Mass Effect Andromeda: To Boldly Go

[Dienekes]

Spoiler: Video-The Know: Mass Effect Andromeda

Show

Because I occasionally look at those.

So... Apparently upper management was high (As usual) is the response to why the animations is bad, and apparently there's some truth to the SJW blaming as to Female Ryder's features... Except it wasn't SJWs, but Upper Management.

I'm not sure I've ever seen upper management actually be praised.

Upper managements goal is to tighten goals, streamline projects, and make sure that the company turns a profit. This is necessary for the medium otherwise projects this big spiral out of control and either the project collapses under their own cost or come out so bloated that they're more a chimera than a consistent game.

That said, they're not, usually, the actual audience for the game they're managing. So if they miscalculate or their gut was wrong about an issue it becomes news. Possibly game ending news. But I can also pretty much guarantee that any popular AAA game had just as much upper management meddling. Only in their case when the game comes out right, everyone praises the director and visual design or game play. Not the guys who make sure that the game actually happens.

But as we can see here. When they mess up they can really, really mess things up.

[RagingKrikkit]

- Option to skip the spaceflight animations

Is this the part where we drunkenly revel?

[Beleriphon]

Is this the part where we drunkenly revel?

Everything else is secondary, this is the one thing I wanted. It was the one thing that actually irked me about the game, to the point that I actively avoided trying to leave planets unless I absolutely had to.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

Improvements coming to Andromeda

The next patch (1.05) will address:
- Option to skip the spaceflight animations
- Bigger inventory
- Improvements to human and asari eyes
- General improvements to hair, appearance, lipsync and acting
- More character creation options
- Remnant decryption keys (the stuff that you can use to bypass the sudoku puzzles) are being made cheaper and more available
- Balance changes to various SP and MP abilities (to be detailed later.)

Future patches will address:
- M/M Ryder romance options (YES!)
- Ongoing cinematics and animations tweaking

This makes me glad I'm going through the original trilogy first. Give BioWare enough time to finish tinkering with it so when I get to Andromeda proper, it'll REALLY be something.

So...what are you all naming your Ryders?

Mine (when I get there) will be Kastanie Ryder, named after the Admiral who took back Shanxi during the First Contact War. Using a bit of Mass Effect's own history, since Alec Ryder seems to be a bit of a nerd.

[tonberrian]

I'm perfectly fine with default names. The game will use them sometimes, and its more refreshing to hear Sara than to not hear anything else.

[thorgrim29]

Mine (when I get there) will be Kastanie Ryder, named after the Admiral who took back Shanxi during the First Contact War. Using a bit of Mass Effect's own history, since Alec Ryder seems to be a bit of a nerd.

Alec probably knew her since he would have been one of her more senior special ops commanders at the time. Alec was around when they discovered the martian ruins. It bears remembering that the Mass Effect timeline for humans is very short. Shepard was born a few years before First Contact with the turians, Kaiden was one of the first generation of human biotics, etc etc... In the games the people fighting against the humans getting a council seat are always presented badly but really they make a lot of sense. Sure the Batarians are ***** but they've been part of council space since the Roman Republic, can't blame them for being a little sore that the interlopers who have been part of the galactic community less than one generation are getting all the respect. Also the humans become a dominant military power super fast, which is a bit odd. And that also means that a lot of the humans in Andromeda also remember the first contact war, why they feel the need to go to a new galaxy when they just had one offered to them I don't know, Bioware could have saved themselves a lot of inconsistencies by setting Mass Effect 1 200 years later is my point.

[Squark]

Spoiler: Video-The Know: Mass Effect Andromeda

Show

Because I occasionally look at those.

So... Apparently upper management was high (As usual) is the response to why the animations is bad, and apparently there's some truth to the SJW blaming as to Female Ryder's features... Except it wasn't SJWs, but Upper Management.

I'm not sure I've ever seen upper management actually be praised.

