Everything I've found wrong in ME:A (feel free to add anything I've missed)
Product: Mass Effect Andromeda
Platform:PC
What edition do you have? Standard Edition
Physical Disc or Digital version? Digital Based Install
Summarize your bug See description.
How often does the bug occur? Often (50% - 99%)
How long has this issue been happening? Always Happens
Which single-player mode are you playing? Standard.
Please select your region
Run the www.speedtest.net network benchmark and post your upload and download speeds.
What company provides your internet service?
Steps: How can we find the bug ourselves? See description.
What is the AMD or Nvidia Model Number of your graphics card?
Please enter memory size in GB.
***EDIT 03 / 05 / 17, Organised issues by severity, added new sections for easier bug tracking, updated lists*** So you know Bioware / EA, even excluding the non game issue stuff using font size 10 and Times New Roman in MS Word this list is still 7 pages long.. we are doing this because we care, hopefully you do too.
***EDIT 19/05/17, Removed issues that patch 1.06 has fixed***
***EDIT 14/06/17, There is a 1.08 patch now but it does not fix anything substantial or address any continuity issues***
***EDIT 12/07/17, There is a 1.09 patch that does actually fix some things, what I've noticed fixed will get removed from the list. If there is anything else let me know***
I'll kick off with my system specs;
R7 1700 @ 3.9GHz
16GB G.Skill RipjawsV @ 3200MHz
GTX 980 @ 1.5GHz GPU, 7.5GHz Memory
EVGA G2 1000w Supernova
W10 Pro 64bit and all updates
Latest drivers for everything
So here is everything I've found wrong in Mass Effect:Andromeda. Feel free to add anything I might have missed and I’ll add it to this post. With any luck someone from Bioware and EA will read this and give some sort of response or at least add it to the list of things to be addressed. The list includes regular game and New Game+ with everything from gameplay issues to bugs.
New Game+ Bugs:
"Cybernetic Device" for the boy on Kavoeld is still able to be crafted upon starting a NG+
Crafting the enhanced shields task. Despite the Nomad already having this upgrade you can still get it in New Game +, which naturally means as you already have it you can’t complete the task preventing 100% completion.
Game Bugs:
Falling through the map is entirely unacceptable, especially when it happens when just doing something as simple as a melee attack with the Asari sword.
Fix the Galaxy Map properly hitting a button EVERY TIME to skip animations is monotonous. Just put a option in one of the game menus to turn them off already.
Characters repeating the same dialog if you happen to go over a area related to that part of the story / task even when events are past and completed.
While on the Nexus, if they play one of Ryder's interviews over the comms or whatever, your character will say the lines instead of them being replayed by the news.
When playing as an infiltrator/ with a sniper rifle, AI will not be enabled if the player is too far away from the enemy and they will just stand there like targets in a shooting gallery.
Why is the player view distance longer than what the HUD can pick up? It’s messed up. At least mark points of interest on the map like ME1 did otherwise the player is just blindly stumbling about on the map. Go look how Mass Effect 1 did it. Those guys got it right first time so its not like you even have the excuse you had no examples to look at...
There is a NPC on the Nexus that looks like he has a bar code down the centre of his face, he addresses you and you speak to him at least a few times so how this got missed is mind boggling.
Having to hack doors all the damn time even to just get to the bar at Kadara port.
After Cora Harper's loyalty mission, Lexi keeps on asking the player if they could see her in the med bay, even though she has no new dialogue.
Habitat 7 doesn't rename to Ryder-1 after the event once you get all 6 planets up to 100% viability.
Planet/Colony names vanish from the Galaxy map instead of staying visible.
Final update to the scourge codex entry leaves it permanently marked as unread.
Journal always shows up as having something unread, but if I actually go into it, everything is marked as read.
Random floating exclamation marks you can't interact with
Mining node extractors tend to spawn or turn invisible randomly.
