We will have to agree to disagree on the proportions thing.  The Tempest feels much smaller to me.  You do have a point about who fixes things, and you're right, that's exactly how it would work, because that's what you do with limited resources.  You may not have gotten to this point yet, but I've seen several times where Liam or Cora were working on the Nomad.

FYI, to answer another post you had, no lockups on Havarl, but I play on the PS4 Pro.

The more I play this game, the more bugs and glitches seem to pop out at me. There was one in a vault that I went through where I couldn't properly boost jump near the edge of a platform while I was sprinting, and every time I tried to do so, I would just run into the electric water and die. That and every 2-3 seconds the screen would hiccup. God, that shit drove me nuts.

There are a lot of bugs, no doubt.  Wait until you try to clear the Kett base on Eos.  What a cluster that was.  Doable, but invisible enemies, not cloaked, invisible, with name bar.  Enemies spawn directly in front of you, just poof, they're there.  Telling you to shut off alarms, but no hud indicators.  Shut off security, but map indicators remain.

I've only hit one bug that legit required a reload.  But I've seen a bunch of others, mostly in side quests that were obviously rushed to completion, and therefore let you complete steps prior to when you should get them, thus jacking up dialogue and quest progress / responses.

I just did that Kett base on Eos, and yup it was a disaster. Even after the base was beaten the game kept spawning enemies all over the place on my way out, even spawning three of them on top of each other in mid air... and when I shot one they all fell to their deaths. I've also encountered a ton of sequence broken dialog... my favorite was in the Kett base on Hoth rescuing the squidperson leader. I had already killed all the enemies in the hallway and was wandering around trying to scan shit when suddenly a dialog burst started and all the characters were referencing being in a firefight... a firefight that stopped minutes ago.

The total lack of polish this game has is almost criminal. My new favorite thing to do is proofread the written items as I keep seeing grammatical errors. Half the written stuff in the game has the feel of a C student's high school creative writing paper. I want to write "see me after class" on a lot of it. And I can't be the only one who thinks Master Control Program whenever the Archon talks... I keep waiting to hear him say "GET ME DILLINGER!"

Also the deeper I get into the game the more derivative of ME1 it gets. Andromeda is the "Force Awakens" of the Mass Effect series... everything in it is a remake or derivative of the other games, just with a multicultural millennial coating.

 An someone embed please? They built youngetting called out for stolen valor of you wear N7 armor. 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=XIGvMlZYjcs

The game is very similar to ME1, but with much better open worlds, a lot more side quests, but worse, to much worse polish and depth within those quests.  Overall I like it better, or at least I like the concept better.   If EA wasn't EA and would have allowed for the 4 months of bug fixing this game needed, it would have been a solid 8.5, maybe even 9. (I'm probably a bit biased on that).  The lack of polish and obvious issues easily deduct a point or two, just because of how constant they are.   Your enjoyment of the game will almost assuredly be linked to your tolerance of bugs.  If you want perfection, don't play it, or at least wait 6 months for the patches to fix most of it.

I think part of the angst is this isn't a new ME experience, just a modification of ME1 with new pieces on the board and a different way of playing it.  Add that to the lack of polish... and people are angry and unable to divest themselves from that anger at "ruining" the series.   I actually really like the game, but as I said before, I'm easy to please in that regard.

Perhaps I'm not far enough along in the story, but why was daddy Ryder still wearing N7 armor when he was dishonorably discharged?

He wasnt. He wears a pathfinder set, but you can build/buy/find a N7 set late in the game. Coulda kept it in a footlocker, I donno. Got the video off Reddit and thought it was funny. 

I originally wasn't going to play it, but I got my copy free so my "rage" is more in the realm of "lulz" at the game. I cannot in good faith be angry at something I got for free.

As for the game being a "new experience", it actually is a new experience (in the strictest sense of the word)... but it is a new experience built from parts of the old experiences (just like Force Awakens). They took what came before, ran it through a Benetton ad, remixed the pieces a little bit, and bing... Andromeda.

The story similarities are legion...