We don't see upper management praised much because when things go well, the consumer won't notice their influence. We don't hear about the good additions (Unless it took work to make it a good addition) or the horrible mistakes they caught in a successful project. You do sometimes here about projects that crashed and burned that might not have if they had better oversight, though.

[Douglas]

Also the humans become a dominant military power super fast, which is a bit odd.

Isn't that how the Turians got on the Council? Seems like something people could cite for precedent to me, though the humans were (until the Reapers) lacking a great enemy to save everyone from.

[tonberrian]

I think it's just good old humans being ready to kill everyone they meet. First contact for humans was a war with the Turians, remember, so they had to build up enough to not get curbstomped immediately. Which I'll admit is weird for a race with one planet to their name. I guess human shipyards worked nonstop to reach the point they did.

Still, I think the Batarians probably had more dreadnoughts than the Alliance, since the Alliance only managed their 9th dreadnought by ME3 and only 6 in ME1. Turians meanwhile had 36 going into ME1, and 39 by ME3. You can probably take that as a relative comparison of the total naval capacities of the Turians vs. Humans. The Alliance is only a "major" military power because the non-council, non-Batarian races don't seem to be major builders of navies at all.

Maybe if the Volus or Elcor wanted to be council races they should have built more dreadnoughts.

[Zevox]

I'm perfectly fine with default names. The game will use them sometimes, and its more refreshing to hear Sara than to not hear anything else.

Wait, really? They actually bothered to record voice acting for if you use the default names? That's kind of nice, actually. I'll have to use those whenever I get around to playing the game, in that case.

[thorgrim29]

Maybe if the Volus or Elcor wanted to be council races they should have built more dreadnoughts.

But they can't, citadel law says that Turians have the biggest dreadnought fleet followed by council members then everybody else. And the First Contact war lasted for a few weeks, not enough time to switch to a war economy, not to mention that even if human ships were surprisingly good for an isolated species they couldn't measure up the turians.

About the turians getting the seat as soon as they joined, sure but they already had a huge fleet and dozens of fully colonized worlds before the salarians found them and had been using mass effect tech for centuries, I guess they were just isolated a bit and everybody else was preoccupied by the rachni then the krogan at the time. Plus they had just pulled everyone's bacon from the fire by fighting the krogan to a standstill long enough for the salarians to deploy the genophage. Compare to the humans who got an embassy as soon as the hostilities stopped and were agitating for a seat 30 years or so later.

[Psyren]

I think it's just good old humans being ready to kill everyone they meet. First contact for humans was a war with the Turians, remember, so they had to build up enough to not get curbstomped immediately. Which I'll admit is weird for a race with one planet to their name. I guess human shipyards worked nonstop to reach the point they did.

That's because we weren't at war with "The Turians," not really. The entire First Contact War took place over one colony. The Turians themselves didn't even see it as a war; for them it was police action. By the time the larger Hierarchy was gearing up to get involved, the Council (the Asari, mainly) were able to calm things down; had they not done so, we'd have probably been stomped hard.

Wait, really? They actually bothered to record voice acting for if you use the default names? That's kind of nice, actually. I'll have to use those whenever I get around to playing the game, in that case.

They had to record it - remember that your twin is in the game with their default name no matter which one you pick. So since all those "Sara" and "Scott" soundbytes are floating around anyway, it wasn't much more effort to add a couple more for the one you're playing as.

Mine (when I get there) will be Kastanie Ryder, named after the Admiral who took back Shanxi during the First Contact War. Using a bit of Mass Effect's own history, since Alec Ryder seems to be a bit of a nerd.

I went with "Ellen" just to see if the voice thing was unique to SAM or not. But yeah, only the default first names are voiced. (I'm willing to bet spelling matters too - i.e. don't change to "Sarah" or "Scot".)

[TheTeaMustFlow]

Honestly, I don't see why they have us choose names at all. What's the point of choosing a first name if it's never going to come up and everyone's going to call you by your surname or title anyway? If they just handed us a first name, they could stop doing the annoying dance-around-the-main-character's-name thing that every bioware game has to have.

