-
Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.
"This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.
Mass Effect Mass Effect Series Retrospective by Shamus Young
- Thread starter Infinitron
- Start date
Sykar
Arcane
Deleted member 7219
Guest
This Shamus Young retrospective just feels too redundant. It is like reading someone write about how they stepped in dog shit and then they do their best to persuade you how disgusting it was. I already know, you don’t need to tell me, and the fact you’re going to great lengths to tell me annoys me.
Drax
Arcane
How annoying, a text I don't have to read.
BUT IT EXISTS!
BUT IT EXISTS!
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 97,475
Are they though? I'm not sure people really talked all that much about the game's problems beyond "lol animations" and maybe "recycled story/boring aliens".
What I like about these analyses is that they show that the designers weren't just "otherwise talented devs who just got unlucky and fucked this one thing up which ruined everything". They demonstrate that the mediocrity is present throughout and that a screwup was inevitable.
Deleted member 7219
Guest
How annoying, a text I don't have to read.
BUT IT EXISTS!
I read every retrospective that guy writes. Can’t help it.
Drax
Arcane
You got Shamusholm syndrome
- Joined
- Oct 1, 2008
- Messages
- 2,683
How annoying, a text I don't have to read.
BUT IT EXISTS!
I read every retrospective that guy writes. Can’t help it.
He should do one on the Trails of Cold Steel series (given your username/avatar).
I'm playing the second one and the plot is driving me insane.Well, obviously 99% of the response was lolwhut, because the vast majority of the modern world appears incapable of communicating beyond memes and twitter. But I have seen a fair number of complaints about the game's plot, if not perhaps to the same level of detail Shamus is going into in this retrospective.
(As someone who didn't play the game, I've been reading the retrospective and enjoying it. I just haven't found any criticisms yet that weren't at least shallowly touched on by other people.)
Last edited:
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 97,475
It's tired face time!
Andromeda Part 7: A Little Less Conversation
A lot of the dialog in this game is bad. Not just regular bad, but embarrassing and infantile. Yes, you can find some good bits here and there, but the low points here are shockingly low. Silver lining: Nobody here is as annoying as Kai Leng. (Assuming such a thing is even possible.)
Probably the most infamous conversation in the game is the one where we meet the Director of Colonial Affairs, Foster Addison. This conversation has it all. Cringy dialog. Mismatched vocal performances. Terrible animations. Uncanny facial expressions. Obvious false-choice dialog. Frustrating dialog options that won’t allow for obvious responses. Overly verbose dialog. Exposition that’s both over-long and yet somehow vague. This conversation probably isn’t the worst example of any of those problems, but it is this unique moment where all of these problems intersect and manifest at the same point.
I get the impression this is where a lot of the audience checked out. At this point in the game, maybe the player is feeling a little restless and wondering why they aren’t having a lot of fun or connecting with the characters.
Is there something wrong with this game, or am I just sad because I miss Garrus and Tali? Maybe I need to give this game some time. Maybe things will improve once we get the introduction and exposition out of the way.
And then we meet Foster Addison…
Oh wow. It’s not just me. This game is actual garbage.
This section is so bad that people are compelled to devise theories about how it could possibly be so terrible.
Let’s Talk to Foster Addison
Looks like you got me figured out Addison. I killed my dad just to annoy you.
As an example of the cringe-inducing conversations this game has to offer, here is our first meeting with Addison, Director of Colonial Affairs aboard the Nexus:
Foster Addison: (Angry and confrontational.) All right, what happened?
Ryder: To who?
Addison: (Still angry.) To “whom”. And your goddamn father!
So this person opens the conversation by correcting your grammar and being angry at you because your father is dead. I didn’t actually care about Alec Ryder and his dumb plans, but I imagine his daughter probably loved him. This dialog comes on so strong I thought the writer was setting up a cartoon villain. I was waiting for some kind of renegade interrupt to punch this lady out. But no. This isn’t a villain. It’s just a person who’s really inexplicably rude. Which, fine. That could be good for manufacturing cheap drama, but the dialog wheel won’t let you push back.
Addison: (Softens slightly, still irritated.) Sorry. My face is tired from dealing with… everything. And right now, I just want to know what happened with Alec.
Ryder: (The game won’t let you answer the question. You get two options and they both lead to the same result.) I don’t want to get into it. Things went wrong – and now I’m the one you have to deal with.
Addison: (Angry again.) Alec Ryder wouldn’t accept that kind of ultimatum. Damned if I will. We’d never have left home if we…
Ultimatium (noun) : A final demand or statement of terms, the rejection of which will result in retaliation or a breakdown in relations.
Dear writer: That’s not what “ultimatum” means. An ultimatum is an offer given with a threat that it must be accepted. Ryder simply redirected a question.
This wouldn’t be a big deal except you just did the who / whom thing. For some reason. If this character is supposed to be fussy, exacting, and pedantic, then they should stick to that. If you’re trying to show that they’re incompetent and hypocritical, then you need to let the player call them on it.
Also, she claims she won’t accept this “ultimatum”, which would imply she expects you to answer the question. Except, she just keeps rambling and changes the subject. It feels like this this linear dialog was written at a stream of consciousness and then never proofed, edited, or reviewed before being handed off to the voice actor.
Also… “My face is tired?” Is English not your first language? What?
None of these mistakes ruin the scene on their own, but every line is just a bit off-kilter or distracting in some way. The cumulative effect is one of either boredom or annoyance. This is the dialog equivalent of having the camera slightly out of focus and off-center for half a scene. Sure, you can still follow the action. But why didn’t anyone catch this?
Addison: (Sighs.) Not “home”. The Milky Way. This is home. This… mess. We don’t have a lot of options, Ryder. Maybe you’ll prove your father right. After fourteen months of failed colonization, you’ll forgive me if I don’t hold my breath.
The reasonable response to this is to point out that those fourteen months of failure are all on Addison, not Alec. Alec was in Cryo sleep and Addison was running shit. She’s basically condemning Alec for failing to predict how incompetent she’d be. Which, fine. Flawed characters can be interesting. But as the player you just stand there and take her nonsensical venting and you can’t respond.
Ryder: (Ask about Addison’s relationship with her father.) You called my father Alec. No one does that.
Addison: A lot of us joined the Initiative because of his vision. What he shared of it, anyway.
Ryder: (Spontaneous non-player response.) Were you friends, or…?
Addison: (Still angry and confrontational.) I’m not your new mother, if that’s what you’re asking. Or his friend.
Addison: He hated that I didn’t use his title. But no one’s a Pathfinder until they’ve pathfound something. Much like a Colonial Director without colonies.
So this woman just bluntly states that she’s deliberately disrespecting your father, who just died to save your life. She admits she’s disrespected him for as long as she’s known him and that he didn’t like it. Fine, this woman is a rampaging asshole. Why aren’t we allowed to do something about it?
Also, Addison’s position is wrong. And hypocritical. If I’m hired as an accountant then I’m an accountant, even before I show up for work on day one. That’s how job titles work.
This wouldn’t be so irritating except she was introduced as “Director of Colonial Affairs” and she didn’t feel the need to argue with that. But as she points out, there aren’t any colonies. Going by her own logic, we should be calling her “Foster”. Or “Dipshit”.
I should go.
She’s disrespecting a dead colleague to his bereaved family, with nonsense hypocritical reasoning, in an angry voice. And the dialog wheel won’t let you DO anything. This dialog isn’t just wrong, it’s actively frustrating. Ryder doesn’t even drop her slightly creepy perma-smile during the exchange.
Why would the writer do this? Why is the writer forcing you to be berated by this petty dingbat for irrational reasons and not allowing you to push back? That’s where the drama comes from! Two people! Debating! Through dialog!
Ryder: (Asking about the hostiles.) There must be some kind of plan for encountering hostile aliens. We can’t have been that naive.
Dipshit: We expected life, not an enemy that refuses to talk. They don’t attack – they disinfect. We’re nothing until we’re bacteria. (Beat.) Sorry. Fourteen months and you stoop to poetry. That’s how bad it is.
Dipshit: Talk to Kandros if you haven’t. He’s unfortunately become the head of our “military”. And as soon as he realizes it, we’re in the shit.
