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Author Topic: Mass Effect Andromeda  (Read 63665 times)
Rasix
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Reply #175 on: March 31, 2017, 10:37:10 AM


-Rasix
HaemishM
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Reply #176 on: March 31, 2017, 11:02:31 AM

Touche.  why so serious?

Maledict
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Reply #177 on: March 31, 2017, 11:07:42 AM

It's worth noting that male Ryder doesn't look anywhere near that good in game. He looks fucking awful to be honest - half the time he appears stoned. The picture used in that comparison is in no way reflective of how he appears in game.
Sir T
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Reply #178 on: March 31, 2017, 06:07:20 PM

Just adding to the general WTF after watching those videos, but...

How the hell did she not notice she was crosseyed from the first scene? Did they not play through their own game?

Hic sunt dracones.
rk47
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Reply #179 on: March 31, 2017, 06:53:04 PM


Colonel Sanders is back in my wallet
jakonovski
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Reply #180 on: April 01, 2017, 04:43:04 AM

The only good Ryder is the Asian female preset.
Trippy
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Reply #181 on: April 01, 2017, 08:18:33 AM

The only good Ryder is the Asian female preset.
The last one is okay too. All of the semi-decent custom non-Asian female faces I've seen are based on that one. Another bonus is her facial animations are apparently not as janky as default SisRyder (more evidence to some that default SisRyder was intentionally fucked up).
Father mike
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Reply #182 on: April 01, 2017, 10:25:33 AM

Found this article interesting.

https://www.vg247.com/2017/03/24/former-bioware-animator-explains-why-animations-in-mass-effect-andromeda-are-the-way-they-are/

The gist of the article is that they generated most of the animations with an algorithm.  Important character/story moments were tuned by an animator, but low priority conversations were never re-touched.  This resulted in the lip-synch only, dead-eyed stare so prevalent thru the game.


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Reg
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Reply #183 on: April 01, 2017, 10:38:05 AM

So they were too cheap to animate a high-priced AAA title properly. How typically EA. I guess the next step is to get rid of the Bioware name and incorporate them into the hive.
Sir T
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Reply #184 on: April 01, 2017, 10:43:01 AM

That's EA's MO after all.

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Reg
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Reply #185 on: April 01, 2017, 10:52:51 AM

Yep. Once EA buys a studio they're doomed. They may last a few more years but they're always destroyed in the end. It makes me sad.
Maledict
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Reply #186 on: April 01, 2017, 10:58:22 AM

To be fair, Bioware have been working on this for **5** years. That's an astronomical length of time in the industry. During that time period, EA also funded Bioware to develop an entirely new IP which they ended up cancelling as it wasn't working out - Shadow realms. I don't think this one can be lamed on EA.

(also, we know from early interviews that Bioware spent a lot of time on procedural generated stuff that hasn't worked out - they talked about 100s of worlds, and of being able to fly your ship into the atmosphere to land. They also spoke a lot about new tech to make the alien NPC faces varied and distinct, which clearly didn't pan out. Seems like they wasted a good length of time developing tech that didn't work and so had to rush the game together at the end)
« Last Edit: April 01, 2017, 03:04:35 PM by Maledict »
Reg
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Reply #187 on: April 01, 2017, 11:12:24 AM

Fair enough. But that's just the kind of screw up that EA uses as a reason to take away a studio's name. How long did Maxis last after the latest Simcity fiasco?
Special J
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Reply #188 on: April 04, 2017, 06:46:57 AM

Went on for some multiplayer.  Here's how my session went:

1. 2 players drop, mission failed
2. Died & fell down a pit. Can't get out next wave. I drop out.
3. Full Extraction YAYYYY!
4. Ok this group's going well, despite connecting to a new host twice we're cruising to Wave 6^^^^Crash to dashboard

Fuck this.

Trippy
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Reply #189 on: April 04, 2017, 07:42:52 AM

You left out:

5. Host has shit connection and everybody but him is rubber banding
6. Some asshole has his mic activated and is blasting 100 db of static
Special J
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Reply #190 on: April 04, 2017, 08:36:02 AM

Oh yes! Those have happened too.

