icemann on 12/4/2017 at 09:21
And I completely disagree with all of that. You do quests, you level up and spend points. That's already an RPG. You talk with people and via the ways you choose to talk with them develop friendships / relationships, and you make decisions on how to deal with things which yield events and outcomes later on. That's completely an RPG. I would argue that the first game is more of an RPG than the 2nd or 3rd games, but they are still RPGs. If your not aware that they are indeed RPGs then I'd suggest you do some reading.
And the Rachni decision does have resulting effects. Have a play of the game and then you shall see.
The only thing Andromeda has going for it, is that it's open world. Beyond that, it doesn't hold a candle to the other games in the series.
Starker on 12/4/2017 at 09:41
Huh? I never said it wasn't an RPG. I said it was barely an RPG / not much of an RPG. And Andromeda is just as much of an RPG by these standards.
Also, you do quests, level up and spend points in the new Doom. Doesn't make it an RPG.
Jason Moyer on 12/4/2017 at 23:22
Quote Posted by Judith
The thing is, where were all the critics, journalists and fans, when it was time to call DA:I on its bullshit?
Enjoying them for being mindless open-world icon hunts? I mean, and I genuinely try not to project my own tastes as an expectation towards other people, have you seen the goddamn games people play? Open-world...CHECK. Non-creative crafting...CHECK. Juvenile love fantasy...CHECK.
Sometimes I almost think I hate videogames because so many of them exist for the sole purpose of consuming time.
Judith on 13/4/2017 at 09:12
I know, the ubiworld template seems to exist solely to take time and give players tedious jobs, with small pieces of actual meaningful content spread so wide and thin. And a lot of people seem to love it. I tend to avoid those games, because, well, when I come home from work, I'm genuinely interested in doing something other than work. Maybe that type of games works better when you're in high-school or college?
What I found weird about DA:I though, is that it found a way to be sort of addictive in its boredom, even for me. E.g. I'm not a completionist, but I like exploration, and that game forced me to be completionist of a sort. Like, some mysterious locations have multiple doors that require ridiculous amount of magic shards to unlock. But, first you have to find magic skull telescopes to even see the shards on the map, and of course they're scattered all over the place, often in ridiculous hard-to-reach spots, etc. You see where it goes. "Want to be an explorer? Ok, now be a good Chinese gold farmer and get down to work." It's like Dungeon Master or EoB all over again, but this time there are 9 or 12 doors in a row, and you need like a 100 keys to unlock them. And they're scattered around the whole world.
reizak on 13/4/2017 at 10:42
...and I opened every last one of those goddamn doors.
In hindsight Andromeda is a logical post-DAI development, but somehow I really quite enjoyed DAI whereas Andromeda just feels pointless. Maybe DAI just managed to fool me but I felt like my actions actually changed something in that game, whereas there's been several points in Andromeda where it seems like I'm making a choice and I've googled to make sure there won't be any terrible repercussions later on (yeah, it's cheap, but I don't want to find out half my crew is going to die ten hours later because I flipped the coin wrong) and in every single case the only outcome of your "choice" is that your character says their line a bit differently. I kinda viewed the original trilogy as a choice simulator so that feels really disappointing, but I guess a lot of the outcomes only played out in subsequent games there too so there's always Andromeda 2 (or is there?). I'm not that far into the main story so maybe your choices start mattering at some point, but I very much doubt it, seems to go against the whole design philosophy.
Pyrian on 13/4/2017 at 21:00
Quote Posted by Starker
* here's a video with some pretty good speculation about what could have gone wrong with the animations. As someone who knows very little about animation in games, I found it very enlightening:
I was a bit underwhelmed by that video: "Here's how Witcher 3 does their impressive animations. ME:A's animations aren't as good. Why? I dunno."
Starker on 13/4/2017 at 22:22
Well, it is clear that the Witcher 3 team has worked very hard to make their system work while clearly something has gone wrong with Andromeda's pipeline. We are unlikely to know what exactly happened without an inside source in Bioware Montreal. I think he laid out some pretty good guesses, though.
DaBeast on 15/4/2017 at 21:16
We're unlikely to know for certain, but there has been reasonable speculation, that likely has already been mentioned, that the core creative members behind Mass Effect have either left Bioware or left the ME team for other projects, leaving development to people who maybe aren't as good or lack the authority/desire to resist publisher pressure.
It's too easy and a little ignorant to call it incompetence, my suspicion would be something hierarchical, like a lack of communication between team leads and designers. Like the game was designed by a committee of fans who wanted to cram in their personal favourite things about Mass Effect series onto the model they were instructed to use from DA:I, couple that with weak QA and you get ME:A.
PR will do what it always does and try to paint a rosey picture. "the game is great, there are no problems here, if you don't like the character designs you're probably a trump supporter"
Jason Moyer on 15/4/2017 at 21:47
All I know is that if Arkane start making open-world games I'm done with videogames forever.
