Mass Effect: Andromeda

degrassinoel

some interesting news doing the rounds today, rumours but they sound accurate enough and fit in with what's been revealed - albeit very little

link

Mass Effect 4 will take place in the Helius Cluster, a melange of solar systems “far removed by time and space from Commander Shepard’s heroic acts.” The game will cast the player as a “pathfinder,” whose task is to travel into the Helius Cluster in search of a new planet where humanity can live.
It’s said the cluster will be four times the size of the game map from Mass Effect 3, and that there’ll be at least one entirely new alien race, too

degrassinoel

news! and an official name for the forth ME game

Mass Effect: Andromeda

Due for release next christmas.. ffs, a year and a half!

http://blog.bioware.com/2015/06/15/introducing-mass-effect-andromeda/

Gbear

I'm kinda bummed they've left the whole bleedin galaxy behind.

Kinda dug themselves into a hole there though.

Still, it should be class. It's not like they were short of planets to explore in the Milky Way, but there's loads of room to have a completely different set of races, which will be cool.
So long as there's enough of the old races swanning around for nostalgia's sake, it shouldn't feel so divorced from the previous games to count against it.

And finally a Mass Effect game without the hideously outdated Unreal Engine 3.

Apparently that trailer was in-engine, which is obviously pretty meaningless these days, but hopefully by the time December 2016 rolls around they'll have figured out how to make games on console not look like hot sick and the PC version will be suitably breathtaking.

Those worlds looked too amazing to balls them up with ****ty draw distances.

A very cool trailer that probably showed as much as can be reasonably expected this far from launch.

degrassinoel

Gbear wrote: »

I'm kinda bummed they've left the whole bleedin galaxy behind.

Kinda dug themselves into a hole there though.

Still, it should be class. It's not like they were short of planets to explore in the Milky Way, but there's loads of room to have a completely different set of races, which will be cool.
So long as there's enough of the old races swanning around for nostalgia's sake, it shouldn't feel so divorced from the previous games to count against it.

And finally a Mass Effect game without the hideously outdated Unreal Engine 3.

Apparently that trailer was in-engine, which is obviously pretty meaningless these days, but hopefully by the time December 2016 rolls around they'll have figured out how to make games on console not look like hot sick and the PC version will be suitably breathtaking.

Those worlds looked too amazing to balls them up with ****ty draw distances.

A very cool trailer that probably showed as much as can be reasonably expected this far from launch.

Yeah i dunno why they've gone all the way to andromeda at all, the milky way was grand and loads of history with all of the different races there. it's probably to do with their decision to cut the Shep story off.

it's going to be a tough act to follow the trilogy with excellent characters like Wrex, Tali, Garrus and Mordin, especially now that they are almost entirely starting from scratch in a whole new universe, to me that's a bit daunting and really hope it works because it's one of the few IP's in the last few years i've really gotten into and actually cared about the characters in it.

That Johnny Cash song was a touch of class, but i did ask myself if i was being trolled right at the start too


Edit: Thanks for the thread name change mods!

degrassinoel

New teaser - happy N7 day!

Kiith

Interesting that Sheppard narrated that. I assume the mission to Andromeda is a backup plan, in case the Reapers actually won? Would allow for a cameo from Sheppard at the start of it i suppose.

degrassinoel

yeah it was a bit weird, and bioware have stated adamantly that sheppard wont be making an appearance in ME4 either

Also, that video has now been made private so this could have been a hoax, not sure

ye can see it here again, for the time being.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0Et481TNgE

flyingsnail

Nothing more than a signing off message according to this, still a bit odd.

UPDATE 2.45pm: BioWare Montreal boss Yanick Roy has now confirmed to Eurogamer that Shepard's unexpected appearance in today's trailer is just the Commander signing off - plans have not changed regarding the character's lack of involvement in Mass Effect's future.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-11-07-theres-a-new-mass-effect-andromeda-teaser-trailer-and-its-voiced-by-shepard

Kirby

Good. We need a new character that doesnt have any baggage and decisions from previous games. A clean slate.

Zillah

degrassinoel wrote: »

New teaser - happy N7 day!

Yay, Femshep!

degrassinoel

finally some news..

http://www.masseffect.com/news/an-update-on-mass-effect-andromeda.html

• More Freedom: One of our biggest ambitions is to give players an unprecedented level of freedom for a Mass Effect experience –where you’ll go, how you’ll get there, and how you’ll play.

• New Uncharted Worlds: We’re leaving the Milky Way behind and headed to Andromeda, where we’ll meet new allies, confront new enemies, and explore fascinating new worlds.