- Neophyte player made human character goes on their first mission hand-held by an elder field agent, who dies in the course of the mission so the neophyte assumes his job.
- The player works for a diverse council on a big hub city, who give them a boarding house spaceship with which their multicultural gang and their six wheeled space car gad about.
- The player has a team built up of the lovable rough and tumble Krogan, the hot scientist Asari, the technical Turian, the militaristic female human, the laid back male human and the token new alien specific to something in the story.
- The enemy is a nebulous threat who "indoctrinates" and corrupts their victims into willing foot soldiers.
- The player travels from system to system, planet to planet scanning and exploring things, rustling up resources and performing menial tasks for the inhabitants so they can continue doing the same.
- And I'm not far enough into the game yet but I'll be disappointed if the game doesn't present me with a "choose between two companions, who lives and who dies" moment.

About the only new things are the ability to romance anyone and anything, and the whole "we come in peace, shoot to kill" story tropes.

It doesn't make it a bad game... it just makes it incredibly derivative. Almost to the point of deja vu.

Could have fooled me.

In my game on the first mission on Habitat 7 (the only mission he appears in) Alec Ryder was wearing fully marked black with red and white striped N7 armor as shown in this video:

I won't disagree.  There are nuances that make it different, but the underlying feeling is still there, and it's more than just having the Nomad/Mako, open world connect.   Revolutionary the game is not.

That said, combat is about a billion times better.   Hopefully there is no easy button like in ME1 with skills and mods that allow for infinite fire. .

I did that mission last night, and I didn't think it was *too* bad. A lot of it is just glitched animations here, the occasional fall through a mountain, etc. But god damn, I abhor when the frames start sticking every 2-3 seconds like it did in the Kadara vault. Ho-lee shit.

A bit over the top, but he's not wrong on many of his points.  As I have said before, you have to be tolerant of the games faults to be a able to enjoy it.  If the faults are the things you most enjoy in a game, you're going to be feeling awful salty after a play through.

Agreed. It's ME1 done technically better but with some serious polish issues. Without those polish issues it'd be a great game across the board. As it stands, it's still a pretty good one. As a lifelong Bethsoft fan I am used to bugs, and while they are annoying, I just shrug and drive on.

I'll add that I suspect a fair amount of the angst is also coming from the Call of Duty: SPECTRE Edition fans that really really liked the changes introduced in ME2 . They were expecting another sci-fi cover shooter with RPG window dressing and instead got a redo of ME1 with all of its side plots, vehicle driving, and inventory/skills/mod management. I read a lot of these reviews and see people bitterly complaining about things that existed in ME1, and which are actually done better in ME: A.

As a final note, ME: A does character choice better than any ME ever has, by far. You aren't locked into a class, you can use any skill by simply investing in it, and you have the full breadth of weapons and armor available to you with the ability to produce upgraded versions that will keep pace with the enemies you face through the entire game. This is one thing ME: A does very, very well, and I'm delighted about it.

The human lightning weapon mod is WAY OP.  Slap it on an Avenger when you build it, and it'll just eat whatever you point it at. 

It's really just his style, he gives pretty much every game out there shit. 

But regardless, I'm equating Bioware's execution of this game to a poorly cooked meal. You can have all the best ingredients, like Kobe grass fed steak, organic jasmine rice and garden grown greens, but if you nuke a steak in the microwave and burn the rice while also crushing the greens with a dull knife, then the meal just falls flat and it was a waste of effort, time and money. 

Andromeda feels like that to me. Plenty of good ingredients, but they were amalgamated so poorly and half heartedly that I'd rather they just not have done them at all. 

But really my biggest gripe is the voice acting. How the hell did we get this 


And end up with this?


Who the hell thought giving the leading female Krogan a lisp was the best fucking idea? No charm, no charisma. Shit, Eve was only for 1/5 of the final game and she captivated me with how the voice actor brought the character to life.

Hmm... I will remember this when I next upgrade my Avenger.

Btw has anyone tried the Remnant cryo/arc/fire weapon mods? Are they adding that ammo or is it a damage boost when using that ammo?  Because of true a 25% damage boost + special ammo would be godly. 

Starting to get bored halfway through

Seems like the dialogue options don't make any difference in the story or anything. I wish they would make a game less focused on a "huge open world" which ends up just being worthless driving around and a smaller world with more choices that effect the missions and story

The only Remnant mod i've tried is the Beam augmentation, which sucked.  It could have been a bug, but i built an Archangel with it, which was great as a standard ballistic rifle, and the damage went way way way down with the beam augment.  It didn't go down on the spec sheet, but it started doing the damage level of a single shot from an Avenger, rather than the typical double tap you get from the Archangel.  Makes me think it was a bug, but not sure. (Part of me thinking it is a bug is because i also made an Archangel with the heat seeking plasma, and the damage from that was just fine, i just hated how slow the shot was because the Archangel is great as a low weight sniper rifle replacement)

Beam augments may be bugged anyway, as i've gotten probably 20 of the things because they drop like crazy when killing Remnant bots.