Quest Bugs:
The task the Turian in Tanns office gives you to find his buddy (which you end up finding in that dark corner at the "underworld" bar on Kadara) if you examine the body you'll get a email from that Turian thanking you before you have even talked to him and picked the task up. lol.
Movie Night quest stops progressing automatically after you find Jaal's components, you don't get any email, notification or quest marker about the progression of the quest.
First Murderer: When confronting Nilken with the evidence you've gathered on Eos, Ryder requests a playback of the recording and shoves his hand through the glass between the two characters.
AVP Cryo Deployment Perks / A Better Beginning: When returning to the Nexus after settling Eos, if you speak to Addison and her assistant to complete the AVP quest before meeting with Tann, Sam will remind you to speak with Addison about the quest you've already completed when exiting Tann's office.
Can't hand over plant medicine from the stoners to help the poisoned refugee, in my case the quest doesn’t even appear in the log.
On Kadara, I couldn't scan the Kett tracks at first and had to reload so I could progress this quest
There's a mission to track down a power failure, but after that the failed ship components are never fixed and are just left open sparking.
I went past the sniper outside of Techixx for the White Death mission and if you drive past the area, it doesn't seem to pick up again. Reloading the save did nothing to try and re-trigger it.
Animation & Cut scene bugs:
Turbo Charge combat ability applies its effects properly, but if the player does not instantly continue to fire, it will still play the reload animation which breaks aiming.
Collision issues with characters in multiple cut scenes, let’s just go ahead and say theres collision issues in every cut scene the game has theres enough of them to say that.
Squadmates wandering off in cut scenes.
When your twin wakes up, at one point Female Ryder was moving her lips along with Male Ryder's voice when the back of Male Ryder's head was to the camera.
There is a bug when Ryder is in the bar having a drink and there is no glass; she is drinking empty air
Just what in the hell is with that random drunk NPC by the shuttle pad at Prodromos? You can't talk to it or anything, it's just... there.
Guards squatting like they are about to be attacked on the Nexus. This looks extremely weird and really has made me laugh a fair bit involuntarily where it looks so bad.
Why do we have to suffer things like the 2 steps forward Ryder takes when leaving the Tempest before we can take control? GET RID OF THAT.
Invisible Ryder in "Movie Night" quest cut scene
Cora & Peebee are merged in a cutscene on Khi Tasira
When I talked to Kallo once on the tempest he was sitting in his chair, then all of a sudden he was standing atop of his chair
Similar bug as above, there is a cut scene between Ryder, Kallo, and Suvi on the Tempest bridge just inside the door, Kallo and Ryder are standing, as they should be, Suvi however is "morphed" in, seat and all, in her seated position arms positioned like she is still at the Tempest controls.
When I talked to Jaal on the Nexus once, Ryder's head was turned by 180 degrees (bug with motion / eye tracking?)
On rare occasions in cut scenes Ryder will have a very bizarre grimace expression that does not fit within any context of the cut scene.
Gameplay Bugs:
Full auto assault rifles are still under powered (except Thokin). Isharay, Dhan, and Ushior are still WAY overpowered.
Why do none of the weapons particularly stun enemies? ME games have got this right pretty much from day dot.
No tutorial for the combat basics. Switching left/right handed I discovered entirely by accident.
Pathfinder weapons (Deluxe Edition) don't upgrade past level V
When you craft a higher level Black Widow precision rifle, it sometimes seems to use a level I blueprint with low stats and therefore doesn't do enough damage in combat
Final boss is laughable, seriously, you thought hitting 3 console buttons and fighting cannon fodder enemies made for a good final boss after doing it a million times in the game already? Yes I’m counting this as a gameplay bug because Bioware have to be trolling us with this.
No second landing Zone on Kadara so we can get straight to the badlands.
Continuity Bugs:
WHY isn't a single main plot point made out to be so important in the game ever explained by the end of the game? I counted SIX major plot points, you explain none of them.
