Mass Effect Andromeda – Page 3

Nomad Valet Service

April 10, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend was a fun one, and not because I did anything special… but more for the absence of anything planned. Saturday we got up fairly early, and ran errands. I had been putting off going to the eye glasses place since getting my prescription, and I guess I was doing so for good reason. Bifocals are extremely expensive. I priced out a set of daily wear and a set of sunglasses and it was going to be almost $800. That is just straight up ludicrous for eyewear… but it is a carnival of errors that adds up in a final price. I have an insanely strong prescription which generally means I need some of those double super bonus lenses with all of the bells and whistles to keep the thickness down. Then when you combine that with the fact that this time around they were going to be adding bifocals and a prism… shit got crazy really fast. Instead I opted to wait… since my Optometrist said I was really on the borderline as to whether or not they would actually benefit me. So I opted to think about it… and wound up just ordering more single vision glasses for the moment from Zenni optical. I have a feeling that I am going to have enough trouble getting adjusted to the prism… that I am not sure if I want to further complicate things with bifocal lenses this time. However I guess when it comes time to renew I will be going for the vision insurance since that at least will hopefully dent that blow.

As far as the rest of the weekend… we cleaned the house like mad when we got home from errands and this largely freed me up to be able to just chill the hell out upstairs with a cat on either side playing some Andromeda. I have to say I love that I ultimately have two cats on my desk most of the time… I have blankets on either side of the keyboard and it isn’t super long before I have attract both Allie our eldest cat, and Kenzie our middle cat. Hell right now as I am writing this post at 6 in the morning… I already have Allie crashed out on the blanket to the right of my keyboard. She will probably sit there in that state for a bit longer until she decides it is time for food and starts prancing back and forth in front of my keyboard. As far as gaming went… I am so deep into Andromeda at this point. All told I am nearly 70 hours into the game and I have been stalling moving the main story forward until I can complete all of the side stuff. As I learn more about the universe… I am starting to feel like maybe this is a better game than the original trilogy. I know that is going to be a controversial statement. I will however add the qualifier of “for me” to the statement, because personally the original trilogy hit a high point with the second game and Andromeda is really structured in a similar fashion. It involves going off on small missions with your team to effect the world in subtle ways. The game play itself feels like this amalgam of Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect, namely the way that KOTOR used to let you roam around planets in what felt like at the time a free manner.

This free roaming nature is for good and bad… like the fact that I never seem to park my Nomad in a reasonable way as I hurriedly hit the E button as I roll up on the next combat vignette. In this case I literally had to jump and try and hit E to re-enter in order to get back in after finishing the remnant site. Side note the N7 armor is still probably the coolest design in Mass Effect, and the Andromeda logo especially will never be quite as cool as it. At this point I am I believe level 43, and I think in truth the game probably expected me to be done with it ages ago. There is a lot of sadness about to happen however, because with the deluxe edition I got a set of really awesome Pathfinder weapons. I’ve become very close with my Pathfinder Auto Rifle, and every time I leveled into a new bracket the next pattern was magically available for development. This has been the biggest resource sink for me as I made one of these each time it was possible. However it seems like you stop getting patterns at Tier 5… and I am not really looking forward to the prospect of trying to find a new auto rifle crush. I am hoping that one of these patches fixes this and lets me keep making my little Pathfinder auto rifle friends. For the moment I am going to be getting my hands on other types of rifles and trying out which seems to fit best for that archetype. In a way it reminded me of the way that Red Death feels in Destiny… and while this game calls it an auto rifle… by Destiny terms it would be a pulse rifle. Whatever the case I am slowing wrapping up some of the loyalty missions because before I start moving the priority ops again I want to make sure I have access to all of the toys.