I ended up changing to a Kett rifle that works very well (for now), not a dev model, just got it as loot and liked how it works.  I still somewhat prefer the instant pop you get from MW ballistic tech as they sometimes dodge the plasma, but it does a nice bit of damage and the charge ability is nice to hold and then release when they pop out of cover.

Favorite weapon by far: Piranha Shotgun. Full auto at close range shreds even the baddest of bad guys real quick.

I borrowed a copy from the library and this about sums it up.

I don't really care for the Avenger, far prefer lighting things up with the Revenant. I'll have to give the lightning mod a try, though.

Valkyrie, anyone? Freakin' love that thing. Still searching for the upgrades to the Halberd, though

I've been using the N7 Valkyrie and the Carnifex pistol.

N7 Hurricane with seeking plasma and the one that gives you a shield boost every time your mag runs dry.  As much as I hate to say it, I'm probably going to get away from using my plasma grenade black widow and get something else.  Too heavy and slowing down power use.

Pardon me while I go put my hand in a blender.......

http://www.polygon.com/2017/3/27/15074856/mass-effect-andromeda-asari-pronouns

 Mass Effect: Andromeda reveals that the all-female asari ... aren’t


They really can't just leave shit alone........

The one bug that seems to be urking me is that an enemy will fall off the map but only partially...usually at a mission point was you will have like  a spot pixels large you can hit them or they are completely in the wall/cliff but can somehow shoot at you however you cant finish that objective because you need to kill that guy

Yep. Saw that shit. They're all-female. Period. If it looks like a duck, talks like a duck, and does duck things, well... it's a fucking duck.

Alright, I just finished Ryder Family Secrets, and I have some speculation I'd like to share.

Click To View Spoiler

Click To View Spoiler

Click To View Spoiler

Andromeda spoiler-free speculation on the ending of ME3: So say you pick the control option at the end of ME3. Shepard's mind/essence now controls the Reapers, and they are rebuilding the galaxy. I figure it wouldn't be long before he sends at least a few of them to Andromeda to help them as well. Since the Reapers are millions of years old, I'm sure 600 to get to Andromeda would be a blink of an eye to them, and it would only be about 30-35 years max for the people in Andromeda before the new reapers show up ready to kick some Kett ass.

Click To View Spoiler

I got a Valkyrie V as a drop the other day and switched over to it to try it out.

It's not my style. When you can land the 2-shot burst it does some serious damage, but I find more often than not one of the shots, at least, is either off-target or goes into a barrier. This combined with the reset time on shots and the low magazine capacity are just annoying.

I like hosing down an area. If some of the shots go into a barrier or miss, that's fine, I've got plenty more coming.

I find myself really hating the Fako, aka the Blomad.

The annoying need to switch into and out of all wheel drive, anemic jumps, anemic boost, and worst of all NO WEAPONS. "Peaceful exploration" went out the window in the first ten seconds in Andromeda. They aren't driving this thing down to the Dairy Queen to share dilly bars with the afro-fish people. Every single time you use the Blomad you are driving into hostile, non Star Trek glorious peaceful commies in space conditions. I fail to believe nobody in the Initiative can bolt some guns and better jump jets on this thing.

This is completely sick and insane but I would actually PAY MONEY for them to offer the ME1 Mako as DLC. I need to be able to moon patrol bounce into a hover while lighting up the Kett with machine gun and cannon fire, death from above style. Then once the combat is done, stop and actually fix the fucking thing myself in the field.

The Blomad is total step backwards in every way.

So ive got about 15 hours into this so far and here is my feelings on it.

I feel completely unconnected to the story line. It makes zero sense to me and the characters throw me off so much i cant get back into a grove of being lost in the story.

One of the biggest things is the total "Fuck you" in writing the story. Im big into sci-fi and big into space travel (im also an AE). Yet, they just throw all that shit out the window when they wrote and thought up ME:A. The past ME's stretch the premise of space travel but they still attempt to keep it grounded in something. In ME:A, nope, fuck you, you will eat this shit up whether you like it or not.

