Well friends, I am doing a thing that I didn’t intend to do… but it seems like the AggroChat crew has finally realized that Mass Effect Andromeda exists. This game was released in March of 2017 and heavily panned by the most vocal YouTubers. It was so heavily memed that pretty much everyone ignored that it launched, and I am going to tell you that in spite of all of the bad press you probably missed out on a damned good game. The AggroChat crew, specifically failed to engage because following right on the heels of this release was Persona 5 with a lot of folks doing replays of Persona 4 right before that dropped. The end result was that I was the sole member of the crew that ended up playing it, so I never really got to get the discussions about the game out of my system. It was only years later when I found out that my friend @Pixel_One_ was similarly desperate to discuss the game that I finally got that out of my system.
All of that said it seems that Tam at least has finally seen the light and is knee deep in a playthrough, which prompted me to want to re-experience the game as a bit of a refresher. I figure I won’t ACTUALLY beat the game a second time given that Mass Effect Legendary edition is landing on May 14th, but it might get me back into a Mass Effect mindset. I honestly expect the retooled ME Trilogy to feel a bit like Andromeda since Andromeda also feels more than a little bit like Dragon Age Inquisition. So getting back used to the particular quirks of this combat engine might due me well, to at least lower my expectations after the relatively high combat and movement fidelity of the Outriders engine.
I feel like one of the things we need to get out of the way for those that did not play the game are the memes. These very public and very prevalent images almost destroyed the Mass Effect franchise. The game did not launch in a great state, and as I understand it much like with Cyberpunk 2077 these issues were significantly more prevalent on consoles. The very first patch solved most of the glaring issues, including the extremely creepy facial animations that seemed to hit poor Sara Ryder way harder than it did her brother Scott. Bioware was using this game as a test to roll out a new facial animation system and from what I can tell it just needed more time to bake. By the time the time the paper launch date actually rolled around the game was in a pretty solid state.
The problem however is that EA decided to do some fuckery with the release of this game and instead of just launching the title on March 21st when most of the issues had been resolved… they instead ACTUALLY launched the game on March 16th through the Origin Access program. If you were subscribed to their games on demand service, you got the ability to play 10 hours of the full game starting almost a week earlier. It is those five days that seemed to make all of the difference in the world as to the trajectory of this title. Making it even worse it seems that the early release copies that were sent to press outlets were even in a less completed state than the one that came from early access. The memes hit hard and fast and carpet bombed the media landscape to the point that I doubt ANYONE who was even vaguely interested in the game had not heard about them.
So all of this taken into account… Mass Effect Andromeda was one of my favorite games of 2017 and quite honestly… were it not for some pretty stiff competition in the form of Horizon Zero Dawn and Destiny 2 I could have easily seen it elevating to the top of that list. Coming back and playing the game again has refreshed a lot of these memories. Andromeda was trying to solve some problems most specifically introducing vertical movement into the isometric shooter formula. The end result feels now more like a prototype for some of the things that the Anthem engine absolutely nailed, but the first steps were taken here in Andromeda. The other major takeaway is just how generally likeable the cast of characters is in this game. There is not a single character that I didn’t like… aka I didn’t encounter a Carth/Corso/Kaidan character that I love to hate and desperately want to shove out an airlock.
Unfortunately it took me until this morning to sort out the optimal screenshot settings… and ended up filling a directory full of completely black images so you are not going to get a lot of variety here. The game does a game about exploring hostile terrains extremely well. I have fun checking off the boxes planetside and visiting the various nooks and crannies of each area. Since I have played through the entire game before however… I am already looking at the possibility of trying to some mods to tweak that gameplay experience. Largely I am here for a story refresher so that I can competently talk about my thoughts on the game when we eventually do discuss it again on the podcast.
If you have never played this game and consider yourself a Mass Effect franchise fan, then you really owe it to yourself to give it a shot. It is permanently “value priced” due to its poor reputation, but it was worth every penny of the premium I paid for it when it initially launched.
The post A Defense of Andromeda appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Mass Effect is an extremely important series for me on a personal level. I am not exactly sure when I came to the realization, but it might be the single best piece of Science Fiction that I have experienced. During my formative years I bonded heavily with Star Wars and Dune so I am already wired to love great Science Fiction storytelling. A little over a decade ago I played my very first Mass Effect game with the release of the second game in the series. Mass Effect 1 was originally an exclusive for the Xbox 360 Console, and as such I completely missed out on playing it as I did not have one at the time. It got a PC release in 2007 but I never actually got around to playing it for one reason or another… more than likely it was due to the fact that I was knee deep in the raid scene during Burning Crusade in World of Warcraft.