The weirdest part about this play through is that I am playing in a fashion that I never really thought I would. For the most part I have maxed out a number of the weapon abilities and all of the passive benefit traits. From there I am largely playing a “pet class” for lack of a better term. I am using the turret which I find insanely handy, and my common MO is to open the door to a base… chunk a turret in and then back out to safety as I let it soften the defenses before ducking back in and mopping up. In addition to the turret I am regularly using the hacked observer that PeeBee gives you access to, and letting it loose to run amok. These two things often times distract the enemy and I can pick them off with headshots from either the auto rifle if medium range, or sniper rifle if extreme ranges. For up close and personal action… I have shockwave with the knock back that can clear out a bunch of things rushing at me. In truth it is more of a jack of all trades build than any deep synergy between abilities… but it is also tailored to some of the things that I like from other games. In the Borderlands series I have almost exclusively played whatever character could use auto rifles and turrets. While I like getting up close and personal in most games… in shooters I tend to relish hanging out in that medium range with the ability to duck behind cover. Lately however I have gotten into using my Asari sword to slice and dice Kett in close quarters… so maybe that medium range thing is shifting. Whatever the case… I spent so much time with Andromeda this weekend and the game just keeps getting better as I get further into it. While the game might have started out awkwardly… it really feels like it is going to finish in style.

Boosts and Buffs

April 7, 2017 by Belghast

I’ve officially reached the point in the Diablo 3 season where I can straight up wreck at least early torment content, which means… I can boost my friends. Last night I snagged Byx, Ammo and Sol and drug them through a few Nephilim rifts until they came out level 70s on the other side. In truth I am rather horrible at boosting people… I tend to overclear because my tank instincts kick in and I desperately want to protect my fledgling charges. So that means that the individual Rifts probably take way longer than they should. However it also means if you are being boosted by me… you are not only walking away with levels but also with a sizable amount of cash and gems. Sadly the loot is functionally meaningless until you hit 70. However since Byx was way ahead of the rest of the crew I am pretty certain she walked with some decent loot as well. The funny thing with writing about how much I was not feeling this season… is that it actually made me really want to play. The moment I posted the blog post I logged in and did a solo greater rift before heading into work that day, and each night since I have at least spent a little bit of time playing. After the boostery, I connected with Grace and we did a couple of rounds of bounties since we were both in desperate need of the crafting materials. I technically have everything that I need gear wise apart from one legendary gem, and a single ring…. but everything could be improved by getting some ancients which have been in short supply thus far.

After playing some Diablo 3 on the laptop, I decided to go upstairs and check out the latest patch for Mass Effect Andromeda. All in all there have been a lot of subtle improvements to the way that the character models look. In truth I think there are a bunch of improvements to the game in general because the worlds just feel better looking. This might of course be the placebo effect, and because they said they patched…. it is making my brain desperately want to see the improvements. However at the very least my Ryder and all of the characters I am interacting with seem more normal looking. The Botox face is largely gone… and the fully open surprise eyes seems to be gone as well. I am pretty pleased with the results because this little bit of window dressing has fixed a lot of my gripes about the game. On the other side of the equation on non-cosmetic changes… the general inventory increases are also amazing. I feel like I am no longer needing to deconstruct items in the middle of a planet rather than waiting for me to be back on my ship. Similarly the ability to tab out of the flight animations while in a solar system makes that just work better, and I am wondering if there is some option I can check in the settings to default to disabled so I don’t need to hit tab.

I put a few hours in last night and in truth probably played about thirty minutes longer than I should have… for my sanity… and my sleep patterns. I really like this game and It definitely is up in the game of the year territory for me. The problem there is… so is Zelda Breath of the Wild and Horizon Zero Dawn… and all of those were released in the first quarter of the year. I guess in a way I am extremely thankful for all of these games, because with the way the real world is turning out… this seems to be the golden age of escapism. It is comforting to be able to lose yourself in a deep and rich game, and completely forget that the world is apparently on fire and someone replaced the fire extinguisher with a can of easy cheese. There are just so damned many quests that I have picked up and that are littering my inventory that I need to spend one entire night trying to burn those down before I move forward. I will probably always be grossly over-leveled for the content as a result… but whatever I have my trust Rank V Pioneer Gun. I just gotta say that once I stumbled onto the weapons provided by the DLC… or more so I stumbled onto how to GET the DLC items… I fell in love with the Auto Rifle. Yes I keep giving mine bizarre names because I’ve had to craft each after the first one…. but whatever it is a freaking awesome gun. More importantly… Ashgar can be happy that I have finally moved on past the Avenger.

