What Are You Playing: 9 Years since the Last Dragon Age

[LibraryOgre]

One thing I noticed in Andromeda myself is that quite a few characters seem strangely fixated on this little arm computer they have. When you'd talk to them, they would keep just tapping away on that thing during the conversation. Like some kind of in universe smartphone addiction. Not a big deal, but it did come across as a little odd.

Like every door opening with an omnitool, even among the Angara, who don't have them? Like doors that take forever to open with an omnitool, like Kralla's Song on Kadara?

[Errorname]

Andromeda was the first game by a new wing of the studio and they wasted a bunch of early development time on deluded pipe dreams of a procedurally generated galaxy, something they could never hope to deliver and which nobody in their core audience actually wanted, and knowing that made the entire project made sense to me.

It's an unsurvivable combination of an extremely green team and deeply incompetent management. Better leads might able to shape the fledgling studio into a team that could have shipped a polished product, and likewise a more seasoned team might have been able to endure foolish management

[warty goblin]

Andromeda was the first game by a new wing of the studio and they wasted a bunch of early development time on deluded pipe dreams of a procedurally generated galaxy, something they could never hope to deliver and which nobody in their core audience actually wanted, and knowing that made the entire project made sense to me.

It was their first solo effort, but they developed ME3's multiplayer.

It's an unsurvivable combination of an extremely green team and deeply incompetent management. Better leads might able to shape the fledgling studio into a team that could have shipped a polished product, and likewise a more seasoned team might have been able to endure foolish management

Given the utter garbage fire that is Anthem, I don't think any team could weather management as bad as Bioware's. Andromeda at least swung for the fences, and while what they ended up with was middling, it's a perfectly serviceable and playable Ubigame. The combat is really quite good, one of the stronger third person shooters around, and the jetpack integration is excellent. Anthem is a subpar copy of Destiny that lacked the courage to admit that's what it was doing and completely screwed that up, to the point it tunnelled right through merely mediocre and into realms of baffling incompetence. I really cannot express just how utterly bad Anthem is. Even the jetpack isn't so much good as it is the one thing that mostly works
and is then left out to die by a game that cannot meaningfully support its one halfway decent feature.

[ShadowShinobi]

Let me just remind everyone that Yo****aka Murayama only worked on Suikoden 1 and 2, which is why those games were so much better than the rest of the series. Eiyuden Chronicle is what the guy who made those games created after 20 more years of experience and tech advancements.

Ah, I'd wondered why there was such a difference in the 3rd game, and onwards.

[Errorname]

Given the utter garbage fire that is Anthem, I don't think any team could weather management as bad as Bioware's.

Yeah, there's a reason I said might, but a more seasoned team probably ships a more polished turd, if nothing else.

Andromeda at least swung for the fences

Honestly, they didn't. They wasted a bunch of money and time fantasizing about swinging for the fences and then decided to aim for a perfectly reasonable and attainable target that they should have been aiming at the whole time and then thoroughly whiffed it

[Cespenar]

I have tried to get into Stray Gods: A Roleplaying Musical, but sadly couldn't. The songs felt really rough, and the overall pacing was erratic at best. Unfortunate, since the VAs sounded pretty good and it was supposedly written by David Gaider, the OG Bioware writer fella?

[Anonymouswizard]

Andromeda was the first game by a new wing of the studio and they wasted a bunch of early development time on deluded pipe dreams of a procedurally generated galaxy, something they could never hope to deliver and which nobody in their core audience actually wanted, and knowing that made the entire project made sense to me.

Bioware has suffered from a mixture of over-ambition and poor management since at least Dragon Age: Inquisition, maybe Dragon Age 2. Although I suspect if the developers had been allowed an actual development cycle instead of rushing an early version to publishable DA2 would have been exactly what they wanted (it benefits from it's much smaller scope, it really needed a longer third act more than anything).

I also think ME3 had the extra hurdle of losing the original Reaper motivation.

Inquisition however suffers heavily from someone deciding the open world levels were a good idea when the strength of the studio was in densely packed areas with lots of story content. Inquisition shines in the heavily scripted missions, but nobody took the team aside and told them to make more of that.

Heck, the best non mission specific map was the one where you fight your way to and kill an Avaar who picked a fight with you.

I'd actually argue that on the whole Andromeda gets off better than Inquisition. At least once they were forced to work on achievable ideas the Andromeda team cut down on the number of maps.

[WritersBlock]

Bioware suffered from all of that and more ever since they sold out to EA. The exact second they did that was the end of them as a even half-decent company.

Call of Juarez has been pretty cool so far, I hear Gunslinger is the really good one so when I eventually finish the other 2 I will see for myself. One day I need to jump in the the 2 ancient gods dlc's of doom eternal still.

[Zevox]

So, Stellar Blade. It came out a couple of days ago, I got it... and I'm honestly still unsure how I feel about it.

The combat is pretty good, don't get me wrong, I'm having fun while I'm fighting the lovecraftian abominations that are this game's monsters, the "Naytiba." But everything else about it kind of leaves me feeling very... meh. As I already knew, the game really wants to be Nier: Automata, so most of it is taking place in the ruins of a post-apocalyptic Earth, with rather melancholy background music. Someone who likes this sort of thing would probably praise it as "atmospheric" or somesuch; for me, it just leaves the world feeling dull and lifeless, which makes it less fun to engage with. At least Nier: Automata had Platinum Games' combat to carry it; while Stellar Blade's combat is good, it's definitely got nothing on Platinum Games' work.

The writing is pretty flat - dialogue is often awkward (hard to tell if that's the original writing or the translation, but either way it's not good), the characters aren't interesting or fun at all as yet, and the story seems straightforward, predictable, and relatively minimal. Side-quests that I've encountered so far are rather boring, simplistic fetch-quests, most of which end with you finding out someone you were looking for died. Much like the world around it, it all just feels kind of lifeless and dull to me.

Still, there's definitely cool moments happening when I'm fighting, which keeps me somewhat interested. But it is telling that I've actually gone back and played a little bit more Legacy of the Duelist in between Stellar Blade sessions the last couple of days. Me playing anything but a fighting game at the same time as a new game pretty much never happens.

[Beelzebub1111]

I've been having fun with stellar blade. I'm not very far into it. Just at the Syringe Horse and I'm just starting to get ahead on the combat. They are offering me an intriguing enough mystery with the whole transhumanism aspect making me wonder what EVE actually is. It's somewhere between Nier and Devil May Cry never quite feeling like either. The use of yellow paint is just enough to not be completely annoying, but I think I'd rather only see it when I scan for it. maybe say it's infrared paint left by a survivor group or something as it's implied to be but make it a little more hidden for the people that hate that sort of thing.

I keep forgetting to perfect guard every hit of a combo and try to riposte on the first parry which gets me killed a lot. It's like I need to rewire part of my muscle memory.