There are a lot of games that I play repeatedly, but other than Castlevania Symphony of the Night there is no game that I have “finished” as many times as Mass Effect. While I have only actually done the start with the first game and play all the way through to the third game once, I have played some semblance of other sequences on four other times, having played the first game to the second game sequence probably the most. I did not exactly love the wrap of and conclusion brought by the third game, so I am guessing that more or less halted my fairly regularly revisiting this franchise. Though admittedly my in sequence play through was before the revisions brought on by the later Mass Effect 3 patches which I have never gone back and played.
Mass Effect Andromeda
Even though it did not do as well, I have a deep love for Mass Effect Andromeda as well and I was enterally frustrated when the media backlash effectively destroyed this franchise that I love so much. I still want to see a continuation of this storyline, and I want to know more about the Andromeda expedition. I have a whole slew of theories that are more or less going unrequited other than some occasional conversations via DM with Pixel One. I was extremely happy when the teaser came out during the Video Game awards and hinted that maybe we are going to be getting a new story that blends both Mass Effect timelines/settings.
More exciting than anything however is when I found out that finally we had a firm confirmation of the rumored remaster of the series. Then yesterday we found out that this Mass Effect Legendary Edition would be releasing on May 14th 2021, just over three months from now. One of the biggest questions for me personally is whether or not this would do anything to remedy to awkwardness of that first game. I’ve suffered through it a number of times because an in sequence play through largely requires it being there in order for everything to flow together neatly. However in 2007 they had yet to really land on the sort of interface and feel of the game that was going to win it the masses.
Original Game as Pulled from on Website Footage
The biggest problem that the first game has is the mechanical control and UI elements. The controls just feel wrong as compared to my first entry in the series which was technically the second game. The graphics are fine and the dialog and acting is still fairly solid. However actually navigating and experiencing the world feels off. Playing Knights of the Old Republic 2 recently, I am realizing just how far Bioware has come as far as interfaces go. It wasn’t really until 2009’s Dragon Age Origins that they truly “stuck the landing” and then steadily improved on that feeling ever since with Mass Effect 2 landing a year later in 2010. My biggest hope with this remastered version would be to blend everything together so that ALL of the games use the same user interface and same controls for a seamless experience.
Legendary Edition as Pulled from the Website Footage
Ultimately all I really wanted was for them to take the User Interface from Mass Effect 3 and carry it down to the other games. What instead appears to have happened is that all of the games got reworked with a new UI. On the Mass Effect Legendary edition website, they have one of those split screen videos with a slider allowing you to shift back and forth between original and new versions of some Mass Effect 1 footage. In this you can see wildly different interface elements between the above screenshot and the one before it. This gives me hope that the first game got the significant work that was needed.
In all of my plays through the game, the one thing I have never actually managed to do is complete a fun as “FemShep”. Everything that I have heard is that the Jennifer Hale voiced Female Shepard is the better way of playing the game. However my deeply engrained need to keep trying to “create Belghast” in every game I play… has always steered me down the path of playing the Male Shepard. One of my goals on this replay is to dive down the rabbit hole of the Jennifer Hale experience. I can’t say that I will succeed, because supposed the character creator is significantly better than the previous versions allowing you to create wildly different looking Shepards rather than just awkward versions of the stock character.
I am excited to revisit this old friend. I look forward to it much the same way as I might look forward to some day sitting down and re-watching all of the Marvel movies in sequence or revisiting the Lord of the Rings movies at Christmas time. I would love to see Mass Effect adapted as a high budget series, because the story that is told is so good and I am slightly disappointed that more people have not gotten to experience it. If you yourself have never played through this series, then you really should pick up Legendary edition and give it a fair shot.
The post Mass Effect Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Mass Effect is an extremely important series for me on a personal level. I am not exactly sure when I came to the realization, but it might be the single best piece of Science Fiction that I have experienced. During my formative years I bonded heavily with Star Wars and Dune so I am already wired to love great Science Fiction storytelling. A little over a decade ago I played my very first Mass Effect game with the release of the second game in the series. Mass Effect 1 was originally an exclusive for the Xbox 360 Console, and as such I completely missed out on playing it as I did not have one at the time. It got a PC release in 2007 but I never actually got around to playing it for one reason or another… more than likely it was due to the fact that I was knee deep in the raid scene during Burning Crusade in World of Warcraft.