Why do we have to take off every time we board the Tempest? Half the time at least it's more likely we just want to sell stuff and make new stuff. Imagine the cool moment you could have of the player standing in front of the Tempest bay door, it slowly opens in realtime with the player in control as the new world outside reveals itself.
The weather system is rubbish make it more varied. Eg; Fog, snowstorms and high winds on Voeld, sandstorms, high winds and heat haze effects on the desert worlds.
Why are the Rokaar (or however their name is spelt) using Milky Way weapons and not Angaran? WTF Bioware.
Why does FemRyder wear lazily done slightly tweaked male versions of the armour sets? Terribly lazy, and creepy in a sense to see. Eg; Equip femryder with the hyperguardian chest.
What happen to seeing the Nexus grow and develop as we were promised? Shunting a few boxes out the way and clearing up some clutter here and there does not count, Bioware / EA.
NPCs being completely oblivious to your doings in the world, often shouting at you as you run by or when you try talking to them about things you have long since solved.
"Development" of outposts, or lack thereof... whenever there's a colony development item that happens, we should get an Email about it requiring acknowledgement and a visit to the colony before it can expand again possibly with special events. IE if Dunn survives the crash & you max out Eos, have Bradley invite you to dinner to celebrate & see Dunn helping him cook dinner before your arrival shocks her and makes her blush while running her mouth at 10,000mph to please keep it a secret for now. At least make it so the player can choose what type of outpost is made for each settlement.
Easy to find extremely poor textures. Eg; the news towers you put up and tree bark textures. Rock textures also look "soupy".
On the Nexus, the PA announcements I suppose their meant to be, the voice that says someone has died but the name is being withheld until next of kin in the Milky Way is notified. Any "next of kin" is hundreds of years dead regardless of lore.
You have to level a lot of criticism at there only being 2 new races and them looking like first concept ideas at that. The player is cut off from the rest of Andromeda, thats fine, but Andromeda is not cut off from the rest of Andromeda. There could still be different races dotted around at busy locations even if you don't directly meet them.
Morda just Growls at you after you've given her the drive core & settled a colony there.
Poor game design bugs:
Dodgy combat AI from team members. Bring back the control we have in ME 1, 2, and 3 over squadmates.
No squadmate customisation. Selecting what weapons our squadmates can use based on their class has worked just fine since ME2. Give it back.
Incompetent, clunky UI. For example; Who wants a massive list of level 1-10 weapons when you are only going to make / use the highest level weapon? Lower level weapons / armour should be superseded, or at least relegated to some kind of "Archived" folder to stop cluttering up menus.
Nobody, I repeat, NOBODY, wants to carry all the weapons they have made in their inventory PARTICULARLY as you can't equip them in the character menu like you can in ME 1!
Come on Bioware... walking around with all the resources you have mined in your inventory is pretty dumb we only need that info when making stuff.
WHY ISN'T THE CODEX VOICE ACTED LIKE IN EVERY OTHER FOOKIN MASS EFFECT GAME?!
Copy / paste Asari. Come on Bioware, we know the Asari are all meant to look similar but this is blatantly copy / paste with just a couple different textures for smaller / larger skin pores, which just look really weird on Asari FYI.
Animals: Really - the same species on every planet (or damn near) like the lizard-dog things. Someone couldn't use a little imagination and come up with several different species for each planet?
Whats the point in all the other non-story / loyalty related planets if we can't land on at least some of them?
Why are there so many tasks that need the player to traipse all the way back to the task giver when a simple call through the hardsuit or on the Tempest will do the job?
Why do we need so many currencies? "Mission Funds" and "Research Data" currencies could easily be replaced just with needing credits. Given credits aren't exactly free-flowing it wouldn't make anything any easier and in fact would force the player more to think about what they really wanted and manage their resources more.
Remnant puzzles. Let's be honest, when people pick up a Mass Effect game they want to play Mass Effect, not Sudoku. If we want to play Sudoku Bioware, we will pick up a Sudoku book. Same goes for the Vaults themselves there is entirely too much puzzling and jumping about - Mass Effect is not Tomb Raider.