Did you say rubber banding?
Jeff Kelly
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Reply #191 on: April 04, 2017, 08:49:46 AM

How much of it is Frostbite? There now has been a host of EA games that had glaring issues post release after switching over to Frostbite. Some of it is probably due to the learning curve that comes from switching to a whole new framework and set of toolkits. You don't get that sort of brokenness though with Unreal, IDtech or Unity.
HaemishM
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Reply #192 on: April 04, 2017, 08:52:57 AM

I don't think it's Frostbite. While DICE has always had a little bit of launch trouble, I don't think they've had nearly as much since creating Frostbite. Now another dev house trying to LEARN Frostbite might have issues related to documentation, but I don't think the engine is going to be the main problem.

Special J
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Reply #193 on: April 04, 2017, 10:43:58 AM

If you'd like to add some extra derp to your character, go talk to Drack in the galley.  The lighting there is interesting.

Velorath
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Reply #194 on: April 04, 2017, 07:48:24 PM

Went on for some multiplayer.  Here's how my session went:

1. 2 players drop, mission failed
2. Died & fell down a pit. Can't get out next wave. I drop out.
3. Full Extraction YAYYYY!
4. Ok this group's going well, despite connecting to a new host twice we're cruising to Wave 6^^^^Crash to dashboard

Fuck this.



You left out:

5. Host has shit connection and everybody but him is rubber banding
6. Some asshole has his mic activated and is blasting 100 db of static



While I'm not loving the multiplayer, I haven't really had many technical issues after the first week or so. Mostly my issues have been trying to do APEX missions and ending up in a group that has the same map and enemy selected but isn't doing the mission (it will say custom game rather than the name of the mission). Also the problem where you're trying to disarm a device and you'll get interrupted for no reason.

For the mics I just mute everybody. I haven't looked since I don't use a mic with this game, but I'm guessing there's no push-to-talk setting. The only thing I ever feel the need for a mic for is when a group goes to the extraction point right at the start of the last round. Also when I'm cloaked trying to disarm a device and someone who isn't cloaked is standing right next to me "defending" which is really just drawing more enemies to the area and getting me hit by stray blasts.

Problems aside I think I probably have around an 80% success rate, even in Gold. Kett seem to be the hardest enemy and most failures are due to Hack or Upload areas getting overrun by Ascendants and Fiends
Ceryse
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Reply #195 on: April 04, 2017, 08:33:11 PM

I haven't really gotten into the multiplayer; still only completed three matches. Since then I've had a number of issues with games just dropping, crashing, lagging, or otherwise being unplayable.

Also, they revealed their announcement today (which they announced the announcing a couple days ago), which boils down to; 'um, yeah.. patch Thursday, a couple fixes to some really stupid shit we did, and we plan to try to fix some other really stupid shit we did over the next two months'.

Andromeda could have been a good game, even with some of the brain-dead design decisions baked into it and the shoddy plot/writing.. if it had been delayed 3-6 months for proper QAing, animation touch-ups and adding a bit more thought to the pacing of dialogues.

Hell, apparently they didn't allow in-house animators who offered to touch up human animations to do so.. because management didn't think it would be necessary due to their facial scanning technology and EA Bucharest handling the human/Asari animations.
Strazos
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Reply #196 on: April 05, 2017, 03:16:52 AM

This whole thing seems like a clusterfuck - so sad that no longer are BioWare games the sort that I can blindly buy with confidence. DA2 was meh, I barely touched DA:I at all, and I'll probably go back and play ME3 eventually. ME1 and 2 were great, as was DA:O, as well as the older Baldur's Gate games and KotOR.

What the fuck happened?

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Jeff Kelly
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Reply #197 on: April 05, 2017, 03:21:20 AM

EA happened
Reg
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Reply #198 on: April 05, 2017, 03:21:40 AM

EA happened. Followed by the exit of the Bioware founders. Followed by the exit of their best employees.
Velorath
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Reply #199 on: April 05, 2017, 06:42:47 AM

It's easy to blame EA, but really how many development studios do maintain a consistent quality over the course of a couple decades especially when it comes to developers that can't can go years without releasing a game (unlike Blizzard, Valve, or Rockstar and even they have had some bad games/internal drama). James Ohlen, who was a key part of most of their early successes through KOTR ended up in Austin as Lead Designer on SWTOR and then was the director on that Shadow Realms game that got canceled. Casey Hudson got hired by MS to be creative director of Microsoft Studios. The Doctors retired. To some extent this just feels like the way things go in the games industry outside of the rare instances of guys like Miyamoto sticking with one company for 40 years.
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Reply #200 on: April 05, 2017, 07:14:41 AM

Precedent.