• The Next Great Mass Effect Experience: Mass Effect: Andromeda will be the first Mass Effect game for today’s consoles and the first built on the Frostbite engine. We’re pushing the technology to deliver visuals, story, and gameplay that have never been done in franchise history.

As we’ve been playing the game at the studio recently, it’s showing us that we’re taking the game in the right direction. But we also know we need the right amount of time to make sure we deliver everything the game can be and should be – that’s our commitment from all of us to all of you. Because of that, Mass Effect: Andromeda will now ship in early 2017. We can’t wait to show you how far we’re all going to go. We’ll see you at the EA PLAY press conference on June 12, with an update.

At least it hasnt been canned.

Varik

degrassinoel wrote: »

finally some news..

http://www.masseffect.com/news/an-update-on-mass-effect-andromeda.html



At least it hasnt been canned.

That theme park got built so it was unlikely to be cancelled.

The move to frostbite was good, worked well for Dragon age.

Zillah

All this talk of "total freedom" just sounds like open world repetitive disaster to me. Expectations set to approximately 3/10.

degrassinoel

Zillah wrote: »

All this talk of "total freedom" just sounds like open world repetitive disaster to me. Expectations set to approximately 3/10.

It'll be inquisition in space, same crap loadscreens, pick up resources here, go there, kill spacerats in the spacecellar then hop out of the mako, and onto the main mission, finish that part, cant do the next bit because you need to kill 5billion spacerats and collect 15 tonnes of spacepotatoes, so.. kill more spacerats and get more spacepotatoes, mako, loadscreen to the next planet, get in mako, drive for twenty minutes, kill new spacerats and harvest new spacepotatoes ...drive the mako... drive the mako some more, loadscreen, mako, loadscreen..

I hope i'm wrong, honestly.. but sure we'll know more in june anyway

Pickpocket

I'm planning on playing through the Trilogy in the coming months. I've never played the two sequels but I put about 10-15 hours into the original when it first appeared on Xbox 360.

I remember there being an awful lot of fetch quests and mining. Crap, basically. This time around I want to ignore as much of that stuff as possible. Preferably all of it. I just want to focus on the main campaign and get to know the keys cast, which will obviously provide some context for the events of 2 and 3.

How long will this streamlined approach take and are there any side missions that have a knock-on effect for the following two games, even in terms of fleshing out supporting characters?

I hope the Mods don't mind me temporarily hijacking this thread but I think it's preferable to digging up an old one.

Finally, I might decide to breeze through it on easy. Will that have any effect on the sequels in terms of levelling, etc.

Thanks!

Venom

degrassinoel wrote: »

It'll be inquisition in space, same crap loadscreens, pick up resources here, go there, kill spacerats in the spacecellar then hop out of the mako, and onto the main mission, finish that part, cant do the next bit because you need to kill 5billion spacerats and collect 15 tonnes of spacepotatoes, so.. kill more spacerats and get more spacepotatoes, mako, loadscreen to the next planet, get in mako, drive for twenty minutes, kill new spacerats and harvest new spacepotatoes ...drive the mako... drive the mako some more, loadscreen, mako, loadscreen..

I hope i'm wrong, honestly.. but sure we'll know more in june anyway

Dude don't even joke about stuff like that

The side quests in Inquisition were awful time wasting MMO style rubbish.

Kiith

I'd quite like Inquisition in space. It was a great game. Get rid of some of the collectibles, and the waste of time repeatable side missions, and you'd have a game i'll happily buy.

degrassinoel

new trailer is supposedly dropping today between 5 and 7pm our time

Zillah

Kiith wrote: »

I'd quite like Inquisition in space. It was a great game. Get rid of some of the collectibles, and the waste of time repeatable side missions, and you'd have a game i'll happily buy.

Going back a bit here, but: why on earth do you think they'd have less of the repetitive junk? If anything the trend is to stick more and more of that sort of stuff into games. I think people tolerated the worst parts of Inquisition so well because they've been trained to expect that sort of gameplay from MMOs. I've serious doubts as to how much they even enjoy doing it; as opposed to feel a compulsive need to work their way through it.

Kiith

What repetitive things are we talking about though? I don't see that much in there that i would consider to be a problem. I'm 50 hours into my 2nd play through, and I've not done a single repeatable quest (the inquisition +power missions). The main quests are pretty enjoyable, and the side quests are grand. There are so many of them that you can pick and choose which ones to do. And while there are plenty of collectables (mosaics, shards etc...), they are all optional. You can quite happily play through it just playing the main quests.