The big thing is the concept of "What life forms will i meet in another galaxy". I had read a review beforehand that basically said Bioware dropped the ball in this respect. Which is totally true because whats the first thing you find in this new galaxy? Not one BUT TWO civilizations at almost the exact same level of development as the milky way galaxy civilizations. I just cant stop thinking about that. Whereas in previous ME's they give the differences in the civilizations alot of nuance and depth showing the vast differences in them. Why oculdnt we be fighting some space blobs or amoeba or something crazy that you would find in another galaxy? Big opportunity lost here.

Then ten seconds into meetings these new civilizations from another galaxy you can instantly communicate with them in great depth. I know this is just a video game trope to move the story along but its jarring. I feel like the writers missed a big chance as far as writing potential for the game, again.

The voice choices are horrible too. Some work out just fine and fit in perfectly. Some i feel like im being shook out of a coma while they are talking. The Krogan with the woman's voice threw me for a total loop. She sounds like an old house wife nagging me about honey-doos. Not that krogans cant be women, but why cant they distort the sound or make it deeper or something? Its a fucking krogan for gods sake. The female Turian is annoying as hell too. Not that its a woman, but make her fucking sound turian. Jesus, i couldnt even tell i had a turian on my team for a long time. I said to myself "Who is this annoying ass lady on my team that keeps talking? Did i equip that blonde dyke by accident?" Nope, turian.


The quests so far make no sense at all. I just finished up Havarl and the last quest was basically "We have lived here for thousands of years and there is no sign of an ark on this planet at all. Oh wait, its 50 feet from where im standing? OMG thank you for saving the planet!" I just rolled me eyes at the end of that.

Then the whole "Mysterious alien culture that is evident on every world and holds all the keys to fixing everything".

Th fighting is fun but i can already see the complaints for only allowing 3 powers. But im on console so im limited regardless.

The real issue with the fighting is it takes FOREVER to get anywhere. To move anywhere is fucking cut scene, over and over again. Its so annoying.

Then I always come back to the same thought.


fourty. million. dollars.






















The Witcher 3 has really spoiled me i think. I truly think its the best RPG ive played in my life up to this point. I just dont believe i cant play another after that.

Glad I wasn't the only one annoyed by that.

I thought WTF?!? not even a mention of "hey stick this babelfish in your ear" or "How the fuck do you know our language?" "How can I understand you?!?"

nope..nothing.

We'll just have to agree to disagree again.  I think the Nomad is much better than the Mako.   There are upgrades to make it do everything better.  All you're lacking is firepower.  Given that you simply stole some else's research vehicle, that's completely plausible.  Could you add some?  Probably.  But adding a turret gun to a chassis obviously not built for it is far from minor upgrades.   More like open heart surgery.

Besides, all you gotta do is power slide it in to any encounter.... instant cover.

Someday, CD Projekt Red will finish Cyberpunk 2077.

Story excuses aside the Blomad is a symptom of a broken game mechanic.

Andromeda has functionally useless "open world" elements that amount to nothing but filler. The "open world" levels are simply normal sized game maps artificially spread out ten times larger than they need to be in order to justify a manufactured sense of grandiosity (and to pad the gameplay time). And forcing the player to navigate them using a defenseless Subaru Brat as a conveyance is more annoying than functional.

In ME1 the Mako levels could be repetitive, but they functioned. The levels were large, empty and expansive on purpose because the Mako moved FAST and could cover the whole map in minutes. Those levels also featured huge enemies that you could only fight in the Mako, giving those large empty levels an extra sense of danger and excitement. The Mako was more or less a surrogate "you" in the open planet levels. You had both the ability move as well as fight, and the only reason to get out of the Mako was to either enter a smaller "on foot" level or to quickly pick up an item and return to the Mako. But getting out of the Mako slowed those levels down immensely (and in some cases made them lethally dangerous), because the Mako was the focus. The same can be said of the Hammerhead levels in ME2.

In Andromeda the Blomad is more or less a slow, boring taxi that shuttles you between disparate points on a map that could have been moved closer together (like they are on Halal, or whatever the blue Endor planet is called) and eliminated the slow taxi concept entirely. The Blomad serves no functional purpose to the game other than to artificially extend playtime. There is no joy in driving it around, unless your idea of fun is driving around a huge empty strip mall parking lot looking for the next store to park, get out, and look at. They tacked on the goofy resource mining as a shallow ploy to prevent people from blowing their brains out from boredom driving the thing from point A to point B, and they tacked on the obnoxious "hazardous environment" stuff to force you to keep using it (as well as artificially restrict your movements to cause you to come back later, again artificially inflating play time).