Its not just Bioware. Its every studio EA bought at least since Origin.

Maybe those creative types don't want to work in a strict corporate environment and it isn't EA specifically? I wouldn't know enough to speculate here. But EA is the common variable in all those franchises becoming shitty.
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Reply #201 on: April 05, 2017, 07:52:46 AM

EA is a known shittycompany to work for from even outsider knowledge. From high hours with low compensation to drive for market value over other concerns. If Your company gets bought and you stick around it's because you weren't skilled enough or mobile enough to leave. Talent doesn't stay there because suits make the money, like other corporations.

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Jeff Kelly
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Reply #202 on: April 05, 2017, 09:14:51 AM

It's easy to blame EA, but really how many development studios do maintain a consistent quality over the course of a couple decades especially when it comes to developers that can't can go years without releasing a game (unlike Blizzard, Valve, or Rockstar and even they have had some bad games/internal drama). James Ohlen, who was a key part of most of their early successes through KOTR ended up in Austin as Lead Designer on SWTOR and then was the director on that Shadow Realms game that got canceled. Casey Hudson got hired by MS to be creative director of Microsoft Studios. The Doctors retired. To some extent this just feels like the way things go in the games industry outside of the rare instances of guys like Miyamoto sticking with one company for 40 years.

EA has a documented history of buying and then screwing up companies. There exist on the record statements by former employees and owners of companies EA has purchased (e.g. Origin, Westwood, Maxis even Bioware) in part even court documented statements that describe in detail exactly how EA shits all over its acquisitions and how the EA company culture makes it so that the acquisitions can no longer produce great games but only shitty bug ridden messes that are focus tested and market researched to hell and back.

Shitty pay, psychotic, dysfunctional corporate culture, long hours, focus on cost cutting, efficiency and bottom line, creative development driven by suits and market research, focus testing and current hot trends only. A focus on cheap and young wide eyed rookies (cost less and stick around longer because they are lured with the promise of 'breaking into the industry') over experienced talent and a perchant for shutting down everything that even slightly underperforms. You don't have to look too hard to find ample material about just how toxic EA can be.

EA has been the focus of a host of law suits by former employees and former studio over everything from shady business practices and misconduct to breach of contract and mistreatment of employees (EA spouse and the ensuring string of lawsuits serve as an example).

What usually happens is that the original owners are forced out or bought out, key talent leaves because "fuck that shitty corporate culture" or gets replaced by rookies to 'cut costs', project timelines get 'streamlined' and bugets get cut and when the end result doesn't perfom well the whole studio gets shut down.

Bioware is simply the last studio in a long line of others that suffers because of EA
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Reply #203 on: April 05, 2017, 11:18:00 AM

It's definitely the EA curse, but probably also the drain created by having to do such a huge budget MMO in SWOTR. Not only does even a live, F2P MMO drain a lot of good company resources, I'd guess MMO development and maintenance wears even harder on a creative type than the shitty EA culture. Combine the two? Recipe for nothingness.

Hell, I'm surprised DICE has been able to make a good game since then - BF4 was awesome (for the genre) but I haven't given a shit about any of the ones they've released since. So maybe their decline is in full effect.

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Reply #204 on: April 05, 2017, 11:30:15 AM

Dice is in good shape, so far. BF1 is good.

Rasix
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Reply #205 on: April 05, 2017, 02:55:53 PM

You know it's bad when my friend at work that has a N7 shirt, N7 jacket, along with tons of other Mass Effect merchandise, cancelled his pre-orders (he bought one for his brother too) when I told him to take an actual look at how bad the initial impressions were.  His final comment (I kind of wanted to see his reaction to it, so I tried to goad him into buying it  why so serious?), "I'm not paying for crap."