[RagingKrikkit]

I think it's just good old humans being ready to kill everyone they meet. First contact for humans was a war with the Turians, remember, so they had to build up enough to not get curbstomped immediately. Which I'll admit is weird for a race with one planet to their name. I guess human shipyards worked nonstop to reach the point they did.

Still, I think the Batarians probably had more dreadnoughts than the Alliance, since the Alliance only managed their 9th dreadnought by ME3 and only 6 in ME1. Turians meanwhile had 36 going into ME1, and 39 by ME3. You can probably take that as a relative comparison of the total naval capacities of the Turians vs. Humans. The Alliance is only a "major" military power because the non-council, non-Batarian races don't seem to be major builders of navies at all.

Maybe if the Volus or Elcor wanted to be council races they should have built more dreadnoughts.

According to the Citadel's major naval treaty (Farixen?), the dreadnaught ratio was 5:3:1 between Turians, Asari/Salarians and everyone else. Being party to this treaty appears to be a prerequisite to opening an embassy on the Citadel, so it left the same ceiling for big ships between the Alliance and the Batarians. However, with humanity ascending to the council, their maximum fleet size presumably tripled, while the Batarians are no longer part of Citadel space and are thus free to expand their navy as they wish.

[Psyren]

Honestly, I don't see why they have us choose names at all. What's the point of choosing a first name if it's never going to come up and everyone's going to call you by your surname or title anyway? If they just handed us a first name, they could stop doing the annoying dance-around-the-main-character's-name thing that every bioware game has to have.

It's a form of expression. I personally don't care if the first name isn't voiced by the NPCs.

From a practical standpoint, it helps you differentiate between your own characters if you have multiple Ryders/Shepards/Hawkes/Inquisitors. This is particularly important in some kind of world-state selection engine like Dragon Age Keep.

[Beleriphon]

Wait, really? They actually bothered to record voice acting for if you use the default names? That's kind of nice, actually. I'll have to use those whenever I get around to playing the game, in that case.

Yeah, its actually pretty cool. SAM uses it quite a bit, vacillation between the given default name and Pathfinder. So I get to hear Scott in SAM's weird computer voice pretty frequently. There's a few other characters that use it as well.

[LibraryOgre]

Also the humans become a dominant military power super fast, which is a bit odd.

IIRC, this was addressed at some point... basically, as I recall, humans have a much lower percentage of their population join the military, leaving a massive economy behind. Also, the humans sort of bypassed the Treaty of Farixen... sure, we're only allowed 1 (or 3) dreadnaughts to the Turian's 5, but there's no restriction on carriers... we won't carry a kilometer-long mass effect cannon, but rather three hundred 10m mass effect cannons.

And that also means that a lot of the humans in Andromeda also remember the first contact war, why they feel the need to go to a new galaxy when they just had one offered to them I don't know, Bioware could have saved themselves a lot of inconsistencies by setting Mass Effect 1 200 years later is my point.

Imagine that you set out for the new frontier. You're heading west! The New World, all set to make it in an untamed land!

You get there, and find that it's already settled. Sure, they look and talk funny, but the untamed frontier is mostly tame.

Might you not want to head a bit further out?

[Beleriphon]

Imagine that you set out for the new frontier. You're heading west! The New World, all set to make it in an untamed land!

You get there, and find that it's already settled. Sure, they look and talk funny, but the untamed frontier is mostly tame.

Might you not want to head a bit further out?

There's also the strong implication that the Initiative project was launched between the events of ME2 and ME3. Initially conceived as a "Hey lets go find what's out there" the Council realized there was the distinct possibility of the Reapers ending galactic life as they know it so they send out the Arks and the Nexus as as way to ensure their species survive a possible Reaper induced doom. Obviously, Sheperd being Sheperd saves the galaxy by being Red, Blue or Green and becomes an immortal legend in the Milky Way. I like to think that no matter what happens at the end of ME3 Sheperd becomes the basis for a new pan-galactic religion. I mean once that gets out wouldn't you think Sheperd would be a pretty good messiah figure?

