Mass Effect BioWare Montreal's Mass Effect: Andromeda - where element zero meets trisomy 21

[Rev]

The end result was lame enough that I never bothered to try ME3.

Lucky guy.

 

[aweigh]

 

[Fedora Master]

You can judge the success of a Bioware game by how much Rule34 it gets. Unsurprisingly, Andromeda and Inquisition get very little.
These games are so bad even autistic perverted nerds don't want to bother with them.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

ME 1 was superb in term of narrative and world building

But overall enjoyable factor? ME 2 wins. By far margin. Gameplay wise ME 1 is a clunky shooter with rather simplistic RPG system. Mako exploration was a disaster, shooting was bad, encounter design is pretty bland.

ME 2 is pop a mole shooter ala Gears of War, which even though rather simplistic is at least enjoyable to the mess that was ME 1. The only thing whoch ME 1 did better was using the heat system instead of bullets.

 

[Zibniyat]

ME1's overall story (and plot), world building, "lore" and many other parts of its "mythology" are a boring derivation of Star Wars KOTOR's (and KOTORII's) one. The similarities were so big, back when I first played it, that it really bothered me how little ingenuity and (attempted) originality were involved.

Starting from the ME's equivalent to the SW's Force - the "mass effect". In practice very similar (you've got similar "effects" to some of the "force powers"), though in principle much less interesting (the Force has a mysterious and religious streak to it, whilst "mass effect" is just a shallow imitation of it in practice).

 

[Atlantico]

Gameplay wise ME 1 is a clunky shooter with rather simplistic RPG system. Mako exploration was a disaster, shooting was bad, encounter design is pretty bland.

Same can be said of Ultima V, but that's still an awesome RPG. You're not actually criticizing, all of those things may or may not be true, and yet that doesn't affect anything on whether it was a good game or not.

ME2 had serviceable shooter mechanics, simplistic RPG system, bland encounter design and no Mako exploration and was effectively one large corridor. That also doesn't *say* anything about why ME2 sucked donkey balls.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Sure and you might as well mention Oblivion too, but none of those games were as big as Call of Duty. That's what the suits were fixated on at the time (it was also attractive because you could theoretically release a game like that every year)

Modern Warfare wasn't a thing until 2007, the year Mass Effect came out. Nobody gave a shit about being Call of Duty before that game. World at War wasn't getting Halo 2 numbers, series was probably as big as Brothers in Arms until Modern Warfare.

Actually, I don't think Call of Duty really exploded until Modern Warfare 2, but that was a couple months before Mass Effect 2 came out. Pretty sure it was Modern Warfare 2 that got producers bringing up how they wanted that CoD money in interview. I'd say CoD had nothing at all to do with the direction Mass Effect went, their template was quite clearly Gears of War from day one. And even disounting the first Mass Effect, it was quite clear the year it came out that customization was going to become a big thing in action game. Thing is, as opposed to building on it, they just kind of half-assed it and added a customization system for your armor that's basically the Halo 2 system with some stats...which is kind of funny because in the meantime Halo Reach had come out the year before.

BioWare couldn't theoretically do that every year. Activision has rotating studios on that title, and I don't really get the impression BioWare is interested in looking outside themselves for their game. Hell, if they were we'd probably have "BioWare" games that looked and played better. Would have been interesting if EA had the Visceral guys (was surprised how BioWare never stole Dead Space's diegesis interface for health, biotics, and the inventory for Mass Effect 2 and onwards) who went on to form Sledgehammer Games, or Pandemic Studios (oh how I wished Mass Effect played like Full Spectrum Warrior) handling the heavy lifting side of development while BioWare focused on the RPG elements and story of the games.

 

[Infinitron]

BioWare couldn't theoretically do that every year.

Nope, but they sure tried their hardest! Notice how many BioWare RPGs came out in that 2007-2012 period versus how things have slowed down since then.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

ME1's story had potential, ME2 and onward it was all popamole shit non-story. That's mainly why I remember the first more fondly. Telepathic Ancient Ones in an eternal war that no one understands. Cool.

ME1 still felt like an attempt at taking a shot at 70s/80s Sci-Fi themes, with its quaint utopia shielded from the unknown horror out there in vast space. Even the soundtrack was pure 80s synthetic goodness.

Then with ME2 and onwards, we got a military-themed shooter with lame SJW chars and anti-white propaganda (Cerberus). A game already tainted with EAs fingerprint.

And it just gets worse and worse.

 

[Infinitron]

Then with ME2 and onwards, we got a military-themed shooter with lame SJW chars and anti-white propaganda (Cerberus).

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

me1 was a promise which has never been kept. the game by itself sucked but we've had nothing like that before. me2 took away all the crap (meaning "almost all the game") and left a sleek, essential shooter with some funny cutscenes (i had a good laugh with the verbose krogan and the renegade trigger, if you know what i mean), one or two outstanding characters and better, much better planets, mostly because there was no mako anymore.
all i would have wanted from me3 was more stuff like krogan planet, or even better the one with tali whose gimmick is just "don't stand in sunlight". it's beyond human comprehension how that bunch of retards couldn't deliver even so little.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

BioWare couldn't theoretically do that every year.

