Bioware Acknowledges 'Mass Effect: Andromeda' Criticism

[Guest]

The company said its dev team is "listening, working around the clock to gather information and plan out solutions to improve and build on" the flawed space adventure.

Bioware Acknowledges 'Mass Effect: Andromeda' Criticism : Read more

 

[dstarr3]

Well, there are a lot of problems that the game has that I don't think can really even be fixed. Like the voice acting. Generally, all of the acting is quite bland. I think by design, as well. There were many lines that were delivered as blandly as possible so that it could fit into multiple contexts. And when you tells your actors to stay bland for so many lines of dialog, you just get a game full of bland acting. And I don't think BioWare has the time or money at this point to completely rerecord and then reanimate most of the dialog in the game. That's just not going to happen.

 

[MatchstickMan]

Agreed with DSTARR3. The biggest problems I have with the game are the dialogue and the acting. BioWare won't completely rewrite the game to fix that, but I can hope they will learn for the next game.

From the article: "..it seems as if Bioware merely imported the facial animation from Mass Effect 2 or 3..."

Oh God, I wish that were the case. Having just played the original trilogy, the animation was significantly better. ME:A just feels deadpan all the time.

In general, I have really been enjoying the game. Once you get past the specific dialogue and the character animation, the story and the game are still pretty fun. Most of the issues I have end up being really nit-picky, like your companions not coming with you through the gravity wells but rather being teleported at the very end. Or your companions dropping from orbit after exiting the Nomad from time to time...

 

[delaro]

I find this hardly surprising with EA owning Bioware. EA has a reputation of rushing products to the shelf before they are streamlined and sometimes even stable. They makes that $60 a copy and players get to suffer.

 

[dstarr3]

Well, that, and this was developed by BioWare's B-team. It was never going to be as good anyway.

 

[rantoc]

Multi GPU performance is soo soo (even with *shivers* fxaa - blurr "aa". Temporal is nice singlecard aa (yet again quite blurry) but it destroys sli/cf busses/performance due to reliance on prev frame IE the prev frame needs to be transfered to other card while processing the current drawn) and the facial animations is bad at times but beside those short-comings i like the title and would still recommend it any day (or night!)

 

[ddpruitt]

I think we all saw this coming when BioWare lost what made them BioWare and it became just another ATM that EA would run into the ground.

 

[DerpDerp1234]

A EA game that wasn't coded correctly nor finished? What??? Color me surprised!

 

[Jim90]

Once again we see alpha/beta testing taking place after the 'official release'. Utterly shocking and a bit sickening. There's really no excuse for this. You know, in the old/gold days - before the internet - games had to be properly tested before release...you couldn't 'patch' them later.

I blame the (apparent) 'fast' internet - the developers now think ALL issues can be resolved 'quickly' by a post-release patch system that they firmly believe is acceptable to the buying public. Inexcusable!

 

[extremepenguin]

What we need as gamers is to actually send a message that we wont tolerate buggy poorly written releases. The pre orders alone for this game probably made it break even once that happens they have very little incentive to release a solid product at day 1 we need a big AAA title to flop and flop hard to send a message that we wont tolerate this kind of stuff any more.

 

[mapesdhs]

Add to the above the ridiculous infestation into the game of SJW politics. What a mess...

 

[July_2]

I think bioware as a developer has a major internal problem they might lack talent or it's bad management, since the EA takeover this great company has disappointed, this is not the only example, you can look at SWTOR and see a great game being ruined right upfront of you

 

[Jan_26]

If you want to enjoy a game... give it at least a year after release. These days it's like that across all developers. Bugs get fixed, performance improved, content added and price lowered.
So next year I'll check out Andromeda. That being said, I love ME 1-3 so an empty shell of a game would be a great disappointment for me.

 

[Dosflores]

Once again we see alpha/beta testing taking place after the 'official release'

I wouldn't call this alpha/beta testing. Andromeda had/has only a few issues that can actually be fixed. It was a pretty solid PC release for current standards (which is indeed sad).

The biggest issues of Andromeda are caused by poor game design. They can't be fixed now. Bioware managed to "fix" ME3's ending. It improved from "terrible" to "really disappointing". I don't think they can fix a whole game now.

All in all, I'm having lots of fun playing it. Its story, characters, and animation are lackluster. On the other hand, I love its gameplay and graphics. And I truly appreciate that it doesn't force you to play in multiplayer mode. In ME3, you did have to play it, even if you weren't interested, in order for the ending to be just "terrible" instead of "insultingly terrible".