Dangerous Water

March 28, 2017 by Belghast

I am pretty sure I am coming down with something because I have felt fairly lousy since the weekend. It is the sort of indiscriminate miserable that just makes doing anything a complete trudge. It also feels like I have spent more time searching for something to play than actually playing anything. Then things happen like the fact that for some reason I booted up Bioshock Remastered? I got the game free for owning all of the other Bioshock content, and I installed it some time ago thinking it might be nice to play back through this game. Then the election happened… and the character of Andrew Ryan felt a little too on the nose for me personally. So as a result it has sat unloved as a desktop icon… waiting on someone to give it the time of day and click on it. For whatever reason last night I did just that… and apparently the game defaults to running at 4k. Did you know that 4k PNG screenshots are almost 15 mb a piece? I didn’t but now do… I have lots of them that I will ultimately need to drop down if I ever hope to use them. Something else that I did not know is that if you have a USB Controller connected to your system… the game doesn’t seem to be willing to give you a mouse and keyboard option. So as a result I played through on the Xbox 360 controller I leave hooked up to my gaming machine. I didn’t get super far before the whim changed, but enough to remember how much I really love this game. I do find it extremely odd that you can’t really sight any of the weapons though…. that is not something I remembered but I guess it makes sense given that your alternate fire is whatever plasmid you happen to have equipped. Personally I still think the game looks gorgeous, and artistically it has some of the most memorable visual sequences and staging.

When I bounced I ultimately did so in the direction of Mass Effect Andromeda, and opted to finish up Hvarl. The weird part about this is that I thought I had not actually really scratched the surface of this planet. However it seems like in the grand scheme of things is is maybe half the length of Voeld. The weird part about this is it seems like the last thing that I waited to do was actually go vault hunting. I am not exactly sure if you can do this early however since the actual access to the vault and the second half of the map only work if you happen to be on specific quests. So far this seems like the most “on rails” planet given that things need to happen in a specific sequence to end up leading to the end of it. The planet itself reminds me an awful lot of Dromund Kaas from SWTOR, with a much more wild jungle area. In the grand scheme I did not like this planet nearly as much as I did Voeld… and also it doesn’t feel nearly as satisfying to move on past it either. I think the biggest part of this for me is the complete and total lack of Nomad action, which makes sense given how dense the foliage is. That said I did not really realize how much of my enjoyment planet side is related to driving my Nomad around until I hit this planet. We talked about it on twitter yesterday… but want to buy a Nomad racing DLC for this game.

Towards the end of the night I moved forward in the story and started the world of Kadara, which happens to be populated by a bunch of the Exiles off the Nexus. Functionally you can think of it as Omega by any other name… except instead of a slew of interesting Aliens… you have a bunch of asshole humans instead. After Desert World, Ice World and Night World… I was happy to move on to something that looked relatively normal. You know other than the whole acid water thing going on… and toxic regions that damage your suit similar to the last few worlds we have been on. Something tells me that I am ultimately going to work on terraforming the shit out of this world first thing so that I can enjoy the ride more freely. I’ve barely just scratched the surface but I gotta say… fighting Nexus outlaws is way more enjoyable than any of the enemy types I have encountered to date in this game. I mean I love the Remnant and it is always fun to kill Kett, but the outlaws here feel much more varied. Especially when you factor in that apparently there is a turf war going on, and the two factions are gunning for each other as well as you. I am sort of longing for a “kill everyone and settle the planet” option but I am not likely going to see that.