[Dienekes]

Honestly, I don't see why they have us choose names at all. What's the point of choosing a first name if it's never going to come up and everyone's going to call you by your surname or title anyway? If they just handed us a first name, they could stop doing the annoying dance-around-the-main-character's-name thing that every bioware game has to have.

It helps separate my save files.

Besides there was nothing cooler than saving the galaxy as Commander BingoBango Shepard.

Or save the world as Warden StankPants Aeducan

[LibraryOgre]

It helps separate my save files.

Besides there was nothing cooler than saving the galaxy as Commander BingoBango Shepard.

Or save the world as Warden StankPants Aeducan

My brother would name his pets in MMOs just for the joy of the message "Princess has clawed X for Y damage".

[RagingKrikkit]

Well, this planet looks okay, what do the sensors say?

Temperature: 1114C

Well, then.

[Morty]

Does anyone know where to find the immigration officer for the quest with the disease carrier? The quest marker isn't working for some reason.

[tonberrian]

Does anyone know where to find the immigration officer for the quest with the disease carrier? The quest marker isn't working for some reason.

Is this the one on the Nexus? I think the immigration officer should be in the Docking Bay, I wanna say northwest corner and straight across from where you get off the Tempest. At a counter greeting new arrivals to the Nexus.

[Calemyr]

Near as I can tell, the backstory works like this:

Spoiler: Spoilers not tied to the main story.

Show

10 years before Mass Effect 1, Garson comes up with the idea that colonizing another galaxy would be incredible. Sure, the Council had only charted 1% of the Milky Way, but apparently every cluster they'd tried that wasn't on the relay network was dead and those behind inactive relays tended to have monsters like the Rachni and Humanity behind them, so playing with inactive relays had been banned. Garson had explorers' fever and a "go big or go home" philosophy. Being absurdly powerful, rich, and influential, she threw herself 100% behind the project.

Just after Mass Effect 1, Garson's resources were exhausted and the project still wasn't ready to go. In comes an unknown benefactor who prefers to only be referred to as "The Benefactor", who wields resources on a scale Garson hadn't dreamed of in her heyday. The project kicks into overdrive, and the Benefactor recruits the disgraced genius Alec Ryder to develop his personal AI project, SAM, into the backbone of the Initiative. (A decision which, in hindsight, was what turned the project from utter failure into unmitigated success.) Ryder, whose resources were also obliterated with his obsession over his pet project (which could theorhetically save his wife's life), jumps at the chance.

At the time of Mass Effect 2, Ryder collects enough information from the Benefactor and the few friends he has left to be convinced the Reapers are coming. Recognizing the threat, he recruits his son and daughter onto his team in order to keep them safe from the robotic cuttlefish of institutionalized extinction. Garson and Ryder grow increasingly nervous about the Benefactor's seemingly unlimited resources, information, and access. Whatever the Benefactor is, it seems unsettlingly... illusive.

After reaching Andromeda, the Scourge rips the Nexus a new one, killing many. Garson is among the first to wake up. Unease about the Benefactor's intentions quickly becomes paranoia and she hides herself away in her apartment on the still-mothballed docks until she is killed by persons unknown. Fearing the damage to morale that would come from her murder, Nexus leadership labels her death as Scourge related.

Completely unrelated, but on Kadara the human pathfinder discovers a group of human scientists identifying themselves as Cerberus, performing research on a collection of non-human exiles. Records on their computer show that they in fact got fired from the organization for being too ruthless even for Cerberus's standards. For their part, the scientists mock their former employer for losing his mind, focusing the majority of his resources on resurrecting a single human as if that would make any difference in the long run...

[tonberrian]

Near as I can tell, the backstory works like this:

Spoiler: Spoilers not tied to the main story.

