What the hell is going on with Mass Effect: Andromeda?

[xMobilemux]

Eh I kinda liked the model on the left (though I'm definitely in the minority on that one). It's not the first time we've seen a big difference between a game's pre-release footage and the way it looks on release, but I'll agree that it's a bit weird how big the difference is.

The French version of Andromeda has the good looking FemRyder and it does look better.
Curious as to what'll happen to it after the day 1 patch.

 

[Dark Drakan]

It's not the first time we've seen a big difference between a game's pre-release footage and the way it looks on release, but I'll agree that it's a bit weird how big the difference is.

Not uncommon for developers to use footage from old builds for trailers & early release gameplay footage. So depends what build that footage is from as to how old it actually is.

 

[Innsmouth]

People may say what they want, but ME Andromeda looks underwhelming and disappointing. I remember how I was wowed by character models in ME2 but this just looks bad. I dont really care for excuse that I didnt played it yet, if it looks bad, it simply do so.

 

[WolfOD64]

http://archive.is/CrKmm

Before any accusations against nay-sayers of the female models cry entitlement or sexism, let me remind you of the batch of fans that really suffer from these homely avatar faces.

 

[xMobilemux]

Reviews are in.

Mediocre at best.

 

[Dark Drakan]

Mediocre at best.

Not amazing & underwhelming in comparison to its potential but 77% average (at time of posting) is better than I expected (ME 91%/ME 2 96%/ME 3 93%). With all the media negativity & personal attacks on Bioware that have plagued its launch I expected worse.

People seemed to have predicted a total disaster & though its not likely to be GOTY material it seems its actually far from the disaster people have been making it out to be. Based on what gamers have been saying, lots seem to be enjoying it none the less. As Jim Sterling said when he gave Zelda Breath of The Wild a 7/10, 7 is a good score.

Think I will wait for it to be on sale somewhere down the line.

 

[DDutchguy]

Mediocre at best.

15 reviewers gave it an 8.0 or higher
11 gave it between a 7.0 and 7.9
6 gave it between a 6.0 and 6.9
1 gave it a 5.0

I don't think mediocre at best fits here. The scores aren't as high as people probably hoped for, but it seems the game is good, not great.

 

[Foxtrot94]

15 reviewers gave it an 8.0 or higher
11 gave it between a 7.0 and 7.9
6 gave it between a 6.0 and 6.9
1 gave it a 5.0

I don't think mediocre at best fits here. The scores aren't as high as people probably hoped for, but it seems the game is good, not great.

Right? I can't believe how effed up some people's view of scores is these days. Now an average of over 7 is mediocre? The heck? Nowadays it's like if it's not at least an 8 it's crap. I'm like, get your stuff together folks, ever since Earth started spinning, mediocre is a 5, or even a 6.
The vast majority of the scores seem to be positive and well beyond those numbers, and this once again goes to teach people that you should never judge a game out of some relatively trivial stuff like graphics (which totally should have been better coming from an AAA studio, on that everybody can agree I think). Which do have their importance but are not the one thing to base your judgement upon. If that was the case, The Order 1886 would be the best game ever developed in the history of mankind.

Saying that a game is mediocre at best, when the best scores are actually higher than 8 means you probably are as high as those numbers. And this is coming from someone who doesn't really care all that much for either this game or numerical scores in the first place. I'm just baffled by the way some people reason in the gaming fandom.

 

[DDutchguy]

Right? I can't believe how effed up some people's view of scores is these days. Now an average of over 7 is mediocre? The heck? Nowadays it's like if it's not at least an 8 it's crap. I'm like, get your stuff together folks, ever since Earth started spinning, mediocre is a 5, or even a 6.
The vast majority of the scores seem to be positive and well beyond those numbers, and this once again goes to teach people that you should never judge a game out of some relatively trivial stuff like graphics (which totally should have been better coming from an AAA studio, on that everybody can agree I think). Which do have their importance but are not the one thing to base your judgement upon. If that was the case, The Order 1886 would be the best game ever developed in the history of mankind.

Saying that a game is mediocre at best, when the best scores are actually higher than 8 means you probably are as high as those numbers. And this is coming from someone who doesn't really care all that much for either this game or numerical scores in the first place. I'm just baffled by the way some people reason in the gaming fandom.

While the facial animation thing became sort of a meme and as such got blown way out of proportion (where you're actively looking for the bad animations and ignoring all the good ones), I do think it's a valid complaint seeing how dialogue-heavy Bioware games have always been. I'll have to play for myself to see what it's actually like.

 

[Shadow]

It's amazing, to me, how many people are going out of their way to be killjoys about this game. So it has some issues, what game doesn't? There's no such thing as perfection. The goal is to have fun, right? In the end, what does it matter if there's a couple visual problems as long as you end up enjoying yourself?

Anyway, I'm curious how this one will go and looking forward to watching mum play. She's been really excited, so it'll be nice to see her finally get to play it.

 

[LordOfDarkness]

@Foxtrot94: I always start from 6. Anything between 6-10 is going from okay/good to awesome/great. 5 is just 'eh', it'd really depend on small factors if I thought it was a 5+ or a 5-

Then of course anything below 5 is just poor to awful.

As for the game itself, it looks alright. I'm not a Mass Effect fan, but it doesn't look too bad.

7 is a good score.

 

[DevilsTear]

This girl is lead facial animator for this game. Can you believe this?

 

[Foxtrot94]

This girl is lead facial animator for this game. Can you believe this?

No I don't, and you shouldn't either. That is reportedly false. See Dark Drakan's post in the previous page.

 

[Innsmouth]

Actually that post don't prove anything. It says she wasn't LEAD animator, yet, her job was facial animator. So can we finally stop defending poor quality and start to accept things for what they are?

 

[Dark Drakan]

Actually that post don't prove anything. It says she wasn't LEAD animator, yet, her job was facial animator. So can we finally stop defending poor quality and start to accept things for what they are?

No-one is defending poor quality, just not condoning a witch hunt against a single member of staff who apparently merely helped capture the faces for the motion capture part for EA labs rather than Bioware themselves (reportedly MANY other developers were in charge of actually porting those animations to the game).

Whole team should face scrutiny for poor end product rather than people throwing hateful and threatening messages towards a single person & blaming them solely. Just more 'GamerGate' fuel to the whole debacle yet again...

Based on what I have seen the game should have been delayed again as it clearly wasn't finished & needed much more polish than the released product received.

 

[DevilsTear]

Just said

 

[Innsmouth]

No-one is defending poor quality, just not condoning a witch hunt against a single member of staff who apparently merely helped capture the faces for the motion capture part for EA labs rather than Bioware themselves (reportedly MANY other developers were in charge of actually porting those animations to the game).

Whole team should face scrutiny for poor end product rather than people throwing hateful and threatening messages towards a single person & blaming them solely. Just more 'GamerGate' fuel to the whole debacle yet again...

Based on what I have seen the game should have been delayed again as it clearly wasn't finished & needed much more polish than the released product received.

Can we quit whole GamerGate debacle? Claim about poor animations was there since first trailer, and they simply ignored that. Than there was claim about ugly models and they ignored it and claimed #believablewomen. Than there was discovered that one of the core team members is openly racist. They still did nothing. Than they hired as writer woman who has no experience and the only time she was noticed when she claimed how she was sexually assaulted in GTAV.
Now that hands on there they simply hiding behind claims about #evilgamergate trying to cover their poor decisions and their stubborn pandering. Seriously, I dont consider personal insults a good way to show somebody's dissatisfaction, but I also dont think that studio should get free pass for low quality work, simply because they pull a victim card.

 

[Dark Drakan]

Can we quit whole GamerGate debacle? Claim about poor animations was there since first trailer, and they simply ignored that. Than there was claim about ugly models and they ignored it and claimed #believablewomen. Than there was discovered that one of the core team members is openly racist. They still did nothing. Than they hired as writer woman who has no experience and the only time she was noticed when she claimed how she was sexually assaulted in GTAV.
Now that hands on there they simply hiding behind claims about #evilgamergate trying to cover their poor decisions and their stubborn pandering. Seriously, I dont consider personal insults a good way to show somebody's dissatisfaction, but I also dont think that studio should get free pass for low quality work, simply because they pull a victim card.

Bioware didn't start the "GamerGate debacle" in the case referred to in this thread. I don't follow the whole nonsense & none of that really means anything to me.

However when people (Ethan Ralph) are making false claims in a blog post & inciting hate against individual & starting a witch hunt the media called him out on it and it's false facts. Not really a victim card in this case when the claims weren't true & were being used to push an agenda by the articles author.

As I said, no one is denying the animations are poor and the quality isn't up to standard. Just that its nonsense to blame a single person, but I've already said that multiple times. They said fixes for animations will come in time & have acknowledged they aren't up to standard. Plus Manveer Heir was fired a while ago too after complaints were made about him.

My guess would be that EA didn't want another delay & wanted the game to launch to push up its profits for a certain quarter. Bioware likely really needed another delay as a lot of the team are new & a lot of rookies on it as people have said but we have what we have. A shame because it had a lot of potential but it has fallen short of that.

 

[Innsmouth]

Bioware didn't start the "GamerGate debacle" in the case referred to in this thread. I don't follow the whole nonsense & none of that really means anything to me.

However when people (Ethan Ralph) are making false claims in a blog post & inciting hate against individual & starting a witch hunt the media called him out on it and it's false facts. Not really a victim card in this case when the claims weren't true & were being used to push an agenda by the articles author.

As I said, no one is denying the animations are poor and the quality isn't up to standard. Just that its nonsense to blame a single person, but I've already said that multiple times. They said fixes for animations will come in time & have acknowledged they aren't up to standard. Plus Manveer Heir was fired a while ago too after complaints were made about him.

My guess would be that EA didn't want another delay & wanted the game to launch to push up its profits for a certain quarter. Bioware likely really needed another delay as a lot of the team are new & a lot of rookies on it as people have said but we have what we have. A shame because it had a lot of potential but it has fallen short of that.

Manveer wasnt fired. He left after game was finished. Also like I said I dont support blame on one person, since I think lead animator is one at fault here. Also 6 years is more than enough to make decent game. … unless you're squeenix. xP

 

[Dark Drakan]

Manveer wasnt fired. He left after game was finished. Also like I said I dont support blame on one person, since I think lead animator is one at fault here. Also 6 years is more than enough to make decent game.

Ah I just read he no longer had a position at Bioware from one of the leads & a Reddit saying he was fired. He had removed all links to Bioware from his profiles too (just said previously worked on ME: Andromeda) so thought maybe there was more behind it.

Sounds to me like there were a decent amount of people on the team that simply didn't have the skill set for the task, hence why final product has been underwhelming. Can happen when direction has been lost in a project & the higher ups just keep telling you to go for quantity over quality. Im all for giving people a chance in the industry & hiring people from all areas but for them to start on such a high profile game within a AAA company was probably a mistake.

I'm not angry Bioware I'm just disappointed, you used to craft such wonderful, detailed RPG's & since EA took the reigns & the founders all retired you have continued on a downward spiral with each release. Games being remembered for the media circus that has shrouded every new title with negative headlines that you do nothing to help yourselves with, with questionable business decisions.