Inquisition is far from perfect, but if Andromeda was like it, in space and with the ME universe, i'd be a very happy man.

degrassinoel

https://youtu.be/pyZw_oqk7Q8

Dave_The_Sheep

That guys head (maybe just the face) looks oddly big compared to his body.

degrassinoel

Dave_The_Sheep wrote: »

That guys head (maybe just the face) looks oddly big compared to his body.

He also has big boots to fill

The_Valeyard

so.......whats this, Reapers from another mother? There galactic cousins?

Robert ninja

I wonder how many colours we'll get for its ending.

Shiminay

I dunno about the rest of ye, but I thought that trailer was fking class! I'm one of those controversial types that thinks ME3 was my favourite of the series and the buthurt over the endings simply passed me by - that game put me through the emotional ringer and the mechanics kept me coming back. The multiplayer mode was fantastic fun (even running some of the easier levels solo was enjoyable when you were in a mood to just shoot things in the face (because who isn't every once in a while?).

Roll on Andromeda folks!

Maximus Alexander

I found the ending disappointing, but the rest of ME3 was fantastic and the best of the series I agree. I don't know why people would allow the 10 minutes or so of the ending to spoil the rest of the journey for them tbh.

Zillah

Ok that trailer makes me feel that there might be a bit of a story. You've hurt me a lot before though. The bad guy has a very "Star Trek 2009 villain" vibe to him. I can't decide if that's good or bad. Expectations set to 6/10.

Zillah

Shiminay wrote: »

ME3

Can you not say "ME3" please? It's one of my PTSD triggers.

gizmo

Zillah wrote: »

All this talk of "total freedom" just sounds like open world repetitive disaster to me. Expectations set to approximately 3/10.

State of the world aside, it could also reference the design changes which have taken place with respect to the ditching of character classes and the broadening of conversation options outside the old Paragon/Renegade system.

Robert ninja

^ Maybe they'll fix situations where selecting something like "See you" as triggering "See you... in hell!" and then Shep kills someone.

Justwinginit

Shiminay wrote: »

I dunno about the rest of ye, but I thought that trailer was fking class! I'm one of those controversial types that thinks ME3 was my favourite of the series and the buthurt over the endings simply passed me by - that game put me through the emotional ringer and the mechanics kept me coming back. The multiplayer mode was fantastic fun (even running some of the easier levels solo was enjoyable when you were in a mood to just shoot things in the face (because who isn't every once in a while?).

Roll on Andromeda folks!

Yeah, me too, I loved the campaign, and MP was epic. Hundreds of hours poured into it......

degrassinoel

Should be gameplay video later tonight from the game awards 2016

afaik it starts around midnight tonight, streaming in the usual places - dont count it being shown until the show is almost over though.. it's billed in the last category.

http://thegameawards.com/watch/

degrassinoel

Well, there it is..

Doesn't say a lot does it?

Dcully

lol at the aiming in that trailer

degrassinoel

I'm fairly disappointed with the entire thing tbh.

It's being called an ARPG instead of RPG now. Concerns me that this may mean an enormous game but little actual story, which would be a massive reverse for Bioware.

The voice acting sounds out of context and it probably is, but it had feck all emotion in it - literally like it was being read by an actor for the first time.

The same crappy dialogue wheel.

The animations, specifically facial animations when disarming the Turian were laughably bad, as was the dialogue in that scene.

25 seconds in, and i was already thinking, it's no man's sky with some added story.

Too much focus on the Mako Nomad.

And jaysis christ the combat looked bollocks. How the fcuk did they get it so right in ME3 and so wrong looking in Andromeda?

I'm probably gonna buy it anyway, but yeah, i'm not being sold by that trailer, i'm being sold by the previous games standard of excellent storytelling.

Gbear

I've seen a lot generally negative reactions which make about as much nonsense to me as the overly effusive ones.

On the animation, I wouldn't be surprised if we're looking at the end of May by the time it actually gets released. They're saying spring so it wouldn't take too much fudging to get it into early summer. They haven't actually settled on any kind of date.
I think one of the devs has come out and said the animations are still a WIP.

So there's a good 10-15% of the total development time left for the yoke.
And these days you can expect a few GB of launch day patches as well and probably the same again a month later.

And anyway, ME has always looked ****e. That's not why people play it.

On the combat, I'm excited.
It seems pretty clear that they're playing on super-easy mode for babies so they can wander around a bit. I wouldn't take the total eschewing of cover mechanics or general lack of tactical gameplay to be too concerning at this point.
What I did love was the fluency of the jetpack (particularly chaining a biotic charge into the middle of it... drool) and the vertical elemement it adds.
ME 1-3 were basically 2d. They were approaching DOOM levels of flatness.
Adding the 3rd dimension is important. It's even more important that it's not a gimmick and it actually affects gameplay, but given that it seems fairly well integrated so far both in exploration and combat I'm not too worried about.