Show

10 years before Mass Effect 1, Garson comes up with the idea that colonizing another galaxy would be incredible. Sure, the Council had only charted 1% of the Milky Way, but apparently every cluster they'd tried that wasn't on the relay network was dead and those behind inactive relays tended to have monsters like the Rachni and Humanity behind them, so playing with inactive relays had been banned. Garson had explorers' fever and a "go big or go home" philosophy. Being absurdly powerful, rich, and influential, she threw herself 100% behind the project.

Just after Mass Effect 1, Garson's resources were exhausted and the project still wasn't ready to go. In comes an unknown benefactor who prefers to only be referred to as "The Benefactor", who wields resources on a scale Garson hadn't dreamed of in her heyday. The project kicks into overdrive, and the Benefactor recruits the disgraced genius Alec Ryder to develop his personal AI project, SAM, into the backbone of the Initiative. (A decision which, in hindsight, was what turned the project from utter failure into unmitigated success.) Ryder, whose resources were also obliterated with his obsession over his pet project (which could theorhetically save his wife's life), jumps at the chance.

At the time of Mass Effect 2, Ryder collects enough information from the Benefactor and the few friends he has left to be convinced the Reapers are coming. Recognizing the threat, he recruits his son and daughter onto his team in order to keep them safe from the robotic cuttlefish of institutionalized extinction. Garson and Ryder grow increasingly nervous about the Benefactor's seemingly unlimited resources, information, and access. Whatever the Benefactor is, it seems unsettlingly... illusive.

After reaching Andromeda, the Scourge rips the Nexus a new one, killing many. Garson is among the first to wake up. Unease about the Benefactor's intentions quickly becomes paranoia and she hides herself away in her apartment on the still-mothballed docks until she is killed by persons unknown. Fearing the damage to morale that would come from her murder, Nexus leadership labels her death as Scourge related.

Completely unrelated, but on Kadara the human pathfinder discovers a group of human scientists identifying themselves as Cerberus, performing research on a collection of non-human exiles. Records on their computer show that they in fact got fired from the organization for being too ruthless even for Cerberus's standards. For their part, the scientists mock their former employer for losing his mind, focusing the majority of his resources on resurrecting a single human as if that would make any difference in the long run...

Spoiler

Show

Mostly accurate, but I think the Nexus' motivation was laziness, not misdirection, regarding their labeling of Garson's death. I don't believe they ever suspected that Garson was murdered, they just didn't have the time or the resources to truly investigate it. Also they lacked magic scanners and AI.

[Calemyr]

Spoiler

Show

Mostly accurate, but I think the Nexus' motivation was laziness, not misdirection, regarding their labeling of Garson's death. I don't believe they ever suspected that Garson was murdered, they just didn't have the time or the resources to truly investigate it. Also they lacked magic scanners and AI.

Spoiler

Show

It is fair to not attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence, but the killer's posture over Garson suggests it was a violent death and I don't think the Nexus medical staff is that blind to miss foul play and Tann is not above rebranding things to further his agenda. Either the killer was more clever than SAM's recreation suggests or Tann simply didn't want the true first Milky Way murder in Andromeda to be of Jian Garson. There wouldn't be a Nexus to arrive at if the truth had gotten out.

[Zevox]

They had to record it - remember that your twin is in the game with their default name no matter which one you pick. So since all those "Sara" and "Scott" soundbytes are floating around anyway, it wasn't much more effort to add a couple more for the one you're playing as.

It's not remembering when it's something that I wasn't aware of before, but that does explain it, yeah. Cool, at least this time it'll feel like the game's main character has a first name.

Honestly, I don't see why they have us choose names at all. What's the point of choosing a first name if it's never going to come up and everyone's going to call you by your surname or title anyway? If they just handed us a first name, they could stop doing the annoying dance-around-the-main-character's-name thing that every bioware game has to have.