I had really low expectations for this, and I usually cave to my inner fanboy. But it's going to take me a long time to get anywhere near this title.

Now, continue with the EA bashing.

-Rasix
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Reply #206 on: April 05, 2017, 03:09:06 PM

Precedent.

Its not just Bioware. Its every studio EA bought at least since Origin.

Yeah, I get it. Way back in the day EA bought a lot of dev studios people really liked and shuttered them after trying to exploit the IP's so in the case of Bioware it fits a narrative people already have in their head and it provides an easy answer without any critical thinking. This is of course despite the fact that most of the acquisitions that people are remembering took place in the 90's under what was mostly, if not entirely different executive team. It also ignores major successes some of these studios released post-acquisition (The Sims, Ultima Online), and the fact that many of the key figures involved in these shuttered studios like Garriott and Molyneux have since become punchlines without any help from EA.

Meanwhile, you know what other publishers have gotten reputations for exploiting IP's, treating their studios and key personnel poorly, or buying studios or dev teams and then ruining them? The answer is: Most of them. There's what happened between Activision and the IW founders, Ubisoft's treatment of Assassin's Creed creator Patrice Désilets (which also includes buying the studio he went to after leaving Ubisoft and then firing him), Microsoft buying up Bungie (a much-loved studio which had a heavy focus on making Mac games) and then having them make nothing but Halo games for the next decade, also the large number of studios that MS has shut down, most of Blizzard North's key people leaving supposedly partly because of Vivendi, Ken Levine laying off most of the Irrational Games team after Bioshock Infinite released because he felt like working on something smaller, the rumors of poor working conditions for the Rockstar team that made Red Dead Redemption, whatever happened between Konami and Kojima, all the studios that THQ dragged down with it, etc...

That's not even getting to all the developers/publishers that imploded on their own with no outside help like Interplay and Ion Storm, or the Blizzard North guys that made Flagship Studios, released Hellgate: London, and then promptly went out of business. Bioware remaining an independent studio wouldn't have guaranteed its success. Part of what made it open for a purchase was that they had partnered with a private equity fund which invested $300 million dollars into the partnership. The partnership also included Pandemic which maybe wasn't the best fit. This was also around the time Jade Empire released which wasn't a huge seller. Dragon Age was stuck in a long development cycle having been started at the end of 2002 (and didn't see release until 2009). They had their publishing deal with MS for Mass Effect which I'm sure helped keep them afloat for a while, but even if EA hadn't bought them somebody else would have. Possibly MS, and I can't imagine that would have ended any better for Bioware in the long run.

I don't have any particular affection for EA (or for any publisher outside of maybe Nintendo if you just look at the software side of the company). I don't think "game studio not that good anymore 20 years later" requires much of an explanation though. We're actually having the start of a pretty good year in major releases so far with stuff like Zelda and Horizon, but overall in the last several years how many releases from major publisher has anyone here been excited about? We can't blame EA for Fallout 4, Halo 5, Final Fantasy XV, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided or the last five or so Assassin's Creed games.

Edit: Also the "blame EA" thing ignores the fact that Bioware had already started transitioning on their own away from a PC game focus where all their success had been up until that point to developing more for consoles starting with KOTOR and Jade Empire. Some of you may recall that Bioware didn't even develop the PC port of the first Mass Effect and that port was released half a year later than the console version.
« Last Edit: April 05, 2017, 04:30:15 PM by Velorath »
Merusk
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Reply #207 on: April 05, 2017, 06:47:41 PM

You would have a point if:

1) There did not exist other creative industries that could maintain quality 20 years later or after founders left.

2) There were not other GAME companies who have maintained quality for as long, including after founders left.

3) There was not a well-documented history of one company in particular screwing things up harder than most and more consistently than the other big publishers they are competing with.


You have this odd history of saying "EA's not any worse than other companies."  We've had this conversation before. I remain befuddled by it.

The only thing I can agree with is that game companies tend to be run by idiot man-children leading to squabbles and internet-level petty arguments that destroy them.

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Reply #208 on: April 05, 2017, 07:26:35 PM

EA has way too much of a track record at this stage for the "EA effect" to be dismissed out of hand with "both sides do it."