 

[Jan_26]

Once again we see alpha/beta testing taking place after the 'official release'

I wouldn't call this alpha/beta testing. Andromeda had/has only a few issues that can actually be fixed. It was a pretty solid PC release for current standards (which is indeed sad).

The biggest issues of Andromeda are caused by poor game design. They can't be fixed now. Bioware managed to "fix" ME3's ending. It improved from "terrible" to "really disappointing". I don't think they can fix a whole game now.

All in all, I'm having lots of fun playing it. Its story, characters, and animation are lackluster. On the other hand, I love its gameplay and graphics. And I truly appreciate that it doesn't force you to play in multiplayer mode. In ME3, you did have to play it, even if you weren't interested, in order for the ending to be just "terrible" instead of "insultingly terrible".

Hm, what was the difference? I never played multiplayer thing, just single player.

 

[Dosflores]

Hm, what was the difference? I never played multiplayer thing, just single player.

Spoiler

If you didn't play multiplayer, the reapers caused more destruction than they did if you got some multiplayer experience points. Even if you did a perfect single-player campaign during the entire trilogy, making all the right choices, the ending showed some destruction that could only be avoided via multiplayer.

 

[Jan_26]

oic, thx for info...

 

[HaB1971]

Even with the extremely flawed voice acting, animations, dull side quests and the 'game play' of 3rd person shooting with dumbed down mechanics of x-ray vision, crouching is automated only when at cover points and being able to see where the AI is going is so typical of games these days. While I get that 3rd person can be ok all to the other stuff needs to go. Games need to be harder, the "Don't hurt me daddy" level of yesteryear has been replaced with what would be considered normal... fun may be subjective but skill is not... I will not waste my hard drive space on these games

 

[cats_Paw]

As far as I know the team that made this game has nothing to do with the original team that developed ME 1 2 and 3 (even between those games there were some changes).

 

[Urzu1000]

I think people are being too critical of Andromeda. The game is absolutely freaking massive. I'm 60 hours in (single player only), and while I've encountered plenty of bugs, I'm still swamped in stupid amounts of content and story. The bugs themselves usually aren't gamebreaking. The few that are can be fixed with some quick reloads from the numerous autosaves.

That said... I wish they skipped some of the more pointless side missions, and scrapped the task system entirely. They could have used that time to add more quality missions to the game, or to flesh out some of the other systems. It would have been nice to be able to outfit my squad mates like I used to do in the original Mass Effect. And the game could definitely do with some more between-mission dialogue on the ship.

Those things were pretty important for immersion for me. I still remember going and talking to Tali and Wrex constantly after each mission, and finding new and unique dialogue almost every time.

 

[alithegreat]

Well, to be honest i am not surprised. For the last 5-6 years, game development is lacking quality at release. Bigger the title, worse the release.

I developed a strategy to counter this, although it is hard to implement.

I wait for a couple of years ( yes , years ). After all DLC, Expansion packs, all additional content and expansion packs released, these games show up as "Collecter's , Ultimate, definitive <insert some label here > editions.
Unfortunately, only until then, they are polished, less-buggy , more optimized.

Also, you can buy them much cheaper, run them on a hardware way more cheaper at max settings.

Of course not everyone can wait that much. But with current standards of the industry thats my only solution. I work full time so i still have a huge list of FRP/RPG games to be finished on my steam account. When i work on them, that time usually passes by itself...

Other than that i believe only option to prevent these from happening is not to buy with inflated release prices.

 

[mrpijey]

Hum, I must have been the lucky one then. I've clocked over 60 hours in the game and apart from some low quality facial animations and minor texture clippings and odd angles the game has been rock solid without any problems or game breaking issues. Personally I love this game and its size is awesome, I love the characters, the planet terraforming system, the rover and everything else about it. Sure, some animations could have been removed, some facial animations could have been patched up to spec and some textures could have been better (especially visible when doing Ansel capturing) but that's stuff that plague every game today. The UI is horrible yes, but nothing that would disqualify the entire game. Personally I think gamers today are way too whiny and complain about everything that isn't "perfect" (according to their point of view), and a lot of people complain just because they can forgetting that there are far far worse games out there that didn't get half the attention this game got. Funny thing is that most of these has not even played the game themselves but only seen screenshots and the stupid memes.

If you like Mass Effect this game is a worthy successor and I hope for more in the series. Buy it, play it, enjoy!