ME: Andromeda Mourning Thread
We all have our own feelings about the recent news concerning Mass Effect: Andromeda.😞 Please, take a moment and share those feelings here so that EA and Bioware may read and feel the impact of the...
Forum Discussion
Due to my love of ME, ME2 and ME3, I invested for the long term in Andromeda. I bought the $100 version for myself and my wife. Bought the Nomad, bought or asked for as a present, several t-shirts and hoodies. I purchased $90 worth of Andromeda Points. I even got the loot crate.
I was ready to leave Destiny (which I have 3000 hours in) to go back to my true love...
I did not care about the glitches those can be patched, what I did care about was what I found in the story. I did not care about any of my teammates until at the end I kind of like Costa. Not a single character was worth romancing. I did not care about the reaper like Kett, I did not care about the Angara, I did not care about the humans, the krogan, the salarians and I really did not care about the Asari. There was no tension in the story to make me want to save anyone in any kind of speed. The side quests were just busy work with little enhancement of the real story. There were no standout weapons. I was hopeful that the load times would be decreased over time but never saw any change and now doubt they could be shortened.
I did like the crypts those felt right. The new power animations were good. At first I liked that all priming powers could be set off by all detonators but after a while this feature made everything feel the same. Movement of the character was very good as well.
Then we get to multiplayer where I put in 1500 hours in ME3 where after every free DLC I spent $40 on packs as a thank you for the great content.
Maps were good but not enough of them. Again the weapons did not feel great. Sure there are some with ridiculous DPS but for the most part they did not feel good to use. I loved the three dimensional aspect of MP but that was about it. You did not have to build synergistic teams, everyone could loan wolf to a point that playing a supportive character with a power like Shield Boost was not that useful. There were no events like in ME3 that drove me to play like crazy on the weekend. The character unlock and leveling system was just a toil not fun at all.
Then came the flooding of the loot pool. Uninspired game design, there is not enough of a change to the weapons to merit that kind of inflation. I had just maxed all rares and then poof, characters were all at 50% and the weapon unlocks became so numerous I just had to give up.
Then Bioware all but walks away from the game. Why should I stay?
At this time I have one single player play through on Andromeda where all other ME games I had a dozen or two. Top 1000 APEX, top 300 Challenge in Andromeda but I walked away. I deleted a character in Destiny and started over. I am having a blast going through content I have played over and over. This saddens me more than you can know.
BTW, I keep coming back to this forum hoping to find hope for the future.
I own ME1...I have about 10-15 max level characters from that game...that means I have went through the game 3 times for each, plus a good number that I didn't max but still completed the game with.
I own ME2...I have at least 30 completed max level characters with that game..I haven't counted exactly, but there was a time I would run a character through the story for fun and sometimes to just use a specific set of character to play. I even posted YouTube videos of how to play an adept on Insanity when everyone was saying you can't play an adept on insanity because of the shields and armor stopping biotics...yeah, I and others proved that wrong..
I own ME3...I have maybe 2 complete runs at most...I am not sure, because I stopped at least 2 times after getting to the party dlc...yeah, the ending burned me that bad, even after installing the Happy Ending Mod(not my perfect ending but better than stock) I still couldn't get back into the game, and quickly lost interest in playing whole series because of the last 15 min of game play in ME3....(I played it with prepurchase and finished BEFORE any changes or additions to game were offered and to me it STANK)...
I own ME:A...I have 3 complete runs and a partial insanity run(which I was going slow on to wait on DLC) and was enjoying multiplayer to keep skills sharp and the use of other powers to learn more playstyles....I haven't played since they announced they canceled support...
I don't know what I will do in the future about Bioware, I will probably keep pre-ordering Dragon Age but anything else will be on a case by case basis and I will probably wait until after launch and see how it actually does. I am getting to where I can't trust them and that to me is very very very sad...
SWKotoR, DAO, DA2, DAI, ME1, ME2, ME3, MEA, and Jade Empire are all in my library, and to have to doubt the company who produced them is heartbreaking.
I started mourning the game midway my first playthrough. The hype was the thing that kept me playing until the end and the feeling that I had at least to finish it, given I had spent a great deal of money on it. The symptoms of failure were telling, as I commented months ago, just like another game of another franchise I loved, under Ubisoft's belt that time, the same pre-ordering-sucking-rushing-because-we-think-we-can-fix-later-policy these companies are relying right now.
I had some fun with the game. Imho, it was mildly passable, not worth the expenses, but I wasn't afflicted by many of the most critical bugs or problems other people were, so my validation was still positive, as a 5-10 at most. What really made me cringe was basically almost all the mechanics and gameplay features, their lack of polish, of creativity, of synergy, of finesse. It felt like someone copied and pasted another game on the template of Mass Effect and though it would work without some hard work on it.
One can explain that the production of the game suffered issues here and there etc., etc., sigh, yeah, that happens. But since when customers must pay for a company's problem? If there are problems, you must fix them and do your utmost for a proper delivery, and frankly, aside the cosmetics of facial animation which were dreadful, but not game breaking, the game would have done fairly better, if less issues had arisen.
So we, mostly here referring to those who play this game for SP, which was what really built its foundation, were left to suck our thumbs as we watched SP being slightly set aside for MP stuff, watch some dreadful social justicars wreak havoc with game design, see a company trying to drain dry people with cash-grab features in MP. Awful. Awful. And then, see patches focused mostly on fixing facial animations, fix problems with the un-thought level scalation, weapons, it felt like a big-fat testing time ... well, everyone already knows this story to be retold.
As for future games from Bioware. Nothing. I'm not remotely overjoyed in the idea of finding out the rest of the Andromeda story through books, comics, charges or memes. This is, as a lack of a better word, a fiasco, a scandal. I still expect the least of decency of presenting a proper closure for this story in the shape of a PROPER game in the future, but I won't be on tenterhooks to see it either.
Given the rest of Bioware games never made it to my shelves, so I'm not, for the time being, a customer anymore. As long as they can afford losing some customers, good luck for those who really tried hard to make the game and to play it. The ones who should be mourning the game right now should be those who let this thing become a disaster.