Ryder: (Spontaneous non-player response.) You don’t trust him?
Dipshit: I trust him to defend us. I do NOT trust a rising military influence in our supposedly civilian Initiative. We came to make history, Ryder. Not repeat it. (Beat.) Ugh. Goddamn poetry.
This is just ghastly. Addison talks about “poetry”, but nothing she says is remotely “poetic”. The bacteria thing is just a really clumsy analogy, but the writer thought they were being “poetic”.
(And she never even answered Ryder’s question. Instead she changed the subject to complain about something that’s completely unsupported by what we’re shown. Kandros doesn’t seem to have any desire to seize power and he’s one of only two people in the Nexus leadership who isn’t a complete incompetent.)
I’m not going to transcribe the rest of this dross, but you get the idea. At the end of the conversation Addison makes sure to point out how much she doesn’t trust Ryder.
Hang on, you have logs that told you what happened to Alec?!? At the start of the conversation you acted like you had no idea what happened to him! When we came aboard you didn't even know he was dead!
How I’d have done it:
It’s not like these two don’t have things to fight about! Rather than ranting about bacteria and poetry, or disrespecting the recently-dead, Addison ought to be grilling Ryder about her lack of qualifications. Alec put his daughter on the Pathfinder team and passed the title to her despite her lack of training. Addison has every right to be mad that all their hopes are riding on the actions of this unqualified whelp. But instead she complains about a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with Ryder.
On the flipside, there’s plenty of stuff Ryder can say here. Addison is complaining about Alec’s plan, but Addison has spent the last fourteen months exploring new frontiers in failure. Since waking up her team has founded a failed colony, gotten a bunch of people killed, enlisted the help of the Krogan as muscle to keep order, created a brutal police state which led to armed rebellion, saw thousands of personnel abandon the Initiative, betrayed the Krogan which led to them abandoning the Initiative, and then sat on her giant spaceship doing nothing while the lights went out and the food ran low. The only reason the two of you aren’t sitting in the dark right now is because you’re sharing your electricity with her.
This would make for a great argument. One person is unqualified and unproven, and the other is an established failure. Sara is grieving and Addison has been living without hope, so both have a lot of reasons to be emotional. You could decide if you want to lash out and make it clear you won’t be pushed around, or you could play nice and build bridges. Instead we get lots of dialog that doesn’t flow naturally, doesn’t make sense, offers almost nothing new in the way of exposition, and which doesn’t allow for reasonable player responses.
This mess of a conversation is a mandatory exchange in the early stages of the game, where you’d expect to have lots of polish. Baffling.
The Vague Rebellion
Cora, why are you behind Tann's desk? That's a really strange thing to do in the context of a meeting.
Not being allowed to push back against Addison is frustrating, but that conversation is even more inexplicable when you compare it to the very next one. We meet with Director Tann, who is now the leader of the entire Initiative. Tann is a bit of a cagey politician. After a few interactions with him you get the sense that he wants to take credit for successful things and distance himself from failures. He likes to give you “permission” to do things you’re already doing, to pretend like he has authority over you.
He’s maybe a bit of a weasel, but harmless in the long run. He certainly never disrespects your family or pointlessly impedes your efforts the way Addison does[1]. I actually kind of liked him, the way I liked Udina back in Mass Effect 1. He’s an interesting foil for the player and I wish their sparring went a bit deeper or led to some payoff.
Some people will dislike Tann because recently a bunch of colonists rebelled and left. They’re now called the Exiles. I imagine a lot of players just assume Tann was a brutal dictator and he’s just putting on a nice face for us. That’s certainly possible, although the bigger problem is that the writer never stops to explain how the shooting started or who was at fault.
Newsflash: Murder isn't exclusive to the Milky Way.
Later in the game we’ll meet some of the Initiative exiles, and the vast majority of them have – in the space of just a few months – reverted to Mad Max levels of lawless savagery. They will attack their follow humans without provocation and can’t be reasoned with. Maybe the story is telling us that the seemingly-harmless Director Tann is actually guilty of some pretty gruesome human rights violations, or maybe the exiles were all bad eggs. The story makes it sound like they rioted not because of anything that Tann did, but because everyone was in a dire situation and Tann couldn’t fix it. In other places it feels like the colonists were big babies who were angry that risky voyages across dark space turned out to be a mild imposition for them[2]. The writer is all over the place here and we can’t figure out to what degree Tann is a tyrant or the colonists are entitled dingbats.
It actually reminds me of the frustrating gaslighting Mass Effect 2/3 did with Cerberus where one person would tell us they’re practical Human-first idealists and another would show us they’re cartoon space Nazis, and you couldn’t explore this through dialog. You couldn’t tell the Cerberus supporters about Cerberus war crimes and the Cerberus supporters would never tell you about the supposed Cerberus good deeds.
What were the issues that drove the rebellions? Who shot first? When did it happen? How did it escalate? How many died?
But Shamus! Isn’t it good when a fictional world offers multiple viewpoints?
Yes it is. And if different sides had different accounts on who shot first then we might have something to work with. This whole thing is so vague that we can’t really think about it.
What is this blue dust cloud outside the window? We weren't having any space-weather when we arrived at the Nexus. Oh well. At least it looks cool.
At a couple of points in the game you’re offered the option of offering amnesty to Exiles, except you can’t ask reasonable questions about their crimes. If this guy stole food and ran away, then sure. Now that we’re stable let’s welcome him back to the fold. On the other hand if he was murdering unarmed civilians during the rebellion then I’d just as soon he remained an exile. Maybe he’s a reasonable guy pushed to desperation by extreme circumstances, or maybe he’s a violent psychopath who was just looking for an excuse to start killing people. Heck, if the story would just acknowledge this it would be fine. SAM could tell you that we know this guy is an exile, but we have no way of knowing what he did. The problem isn’t that you’re not allowed to know everything, the problem is that you’re never allowed to ask.
Which means that instead of Ryder being asked to answer the Hard Questions, it seems like she’s just another dumbass that doesn’t know how to assess risk.
Director Tann
You've decided to allow me to pursue the only course of action available to us? You're a cunning one, Tann.
In either case, the player doesn’t know about any of this when we get to the Nexus. And yet the dialog wheel enables you to push back against Tann as soon as you meet him. You can accuse him of being an opportunist and point out his slimy behavior, even before he’s done anything even mildly objectionable. Can Ryder see into the future? Why is the player allowed to spar with the harmless Director Tann before he’s even a problem, but they’re never allowed to give the slightest resistance to Addison the hateful obstructionist jackass? These two conversations happen back-to-back, which makes the discrepancy even more jarring.
I haven’t begun to scratch the surface of the dialog problems in this game. We’ll talk more about this stuff as this series goes on.
Drax
Arcane
Yeah, pretty much.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 97,475
Andromeda Part 8: The Nexus
While talking with Director Tann, he gives you a task: Go out and fix the golden worlds to make them habitable. I guess he’s read the script and knows that you’ll discover that the alien structures are climate-control devices that will make this possible. The more reasonable thing a person would do in this situation is suggest looking for some new worlds. He ought to ask you to go out into uncharted space and see if you can find anything livable.
You can call him out on this by pointing out that making planets habitable is impossible, and he responds by saying a “true” Pathfinder would enjoy the challenge. Given what he knows[1], this is not a rational point of view for him to adopt.
Worse, this takes away Ryder’s agency within the story. She’s the main character and yet she’s just following orders from other characters. (Who are, incidentally, all proven failures.) We just went through that ridiculous train-wreck of a scene on Habitat 7 to put Sara in charge, and now the writer is going to keep having other characters make decisions for her.
Mass Effect 1 knew that the protagonist should drive the story, and so the writer worked hard to make it seem like Shepard was the person making decisions. In the Classic BioWare games, the dialog was framed such that your character was the one making decisions and driving the action, even if they theoretically reported to some distant leadership. In KOTOR you were working for the Jedi Council. In Mass Effect you worked for the Galactic Council. In Jade Empire you served your martial arts master, until spoiler happened and you ended up working for a god. The player character was always part of a larger whole, because peasants and working-class types are more relatable for the audience. At the same time, the dialog made it clear that the player character was making the big decisions. We need our main character to be an agent of change, because making decisions is how you reveal their values and personality and how you signal their growth. If the protagonist has no agency, then they might not even feel like the protagonist. They’re just a walking gun.