Their handling will be paramount, but it's still nice to see the likes of the Carnifex, Avenger, Revenant, Piranha and Black Widow return.
They seemed a little piddlier than in ME3, so I'd imagine the old top-level stuff will be the new galaxie's low-mid tier stuff.
There seemed to be some sort of wacky purple particle beam in the vein of the Collector Rifle from ME3. Maybe that'll belong to the Kett.

Overall I'm still obviously eager to see the game come to frutition but we don't really know a whole lot from this.

The biggest question marks are over stuffing the game full of pointless bollocks. At this stage, after thinking about how to implement it properly and seeing dozens of games try it, I actually think that the whole scavenging/crafting thing could just be ****ed off entirely in nearly every game.

Maybe for something like Dying Light it made sense and the way your weapons had limited shelf lives bound the whole thing into the gameplay in a more focused way, but I struggling to see the point of shoe-horning it into everything.
It's pretend, low-effort content that's purely so you can inflate the advertised gameplay times in a lot of cases.
Bethesda has a lot to answer for.

Varik

Adding in a load of forgettable aliens isn't good but I hope there's more than just the 2 big ones they've mentioned and it won't just be milky way species.

Thargor

Definitely underwhelmed after that tbh. The shot of the station on that first planet they went down to made me think of the few hours I invested in Mad Max before I got bored and gave up, Witcher 3 has ruined RPGs for me.

degrassinoel

Gbear wrote: »

I've seen a lot generally negative reactions which make about as much nonsense to me as the overly effusive ones.

On the animation, I wouldn't be surprised if we're looking at the end of May by the time it actually gets released. They're saying spring so it wouldn't take too much fudging to get it into early summer. They haven't actually settled on any kind of date.
I think one of the devs has come out and said the animations are still a WIP.

So there's a good 10-15% of the total development time left for the yoke.
And these days you can expect a few GB of launch day patches as well and probably the same again a month later.

I'd agree with that only at the end of the video, it says that it's representative of the gameplay. So yeah, i'm still baffled as to why in the name of god they included that horrifically undercooked incomplete scene with the Turian.

Unless part of the story is that Fem Ryder has severe muscular atrophy from her 600 year flight to Andromeda, that she's incapable of moving facial muscles whilst executing complex hand to hand defensive moves.

Why would bioware include something that's not anywhere near finished in a glossy trailer like that?

degrassinoel

pc gamer picked up on it too

http://www.pcgamer.com/mass-effect-andromedas-facial-animations-are-still-being-polished/

From what they've said it's being worked on.

Gbear

degrassinoel wrote: »

I'd agree with that only at the end of the video, it says that it's representative of the gameplay. So yeah, i'm still baffled as to why in the name of god they included that horrifically undercooked incomplete scene with the Turian.

Unless part of the story is that Fem Ryder has severe muscular atrophy from her 600 year flight to Andromeda, that she's incapable of moving facial muscles whilst executing complex hand to hand defensive moves.

Why would bioware include something that's not anywhere near finished in a glossy trailer like that?

Desperation from the fans to see anything?
The ravening hordes are at the gate and they need something to hold them off for another while.

degrassinoel

They made a bollocks of it - if they'd edited that part out it would have at least looked semi professional.

This trailer has better facial animations than the andromeda one has, and it's nearly a decade old.

I don't think they're anywhere near finished this game at all. Releasing a gameplay trailer at this point was just stupid.

degrassinoel

unofficially the release date is 31st March - some keyselling sites and game magazines have picked up on it, but like i say, unofficial.

Also more gameplay footage tonight

https://twitter.com/masseffect/status/814606946267492353/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Sephiroth_dude

I just always presumed it coming out in march.........didn't realise there's no official date yet.

degrassinoel

it's official now, 23rd for us, 21st for Merica

The_Valeyard

degrassinoel wrote: »

it's official now, 23rd for us, 21st for Merica

hope there is a European server.


I often dislike when the Americans get the headstart.

Falthyron

The_Valeyard wrote: »

hope there is a European server.


I often dislike when the Americans get the headstart.

Being an Origin title, I have found a quick visit to Korea on the interwebs generally triggers an open invitation to play the game earlier than intended. Must be some sort of exclusivity deal between the Korean government and EA. Fair play. If only Enda would get us something similar.

degrassinoel

I'd guess a lot of people will be doing that, stupid this day and age to have a staggered release date with digital distribution.

Maximus Alexander

The promotional material for this has been fairly weak. You can make bad games look good with some creative marketing, so it should be pretty easy to make a good game look good. This worries me.