As far as if any other studio had produced this would we still be disappointed?? Well, I will assume you are talking top line AAA studios and not an Indie one, but....
Story...no, If Beth, Ubi, or many others I would have been happy to see a story this to a point well written to try and mesh characters, action and exploration. Problem is Bioware made their name on doing exactly this, and this product was decent, needed fleshing out and not up to their standards.
Graphics....yes and no....the planets, most aliens and general stuff are beautiful and you can see the effort and care SOME things are given. The issue is either the engine, the use of the engine or just lack of skill in TOTAL that creates the issue. When main characters, such as Addison, and Female Ryder have such GLARING issues it creates a disconnect to the game. When you can see an obvious effort to NOT make female characters good looking, it creates a disconnect in a Sci-Fi/Fantasy game. When characters do wonky things cause the engine is borked, it creates a disconnect. And while pretty other stuff can hide some things, the obvious disconnect stuff wouldn't be tolerated in just about ANY game dev. You have a Battle Field game and your character "break dances" either in a cutscene or moving around the map and it isn't acceptable on a AAA title. When you want to cuss and jerk back from the screen because of the weird facial animations or looks of characters it isn't acceptable from an AAA dev.
Quest....yes and no...it was almost like they couldn't decide if they wanted a more Morrowwind style quest system where stuff is in your Journal and you found stuff through exploration or if they wanted a more ME2/Skyrim system where markers lead you to everything....either is fine, but require different support when doing them, and this made many quests seem broken when actually they were just not handled properly. And yeah, some were broken.
All in all, it isn't a bad game, it is actually fairly decent if you just look at it from a stand alone point and not expect ME trilogy quality from it. I agree with you in that yeah, I don't think anyone ever played it beginning to end....and I think that was because of the troubles in production. Most of this can be laid directly at Bioware's management's feet in dropping this title on a production studio that wasn't ready for it and didn't include any truly experienced oversite people to watchdog them. At the end you can tell from stories and the final game, someone came in, kicked butt enough to get the product out the door, but failed to really check the product or maybe just didn't want to delay it any. The game is a story of ALMOSTS....it is almost a great game, the studio could almost handle it, it was almost ready for release, and it almost had a chance to be supported longer.
Almost is sad, cause I can see what it COULD have been with just a bit more work and polish, plus a few DLCs.
True, the plot is the actual problem with the writing. Individual roles and scenes are well written. Funny in places, poignant in others, self-justifying when needed - for the most part, good stuff. The overarching plot is what never seems to get it together. And I think I will never get past the fact that my Ryder looks and sounds like she only just got her learner's permit (should they be letting her drive a high-tech all terrain vehicle around on unexplored planets more or less unsupervised?). In places, the writing tries too much to be 'current' and sacrifices a little piece of immersion with every line.
I've heard the "ugly women on purpose" theory before, and I'm sorry, but I lol'd, and still am. This is far from the first game in which the character generator was *one of the first things doctored up by modders due to extreme limitation of customization choices, and usually for the female characters. Inquisition had the same issues, but this gets modded out the wazoo in Bethesda games, DAO, DA2, and on and on...the eyebrows were particularly alarming this time through. But since all the human random generated toons looked either suspiciously inbred, bland, or unattractive, regardless of gender, I'm going to be on the side of 'general art department failure' and not 'SJW conspiracy'.
If you wanna stretch it to "less graphics choices/resources = works better on a console" then you've wandered out of your tin-foil hat territory and into mine.
Most of the character models had puzzling design decisions... You might be able to get away with using the same mesh for all like-gender members of a species, but not humans, and not one that shares as many facial similarities with humans, like the asari. Giving them all the same face gives it the feel of a different kind of sci-fi movie. This is backed up by the weird adaptation of facial markings by other races, when before only turians had facial tats, and asari had colorful skin striping on a variable blue base color. Now everybody has em, and it's jarring enough to be lore-breaking. Green and pink turians look like they need to be in quarantine until a cure is found.
Frostbite, as I've said before, seems to generate stunning environments. They all look beautiful and immersive. Character models must be some other module, like combat, inventory, questing, etc. And whoever was responsible for character skins/textures stopped when they got to "Hey, it's working....close enough".
Looks like the quest team, just ran out of time to chase down the problems. Un marked collection quests would be fine, if you weren't looking for a needle in a haystack made up of needles you didn't want. Misfiring banter at sites, and far too many *unmarked places to look. I call myself a completionist usually, but this game made me lose interest in completing the unmarked random tasks.
Random break dance glitches become funny memes, but so many problems in a top tier game from a top tier studio, when you know they can do better, are hard to really chuckle about.
*Edited for grammar and clarity
I will be honest....I wouldn't have given the idea the time of day, that they would intentionally make female characters not as pretty, EXCEPT for one simple fact. They obviously based Scott Ryder off his male voice actor....no it isn't perfect and yeah, he still has some funny quirks due to the AI facial controls, but he is CLOSE. Then you take Sara Ryder, and you look at her, then go find a picture of her voice actress.....NOT EVEN CLOSE. IF the art department quirked it up this bad that they were TRYING to make Sara look close to here voice Actress and got what they produced.....then yeah, they deserved to be fired. Then after I started looking into some of this and hearing some stories about how Bioware was leaning toward catering to that crowd, and I found the Day one patch changes to Sara's face. The changes weren't from making her bad to better, it was actually reverse....they actually made Sara look WORSE after the day one patch and they never reverted her back to the Day one look that I am aware. So you combine the hair styles chosen for women, the horrible creator choices for women, where you work to make a good looking character, and the obvious close resemblance of Scott Ryder and I came to the conclusion that it is a definite probability they actually didn't want women to be really pretty in MEA, and a more "Girl next door" look
And as an example of them NOT looking at total game when it comes to characters story and plot, I give you Liam and Vetra. IF you think about the back story and jobs of those two characters, their personalities are reversed. It is like somewhere in the production they had to reverse them(SJW, plot points, romance, Mars was in the wrong quadrant of Jupiter....I don't know) and no one ever went back and looked how it didn't make sense with their backstories and jobs. Liam isn't in any way shape form or fashion, suited to be either Security head OR from Crisis Response....think about how he acts....is he REALLY who you would want to be first in during a crisis?? Is he who you would want to set up your security and run a team?? Now think of Vetra, calm cool, collected, SHE is who you would want on a crises team...., but as a character I think she would have been better to have more of Liam's lines, and vice versa.