Everything is fine.
In more recent BioWare games, the story has inverted all of this. The writer has adopted a parent / child relationship with the player character. The protagonist gets bossed around and you’re obliged to do what NPCs tell you to do, and the writer doesn’t even make much of an effort to get buy-in from the player. You can’t ask probing questions and the dialog doesn’t waste time justifying things to the player. At the same time the game patronizingly pretends like the player character is in charge. You’re the Inquisitor. You’re the Pathfinder. You’re the famous Messianic Commander Shepard. You’re so great. People look up to you. People love you. You’re special. You’re important. Now go do these missions and don’t ask any questions.
Like I said so many times during Mass Effect 3: This is backwards.
How I’d have done it:
Rather than have Tann assign Ryder an impossible task that later becomes possible due to space-magic, why not fix this by giving Ryder more agency within the story?
Tann would task Ryder with locating new golden worlds. Ryder could then say that charting beyond the Heleus cluster could take months or years, and that the Initiative doesn’t have that kind of time. She thinks the existing golden worlds can be fixed using the technology she saw on Habitat 7[2].
Tann would find the notion absurd. Ryder would want to follow through on her father’s discovery. The two of them disagree. The main character strikes out on their own. This will raise the stakes and also make them more personal, because now if she fails it’s all on her. Everyone is counting on her and she’s betting everything on her father’s hunch. This is how you create drama.
In the end, Sara’s efforts bring about a positive change. Tann resists Ryder until she proves her course of action correct. This causes him to change his opinion. He realizes his conservative ass-covering style of leadership has been holding the Initiative back, and that they need a daring trailblazer like Ryder. Addison realizes Ryder is delivering on the promises her father made, and stops being an obstacle to her.
If we do things this way, then our protagonist gets to be the one in the driver’s seat, the player gets to feel like they’re responsible for the fate of the Initiative and not just dumb muscle following someone else’s orders, we get some good short-term drama, nobody needs to behave like they’ve read the script, and everyone gets a little character arc.
Before we go running off to terraform alien planets with space magic, let’s take a look around…
The Nexus
On the lower right is the Human ark with 20,000 sleepers on board. Contrast with the Nexus, which is designed to be their administration building / staging area.
Obviously this place is designed to replicate the function of the Citadel in the original trilogy. Except, we don’t actually need this place and its very existence strains credulity.
The Nexus is 15Km long and the central wheel has a circumference of over 16Km. That’s gargantuan. This place could hold millions.
Take a look at the inside of the central ring:
There's enough open space that we could just be hunter-gatherers on our own spaceship.
Given the stated size, that expanse of greenery and buildings goes on for 16.6Km. It’s got things growing on it. What are those buildings? Who lives there? According to the codex, the Nexus is a home for the leadership and a processing point for people disembarking the arks to colonize worlds. It’s basically a giant airport terminal / embassy / immigration building. There’s no reason for it to be this enormous.
When you finally get out there and start creating outposts, you’ll create these little four-acre villages of prefab buildings and a few dozen people. The first one is on a patch of dead ground on a desert world. The second is on a planet that – aside from the hulking predatory monsters that attack you on sight – is indistinguishable from Antarctica. The third is on a furnace planet with no visible water that’s tidally locked and therefore is always daytime. Everyone acts like these tiny outposts are a huge step for the Initiative. Meanwhile I just want to point out the window and ask Director Tann, “WHY DON’T WE COLONIZE THE SIXTEEN KILOMETERS OF FARMLAND WE BROUGHT WITH US?”
The only thing more absurd than the idea that people built a spaceworthy ship to rival the Citadel in just 9 years is the idea that it serves no apparent purpose and nobody uses it for anything.
Clearly you’re not supposed to think about this as much as I have. The designer obviously wasn’t thinking about this in terms of science or immersion. They were just trying to clumsily reverse-engineer the setting of Mass Effect and they started by copying details without understanding what purpose those details served. The writer felt that a Mass Effect game needed a massive Citadel-style station, so they put one in the game. It’s silly, but I guess this is another detail we can hand-wave as part of establishing this new setting.
How I’d have done it:
Just make the Nexus smaller. This isn’t the seat of government for a galaxy of trillions, it’s an administration building for a society that – even if you woke all the ark sleepers at the same time and had them disembark here – would still be less than half the population of Pittsburgh. The Nexus doesn’t need to be the size of a major metropolitan area. Having that huge panorama of greenery just undercuts the need for the work the player character is doing, so get rid of it.
Getting a Ship
I have no idea why Andromeda cutscenes have black bars on the SIDES of the view. Usually cinematics try to make the view wider with bars at the top and bottom. Are we trying to imitate analog television?
Once you’re done talking to all the losers on the Nexus, you’re granted a ship so you can begin your adventure. Well, first Addison tries to stop you from leaving with red tape, even though everyone is doomed unless you can find someplace to live and you can’t begin doing that until you leave. And again, you can’t storm into her office and ask why she would put petty bureaucracy above basic survival, particularly in light of the one-way conversation the two of you just had. Instead, Vetra (a female Turian) steps in and smooths things out by bribing a port official. In the process, she joins the crew. (I’ll talk more about our crew a little later in the series.)
The designers felt the need to include the Krogan, even though that didn’t make a lot of sense. They felt the need to include a surrogate Citadel, even though that doesn’t make a ton of sense. So it’s not much of a surprise that the ship they give the player looks and feels a lot like the Normandy.
I like the Tempest. It’s easily the most convenient player ship in the series. This is the fourth game, and we’re still flying around in a ship with loading screens disguised as transport. But this is the least obtrusive the loading has ever been. The only impediment to getting around is the short ladder between the upper and lower deck. I’ll take that over the slow-ass Normandy 1 elevator any day.
I'm glad the initiative was able to give the Tempest its own Apple Store. I'm sure that will come in handy.
Part of the trick here is that if a companion has a cutscene / conversation pending, they wait for you in one of the side-rooms with the door closed. This means the door itself can act as a loading screen for all the conversation data. If everyone was standing in the open, then the game would need to have the data for everyone ready, just in case you talked to them. In ME1 the game needed to load up all the Kaiden conversation data when you visited the second deck, even if you weren’t planning on talking to Kaiden. But here on the Tempest, you usually don’t need to wait for Vetra’s data to load unless you deliberately go into the room where Vetra hangs out.
The companion conversations are a little more sophisticated this time around. In the previous games, Garrus and Shepard would stand facing one another and we’d have the conversation in simple shot / reverse shot style. But here on the Tempest our conversations feel more like cutscenes. Vetra will be using her computer or tinkering with some gear. Cora will be taking care of her plants. Jaal will be emoting for the people in the cheap seats. (There are also simpler conversations in the style of the earlier games. This usually happens with characters hanging out in the common area rather than hiding behind loading doors.)
While this step up in quality is nice, I’m not convinced it serves the series. I imagine these cutscenes are significantly more expensive to produce, since they involve custom animations and hand-crafted (rather than procedural) camera framing. And yet I never saw anyone list this feature as a point in the game’s favor. I don’t think most people noticed.
The Tempest
Yup. Seeya!
I still miss the spatial continuity of the Normandy-1. In the original game, you could look out the window and see where you’d landed. Then you could exit the bridge, walk through the airlock, and find yourself standing in the area you were looking at through the windows. It was completely seamless. Here in the later games that sense of continuity is gone. When you arrive somewhere, you watch an unskippable cutscene of the ship entering the atmosphere, and when the cutscene ends you’ll find yourself outside the ship. When you return to the ship, you’ll get a cutscene of the takeoff, and then you’ll find yourself on the bridge. It’s literally impossible to land without disembarking or to embark without taking off.
Which means your first visit to the Tempest is a unique one. It’s the only time in the entire game where you can run around the ship while you’re docked. After this point, you’ll never again be able to be aboard the ship while the ship is on the ground. Which is a shame, since it’s cool to look out the windows and see where you are.
