onemadvagabond wrote:
If you can bump up the graphics, the facial features do get better. I had it on medium at first and then bumped it up to high. My gpu is a 960 so I haven't tried anything higher than that, and I think that if I did, the game would begin to lag too much.
I liked it more as I got past the first few hours and then began to like it a lot, but now am on Kedara(or whatever) and it is all feeling very repetitive and just feels hollow. The story is very lacking in depth as well as the characters. I find I have not been drawn in to the story at all and feel nothing for the squad mates. I just really don't see it having the replay value I was hoping for. I may not play it a second time. I guess it will depend how well they fix it and if they come out with some amazing DLC. I just don't see buying any more of these games either unless they make some real strides in improvement. It's OK. I give it a solid 7, but nothing more, because of the before mentioned lack of depth and character, and the majority of the game just feeling like filler in order to make it seem like there is so much to it. Another one fails to live up to the hype.
I went through the same thing, early frustration with the learning curve in places, then really really liking the game as I got into it. Then at Kadara things started turning a bit into drudgery and the love started fading. Particularly when after hours and hours spent on Kadara I thought I was done, only to have to come back a boatload of times for new quests from other outpost worlds/stations, that sent me back to Kadara.
I would agree on the hollow characters. Part of it I think, is on the other ME's after each mission you could go around and talk to your squad mates and they would usually have something new to say, adding to your relationship with them and a sense of comaraderie with them. On Andromeda, it's rare that they have anything new to talk about, so you try to interact, get nothing new, and exit. It leaves you not getting to know the characters at all. It seems the periodic banter you hear between them is your only connection to them most of the time. (Some of that banter is damned funny though!).
There is definitely far too much emphasis on the kajillion fetch quests and not enough on story telling and squad mate interaction, and I think that is what is leaving it feeling more hollow than the prior titles. I'm still loving the game for the most part, but I am getting annoyed with the machine gun barrage of repetitive quests. Every time I think I'm done with a world and ready to finally move on to the next one, some jacka$$ at the Nexus sends me on 3 more quests back on the world I just spent an absurd amount of time clearing out. I go one day loving the game, to the next being annoyed with it. (Contagion has to be the most irritating quest in the history of gaming. Starts out fine then just keeps going and going and going... ) Then there is every base that you cleared out, being full of baddies again every time you drive through for the umpteenth time for the umpteenth quest sending you back to that area. I've gotten to the point I just drive through and ignore them, trying to just finish the damned world. The repetitive questing definitely gets to the point of drudgery, not fun. I'm a bit of a completionist, but I've started ignoring some of the optional quests, because there is just way too damned many repetitive, no story, go scan this whatever at that remote place you've been to 3 times already quests.
There are a host of glitches as well. Enemies floating in the air, sometimes even after you kill them. Squad mates flitting around like a leaf, people walking off in the middle of a conversation, but you're stuck in place and can't follow so you can't hear what they are saying and only getting your half of the conversation, the game momentarily freezing at times (the only title I have that is doing that), and of course there are the enemies or critters stuck inside rocks.
As for the players character, I was able with a LOT of tinkering to make my female Ryder look pretty dang good, aside from the weird surprised doll eyes, but the defaults are all pretty lousy. The NPC's, especially the Asari, look like caca compared to the prior games. In the prior ME's, there were a handful of different Asari facial structures for the NPC's, but in Andromeda, all of them look like the Doc (They did a good job in ME2/ME3 making Miranda look like Yavonne Strahovski, but not so much with making Lexi look like Natalie Dormer) but with a different color slapped on them, and none of them look near as attractive as the Asari in the prior titles. All characters voices are sometimes out of sync with the mouth movement too. And what's with the holographic stuff in this game? Omni tools and holos all look like digitized muck compared to the prior games too.
66 hours in, I'm still enjoying the game and appreciate the effort put into the good bits of it, but I go from loving it one day to annoyed with it the next. I still hold with my 2 hour in assessment, that the game definitely needed more polish before release. It seems like the emphasis was put on making too many fetch quests, and on making the environments looking pretty, and not enough time was spent on making the characters's look pretty and developing a relationship with the main NPCs. Character development conversations needed more fleshing out and bug squishing definitely needed more time.
P.S. For the purpose of aiding with bug squishing if anybody at Bioware is reading this;
PC Origin game version
P8Z68 Pro MB
Core i7 3770K
256GB SSD (OS Drive)
1TB HDD (game installation drive)
8GB 1866mhz DDR3
GTX 980 Strix- 378.92 driver
Mostly Ultra settings with a couple of high settings @1080p
(FPS holding at monitor refresh rate of 60hz for most part, with periodic dips into the 45-55 range during heavy effect periods)