@mcsupersport wrote:
... Now think of Vetra, calm cool, collected, SHE is who you would want on a crises team...
Oh so true! I hadn't thought of the disconnect between roles and personalities, but you're right. Too bad she didn't get the attention (from the writers) she deserved. 😞
They neither of them were based on the voice actor. Each had face models. Steven Brewis and Jayde Rossi. To my eye, they both look like the model, but the texture from the Brewis scan was reworked from the original to work in the ingame environment. A straight scan is always going to look like a death mask once you hang it on a mesh and subject it to in game scaling and lighting. For whatever reason, the Rossi texture wasn't processed properly in some of the images that were released early on, but were never actually in the game. Still they made it into the memes. I never use the default character and roll my own, but default Sarah is pretty.
Animations are still sometimes weird. The facial tracking seemed broken, and the shading non existent, at least until the patch, making your character look like a muppet in several scenes. For sure, it doesn't look right. Even my custom Ryder, I still can't wait to get past the first scenes and off the ark... I don't know what's going on there, but even with a custom Ryder and the improved shading, there is something wrong with the eyes and animation. I've played too many games where the character creator gave you too few options to work with, and you had to spend some time at it. Pre-Frostbite BW games just plain did that better. And most all of those aforementioned games had community mods that made custom characters look like models. For whatever reason, nobody cried SJW over those games, and I can't really see the difference between this custom creator and Skyrim's as far as putting together a face I could like seeing in cutscenes for the next 60 or more hours. Either game, I spent the first two evenings just creating my character.
FemShep runs like a cowboy, and SisRyder suffers from the same gait. I'm not sure if that was a technical limitation or a design flaw, but I wouldn't throw a SJW/IMD (or whatever the opposite is) warning banner on it and run it up the flagpole. It just looks wrong.
I don't see a SJW conspiracy under the bed here, just a game that had five years of effort go in, and disappointment pop out the other side. If Liam bugs you now, imagine playing SisRyder and knowing he's meant to be appealing to the player as a romance option. Like Peebee, he is immature, yet occasionally funny to me, but spends most of his time cooling his heels back on the Tempest in my game. Gil plays for another team, so Jaal suddenly becomes the only interesting guy on the ship. However, I do not take away from it that this production decision is anything except a disappointing production decision.
Conspiracy theories on the Internet are like skin pores - everyone has a billion, and on examination never look up close the way they do from a distance.
@mcsupersport wrote:
I will be honest....I wouldn't have given the idea the time of day, that they would intentionally make female characters not as pretty, EXCEPT for one simple fact. They obviously based Scott Ryder off his male voice actor....no it isn't perfect and yeah, he still has some funny quirks due to the AI facial controls, but he is CLOSE. Then you take Sara Ryder, and you look at her, then go find a picture of her voice actress.....NOT EVEN CLOSE.
They're supposedly based on the models (Steven Brewis and Jayde Rossi), not on the voice actors (Tom Taylorson and Fryda Wolff). (Edit: Posted above. I took so long to type this that I missed the previous reply.)
Many of BioWare's characters are modeled after someone and it's spot on (e.g. Shepard / Mark Vanderloo, Liara / Jillian Murray, Illusive Man / Jon Briddell). In more rare occasions, they look nothing like the model at all (Leliana / Alleykatze). (Tip: Don't google Alleykatze at work with the safe search off.)
My theory is that they prioritized Scott Ryder's appearance because more players pick male protagonists when given the choice, and because he was featured in earlier game demos. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't base Sara on any model at all and only claimed she was based on one so that there couldn't be claims that the two default appearances weren't treated equally (like in Mass Effect 1 and 2). To go back to the example of Dragon Age: Alleykatze and Victorria Johnson (Morrigan) were used in promotional material (a news post and a cinematic trailer), but not in the game, so I suspect it's more of a marketing thing.
I honestly don't see anything wrong with default Sara's appearance other than the goofy facial animations. Same with Cora or Cassandra Penthagast, who received similar criticisms. Appearances are subjective, of course, but I think think the outrage is spectacularly overblown. If all the men in this game looked like Liam Hemsworth and all the women looked like the witches of Crookback Bog, then I'd believe it were intentional.
@mcsupersport wrote:
they actually made Sara look WORSE after the day one patch
I strongly disagree, but again, it's subjective.
@Fred_vdp wrote:
@mcsupersport wrote:
they actually made Sara look WORSE after the day one patch
I strongly disagree, but again, it's subjective.
mcsupersport; I believe the expression you meant to use was, "... made Sara look less classically beautiful..." 😉
And as Fred_vdp said, "beauty = beholder". :eahigh_file:
