Mass Effect Andromeda: To Boldly Go

[Lord Fullbladder, Master of Goblins]

My instinct is to look exactly where I'm going, especially since opening the menu pauses the timer and gives me breathing room to plan. I fully acknowledge I may just play games differently though. In addition to Skyrim, I've played both Prototypes, GTA, numerous Assassin's Creed games and Dragon Age Inquisition itself, so checking the map periodically has become instinctive to me. (My first instinct in fact was to see if I could fast travel closer to where the colonists were, but the designers had anticipated someone trying that.)

Yeah, sorry, Psyren, I checked the map a lot in Inquisition, but as far as I know right now I have to bring up the pause menu, go to the journal, and then tab over to the map, each of which take rather longer than they need to in my perspective (and seem to take longer to load than they did in Inquisition).

Perhaps this lack of patience is also why I am now getting super annoyed at the long swooping cutscenes required to look at anything in space. I'm getting frustrated is all I'm saying.

[RagingKrikkit]

Perhaps this lack of patience is also why I am now getting super annoyed at the long swooping cutscenes required to look at anything in space. I'm getting frustrated is all I'm saying.

Yeah, those were neat for about the first two trips, then I found out I can't skip them. I'm almost tempted to keep track of how much time I spend staring at stars flying by in this game.

[Rodin]

Yeah, those were neat for about the first two trips, then I found out I can't skip them. I'm almost tempted to keep track of how much time I spend staring at stars flying by in this game.

Given the low success rate I've had on finding actual interesting stuff, I'm pretty much planning on ignoring the other planets until later in the game and then looking up which ones have something interesting. The animations are far too long for too little reward.

[tonberrian]

Anyone figure out what triggers the "Defeating the Kett" mission on Eos?

[5ColouredWalker]

Going near the area I think.


That said, MY ****ING GOD!

I get sometimes you just need to spawn in enemies.
But can they not teleport in from the Ether right in front of me.

I have died to god many times from that, most recently right at the end, and for some reason it won't let me save my progress, because the game decided to spring a priority mission on me with no warning.
**** YOU VERY MUCH!

It'd also be nice if they could mark the alarms properly, instead of just letting the roar and hoping you could find the things, in a firefight, among a boatload of new tech.

[Inarius]

Going near the area I think.


That said, MY ****ING GOD!

I get sometimes you just need to spawn in enemies.
But can they not teleport in from the Ether right in front of me.

I have died to god many times from that, most recently right at the end, and for some reason it won't let me save my progress, because the game decided to spring a priority mission on me with no warning.
**** YOU VERY MUCH!

It'd also be nice if they could mark the alarms properly, instead of just letting the roar and hoping you could find the things, in a firefight, among a boatload of new tech.

Honestly I never saw an enemy spawn during that fight, but it may be because I was charging around and constantly on the move. As for the alarm stations they are marked on the map though they aren't marked on the compass which is an issue imo. I didn't even realize I could tell where the alarms were until I got halfway through the mission and opened the map to figure out how to get to the command center area.

Overall there are a ton of little annoyances that do add up. My current gripe today was when I started upgrading all of my old armor. Its really annoying to not be able to equip and unequip gear without having to run halfway across my ship to a loading station. Especially when I need the materials from deconstructing your old items to craft new ones. Even worse is when I go shop on the Nexus for new gear. There are no loading stations anywhere near the stores there so I have to run back to my ship, watch a cutscene then equip my new gear.

[5ColouredWalker]

Honestly I never saw an enemy spawn during that fight, but it may be because I was charging around and constantly on the move. As for the alarm stations they are marked on the map though they aren't marked on the compass which is an issue imo. I didn't even realize I could tell where the alarms were until I got halfway through the mission and opened the map to figure out how to get to the command center area.

Worse yet is that the markers don't turn off, so you end up turning around and going back to ones you've disabled.

As for moving around, I was to. But I had a particularly fun moment when I saw a Chosen, unloaded my kit to kill him because I was near death, and as he was keeling over, another sprite popped into position, animated, and turned around to kill me.
Cora got the blighter in a charge, but I was unimpressed.


But yes, for me the problem definately is lots of little niggles. For example, No saves during Priority events, which won't tell you in advance that they're comming (I had to turn off before going to work during one), and they don't always have checkpoints.
Add that, a crappy UI, and poor animations, spot of horrible writing, and I'm rating this at or below ME1 at the moment... And I've just come back to Eos and have barely touched on the Angaran planets.

[Squark]

Yeah, sorry, Psyren, I checked the map a lot in Inquisition, but as far as I know right now I have to bring up the pause menu, go to the journal, and then tab over to the map, each of which take rather longer than they need to in my perspective (and seem to take longer to load than they did in Inquisition).

Perhaps this lack of patience is also why I am now getting super annoyed at the long swooping cutscenes required to look at anything in space. I'm getting frustrated is all I'm saying.

You want the center menu button. I know, I did not expect it to do something, either (This hasn't been a thing in previous games, has it?)

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

Aye, just load up the pause menu and hit select, it defaults to selecting the map if you don't move the cursor/selector.

[5ColouredWalker]

Oh, at least two Augmentations come with unlisted drawbacks.

The Old Style Cooling Systems from Milky Way reduce max ammo quite significantly. The Explosive Plasma bolts drop RoF significantly (As far as I can tell).

[Lord Fullbladder, Master of Goblins]

You want the center menu button. I know, I did not expect it to do something, either (This hasn't been a thing in previous games, has it?)

Ah, that'll be much easier, then. Thank you.

[Derthric]

So just as a heads up to everyone who does any crafting. The augments you can research can only be researched once and used once. The only way to regain an augment you've researched and used is to deconstruct the item the augment was installed into. I learned this a little too late for a couple of augments sadly, and I never noticed any warnings about how researched augments work. I just assumed they could be plugged into whatever gear you crafted.

I know this is a late reply but a little PSA for you. Do not equip an augment into an item that cannot be dissassembled, for example the preorder/deluxe guns, because then you will never get it back.

And that's how I lost my vintage heat sink, which works well on high ammo clip weapons like certain SMG's and AR's.

[Morty]

How do you disassemble items, anyway? I haven't seen this option anywhere.

[tonberrian]

How do you disassemble items, anyway? I haven't seen this option anywhere.

Go into the inventory menu, and you can highlight weapons and armor and disassemble them.

[Inarius]

Interesting note, Peebee mentions to Drack in party convo that hes close to dying of old age and that has about as much years left as Ryder and the other human crew members. He actually agrees with it so it seems that krogan may live to be around 1500 years old before dying of old age.

[Squark]

I know this is a late reply but a little PSA for you. Do not equip an augment into an item that cannot be dissassembled, for example the preorder/deluxe guns, because then you will never get it back.

And that's how I lost my vintage heat sink, which works well on high ammo clip weapons like certain SMG's and AR's.

That's is rather annoying. On the plus side, I seem to have found a replacement copy of the electrical conduits augment I put in my shotgun, so I haven't lost anything in the long run.

[5ColouredWalker]

Go into the inventory menu, and you can highlight weapons and armor and disassemble them.

However, you have to unequip them first.

Interesting note, Peebee mentions to Drack in party convo that hes close to dying of old age and that has about as much years left as Ryder and the other human crew members. He actually agrees with it so it seems that krogan may live to be around 1500 years old before dying of old age.

That's interesting.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

Quick, what's a better human name: Mark or Joshua?

[Maryring]

I'm personally fond of Joshua.

[Morty]

Go into the inventory menu, and you can highlight weapons and armor and disassemble them.

Thanks. Not sure how I missed that. I might eventually scrounge up enough vanadium to make some items I want. No idea where to find it otherwise.

Quick, what's a better human name: Mark or Joshua?

I vote Joshua. It's less common than Mark.

[tonberrian]

Eos says it has vanadium on it, but i think you have to go mining for it - i found like one spot to pick it up in the wild.

[Dienekes]

Quick, what's a better human name: Mark or Joshua?

Why decide? Jork is clearly the best compromise.

[5ColouredWalker]

*Finishes Experiments*
The Old Style Thermal Clips drops clip size by 60%, which means there's only 1 weapon that can have more ammo in it than a Remanant weapon after the Augment... Which just so happens to be a Kett weapon that requires 60 of a material that costs 244 EACH to buy when avaliable, and drops rarely.

Extra Edit:
Oh, is anyone actually regularly changing their abilities using the favourites system?
I'm not. I have three sets (Overload/Pull/Cryo, Overload/Incinerate/Bolt, and Cloak/Turret/Whatever). The first I've barely used since day 1, the second I use almost all the time, and the third I use should both my companions go down, and I've built my companions as tanks, so that's almost never.
Which means that what I've found best is one set which I barely move from, which means I'm basically limited to 3 powers because nothing else is quite good enough, particularly since everything starts on CD.

[Inarius]

I haven't actually changed my setup ever. Though I did make one setup specifically for fighting architects if I ever encounter one again because close range combat is not so good against them My setup is basically charge/lance/pull with vanguard. It gives me a little range utility and the ability to setup/detonate combos. My second setup is lance/turbo/backlash with soldier. That's in theory supposed to be used when close range and melee are a severe hazard but I haven't really used it at all.

[NeoVid]

If I'd ever seen how to use the favorites system, I'd give it a try. Thanks, ME:A interface...

[Inarius]

If I'd ever seen how to use the favorites system, I'd give it a try. Thanks, ME:A interface...

If youre on PC its f1-f4 to switch between favorites. No idea with a controller though.

Another nitpick with how the game describes stuff is I have no idea what some bonuses do. Some are straight forward like max shields, but it took me a while to figure out what biotic power restoration and power shield cost reduction were used for.

[Actana]

Not sure if it has been mentioned already, but I found a vendor who sells items for less than she buys them for. It's straight up hilarious and infinite credits as long as you can suffer the interface.

Spoiler: Location

Show

On the Kadara (the pirate planet, in case I forgot the spelling) Badlands area, going east from the first forward station you should find some wind farms. Inside, there's a Turian smuggler who gives you a quest to find some shipment of stuff. She also works as a vendor, with somewhat outrageous prices. However, somehow her prices also increase the price of things you sell to her, and after completing the quest you get a discount for her goods, but your selling prices still remain the same. You can effectively juggle items back and forth, gaining a small profit at a time. Best done with higher value gear, but the slowness of the UI makes it very annoying to do for any longer periods of time.

I had the first tier of buying/selling prices for AVP, so I'm not sure if the prices are there by default, but even with the ridiculously high sell prices, you should be more than set for life. A single unit of nickel, for example, regularly goes for under 20 credits a piece, but for her you can sell it for around 100 a piece. And if you're like me and like collecting all the nodes ever, you should have more than enough nickel to be set for life.

[RCgothic]

Got a little more play time in yesterday - 2/3 monoliths activated on Eos.

I like the nomad, it's a definite improvement on the Mako from ME1, mainly by being faster. Combat continues to be challenging. Fighting a Fiend and two drop ships of Kett at once was totally brutal. Ended up having to bunker up in a building and kill them as they came.

Met Drack and Peebee, who seem more convincingly animated thus far than the human NPCs. Liam was doing something very unnatural with his arms whilst explaining the R&D console on the Tempest. Why does Cora go around with a stupid grin the whole time? No idea.

Also not figured out how to quickly change between profiles on the Xbox version yet. The interface really is atrocious. It's like they decided to take the worst bits of ME1 inventory management and multiply it by five.

So far I'm caught between thinking the open world aspect brings an interesting dynamic to combat and missing ME2/3 where you follow a linear path and demolish all before you as you go after a specific mission at a time.

[5ColouredWalker]

If youre on PC its f1-f4 to switch between favorites. No idea with a controller though.