Nope, but they sure tried their hardest! Notice how many BioWare RPGs came out in that 2007-2012 period versus how things have slowed down since then.

How big are those Old Republic things they do? I see they've done six of those post 2012. So it seems a lot of their focus shifted to that. Sounds like Frostbite 3 slowed them down too. And then there's the canned Command & Conquer and Shadow Realms games. That said, EA has been giving them a whole lot of leeway; funny it took Andromeda five years of development to basically gets right back to a bog standard Mass Effect that does nothing to play into the whole idea behind that game.

 

[Fairfax]

But then there's a lot that's odd about that series. Like how bare bones the armor system is, and how they lazily dropped it for your squad. Given how people like playing with that shit

As I've said before, the key to understanding the trajectory of the Mass Effect trilogy (and really BioWare as a whole) is that it was basically developed entirely B.S. (Before Skyrim)*.

Before Skyrim sold 20+ million copies and initiated the open world RPG craze, AAA developers didn't realize that people like "playing with that shit". They were moving away from RPG mechanics, they were all trying to jump on the Call of Duty bandwagon.

*Yes, ME3 technically came out afterwards, but by then it was too late to course correct.

Studios weren't moving away from RPG mechanics because of COD, they were dumbing them down to make them more appealing to the general public. Skyrim was a game changer, but it wasn't a massive hit out of the blue, it was the culmination of Bethesda's process of reaching a bigger audience, which started with Morrowind.

BioWare had a different trajectory. There's an interview from around that time where one of the doctors said something like "we didn't think too much about the market, we just did things we wanted", which explained projects like Jade Empire. They eventually started to do a lot more research and tried to broaden their appeal, and their games slowly optimized the things they were good at and what people liked the most about them.

The ME1->ME2 transition is the perfect example. They either cut or dumbed down everything that didn't work and/or most fans didn't care about, and focused on the combat, characters, romances and simple mechanics. That approach made their games much more popular and successful, but they made one big mistake in the process: they underestimated how much people like open world exploration with RPG elements. This is what prevented them from reaching Skyrim levels of success before Bethesda did.

They realized their mistake afterwards (probably due to market research rather than introspection) so they added a ton of it in DA:I and ME:A, but they didn't have the expertise to get it right, and alienated a lot of people in the process. ME:A pretty much killed the series for the time being, and TW3 made DA:I look really bad even to casual fans, so selling as much as the biggest RPGs will be much harder for them from now on. This might explain why they're chasing the Destiny audience with Anthem instead.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

ME1's story had potential, ME2 and onward it was all popamole shit non-story. That's mainly why I remember the first more fondly. Telepathic Ancient Ones in an eternal war that no one understands. Cool.

ME1 still felt like an attempt at taking a shot at 70s/80s Sci-Fi themes, with its quaint utopia shielded from the unknown horror out there in vast space. Even the soundtrack was pure 80s synthetic goodness.

Then with ME2 and onwards, we got a military-themed shooter with lame SJW chars and anti-white propaganda (Cerberus). A game already tainted with EAs fingerprint.

And it just gets worse and worse.

Hey dude. Which characters in ME 2 and onwards were SJW?

 

[Storyfag]

How big are those Old Republic things they do? I see they've done six of those post 2012.

What? The MMO expansion packs? Why would you ever think these could be big?

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

me1 was a promise which has never been kept. the game by itself sucked but we've had nothing like that before. me2 took away all the crap (meaning "almost all the game") and left a sleek, essential shooter with some funny cutscenes (i had a good laugh with the verbose krogan and the renegade trigger, if you know what i mean), one or two outstanding characters and better, much better planets, mostly because there was no mako anymore.
all i would have wanted from me3 was more stuff like krogan planet, or even better the one with tali whose gimmick is just "don't stand in sunlight". it's beyond human comprehension how that bunch of retards couldn't deliver even so little.

Mass Effect was an idea that even the first Mass Effect didn't fulfill. Even by the time it made it to the shelf it'd dropped two of the reasons the series was even called Mass Effect to begin with. Gone was the whole reason they went with the dialogue wheel in the first place, and gone was having to make choices about what missions you went on. The one core idea about how your actions would have an effect on things was the idea of throughlines between games, but then that's something you needed to wait until the next game to see if it was actually a thing...which it turned out not to be in ME2.

In actuality Mass Effect 1 was a pretty bad third person shooter. It had pretty terrible corridor style level layouts, the opening area of that game was a pretty rude awakening from what I thought the game was going to be from following its development into what the game actually was; and bland tiny open areas. Can't really say there was anything new about what was actually in the game. There was potential for all the different elements at play, there's vastly more interesting ways they could have taken it even within the realm of being a third person shooter.