Speaking of windows… they’re strange. The outside of the ship is totally windowless, and yet inside you’ve got these huge panoramic views. When you’re at the navigation controls on the bridge, you’re completely enveloped in windows. You’ve got a similar setup in your quarters. The meeting room at the back of the ship is this spacious multi-level thing with skylights that looks like an upscale shopping mall. (It really is gorgeous.)
Wow. Look at all of this lush greenery we can see through the windows we don't have. Anyway, let's go colonize some lifeless rocks!
I guess we’re supposed to assume these “windows” are actually display screens[3]. There’s a shimmering hex pattern on the surface that supports this notion. On the other hand, these things don’t work like display screens. The stuff outside has parallax[4] as you move around, which is more like the Looking Glass technology in Prey 2017. In the Mass Effect trilogy the 3D displays are shimmering monocolor holograms, and they’ve never had anything like these magic VR-windows. I guess this is another detail we have to hand-wave for the sake of the new setting.
That’s fine, although I still miss the spatial continuity of the original. I think I’m the only one who cared, but I enjoyed the feeling that my ship was a physical object and not a pocket dimension with loading screens.
Excellent - I'm really enjoying this series. It's like playing the game without having to play it, and with the grumpiest pedant in the family nitpicking at every turn.
- Joined
- Feb 10, 2018
- Messages
- 1,306
It's even worse?
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 97,475
Meet the companions:
Andromeda Part 9: The Squad
One of the goals BioWare had for Andromeda was to make a game about being an explorer. That’s what the whole “Pathfinder” thing is about. Strange new worlds, new life, new civilizations, boldly go, etc etc. It’s a great thematic fit for a sci-fi series like this.
But then apparently someone else on the team decided that the Pathfinder should be fourteen months late to the party. The Nexus exiled a bunch of people and now they’re scattered all over the cluster. In the course of the game, you will never be the first person to set foot on a world. For the major worlds, you’re not even the first person from the Milky Way. You’re not even the first human. Everywhere you go you’re bumping into existing human communities and structures.
You’re not the Pathfinder, you’re a tourist.
Squad
Before we take off in our shiny new spaceship, let’s look at our starting squad members. Like Mass Effect 1, you begin with a couple of humans and then add aliens to the crew as the story goes on.
As before, your crew members have special “loyalty missions”, which are quests dedicated to their character. In Mass Effect 2, you had to do someone’s loyalty mission to enable them to survive taking part in the suicide mission. It felt a little arbitrary. How does settling Garrus’ grudge enable him to survive a rocket to the face?
Here in Andromeda, you can’t unlock the top-tier abilities for a character until you make them loyal. I like this better. It makes a little more sense and it makes them more generally useful. If I make Garrus loyal in Mass Effect 2, that’s only useful in specific circumstances during the final mission. If I make Cora loyal here in Andromeda, she’s more useful every time we’re in combat together.
Cora Harper
Sorry for being rude earlier. As an EX-Navy SEAL I should be in total control of my emotions at all times.
Cora has this odd tic where she’s constantly mentioning that she used to be an Asari Commando[1]. It comes up in conversation with her on a regular basis. After the first couple of times, it starts to feel like she’s an insecure braggart. It’s like a guy that’s constantly telling everyone how he used to be a Navy SEAL. The first time might impress you, but by the third or fourth time you might start to feel like he’s sort of sad and desperate for attention.
The thing is, I think this is completely unintentional. I have this suspicion that different people wrote her various scenes. Each of them read her character description, saw she used to be an Asari Commando, and thought, “Oh, that’s interesting. I should make sure to work that in.”
Strangely, her loyalty mission is kind of part of the main quest[2], so I’ll cover her mission when we reach that point in the game.
This is the first Mass Effect game where a human is my favorite squaddie. Although maybe that’s less about how good Cora is and more about how lackluster your alien buddies are. Ignoring her odd habit of bringing up her commando position all the time, I kinda like her generally upbeat attitude. Her side-plot about growing Milky Way plants here in Andromeda forms a sort of thematic connection with the premise of the game. It’s not much, but it’s a nice sentiment.
More importantly, one of her combat abilities is a shield boost that extends to the player character. I favor a very mobile, high-risk style of play, and her shield boost reduces the time I have to spend cowering behind cover.
Liam Kosta
I appreciate the more natural movement and more ambitious cinematography in this scene. It's not just shot / reverse-shot.
Liam is unremarkable as a squaddie. He’s a nice guy. Ex-cop. His backstory pretty much writes itself. No surprises. But the thing that makes him unique is his loyalty mission, which is actually pretty divisive. Some players found it annoying or frustrating. The mission doesn’t become available until much later in the story, but let’s talk about it now.
Liam decides, all by himself, that he wants to build bridges with the local aliens. Without permission, he shares the location of the Nexus with one of the alien leaders we meet in Andromeda. She is then captured by enemy forces. The concern is that they might extract the location of the Nexus from her. The Nexus has no weaponry, so secrecy is the only thing keeping it from being boarded and plundered.
This places the entire Initiative at risk. A reasonable person might conclude that this screwup is just too big to tolerate. Like having Ashley kill Wrex, this isn’t the kind of thing the player is likely to forgive. Even after you do the mission and fix things[3], you might wish you could dump Liam back on the Nexus so someone else can babysit him. There are several other people from the Pathfinder team inexplicably cooling their heels back at the Nexus, why can’t I dump the dangerously incompetent Liam and take one of those other guys?
In fact, the two-option dialog wheel won’t let you do anything about his failures. You can barely even chastise him.
There's a fun gag where the game plays booming villain music whenever the antagonist appears on-screen, but then cuts out again when you hang up on him. Made me laugh.
The thing is, this side-mission is actually a major tonal shift from the rest of the game. In terms of tone, I’d say it’s closer to the Mass Effect 3 Citadel DLC: A comedy adventure where the stakes are supposedly high but you never get the sense that the bad guys have much of a chance. It’s a rollercoaster of jokes and banter.
The problem is that the rest of this game takes itself so deadly seriously that this tonal shift might feel kind of confusing. It’s like cutting from the dour mood of Thor: The Dark World to the wacky hijinks of the Thor: Ragnarok. Making things worse is that when Liam reveals his mistake, you haven’t yet begun the mission and therefore you’re still in the poe-faced tone of the main story. You’re therefore likely to take this threat very seriously – much more seriously than the characters take it. It’s not until you begin the mission that you realize you’re up against a joke of a villain and everything is going to be just fine.
I’m a bit torn here. In isolation, I really love this mission. It’s one of the exceptionally rare parts of the game where the jokes land. It’s also successful in a way that the main story isn’t. The main story tries to be serious and epic and comes off as lame and overblown. Liam’s mission tries to be a disposable adventure comedy romp and succeeds.
On the other hand, the tonal shift is messy and it doesn’t fit with the rest of the game. I think this tone would have been a far better direction for the entire project. If we compare the Citadel DLC to the rest of Mass Effect 3, we see that BioWare’s style (or perhaps their writing team) is much better suited to this lighthearted adventure than to the grim bombast they’ve been doing.
It's a fun gimmick to have the player navigate the ship while the artificial gravity points sideways.
Even in terms of gameplay, the mission itself is so much more engaging than the rest of the game. You attack this immense Kett warship. You’re expecting to face some bellowing Kett menace, but then you discover this ship is actually an obsolete junker. The Kett abandoned it, and the wreck was found by a small-time space pirate. He’s been trying (unsuccessfully) to refurbish it, and you get the sense it doesn’t actually work very well. Being the captain of a huge warship has given this guy delusions of grandeur, but he’s not very bright and not at all imposing.
During the mission the artificial gravity gets screwed up and you have to navigate through the level by walking on the walls. Then it shifts again and you’re on the ceiling. You end up returning to a previous room only to discover you have to navigate the familiar space with a totally different orientation. The player has likely seen a ton of Kett bases at this point, but the shifting gravity makes it feel fresh and interesting.
This action adventure doesn't really fit with the rest of the game, but it works really well in isolation.