I completely agree, but there's sadly plenty of players who would rather give the character a name that never appears anywhere besides the menu screen than have the people in the game actually be able to refer to them by name, and it's such a long-established part of Bioware's MO that I don't think we should expect it to change.

[Dienekes]

I completely agree, but there's sadly plenty of players who would rather give the character a name that never appears anywhere besides the menu screen than have the people in the game actually be able to refer to them by name, and it's such a long-established part of Bioware's MO that I don't think we should expect it to change.

It's interesting to me that this is a problem for people. Mostly because all my friends and co-workers refer to me by my last name. The only people that call me by my first name are my direct family, which, usually are not relevant in a Bioware game, the only exceptions being DA2 and MEA. At least of the games I've played.

[Inarius]

Near as I can tell, the backstory works like this:

Spoiler: Spoilers not tied to the main story.

Show

10 years before Mass Effect 1, Garson comes up with the idea that colonizing another galaxy would be incredible. Sure, the Council had only charted 1% of the Milky Way, but apparently every cluster they'd tried that wasn't on the relay network was dead and those behind inactive relays tended to have monsters like the Rachni and Humanity behind them, so playing with inactive relays had been banned. Garson had explorers' fever and a "go big or go home" philosophy. Being absurdly powerful, rich, and influential, she threw herself 100% behind the project.

Just after Mass Effect 1, Garson's resources were exhausted and the project still wasn't ready to go. In comes an unknown benefactor who prefers to only be referred to as "The Benefactor", who wields resources on a scale Garson hadn't dreamed of in her heyday. The project kicks into overdrive, and the Benefactor recruits the disgraced genius Alec Ryder to develop his personal AI project, SAM, into the backbone of the Initiative. (A decision which, in hindsight, was what turned the project from utter failure into unmitigated success.) Ryder, whose resources were also obliterated with his obsession over his pet project (which could theorhetically save his wife's life), jumps at the chance.

At the time of Mass Effect 2, Ryder collects enough information from the Benefactor and the few friends he has left to be convinced the Reapers are coming. Recognizing the threat, he recruits his son and daughter onto his team in order to keep them safe from the robotic cuttlefish of institutionalized extinction. Garson and Ryder grow increasingly nervous about the Benefactor's seemingly unlimited resources, information, and access. Whatever the Benefactor is, it seems unsettlingly... illusive.

After reaching Andromeda, the Scourge rips the Nexus a new one, killing many. Garson is among the first to wake up. Unease about the Benefactor's intentions quickly becomes paranoia and she hides herself away in her apartment on the still-mothballed docks until she is killed by persons unknown. Fearing the damage to morale that would come from her murder, Nexus leadership labels her death as Scourge related.

Completely unrelated, but on Kadara the human pathfinder discovers a group of human scientists identifying themselves as Cerberus, performing research on a collection of non-human exiles. Records on their computer show that they in fact got fired from the organization for being too ruthless even for Cerberus's standards. For their part, the scientists mock their former employer for losing his mind, focusing the majority of his resources on resurrecting a single human as if that would make any difference in the long run...

Spoiler

Show

One big but interesting thing is the Benefactor joined the Initiative years before Mass Effect 1. He knew something was coming before Shepard dealt with Sovereign. Ryder actually confronts the Benefactor about this after talking to papa Vakarian shortly after ME1 while Garrus was still in C-Sec. To top that off its hinted that the Benefactor is either on the Nexus or on an Arc and it makes it seem like the possible Cerberus connection is shaky. I wonder if they threw in Cora Harper as a red herring to make people draw connections where there were none. Bioware does have its moments where it pulls the occasional switch like this.

[RagingKrikkit]

It's interesting to me that this is a problem for people. Mostly because all my friends and co-workers refer to me by my last name. The only people that call me by my first name are my direct family, which, usually are not relevant in a Bioware game, the only exceptions being DA2 and MEA. At least of the games I've played.

You military, by any chance? Going by last name is the norm there.