In hindsight I'm kind of surprised neither Mass Effect or Mass Effect 2 were just a sandbox style game like a GTA. Sandbox kind of seems like what they wanted to do, but like many things in ME never committed to. Would imagine if they used Pandemic Studios' Zero engine they could actually have had some good driving, and stuff like the sandworms seems like an idea made for a sandbox.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

How big are those Old Republic things they do? I see they've done six of those post 2012.

What? The MMO expansion packs? Why would you ever think these could be big?

I don't play MMOs.

 

[Space Satan]

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

Wuh?
I personally was not really that interested in gaming this year, but if MEA is considered one of the highlights of it than this was really a poor year for the games industry. Isn't there some mobile game or online game that had more meaningful content?

 

[fantadomat]

At least they did go for top 50,after all there is hardly 10 good games this year.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

It's kind of funny reading what they've got to say about what they're calling the 26th Best Game of 2017. Two of them call it boring, that Oli Welsh person can't even pretend to muster up anything good to say about it, and the person that's clearly a huge Mass Effect mark seems more interesting in what a sequel could have been rather than what ME:A actually is.

26. Mass Effect: Andromeda
BioWare Montreal

Tom Phillips: It's been months now, and I'm still not okay about Mass Effect Andromeda. On launch - chucked out days before the end of EA's financial year - Andromeda arrived as a fine but far from fantastic Mass Effect game. It was unpolished, in need of another few patches to iron out its most GIF-worthy bugs, and it required another writing pass to really draw out its soul. It didn't get that, and while it would likely never have reached the heights of the series' past - a Mass Effect 2, a game of the generation - it could still have really been something. Andromeda had huge shoes to fill, yes, but it could have been enough - enough that BioWare's plans for the future of the Mass Effect franchise weren't instead snuffed out. Andromeda had so much promise, and so many moments worthy of seeing, I'm heartbroken we won't get a sturdier, more refined sequel which expands upon these, that we will never see more of ancient Drack, motherly Vetra, sly Kallo, discover the Benefactor, meet the Jaardan, or save the quarians. Even as an average Mass Effect game, Andromeda is still well worth the journey. And I'm still not okay.

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell: Andromeda could have been a brave new start for Mass Effect - a galaxy in which the original trilogy's once-mighty races are needy vagrants, a protagonist unburdened by decisions in previous games, a core mechanic that sees you terraforming planets and so, altering their threats and ambience rather than just running a hoover over all their secondary objectives. Instead we got a vague retread of Mass Effect 1's plot with uneven writing, lots of boring legwork, some questionable Big Choices and a king's ransom in bugs. It's a shame, because the combat is snappy, florid and fairly substantial and the environments are truly glorious, on par with Destiny's in their scale and artistry. If you're in a forgiving mood and have time to burn, there are worse ways to see out the Christmas period.

Wesley Yin-Poole: Andromeda isn't a bad game, as the internet circa launch had you believe. It's just not very good, and for Mass Effect fans, that's perhaps the biggest video game disappointment of the year. The bad faces were not in fact Andromeda's biggest problem, although they were the funniest. The game's biggest problem was how boring it all was. The characters weren't particularly interesting, the planets were uninspired and the quests were instantly forgettable. For a series that made its name on all three of those things, Andromeda was the letdown of 2017.

And yet, here it is, on this list of top games of 2017. Why's that? Well, the combat is fun. The new spaceship is pretty cool. And, well, Jaal is kind of awesome, isn't he? There's flashes of Mass Effect magic buried within Andromeda's banality. You just have to work really, really hard to find it.

Oli Welsh: One of these days, we're going to have to talk about what the city of Montreal and the development culture there - created by Ubisoft and turned into a factory/strip-mine kind of operation by every other big publisher - is doing to gaming. Because it's not good. In the last couple of years it's killed off Deus Ex and Mass Effect. I'm seriously worried Tomb Raider or something will be next. Will no-one think of the franchises?
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[cvv]

MEA is a Top 2017 game in the same way Hitler was Time Magazine's Man of the Year.

 

[fantadomat]

MEA is a Top 2017 game in the same way Hitler was Time Magazine's Man of the Year.

What the fuck mate,how can you compare that glorious stash with a bulldog's face creatures?

 

[Mark Richard]

At least they did go for top 50,after all there is hardly 10 good games this year.

An individual could probably come up with 50 genuinely good games this year, but a list by committee is dependant on several staff members playing the same games since they can't very well cede top spots on the word of one person's experience. As always such lists generally say more about exposure than quality.

 

[Luckmann]

MEA is a Top 2017 game in the same way Hitler was Time Magazine's Man of the Year.

That's deeply, deeply unfair. Hitler did a great many good things, whether you believe in the holohoax and is a brainwashed McDrone waiting to be vaccinated against racism or not.

Hitler instituted programs against the cancerous hazards of smoking and fought the banks.
All Ass Erect: Androgyna ever did was give people cancer and feed the bankers.