The Blomad is bloat disguised as player freedom. It is empty Ubisoft-ish "open world" crutchery and it should have either died in development or been built into Mako II with a purposeful, focused existence designed around IT rather than getting out of it. As it stands the Blomad is the gameplay equivalent of the obnoxiously long "moving between areas" cut scenes in the game that they use to hide loading.

Honest question.  Why are you still playing this game?  You seem to absolutely loath everything about it.  Every post is a multi paragraph diatribe against the game where you take some piece of the design and tear it to pieces.

While the game has a lot about it that is far from perfect, even bad, I am baffled as to why you would continue to torture yourself by playing it when you obviously hate so much about it.

Do people not do logic puzzles in school anymore or something?

I did a couple of the much-bitched about glyph solving puzzles. That was ridiculously easy. Smartphones doing everyone's calculations really is making people dumb.

You know what would have been sick? Doing something realistic like trying to communicate with a selection of pictograms for first contact since it was totally unexpected and in an emergency, and then SAM figures out their language for your translator for subsequent encounters. Not only would it have been immensely more realistic, but it would've been fricking cool to worry about what you're conveying with a selection for four pictograms for everything you say, and trying to figure out what they're trying to convey doing the same.

So I can't deconstruct armor in the load out, and I can't swap what I'm wearing in the R&D mode?

I have to change what I'm wearing in the load out then deconstruct via the pause menu......

That makes total fucking sense......

Crafting anything is a total PITFA...

Well, to be honest I'm just trying to finish the story so I can stop... but I keep playing because I find this game unintentionally hilarious.

It is a special kind of mediocre that shows someone really, really tried at some point to make a good game... but then either due to time constraints, lack of ability, interference or just plain incompetence they messed up several key parts of it. And yet despite that some parts of it shine... like the whole Halal blue Endor planet. That was a good, tight level that had the right amount of things to do in it, spaced out just enough that you felt like you were exploring a dense map without all the undue labor of driving around through vast voids of nothing. It felt like classic Bioware.

And that is part of me keeps hoping it will somehow turn things around. That despite all the glitches, goofs, messed up aspects and clunky unnecessary shit that has come so far, there are still parts of it that are pretty good. As if it was simply masking the greater good hiding behind all the junk. And another tiny part of me is trying to relive that pure fun I had playing ME1 for the first time... because somewhere behind the dead, doll's eyes of this game is a glimmer of an actually pretty good game... If it would just get out of its own way that is.

And also because I am a firm believer that there is no such thing as unconditional fanboyism. I tear to shreds everything I enjoy... just wander into the Walking Dead thread sometime to really watch me get mean.

Oh god...

So Ryder's sister just woke up and I'm having a serious conversation with her about their father.  Suddenly, her lips are forming the words of the conversation but it's the male Ryder's voice and lines.




Despite the problems and glitches with the game, I'm still really liking it.  I hope to god they make a sequel, because most of the problems with this game really could be fixed in a second iteration.  Whether they *will* get fixed or not or not is up in the air, but it's at least something I'd like to see them attempt.

Neutralizing the Kett vase on Voeld was infuriating playing on the second to highest difficulty. You can't save your game as it doesn't auto save until you've cleared probably a dozen different groups of enemies, quite a few of which will spawn in front of you and kill you before you can react. I probably died fifteen times before I got inside the hangar and it saved.

I'm just happy that Bioware said they are working on a save during priority missions.  Somehow that bug got through QC as they thought it was intended.  (IMO ass covering) 

No way that's a bug, since oif you try to manually save, it specifically says "the game automatically saves during priority missions" or something to that effect.  Just a bad design choice.

Another bad design choice - having to scroll through to the number you want when selling items.  Say I've got like 1,500 angaran meditation crystals, or 800 omnigel canisters.  Since I'll never use that much of any item I want to sell most, but not all of them. But instead of being able to manually enter the number I want to sell, or using a slider system like fallout, it instead forces me to hold down my mouse button forever as I watch the numbers tick down to the number I want to sell.  When you are trying to sell, say, half of your 800 pieces, it takes FOREVER.  Garbage.