The mission also gives some of the supporting characters something to do. Some of the colonists show up in a ship of their own and participate in the battle. The rest of the story makes it seem like Ryder is the only person in the galaxy that DOES anything, so this moment where the colonists are able to help themselves is a breath of fresh air.
Do we praise this mission for nailing its tone, or do we criticize it because it fails to integrate with the rest of the story? Do we praise it because the banter and jokes work, or criticize it for the restrictive two-option dialog wheel that obliges the player character to treat the situation as a minor screwup and not a dire threat as the rest of the story suggests it should be? Do we praise it for the interesting gameplay and for giving minor characters something to do, or do we criticize it for the fact that a lot of the action beats are undercut by the janky animation?
I don’t know. I liked it a lot in isolation, but you can’t play it in isolation. The fact remains that this mission doesn’t fit with the rest of the story.
Vetra Nyx
So Vetra, what does that eye thing DO, anyway?
Vetra joins your party just as you leave the Nexus. She’s got this thing where she’s supposedly the person you talk to when you need something on the down-low. If someone says they “know a guy” that can hook you up with something, Verta is the sort of person they’re usually talking about.
She’s fine. She’s not a classic BioWare buddy like Garrus, Mordin, Wrex, or Legion, but she’s a fine companion and has a few interesting stories to tell.
The thing that bugs me is her loyalty mission. It requires you to go to a base somewhere remote to confront some jerk for reasons that aren’t worth getting into. The problem is that as you enter the building, you hit a tripwire (in a cutscene, of course) and a trap door opens under your feet. Everyone falls in.
In this game everyone on your team has JUMP JETS. Like, rocket boots. The game firmly establishes that you can boost yourself up and even do a little climbing. The cutscene shows you grabbing onto the edge, but then your character forgets she can do pull-up and that she’s wearing rocket boots.
Use your jump jets, dumbass.
SAM is normally able to determine the operation and purpose of alien technology on the other side of ten feet of solid rock, but here he can’t detect a trap door built by humans using modular human building materials.
(And of course, there’s the question of why the bad guy is capturing you alive rather than killing you, but who cares?)
How I’d have done it:
Don’t make the player character blunder over a trapdoor in a cutscene. Do it in gameplay. Have the player walk up to the door while characters chat[4] about how they expect the Bad Guy to be on the other side. Then the player pushes the button to open the door, in gameplay. The button opens up the trap door under them instead of the door in front of them. You could even have Sara asking SAM about what they’ll find on the other side of the door, to explain why he didn’t notice the trapdoor.
I’m not saying this is totally airtight, but this saves us from the visually absurd scene of Sara clawing at the metal floor instead of effortlessly rocket-boosting free.
Barring that, don’t have Ryder grab the ledge. Just have them fall all the way. Being caught off-guard in a cutscene is annoying, but it’s not as bad as being caught off-guard AND being unable to lift herself AND forgetting her rocket boots.
We’ll pick up three more squad members as the game goes on. We’ll talk about those folks when they show up.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 97,475
On to the first planet:
Andromeda Part 10: Eos
There are a total of five (eventually) viable planets in the game, and early on the game makes it clear that your goal is to heal them all using the alien monoliths. Each planet has some sort of environmental problem: Radiation, extreme heat, extreme cold, caustic water, and out-of-control wildlife. We’re fresh out of the introduction, and already these alien gizmos have lost all sense of mystery. We know what they do and we’re confident we can use them. They’re reduced to obvious mechanical contrivances.
Fine, we’re not doing a sci-fi mystery anymore. Instead we’re doing simple action adventure. We can argue about whether or not that’s a good idea for a Mass Effect game, but it’s not an inherently bad idea for a story. But even if we’re going to use Andromeda’s galaxy-sized canvas to tell a simple story, there’s no reason to portray it in such a boring way. Everyone just assumes that the alien monoliths can fix the planet and they assume they’ll be able to figure out how to use them. You could make this plot significantly more interesting by just having the characters show some level of apprehension or uncertainty.
Planet Eos
This place makes me wish for a nuclear winter.
Eos is our first step on our tour of the Heleus Cluster. It’s the first of two orange desert worlds we’ll encounter. The surface is bathed in radiation, making it uninhabitable.
The lack of narrative ambition is just staggering. Even if we’re committed to this shallow plot, this new setting should give us lots of leeway to introduce wild landscapes. Does this planet really need to look like the Mojave Desert? Can’t we get some purple sand? Strange rock spires? Creepy “breathing” flora? Luminescent jellyfish creatures floating around? Steam vents? Bones of giant creatures killed by the radiation? Some dead trees? Pools of glowing liquid? Massive crystal structures jutting out of the ground? The artists made a bunch of scenery objects for this place. They could just as easily have made assets that don’t look like pedestrian Earth scenery.
SAM scans the surface of Eos and finds another alien monolith. We land, and it turns out there’s already a colony here. Or was. It failed, and now everyone is dead or scattered.
On the surface we get the vehicle we’ll be using this time around, so I guess it’s time to talk about…
The Nomad
Don't get excited thinking you'll get to see some cool animations of getting in and out of this thing like you might see in other open-world games. As in Mass Effect 1, a single button press instantly teleports the entire team into the vehicle. Sad face.
Mass Effect has always had a strange relationship with vehicles. The first one had the Mako, a bouncy tank. It served an important purpose within the world for giving things a sense of scale and distance, but a lot of people found it frustrating to drive. Also, the random planets you explored with the Mako were often ugly single-texture monstrosities with nothing along the lines of flora or fauna, which made them barren and dull. Which means that driving around them lacked a sense of wonder and discovery. This was actually a problem with the worlds and not the vehicle itself, but it made people dislike the Mako sections and so it was cut from later games.
Mass Effect 2 gave us the Hammerhead, which was completely pointless since it was only ever used on Hammerhead-specific planets. It felt like someone had grafted a terrible hovertank game onto this RPG.
Mass Effect 3 got rid of vehicle sections altogether, and turned them into cutscenes.
So now Andromeda brings us back to the original idea of using a six-wheeled vehicle to get around on a large world. And I think the series finally got it right. They left the tank turret off this time, so the Nomad doesn’t get mixed up in the combat systems of the game and the designers didn’t have to design two different classes of enemies for vehicle and on-foot combat. Instead, the Nomad is just a tool for transport and exploration. This also helps underscore that the Initiative is a civilian enterprise rather than a military one, showing that they didn’t bring a friggin’ TANK on a mission of peaceful exploration.
Exploration
Really? We're going to build our first colony at the bottom of a box canyon? I mean, I guess one spot of lifeless wasteland is as good as another, but can't we at least pick somewhere with a view?
Thanks to the Nomad, planets can now be large[1] and offer lots of different areas to explore without forcing the player to trudge through miles of empty wilderness.
My complaints about the Nomad are mostly limited to the environments where you pilot it. Some of the terrain is too obviously contrived to force you to drive huge distances around a mountain. That’s good for making the world feel larger than it really is, but it gets to be tedious after a while. The maze off cliff walls can feel smothering and blocks your view of the horizon, which is a shame because being able to see to the horizon is what gives you that fantastic trailblazer vibe.
This isn’t helped by the fact that all the worlds are all single-biome locations, which causes them to get old fast. The fact that the sun is always locked in place with no day / night cycle doesn’t help either. Once you’ve driven on a planet for sixty seconds, you’ve basically seen everything that planet has to offer in terms of visuals.
Our five-year mission: To exploit strange new worlds. To wipe out new life and new civilizations. To boldly get some where no man has gotten some before!
Even though the maps are large, their single-biome nature makes them feel small. Sure, I understand it wouldn’t make sense to land on tundra and then drive half a kilometer to find yourself in jungle, but that’s no excuse for having the planets be so relentlessly same-y. You can change the color palette without needing to go to a new climate. You can have grass in some spots, lifeless dirt in others, and rocky wastes elsewhere.
As it stands, these planets are basically devoid of life. No forests, no migrating wildlife[2], no shifts in weather, and no change in color tone. And like I said, two of our five planets are orange deserts.