C is for Captain

March 27, 2017 by Belghast

I thought I would start things off with a humorous glitch this morning that started happening last night. Any time I would go into the bar and get a drink, the glass was missing and would instead get this goofy empty hand sequence. Secondly I got chastised the other day for not saying that there would be potential spoilers in my blog post… so lets get that one out of the way. I am not intentionally going into full on story mode, but I also am too sleepy to probably comb my post adequately for spoilers. So there might be some, especially since I am realizing that my definition of a spoiler is vastly different than the definition of some folks. For me a spoiler is generally a big plot point, or what happens when you make this or that decision. Whereas I never would have thought the fact that you end up on an ice planet, or the fact that you wind up getting a new race that has been featured in pretty much every trailer for the last bit would be classified as spoilers. So be forewarned, your mileage may vary. To be truthful this is probably a blanket statement about every post that I make. While I generally try not to spoiler larger plot points, the fact that I am writing a blog every morning and need constant fodder means that ultimately details about games will come out. Hell the simple fact that I am posting a constant flood of screenshots is probably spoilery in itself.

I spent a fair amount of Sunday playing Mass Effect Andromeda, and lets me honest… I spent MOST of that time wandering around Not-Hoth. The way the planets work in this game is a massive trap for someone like me who likes to roam around aimlessly and complete mini objectives. I generally like ice zones and ice planets… and while there was a huge segment of Hoth in SWTOR that was sheer drudgery… I still loved it. So the fact that I am wandering around in a giant all terrain vehicle on gorgeous ice flows exploring nifty things I see off on the horizon… that is definitely in my wheelhouse. I did however take time out of my busy schedule of killing remnant and kett camps to move the story forward, and unlock the vault on Voeld. This allowed me to set down my second colonial base, that was given a name there is no way in the hell I am ever going to remember. I mean I realize that they couldn’t give me the ability to name these settlements because voiced dialog lines…. but at least make them easy to remember. I mean they all have nifty lore nuggets when the colonial governor explains why they named the town whatever they named it… but there is zero point zero chance I am going to remember any of it. I may or may not have an issue with remembering the names of things… and if you have ever listened to AggroChat there is a lot of me explaining what I am talking about… and then Tam or Ash coughing up the name of whatever it is.

The biggest takeaway from the weekend… is just how much in general I like my crew. I am even starting to like Liam, who I guess at the first I was sort of expecting to be the Corso Riggs of the crew. There is something I like about each and every one of them, and I guess that is sort of the hallmark of a good Bioware game. The biggest surprise for me however is how I have ended up playing with Jaal. At face value he did not exactly seem like I character I would want to run around with, but did anyways because I kept exploring functionally his homeworlds. However over time I have come to actually like the Cat Squid Whatever quite a lot. I am however having weird flashbacks to the Selkath and Manaan when interacting with Aya and the Angara. In truth there is a lot of this game that feels thematically reminiscent of Knights of the Old Republic. I mean functionally we are unlocking ancient tech similar to that of the content leading up to the Star Forge, and while not exactly the same it feels strangely similar to me. I think in part I have spent so much time working on the two spin off Angara worlds because otherwise it would feel really freaking wrong when we started plunking colonies down on these planets. If I had not done a bunch of things to fix core problems and to build a giant freaking bridge between the Angara and the species of the Milky Way… it would feel super invadery when I started setting up shop on their worlds.

My growing take away however is that while this game is full of glitches and all sorts of strange shit going on… that underneath the lack of polish is a really solid experience. I struggled at length to get into Dragon Age Inquisition… because I just didn’t care about the story that was happening and in truth many of the characters that were part of it. That has not been the case with Mass Effect Andromeda. While the narrative feels a little ill fitting at time… and “Ryder” feels more forced at times… I still very much feel like I am my own character. I can tweak the dialog just enough to give my own spin on the conversation. While it doesn’t seem to have some of the same lasting effects as going renegade used to… there are still some of these moments scattered throughout the game play where a quick time event alters the course of the story. I think what is missing is the asshole Ryder option, similar to asshole Shepard… and that was something I never played. I could never bring myself to go down those dialog options because I just don’t have that level of cruelty in me… even if being enacted upon non-existent people. All of that said… I am enjoying the hell out of this game.