mechanism to convey that sense of scale would have been much appreciated. That's a fairly small niggle overall though.

Really, other than the shoddy animation work and poor performance on PC, the only real knock I have against the game is the busy work to run around scanning glyphs before you can do the sudoku puzzles. That was more annoying than anything else, but unlike a lot of people, from what I've gathered, I actually enjoy sudoku and found those puzzles fairly interesting, if simplistic in places, so that made up for a fair amount of scavenger-hunting.

 

Andromeda's biggest sin was the part where fuck all of your decisions had any consequences whatsoever.

 

I meant the leveling and class/profile system; the decision trees and whatnot is usually thrown under the "writing" umbrella. And yeah, Andromeda's writing was functional, but little more. I liked the overall tone and direction, but the only sequence that really jumped out to me as well-written was Liam's loyalty mission. And that was more because of how ridiculous and shark-jumpy, in a good way, it was.

That said, that isn't a new problem for Mass Effect. There's precisely one meaningful choice in the entirety of the original trilogy, and that's whether or not Wrex lives through Virmire. Every other choice you can make ends up playing out functionally identically, with maybe a handful of cosmetic differences.

 

As much as I love Mass Effect, and as much as I defended the game pre-release and tried to avoid the 'Andromeda sucks!" groupthink, I just don't love Andromeda. It's the only ME game I've never replayed. I finished my first playthrough and just ... never went back to it. It's not just the super-simple "you only get three powers at a time and everything goes on full cooldown if you switch to a different three" not-a-class-system. I don't get hung up on the whole choices/consequences thing because I understand that as writers trying to craft a coherent narrative across multiple games, all they can offer is the illusion of choice.

I just felt like this wasn't the game we were promised. We were supposed to be the bold explorers into the unknown. Instead, we're the absolute last people to get to anywhere. We show up in Andromeda and there's already a Citadel stand-in, a few failed colonies, two successful rebel settlements, etc. We make First Contact with new enemies and allies, but nope, turns out the kett have been killing/abducting people for ages, and the Nexus exiles have had contact with the angara for a while.

I think the game would have been so much better if the Pathfinder teams arrived on the Nexus and scouted Heleus as actual explorers. Imagine if you wake up at the beginning, run into the Scourge, and everything's fucked. You can't contact anyone, and nobody's awake to hear you if you did. You've got the superstructure and framework of a massive space station wrapped around a mini-ark with a population you can't thaw right now. Supplies are critical. Personnel is critical. You don't know where you are, or what the space-cloud is, but the clock is ticking and you've got work to do. The Arks are coming. You need to be ready when they arrive. And First Contact goes very, very bad...

 

The only choices in Mass Effect 1 that had any tangible consequences within that game were on Virmire - all the others set things up for the sequels, but didn't change anything immediately, and I'd say it's the same with ME:A; plenty of things that could be developed in future installments, but right there and then, nothing much changes. True, the choices you faced in Mass Effect 1 were on a grander scale, and had more obvious consequences, but that doesn't automatically mean there wouldn't have been development on those lines in sequels. Or it didn't, anyway.

I've seen this point made a lot since ME:A came out, and I have to wonder how many of the people saying it were enormous fans of the cast straight away from the first game. Most of the time, when I see people raving about a particular character, the first game either gets ignored completely or it's used to highlight the character development done. It does seem that on Tumblr in particular, people were comparing ME:A to the entire trilogy and inevitably being disappointed, whereas it should have been compared to just the first game.

Anyway. This tweet has been doing the rounds as well.

That by Casey Hudson, one of the lead writers on the trilogy who recently returned to Bioware. Leaving aside the vague glimmer of hope it inspires, I do find it amusing that one of the people most frequently criticised over ME3's ending is now being seen by some fans as the best hope for new content.