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:
@Fred_vdp wrote: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.
Well, I did have in mind when i was writing the response you reference how default FemShep looked. She looked like a character generated pudding in the first two games, and in the third was dev created, based on fan voting, but to my knowledge not a face model, unless I missed that.
I tried her in one play through, and didn't like the results. Again, a collection of little issues that made her look not quite right in the game to me, and it looked weird. Some of the only images of her that I liked it turned out were fan art of default FemShep so good that BW made them available for download.
Of course, my custom FemShep, canon in all my games, became my standard and all others lack the same value to me. But that's my headcanon, and there was never a model-sourced FemShep default to compare her to. I also assumed that they spent more time and care on the target demographic appearance, which actually didn't bother me since I don't ever use the provided default and create my own. To my mind, they could save some money and skip the default actor-scanned appearances and I'd miss nothing. Players who want a fast start can hit random in the custom appearance screens a few times until they wind up with something not too bad and click Start.
I bypassed a lot of the online frenzy by not taking part in any pre-release speculation. My pre-Andromeda existence was so spoiler free that my buddies online would poke fun at me for it. I've muted people in Teamspeak for even hinting at dropping information. I saw nothing, and I mean nothing, of the game until the day it dropped, and that was by my choice. So I never got worked into a state by the various rumors making their way through the fan base - I just wanted to take the game on face value without all the freaking out in the online forums. When I came out of my Andromeda isolation the first thing I heard was that the animations were awful, and the female characters ugly-on-purpose. What I saw was a game that wasn't done cooking and could have spent another year in the oven.
I am not in the stereotyped industry target demographic. I've been a gamer a long time. Do I think the character creator lacked options? Yes, absolutely. Do I think it was because of SJW engineering? No. Do I think that the lack of it in previous games was due to chauvinistic, sexist or racist developers? No. I've played a great many games which lacked any real choice at all in character appearance, so yes, its hard for me to get excited (or even raise an eyebrow) on this topic without substantial reason to do so. I just haven't heard any.
I really don't know if it was a lack of skill, lack of time, lack of polish, SJW values, art direction, desire to appeal more to women, or just a bad game engine when dealing with faces, but the sad fact is MOST characters have a mediocre to odd appearance, to ME. Some make sense, others are just head scratchers...changes in Krogan faces and accents, watching the Alpha build of saving the Krogan colony ending, and then seeing the final release....Sara looking so different than her model, compared to Scott's looking close to his, ALL the Asari having same faces, lack of facial markings on Turians, Peebee raccoon swipe(reminded me of a DA2 reference), All these just made me wonder what happened.... We will probably never know as Bioware will not say, and EA closed the doors of the studio....so maybe that WAS explanation....lol.
Personally, Cassandra from DAI, is one of my favorite characters from that game. She is tough, good to have in the party, loved the story behind her, her soft spot for smutty romance, and after seeing her in game for a short while, I really liked the Face and model used. When playing a male Inquisitor, she is my romance character. The thing is, her facial scaring, and personality all match her story and character. You really shouldn't expect a front line character, who has fought dragons, templars, demons, and a whole host of other things to come out without some scars and the shorter hair means it fits under helms and can't be grabbed in a melee.
I think the biggest issue I have is, I can overlook some "marginal design choices" if the story and characters are good enough. I am not a fan of Sera's looks in DAI, but I like her character because she is interesting and different, but in MEA, they couldn't or didn't pull off the it's ok to be mediocre if you are interesting trick, for me at least. Liam, I wanted to air lock him, PeeBee was ok but looked too young I guess, and acted more like her father should have been a Salarian instead of a Elcor. Suvi was one of my favorites of the crew, along with the Dr Lexi, Vetra, Cora, Jaal and Drak....the rest I would have been happy to NOT be there or have radical changes.
Rewrites I would make.......
Liam....you meet him on the Nexus, he is supply officer..aka Vetra's job. You keep his loyalty mission, cause it makes sense that he was working the system and gave out data he shouldn't trying to finesse the system. You keep his actions to try and get you to scan the market and even trade with Jaal naked, these would then all fit his personality better and job description.
Vetra...oddity is she is on the Human vessel, BECAUSE Alec required it. While he wasn't a fan of non-humans, he saw the usefulness of Vetra when she saved him, and her background of Crisis response and security made her too good to pass up. As a favor to her to get her on board, her sister is brought along as part of a special patherfinder liason. After docking with Nexus, Vetra helps set up better security on the Nexus and her sister stays behind as a tech to help. Most of her loyalty mission can remain the same, with some dialog tweeks to make it work.
Swap the models and characters between Peebee and Lexi. Peebee then becomes the Dr. on board the ship...not sure she wants to be there, because she never planned on it, and not sure she wants the danger or upheaval. Lexi then becomes the smart researcher studying the Remenant, calm cool and collected. Lexi then becomes the love interest and takes over the science hall instead of Jaal.
ODD TANGENT----
What is Bioware trying to say about men in the game?? Take on these ideas and say "WHAT??"
1) Liam, straight love interest....basically an idiot and totally doesn't make sense based on his history or jobs.
2) Drak...Man's Man character..raised his grand-daughter, but is a relic of the past and will soon die.
3) Hark...krogan scientist, incredibly smart, but can't fight, isn't tough..aka would be called a wimp...gets the girl in the end, and is called the Future of Krogan.
4) Spender....human weasel...just a low life piece of self serving trash...
5) Number 8.....incompetent and while in charge isn't someone you trust.
6) Jaal...good fighter, smart, tough but always talking about feelings, opposite of Drak in he is fairly young and has a future.
7) Alec....ruthless, caring...DIES...
8) Gil...homosexual romance....smart, not a planner, effective in keeping the ship going.
Now look at the women....
8) Cora....male love interest....effective, trained, good looking, powerful, SHOULD have been pathfinder.
9) Lexi...smart, good looking, trained, educated, effective, doctor who keeps you all alive.
10) Vetra..smart, trained, effective, supplies trip and gets troubles out of your way.
11) Peebee...love interest....young, smartest in the room on Remanent, effective, powerful.
12) Kesh...smart, effective, tough, respected, keeps station alive.
13) Suvi....smart, absent minded but that is because of her extreme intelligence, educated, and effective as science officer.
So what patterns do you see, and what can you take from it???
Me, it seems like someone is trying to say something.....but you decide. HMMMMM???
@voteDCI hear ya. I did last a lot longer but I pretty much agree with all your points. Once I figured out my sniper build, which ruled, I never felt like playing anything else to be honest so I just stuck with that. So I didn't get the replay value from trying different classes cause when I did my second playthrough and tried something else it was just easier to go back to sniping and sod the rest.
It seems that Anthem will be the next evolution of ME combat. Instead of jump jets you get flight jets and you can also switch classes/javelins on your character. So not sure that game will hold my attention for that long. Probably will wait with buying it and see what people think first cause after Andromeda and seeing where Anthem is going I've become rather wary of what BioWare is doing.
And right there, you nailed it! Bioware obviously put all of their major resources and muscle on Anthem. ME Andromeda played to me like a game with a lot of promise. But completely under performed because the devs were forced to cut too many corners. Based on what I have seen of Anthem so far, That game could suffer a similar fate. Because it doesn't seem to have an anchor story that will generate interest in sequels. Maybe Anthem should have been ME-A Anthem. And connected back to exploration and settling of a new Galaxy. IMO ME-A drifted all over the place because Bioware was drifting all over the place. There were many things I liked about ME-A, that have already been stated by others. I was disappointed by too much repetition in combat and discovery. A strong sequel could easily fix this franchise. Just like ME2 improved ME1.