How I’d have done it:
Yes, I get that the point of the game is that these planets have been knocked off-kilter by malfunctioning alien technology and are therefore uninhabitable, but certainly there’s room for a little artistic license. The alien technology in this game is so random, unexplained, contrived, and arbitrary, that I doubt it would shatter anyone’s immersion to have a couple of grassy patches here and there. If anything, the irradiated planet ought to give you an excuse to make a place with intensely strange and interesting flora. If you’re going to abandon the pretense of hard sci-fi and have a universe that runs on space magic, then you might as well take full advantage of it and use that to create fantastical environments.
The maniac in charge of the Mass Effect 3 color filter still shows up sometimes, but his vandalism isn’t quite as bad as it was in the previous game. Having said that, we could still do with more variety. Grass here. Giant mushrooms over here. Rolling plains in one spot, spiky hills in another. How about some Fisher Towers? Some contrasting colors between dirt and rock? Even if we can’t have living trees, how about a forest of dead ones?
The planets do have a little variety. The ice planet has snowy mountains surrounding a mostly flat frozen lake. There’s a lake on the irradiated planet and fields of sinkholes on the furnace one. The designers were on the right track, but they didn’t go nearly far enough. If we gave each planet three or four regions of distinct color, topography, and soundscape, it would go a long way to making these planets feel large and interesting. We could put each monolith in its own biome, which would relieve some of the tedium of doing the same thing three times.
In this section we get into our first real gunfights of the game, so let’s talk about the…
Combat and Leveling
Does this place look 66% viable to you? It doesn't look 66% viable to me..
While the Mass Effect combat system has evolved a great deal over the years, it’s always been built on three basic pillars:
Tech powers are often associated with sniper rifles and biotic powers are often associated with melee or shotguns at point-blank range. This isn’t a rule or anything. If you like, you can carry a sniper rifle and use biotic powers, or you can use tech abilities in melee range. But there are often bonuses built into the system that assumes tech specialists are snipers and biotics are close range fighters.
- Guns. I’m sure you’re familiar with this concept by now.
- Tech / stealth powers like turning invisible, hacking robots, destroying shields, and that sort of thing.
- Biotic powers that let you fling the bad guys (or even yourself) around the battlefield.
For the record: I never mess with tech powers. Every time I start a new game I tell myself I’m going to do something different this time. And then I end up playing as a close-range biotic again. I’m a fan of run-and-gun style shooting, and I like games where you have a lot of combat mobility. I strongly dislike sitting behind cover and playing whack-a-mole with guys as they poke their heads up. There’s nothing wrong with that sort of game, it’s just not my thing.
Which means that I’m not an expert on the Mass Effect combat system. I’ve always ignored a third of it (tech) and tried to minimize another third (firearms) because I enjoy the mobility of biotics. But in my non-expert opinion, this is the best Mass Effect has ever played. (At least, in the moment-to-moment mook fights. The boss fights are usually a joyless slog against predictable enemies with massive HP bars.)
The rocket boots are pretty fun. They might be my favorite feature in the entire game.
As in the earlier games, you get a handful of skill points every time you level up. You spend these to upgrade your skills. The cost of each rank increases by 1, so it costs you 1 skill point to get Charged Shot level 1 but 6 skill points to upgrade from Charged Shot 5 to Charged Shot 6. Normally this would incentivize the player to generalize. If the low-rank skills are cheap, then why not just buy the first couple of ranks in everything? The game balances this out by making the first few upgrades weak, and the final upgrades really powerful.
The other thing that encourages you to specialize is the fact that you can only equip a measly three powers at a time. I suppose this makes sense if you’re using a dual analog controller, but if you’re using a keyboard it feels very silly. This also means that once you hit level 40 or so, there’s nothing left to spend your skill points on. By 40, you’ve maxed out all three of the abilities you’ve chosen and all of the passive powers. What’s left? Invest points in some skill you can’t use because you don’t have room to equip it? I suppose you can buy additional powers and swap them around as needed, but it’s a chore to pause the game, open the skills menu, find the skill you need, and add it to your hotbar just because you met a guy with lots of armor and you didn’t have any anti-armor stuff equipped.
The selling point for me is the way your jump jets integrate with combat. They allow you to do a dash-dodge move, or you can jump straight up in the air and hover for a few seconds to deal with an enemy that’s shy about poking their head out of cover. You can also jump up over cover and then hit the melee button to do a ground slam move. It’s all pretty fun and it manages to look cool.
Drack
Thanks so much for letting me know I'm offline while I play this fundamentally single-player game. This is exactly what I need to help me maintain a sense of immersion during a dialog scene.
Just before you officially found the colony on Eos, you meet up with Drack and he joins the party. As much as I think it makes no damn sense to bring the Krogan with us, I admit he’s a pretty cool character.
There’s this odd quirk with his story though. At one point during the main story you’re assaulting a Kett location and then you hear the Drack’s scouts are being held prisoner here. In my first two playthroughs, this came out of nowhere.
What? Drack has scouts? He apparently commands a team a of guys that he personally recruited and they went missing at some point?
On my third trip through the game I did see a single line of dialog that made passing reference to the scouts, but it didn’t even make it explicit that the scouts in question were a team that Drack had a personal attachment to or that they had gone missing. There are also a couple of intra-party conversations you might hear while you’re driving around, assuming they don’t get truncated / interrupted by other chatter.
Still, this is a really important plot point and it feels like his sudden attachment to these scouts comes out of nowhere. Which means it doesn’t quite have the emotional punch it ought to. I imagine this is another detail that would have been smoothed out if the game had been given more time for polish.
Last edited:
Shamus doesn't claim that excluding good part from the terrible game makes it better game, but it's interesting how he is having trouble making up his mind.
I haven't played ME:Andromeda and don't have any intention to do so, but to reflect this to ME3, there were many issues with that game even without the dreaded ending. It was very disjointed experience. Early game was a mess, first real mission on Mars felt very artificial... then there were pretty decent content on Citadel. How Citadel changed as game went on was really one of the good things in ME3. What comes to Missions some were pretty decent, having good parts and then some where... pretty much wasted potential. Writing was all over the place what came to narrative and dialogue.
I can't blame anyone who ridicules ME3 and BioWare for the ending of the trilogy, but I found experience sometimes almost repulsive because of some parts were actually delivering from ME1's potential, some were beyond childishly naive, rinse and repeat.
I recall thinking about it back then, if ME3 would feel better game if parts that I liked were removed, what kind of game it would be then? And my conclusion was that it were been even worse experience with good parts cut off. If things that worked were left out, the end product and overall experience would have been even worse that what we got, something terrible to surreal levels haha.
So Shamus is undecided in this point but I think he is clouded with his focus to comedy, he uses ME3: The Citadel DLC as comparison. Comedy doesn't equal quality, though it's worth a note that he feels BW succeed with comedic part of ME: Andromeda.
Bottom line: In ME3 writers who used ME1 as foundation who clearly knew the world and it's dynamics, were able to create pretty good content. Then there were some other main vision going on simultaneously, which also lead to dreaded ending. So the end result appears to be a result of politics. These things happen and I would say that one path leads to better skills, better understanding of working with what you have instead of pulling shit out of your ass because you want to. And other path leads to improved social skills, working with internal company politics.
I don't think this is wrong or right matter, but a matter that in the end, those with good talent go anywhere. Those who have good skills at social / bureaucracy has potential to be anywhere, though that potential may rarely realise. And after all in certain leadership principles, drones are only useful as long as they will remain drones.
1. Some of the negative feedback from Mako happened because of bug which could happen on PC and Xbox. It's mostly noticeable on final Mako ride which is race against time to relay (to get back into the Citadel) because of that segment has a timer. I don't remember the details but something happened messing up the internal synch of the game causing physics issues. Mako became quite difficult to drive and slow, making timed segment difficult to beat. BioWare never admitted that there was a bug and I guess it became even internal truth at some point that it was vehicle and bug ever existed. Then there are people who don't like vehicles no matter what.
2. Environments of ME1 were often repetitive (and structures were the same). This happened because developers responsible messed up with Unreal Editor, this happened likely because of bug in UE. People who has hacked to assets of gam0e found all sort of stuff in there. In a nut shell, when devs were trying to delete something from assets it appeared to be deleted in UE and was just unlinked from game, data remained. So they needed to cut corners to stay within disc space budget.
Art design saved IMO what it could. There were all kinds of skyboxes styled like '70's science fantasy leaning towards science which contributed a lot to mood and tone. Environmental hazards actually mattered (some could be nullified with right kind of armour though IIRC) but Mako actually mattered.
I really like how Shamus dissects these games to pieces but perhaps he is chasing his own tail a bit. He stresses quite a bit how environments actually feel repetitive also in ME: Andromeda.
What ME1 did right here, I think that artist somehow managed to extract ideas from earlier works to environments. Back in the day (before the net) there were these Terran Trade Authority books, which were for pre-teen audience science fiction. They worked like there were on going story on one page and painting on the next and there were some sort of theme or plot that went on and it was writers patch work to get matching paintings to the story. It's sort of ridiculous, also part of the glorious 80's which isn't often talked about, haha, but that's how it was back in the day. Some examples:
If the images don't load try copying source and pasting it in address bar.
Anyway, like Shamus wrote, new environments are actually as repetive as environments in ME1 but this time there aren't those skyboxes etc. small stylish things. IMO BW lost a lot when they let go of their original influences and their vision of it. ME1 exploration never totally capitalised it's potential, but was better than exploring something that people are already familiar with. Desert on alien planet is just a desert unless you add something alien.
Wrong. Thresher Maws gives 2 x XP if killed on foot versus killed via Mako turret. They are also way faster to kill on foot on higher level weapons if you know how to upgrade them. IIRC this also applies to Insanity difficulty.
- Joined
- May 25, 2006
- Messages
- 8,363
Turkish space program?What ME1 did right here, I think that artist somehow managed to extract ideas from earlier works to environments. Back in the day (before the net) there were these Terran Trade Authority books, which were for pre-teen audience science fiction. They worked like there were on going story on one page and painting on the next and there were some sort of theme or plot that went on and it was writers patch work to get matching paintings to the story. It's sort of ridiculous, also part of the glorious 80's which isn't often talked about, haha, but that's how it was back in the day. Some examples:
#1 reason I stopped having urge to continue Andromeda is that the love interest is an ugly SJW woman with SJW haircut.
If the love interest was prettier I would consider it a better game. It really, really bothers me that they intentionally saddle you with only 1 female human love interest and make her an ugly SJW one on purpose, to spite the player. It's the single-biggest FUCK YOU! in the game.
If the love interest was prettier I would consider it a better game. It really, really bothers me that they intentionally saddle you with only 1 female human love interest and make her an ugly SJW one on purpose, to spite the player. It's the single-biggest FUCK YOU! in the game.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 97,475
Andromeda Part 11: The Vault in Our Stars
So the team is here on the planet Eos to fix the climate by fiddling with the inexplicably intuitive and user-friendly alien vaults.
Once we get the Nomad and do a little tutorial stuff, we settle into the rut the game designer has planned for us: Drive to three different monolith towers, shoot the inhabitants, do the puzzle, and then go to the alien vault to reset the global climate.
The Monoliths
SAM is the worst. He's constantly explaining everything without actually TELLING you anything. It's really weird.
The three Monolith towers work something like this: Once you’ve murdered whoever is guarding it[1], you’ll find a console. The aliens who built this thing may be from another galaxy, but by a strange coincidence they just happened to use computer consoles that are the right size for a human being. You’ll need to hop around the environments and do some light platforming to reach hidden glyphs on the tower. Once you scan those, SAM can hack the alien computer or whatever. You do a sudoku puzzle, the tower lights up, and you drive to the next one.
It’s not bad by the standards of BioWare puzzles. Or at least, the first couple are okay. But when you realize you’ve got to do three of these on every planet the whole thing starts to feel very Ubisoft-ish. It wouldn’t be so bad if each tower had a different gimmick, but the designer runs out of ideas very quickly and from there you’re just repeating the same task again and again.
Once you do three towers, a secret vault will open up somewhere on the map.
The Vaults
Credit where it's due: Sometimes the cinematographer manages to set up and frame a really cool shot like this one. It's not often, but it makes me wonder what this game might have been with a less troubled dev cycle.
The vaults are more involved. They have a lot of no-stakes platforming[2] and trivial yet time-consuming puzzles. Maybe you’ll find yourself in a massive chamber with computer consoles in the far corners, and you need to activate the consoles in the order A, B, A, C, A. It’s not hard, but you have to do a lot of hopping between platforms and kill a bunch of dudes every time you reach a console. It might take you ten seconds to solve the puzzle conceptually, but it’ll take you five minutes of hopping and shooting to enact your solution.
I really dislike these sections, but not because of the hopping and fighting. Those are fine. The shooting is standard and the platforming is inoffensive. My problem is that SAM won’t shut his stupid robot mouth long enough for you to experience an air of mystery or even think for yourself.
Pathfinder. You’ll need to find a console to open this door. Pathfinder, look for a console to reset this machine. Pathfinder, if you activate these consoles in the right order, it may open the door for you. Pathfinder, you’ve activated this console, and that should restore power to the previous room. Pathfinder, this shaft leads down to the main chamber.
Thanks SAM. I was starting to feel a slight tingle of curiosity, but you managed to head it off before it bloomed into genuine interest.
SAM does this throughout these missions. He’s supposedly a hunk of metal in your head[3], but he clairvoyantly knows everything about how everything around you works, and he’s constantly explaining things to you a step at a time. He’s always making assumptions about how this technology works and his assumptions are always correct, to the point where this alien technology feels completely mundane. The game never allows you to ponder a puzzle. The moment you walk up to a console, SAM immediately chimes in with what it’s for and what you need to do to turn it on. SAM theorizes that somewhere there must be a console to restart the atmosphere cleaner, and that’s exactly how it is.
These vaults are frustrating because I find the spaces to be visually interesting. These places are screaming that they’re part of a grand mystery, but the game won’t let you enjoy a single moment of uncertainty or wonder.
How I’d have done it:
My first instinct is “do a different plot”, but that sort of goes against the spirit of these suggestions. So I’ll constrain my advice to the scenes at hand. I understand we’re no longer doing details-first sci-fi. Fine. That’s disappointing to me, but we have to judge the game we got, not the game we wanted.
This is such an easy problem to solve! All you need to do is cut most of SAM’s dialog. The player already knows they’re here to fix the planet with space magic. Just let them explore the place on their own, at their own pace. It’s not like players are going to be baffled by this linear dungeon of combat and Sesame Street level puzzles. SAM’s narration is like watching 2001: A Space Odyssey with a guy who keeps talking over the movie and telling you everything that’s about to happen, leaving you with nothing to do but wait for events to play out.
Laying aside the damage this narration does to the pacing, it also ruins the mood. While I can accept that there’s no science behind the vaults and they run entirely on inexplicable space-magic, that’s no excuse to make them so accommodating for our team. Instead of having everyone constantly making correct guesses about the technology, have them make incorrect (yet plausible for the genre and possibly humorous) guesses about what they are and how they work.
There’s already some dialog in here where characters will blurt out a comment about how cool this stuff looks. I appreciate having my teammates react to what’s going on, but it would be even better if these barks showed that your team really has no idea what they’re doing.
Liam: (As the player is exploring a tower on the surface.) Maybe these machines are working fine. Like, maybe the aliens that built this place LIKE the radiation. Maybe it’s that they eat or whatever.
Cora: (After defeating a batch of robots.) Maybe that’s what happened to the people that built this vault. Maybe they lost control and were killed by their own defense robots.
Liam: (Upon reaching the plant room.) Woah, check it out guys. More plants! Way down here where there’s no sunshine. Maybe the robots just really like having a garden and they don’t want us trampling it.
Vetra: (Upon reaching the lower levels.) Maybe this place is supposed to be a bunker. Maybe there was some sort of cataclysm on the surface and the builders took shelter here?
Liam: (If the player lingers in one room for too long.) Maybe the builders are still here, but they’re so tiny we can’t see them? But then why would they build their consoles this big? Nevermind.
Liam: (Upon reaching the final room.) What if, like, these PLANTS are the ones that built this place? Maybe they just move real slow or something. What do you think? Guys?
Maybe they reach the first tower, and they assume it will clean the air when they turn it on. But then it doesn’t, and they realize they need two more towers[4]. Have them assume a console will cut power to a forcefield, but then it does something else entirely and takes them in an unexpected direction. They reach the second gravity shaft and assume it’s going to take them down again, but instead it lifts them up. They assume a console will activate the obviously posed killer robots, but then it just turns on the lights. They laugh nervously, start doing a puzzle, and halfway through the robots wake up.
All of this would help sell the idea that these places are crazy alien tech, and not a murder dungeon with a big glowing “ON” button at the end. These vaults look really cool and they might make for a tense scene if SAM’s omniscience wasn’t constantly obliterating all sense of mystery.
Peebee
The pupils in her eyes are huge, which is part of what makes her seem so child-like. That, and her body language. And personality. And inane dialog.
As we’re exploring the monoliths, we meet Peebee. Peebee is aggressively annoying. To be fair to the writers, this is entirely deliberate. To be fair to me, that doesn’t make it okay.
Peebee is an Asari. Asari live for a thousand years. Their defining attribute ought to be “maturity”. But Peebee has the personality of a 13 year old. She’s impulsive, unreliable, self-absorbed, pushy, and opinionated. She’s the last person I’d bring with me on any mission more important than a beer run.
This could be okay, as a deliberate effort to design a character that plays against type. I imagine it would be humorous to befriend a Krogan poet, or a berserker Salarian. The problem is that this game has basically turned all of the aliens into different flavors of humans. None of the Asari in the game feel like Asari to me. They’re not patient, aloof, wise, or placed in positions of power[5]. They’re bartenders and mooks, and you could swap out their character models for human ones without needing to alter the dialog at all.
So in a world where the Asari have lost everything that made them special, Peebee doesn’t feel like she’s playing against type. She just feels like yet another human with an Asari paintjob.
Peebee talks like a human. At one point Ryder asks her what “Peebee” stands for and she jokes that it stands for “Peanut Butter”. Now, I’m not saying it’s impossible that this Asari has heard of peanut butter, but is that really the best way to characterize an alien? Does she need to constantly speak in human-centric idioms and make reference to things from Earth? Isn’t the entire point of having alien friends the ability for them to offer fresh viewpoints that a human couldn’t give us?
What? "Let it ride"? This is Peebee's introductory line? Why does the dialog in this game feel like an awkward translation? This dialog is making my face tired.
It also feels like the writer missed the point of having annoying characters. Pairing a straight man and a clown is a time-honored trope and it’s been used in everything from romantic comedies to buddy cop movies. You create two wildly divergent personalities and you let them bounce off each other. The problem is that Peebee’s antics are all one-sided. Her annoying personality would be fine if the player was allowed to express their annoyance, but our dialog wheel here in Andromeda has been reduced to the binary choice of “totally agree” and “slightly agree”.
In Saint’s Row, you end up with a lot of goofballs on your team. Some of them are even annoying. The key is that this trait is then used to fuel the banter between the characters. The Boss teases Pierce about being a sellout. They poke fun at Matt for being a NERD. They mock Shaundi for being too high-strung. We never get anything like that in the relationship between Ryder and Peebee. You never get the two of them trading insults or doing jokes with callbacks. Peebee just says something childish and Sara responds in her usual tone. There’s no sense of tension, rivalry, or exasperation.
Even ignoring her grating personality, her dialog is cringy, obvious, and overly verbose. The two of you meet in one of the Monolith ruins, and she tells you that she refers to the long-gone aliens that built this place as “Remnant”. Then a few lines later she says she’s really into studying “rem-tech”. And then she breaks this down, explaining that it’s short for “remnant technology”. Then she explains that she likes to shorten words because it makes things easier. Is the writer trying to show she thinks the player character is stupid, or does the writer think the player is stupid? I can’t tell.
You'be been studying this tech for months? Wow. You must have learned a great deal. Too bad the dialog wheel won't let me ask you about any of this, since it's THE CENTRAL MACGUFFIN THE ENTIRE CONFLICT IS BUILT AROUND.
Peebee is supposedly obsessed with Remnant tech. You might think that this means she’s our go-to character for remnant details and backstory, but instead Peebee talks mostly about herself and all the remnant stuff is left vague because worldbuilding is for losers.
Even if we accept her personality as a good design for an Asari and even if we decide we want a “quirky” companion, her dialog really needed another editing pass to tighten it up.
How I’d have done it:
Classic BioWare games often had characters pulling double duty, where their personal story also did a bunch of worldbuilding. This idea has mostly been abandoned and now everyone just talks about themselves.
It would have been great to have a smart, analytical, grounded character that was into the Remnant. Their dialog could provide insight and backstory, the way Liara did for the Protheans, Mordin did for the Genophage project, or Legion did for the Geth.
As much as I dislike this character, she actually has my favorite line in this section of the game. She finds some random Remnant gizmo and assumes it must be a “symbol of authority”. Then the next time you see her she runs through the room saying, “It’s not a symbol of authority! The Remnant still shoot at me!” This part of the game needed a lot more of that sort of thing. Although it’s odd that the only person making wrong assumptions about the Remnant isn’t the one who landed two hours ago, but the Asari that’s supposedly been studying them for months. Like I said, this needed another editing pass.
Sure, the aliens invented spinning red sirens to alert you of danger, but they haven't yet unlocked the secret of yellow and black hazard tape.
After you reach the final chamber of the vault, Sara can push a button and the vault “reboots” or whatever. SAM describes it in terms over “overriding the lockdown so the vault can be restarted”, which makes it sound like the vault runs on Windows 95. The whole point of having mysterious alien technology is that we can have it do things without needing to explain how it works, but then SAM exhaustively explains the operation of the system with so much certainty and familiarity that you have the worst of both worlds. The place has no sense of mystery or wonder. You spend tons of time and dialog explaining things, but the player never gets the satisfaction of understanding or discovery.
Rebooting the vault releases a death cloud that chases you out of the vault. Luckily, the aliens that built this place adopted “spinning red light cone” as their universal symbol of emergency and danger, just like a 21st century human ambulance. What are the odds?
Clean
We've got rocks, irradiated sand, and stagnant water. Everything we need for a thriving colony.
Once you return to the surface you discover that – just as everyone assumed – the vault has cleaned up the radiation. I don’t know if it’s just been cleaned from the air, or also from the ground, or what. Regardless, you can now start your first real colony.
Once you found your colony on Eos, you’re given a choice: Do you want a military outpost, or a scientific one? This is really annoying, since the only correct answer is, “PLANT CROPS AND SCREW EVERYTHING ELSE YOU DUMMIES!”
Look, I wouldn’t be doing the “But what do they eat?” thing again, except the game brought it up. I’m totally ready to accept the notion that they were smart enough to bring several years worth of food. I’ll bet you could fit a lot of Pop-Tarts in that immense 16Km tube that’s wrapped around the central hub of the Nexus. But then at the start of the game the writer explicitly stated that the Nexus was out of food. If that’s true, then nothing else matters. Grow food now or die. Why would anyone found a scientific outpost if we don’t have the means to feed our people? This isn’t a Cerberus operation and we’re not here to study the effects of starvation on colonists.
After you make this decision, you travel back to the Nexus and someone makes it clear that the scientific outpost is supposed to study HOW to grow food on this alien world. That’s information we really should have given the player before they made the decision. This is one of a tiny number of real choices you have in the game. It has almost no impact on anything else and is mostly cosmetic. Worst of all, the proper context isn’t given until after you’ve made the decision.
Atrocious.
Everything is fine.
It doesn’t matter anyway. The new colony is only a couple of acres. Even if the scientists instantly figure out how to grow crops in this lifeless orange desert, I don’t imagine these two acres are going to feed the hundreds of people living on the Nexus. Or even the handful of people living here.
How I’d have done it:
Just don’t bring up the food thing. Don’t give us details up front if you’re going to turn around and tell us the details don’t matter. Figure out what genre you’re working in before you start writing, and explain the rules so the player can understand the choices they’re making.
As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.