I played DA:I for 2 hours and then gave up after the umteenth time of my character swinging at thin air for 5 seconds. I don't know what the hell they did to the combat in that game but it sucked. Also my character looked completely ridiculous with shiny plastic hair and shinier lip gloss. I'd rather dig out DA and actually try and finish it this time. Which actually isn't a bad idea, come to think of it.

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Velorath
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Reply #209 on: April 05, 2017, 09:20:08 PM

You would have a point if:

1) There did not exist other creative industries that could maintain quality 20 years later or after founders left.

2) There were not other GAME companies who have maintained quality for as long, including after founders left.

3) There was not a well-documented history of one company in particular screwing things up harder than most and more consistently than the other big publishers they are competing with.


You have this odd history of saying "EA's not any worse than other companies."  We've had this conversation before. I remain befuddled by it.

The only thing I can agree with is that game companies tend to be run by idiot man-children leading to squabbles and internet-level petty arguments that destroy them.

Other creative industries are not the same as the game industry. If you'd like though we can go into the parallels with the film industry at a similar time the each industries lifespan and look at rises and declines in various studios outputs over the span of two decades but that's going to be a much longer conversation.

Personally I'd say that people here have an odd history of saying "EA is the worst" because they're still upset over shit that happened 20-25 years ago when the truth is, "yes, the game industry as a whole is shitty to the people who actually make games" and EVERY major publisher has very public shit you can point to that shows it. Point to all the major game companies that have maintained quality for decades. Point to game development studios, especially PC focused ones that have remained independent since the 90's, have survived and continue to be relevant, please because I'm having trouble thinking of many examples and the exceptions are being far outweighed by the rule. Even the ones I'm thinking of still have key personnel from the early days in place. And one of those makes most of its money as a digital store these days.

I listed about 8 or 9 examples of shit other game companies have done and I could spend the next several hours here listing a lot more, like rumors of internal conflict causing the departure of Amy Hennig and other key people from Naughty Dog, or former Valve employees suggesting that the corporate culture wasn't quite how the Valve handbook paints it to be, or just about anything that has ever come out of Bobby Kotick's mouth. The best some people can throw back is "but Bullfrog, Westwood, Maxis, and Origin!". The shift that's gone on in the industry from the 90's heyday of developers that specifically made PC's games, to now when everything is developed for PC and Consoles would cause me to guess that none of those studios would be around now in the form that we know them anyway. I feel like people are envisioning some alternate reality where if EA didn't exist that we'd somehow still be getting Ultima and Populous games right now instead of disasters like Molyneux's Curiosity.

My thing that EA is not worse than most other game companies is because to lay the blame for Bioware's decline squarely on their shoulders is lazy. It ignores every other bit of context about working conditions in the industry as a whole and how the market has changed in the last 20-30 years. It's a one-line answer that provides zero insight and it looks at things in a vacuum rather than examining the factors that caused these studios to get bought up in the first place and the fact that most of these studios had niche audiences to begin with that we just happened to be a part of. I mean, is the implication that EA did not give them the time or the money to complete the project properly? I'm pretty sure that the game had more of both than most of Bioware's previous projects.  Did EA nefariously go back in time and somehow get Bioware to hire Mac Walters years before EA would acquire Bioware? I could see maybe blaming EA for rushing DA2 but most of the issues with ME3, DA:I, and ME:A all seem self-inflicted by Bioware. ME3 in particular largely had issues at a story level and I don't think EA execs were rewriting the script.

You want to know how Bioware could have completed this game properly with the time and budget they had and still been able to polish all the animation? They could have dropped about half the side quests and dialogue from the game. There's a ton of bloat that I've been spamming the space bar to get through when I can get myself to actually play the game. They thought they were doing Witcher 3 side quests but completely missed the mark and the vast majority could have been trimmed from the game to make an overall better product. It's purely a case of quantity over quality, and again I think it's a decision that came straight from Bioware. I don't imagine there was a mandate from EA that they had to have hundreds of hours of dull side quests.

But whatever, it's all EA's fault. They also killed Crytek, LucasArts, Silicon Knights, Troika, all the celebrities that died last year, developed AIDs in a lab, and are probably anally raping all our mothers right now.
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