Another nitpick with how the game describes stuff is I have no idea what some bonuses do. Some are straight forward like max shields, but it took me a while to figure out what biotic power restoration and power shield cost reduction were used for.

I didn't know that, I've just been using Tab and then following the UI.

That said, what do BPR and PSCR do? (The later only makes sense to me for Bolt, which can cost shields for it's final evolotion.)

Got a little more play time in yesterday - 2/3 monoliths activated on Eos.

I like the nomad, it's a definite improvement on the Mako from ME1, mainly by being faster.

Trust me, you start to hate it. It's shields are horribly low, so later when you start coming accross Kett Bases, particularly ones that have enough Kett to man all the fortifications preventing you from just driving up and getting out (Roughly half the reason I bother toting a sniper is for Kett Bases.), You'll miss how tough the Mako was and the fact you lack a gun.

Oh, and my kingdom for the Hammerhead.

Edit: Oh, I will point out again that I'm playing on Hardcore. Which means the guys with the miniguns are horrifying to fight, and they likewise make mockery of the Nomad.

Extra Edit: Backup Life Support is welcome... Thank you.

Yet Another Edit:
After yet another problematic Kett Base, culmulating with optional extra loot not working right despite dialouge firing, I went to send a bug report, only to be unable to... Looking at bug reports, it seems their sight for such reports is itself buggy, not allowing the proper reports to be filled.

GJ EA.

[warty goblin]

The more I play of this, the more baffling I find it.

The talky bits are goddamn horrible. The human characters - at least at the settings my computer can handle - all look like cyborgs wearing ill-fitting skin suits. I swear my Ryder's eyes (which are perfectly white spheres with irises and pupils but no depth) are permanently about 5 degrees out of focus, and the women all seem to have this identical permanent derp face. And the game just throws characters at a person like crazy. For instance, I did the Vault on Eos, so I was told to go talk to the Madam Tired Face about thawing people out of cryo. She already feels essentially extraneous except as a sort of foil, 5th class for our hero, because there's another person higher up the totem pole, Could she tell me how to do this? No, I had to go talk to another schmuck - mercifully about 5 feet away - who said basically the same damn stuff, and then directed me to an interface with a tutorial that explained how to actually do stuff. All of this took like five minutes, and what did this accomplish? It's like somebody drew up an org chart, and wouldn't rest easy until the player had talked to every last goddamn person on the thing.

Also, everybody sounds like a moron.

But then eventually I wade through all that, and I get to tool around a nice chunk of inhospitable terrain, shooting aliens and mining stuff and generally having a grand old time. I'm not sure I've had this much fun tooling around doing silly little quests in a big slab of geography since I sunk a disturbing number of hours into Oblivion a long period ago. It's not that any one element is astonishingly good, it's that the combat and exploration jell very well together. I can usually see interesting stuff before it pops up on my compass, so I feel like I'm observing and exploring the landscape, rather than meandering between HUD elements. I kind of like scanning things, both for the tasty tasty research points, and because it really sells the Star Trek fantasy. Combat feels good - pity the cover system only barely works a lot of the time - but the shooting is fun, and it actually happens in open areas at longer ranges as well as straight up corridor murder fests.


But then there's the interface. It's worse than the Mass Effect interface and the Oblivion interface put together. Everything's about three submenus down, about half the time I can see something I want to change in one submenu, but need to back all the way out to the first level, then descend a different menu tree to actually change it. And then there's interfaces that are only accessible from some locations for some reason. Look, I've got an AI living in my head and a miniature factory strapped to my wrist, but between the two I've got less information management capability than an iPhone. So far as I can tell if I want to unlock a new gun, I've got to go back to my ship - loading screen - go to a specific terminal, research the damn thing, exit that menu, possibly go to a different terminal to buy some crafting ingredients, go back to the first terminal, build the gun, go back to a different location in the ship, land the ship - loading screen, choose my loadout when I disembark, then fast travel - loading screen - back to somewhere close to where I was? That's three loading screens and a minimum of four menu systems to change from gun level 1 to gun level 2.