There are a lot of games that I play repeatedly, but other than Castlevania Symphony of the Night there is no game that I have “finished” as many times as Mass Effect. While I have only actually done the start with the first game and play all the way through to the third game once, I have played some semblance of other sequences on four other times, having played the first game to the second game sequence probably the most. I did not exactly love the wrap of and conclusion brought by the third game, so I am guessing that more or less halted my fairly regularly revisiting this franchise. Though admittedly my in sequence play through was before the revisions brought on by the later Mass Effect 3 patches which I have never gone back and played.
Mass Effect Andromeda
Even though it did not do as well, I have a deep love for Mass Effect Andromeda as well and I was enterally frustrated when the media backlash effectively destroyed this franchise that I love so much. I still want to see a continuation of this storyline, and I want to know more about the Andromeda expedition. I have a whole slew of theories that are more or less going unrequited other than some occasional conversations via DM with Pixel One. I was extremely happy when the teaser came out during the Video Game awards and hinted that maybe we are going to be getting a new story that blends both Mass Effect timelines/settings.
More exciting than anything however is when I found out that finally we had a firm confirmation of the rumored remaster of the series. Then yesterday we found out that this Mass Effect Legendary Edition would be releasing on May 14th 2021, just over three months from now. One of the biggest questions for me personally is whether or not this would do anything to remedy to awkwardness of that first game. I’ve suffered through it a number of times because an in sequence play through largely requires it being there in order for everything to flow together neatly. However in 2007 they had yet to really land on the sort of interface and feel of the game that was going to win it the masses.
Original Game as Pulled from on Website Footage
The biggest problem that the first game has is the mechanical control and UI elements. The controls just feel wrong as compared to my first entry in the series which was technically the second game. The graphics are fine and the dialog and acting is still fairly solid. However actually navigating and experiencing the world feels off. Playing Knights of the Old Republic 2 recently, I am realizing just how far Bioware has come as far as interfaces go. It wasn’t really until 2009’s Dragon Age Origins that they truly “stuck the landing” and then steadily improved on that feeling ever since with Mass Effect 2 landing a year later in 2010. My biggest hope with this remastered version would be to blend everything together so that ALL of the games use the same user interface and same controls for a seamless experience.
Legendary Edition as Pulled from the Website Footage
Ultimately all I really wanted was for them to take the User Interface from Mass Effect 3 and carry it down to the other games. What instead appears to have happened is that all of the games got reworked with a new UI. On the Mass Effect Legendary edition website, they have one of those split screen videos with a slider allowing you to shift back and forth between original and new versions of some Mass Effect 1 footage. In this you can see wildly different interface elements between the above screenshot and the one before it. This gives me hope that the first game got the significant work that was needed.
In all of my plays through the game, the one thing I have never actually managed to do is complete a fun as “FemShep”. Everything that I have heard is that the Jennifer Hale voiced Female Shepard is the better way of playing the game. However my deeply engrained need to keep trying to “create Belghast” in every game I play… has always steered me down the path of playing the Male Shepard. One of my goals on this replay is to dive down the rabbit hole of the Jennifer Hale experience. I can’t say that I will succeed, because supposed the character creator is significantly better than the previous versions allowing you to create wildly different looking Shepards rather than just awkward versions of the stock character.
I am excited to revisit this old friend. I look forward to it much the same way as I might look forward to some day sitting down and re-watching all of the Marvel movies in sequence or revisiting the Lord of the Rings movies at Christmas time. I would love to see Mass Effect adapted as a high budget series, because the story that is told is so good and I am slightly disappointed that more people have not gotten to experience it. If you yourself have never played through this series, then you really should pick up Legendary edition and give it a fair shot.