Tempest and Nomad are terrible. Interior of Tempest is very poorly designed and jumping out of the Nomad all the time to kill enemies instead of blasting them with a cannon on the Nomad is just repetitive. WE WANT THE CHOICE!
Cutting the skill tree down to three powers just makes things less varied, and therefore less fun.
Most augments (someone at Bioware is a Deus Ex / Ghost in the shell fan) are under powered and useless. 2% gains, really Bioware? REALLY?
Performance Issues:
The game itself runs poorly with FPS randomly tanking for no reason, particularly aboard the Tempest. < Bold and underlined because Bioware STILL haven't fixed this.
Landing / leaving the Nexus, and all other locations for that matter, should have cut scenes that can be skipped (no intrusive UI prompt). We are PC players, we have SSDs Bioware. Hell, even a good HDD is fast enough it only has minor lag.
Multiplayer Bugs:
Large enemies like fiends tend to skip spaces they are too large to fit through, effectively giving them a teleportation ability. Them running into scalable objects like crates may also trigger such behaviour.
Automatic reloading needs to be optional and / or tweaked. way too often it aborts an action you rather want to perform than reload. i.e. leaving you unable to perform melee attacks because the reload cannot be interrupted all of a sudden.
Heavy hitters with one shot kills can grab you through floors and walls. (honestly, giving an enemy the ability to oneshot you while there not being any indication of them approaching (screenshake, proximity alert) or a means to fight back, is a bad design choice)
Throwing an enemy out of the map will give you an assist kill and not grant you the kill, player that shot last will get the kill.
Push-to-talk does not respond since 1.05, no matter what button I bind it to. I guess that's why voice chat has become a lot more quiet ever since.
Joining Apex missions puts you in custom matches most of the time, with no mission selected.
MP announcer tends to be mute if you join mid mission.
Your Apex character sometimes speaks with another's voice.
Sometimes Apex character taunts are overly loud and can be heard throughout the entire map.
Voice chat does not work properly (bad encoding, lag, signal loss)
Lack of text chat (and no, origin IM does not count)
What we have been lied to about...
We were told we'd have to really dig to find out what happened to the Quarian Ark, only to have alarms going off & smacked in the face with a trout after tripping over the NPC to spoonfeed you the info postgame.
General Chat
Garrus and Shepard could also BELIEVABLY be bought back too, in the case of Garrus some Turian high up could of just decided to sneak a DNA sample aboard the Turian Ark for the "If things go REALLY bad.." scenario. In Shepard's case it would be a story of some Cerberus member sneaking a DNA sample from Lazurus aboard the human ark for the "If things go REALLY bad..." scenario. I think we have all seen the suspiciously Cerberus-like symbols on consoles dotted around the ark and we already know Cerberus members did make it on to the human ark. DNA cloning FTW.
Just sayin' Bioware...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Quantum travel between solar systems, this is the worst. It just looks bad and the sound makes it worse still. Go and look up the alcubierre drive and Nasa warp drive to get a better idea of how this should be done. Things don’t need to be strictly “to the letter” obviously, but travelling between systems as it is would just not look anything like that unless perhaps the ship is generating a wormhole – which we know its not, and even then it would probably look more whiteish-blue.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bioware has made some damn good games, but for Mass Effect Andromeda they dropped the ball on a lot of aspect of the game play. Time to get these fixed so if/when there is a new Mass Effect game - they won't have players wondering if it's worth the money they will have to shell out.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
With all the stuff that is wrong with ME:A, you better not charge for DLC if you want even a faint hope of being forgiven by gamers for this mess of a game.
I say all this not just as a ME fan, but also a game modder who knows how to do all of this, QA for ME:A prior to release was obviously nothing short of extremely questionable to say the least. It would be unfair to lay ALL of the blame at the devs feet too, EA should of given the devs another 3 - 6 months to address problems but the devs are most definitely not blameless here either.