The post Mass Effect Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Horizon Zero Dawn – PS4
Once again I am continuing down the path to 2019 as I talk through the games of this decade that were important to me. Going back this morning and assembling my picks for 2017 made me realize what a freaking phenomenal year for gaming this was. There are so many games that would have been game of the year… were they not up against other competition. Once again a preface of that this is my personal list of the games that were important to me during the year. Your list probably looks a bit different and there are a few games that were left off because I never quite got into them the way that I should.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – Nintendo Switch
Lets be honest… this is the game that sold a bunch of switches. This is absolutely the reason why I bought mine and even managed to start out on the WiiU and then rebought it and restarted from scratch when I ultimately purchased my Switch. I have issues with one gameplay mechanic, and that is the breakable weapons. However even taking that into account there is no denying how good of a game this is. I ultimately greatly prefer playing it now on Cemu running the WiiU game on emulator so that I can apply a mod that removes weapon durability. There is just something about this game world and the pacing that make me want to get out and explore. The fact that through climbing and stamina you can both gate your progress but also feel like you can get anywhere if you try hard enough kept me pushing forward and trying to find the next secret. If I could remove the gyroscope nonsense and the weapon durability this would have been the perfect game.
Assassin’s Creed: Origins
Assassin’s Creed: Origins – PC
I’ve made attempts in the past to break into the Assassin’s Creed series but there have ultimatley been two obstacles. Firstly they are games that were designed for the console in mind and seem to be way more reasonable when played with a controller than a mouse and keyboard. Secondly they were games that felt defined by a bunch of mini games and things like rooftop chases, which some sneaking around that felt forced and limiting. AC:O pushes the Assassin’s Creed game into a full open world experience where you explore large swaths of the Ancient Egyptian countryside and get a real sense of place and setting that make it feel like you are part of something much larger than effectively being trapped in a single city. The combat itself also seems to be way more forgiving of my desire to rush into combat and not stealth at all, which makes for a better experience personally. I love this game and at some point I will get around to playing the follow up Odyssey.
Night in the Woods
Night in the Woods – PC
While there are significant issues surrounding the co-creator of Night in the Woods, I cannot write the game off because it is extremely powerful. It spoke to me on such a primal level because it effectively could have been my story. I grew up in a tiny town much like the one depicted in the game, and was one of the few of my friends who successfully transitioned into college… but the fact that I lived at home for the first two years commuting back and forth made for a bizarre experience. I was living in two different worlds… the world that remained the same as High School where I saw the same people I did then on a regular basis… and this new fledgling world of experiences as I took my first steps into college. Like Mae I reached a point in my Junior year where I came perilously close to dropping out of School entirely. This game means so much to me, and nothing is probably ever going to change that.
Mass Effect: Andromeda
Mass Effect Andromeda – PC
While this game was universally panned by critics and social media… I loved it and will be forever saddened by the fact we wont see more of this setting. This is the game that YouTube killed because of some pretty bad issues in the early release candidate that were more or less fixed in the first patch. However by that time all of the damage had been done and all of the demo real of horrific facial contortions was shot giving it an endless stream of memetic images. I liked what this game did to Mass Effect by opening it up and bringing us to an entirely new galaxy with its own issues, while at the same time providing hints of the conflicts from the original game that ultimately lead to the splintering of the Andromeda project. I want to see more of this setting and I am hoping at some point EA allows Bioware to revisit it.
Destiny 2
Destiny 2 – PS4/PC
I love Destiny as a franchise, and while I would have greatly preferred that Destiny 2 didn’t exist from the standpoint of that I would have rather seen the first game transition to the PC and get the necessary upgrades it required, I was okay with the reset because it meant I could finally play the game on my platform of choice. Destiny 2 had a rocky road but today we are experiencing a renaissance of some of the best content that has ever existed in a game of this sort. All of that ground work comes back to the transition from the first game to the sequel and the subtle changes that were made to the way the game functioned. It has been an interesting ride but one that began back in 2017, and for that it will always deserve a space on these sort of lists.
Horizon Zero Dawn
Horizon Zero Dawn – PS4
Horizon Zero Dawn was easily my game of the year for 2017, and would be a heavy contender if I was trying to make a game of the decade. I love the setting and how it takes the post apocalyptic genre into some very new and interesting directions. I love Aloy the protagonist because she represents a new kind of character that we really haven’t seen much of to this point. I am absolutely hungry for more of this series and I fully expect to see a new game in this sequence release as a launch title for the PlayStation 5. I would love to see this release simultaneously on the PlayStation and the PC at the same time, but I somehow doubt that is actually going to ever be a thing. If you have yet to play this… it is worth the purchase of a console just for this game alone.
