Still working on seasonal stuff for Diablo 4. I got all my world bosses done, now I'm just trying to level up for the rest of it. I got a weekly game plan for myself, so I think I might finish it before the season end on Oct 17.
In the meantime I've been replaying (again) 2015's Mad Max. I've had a lot of irl stuff going on that sucks and it's been very cathartic to play. Just drive around and punch mutherfuckers? Hell yeah.
Been thinking about picking up Gungrave G.O.R.E since it's on Xbox Game Pass. There's an anime that goes with it I guess? Nobody I've talked to know a lot about it, so I think that might be my next game to play just for the hell of it.
How do you feel about/have you played Andromeda? I love the ME trilogy, and I was a quarter through ME2 doing a trilogy replay as well, but then Starfield released. I'll get back to it eventually though. I haven't played Andromeda myself, but I feel like it couldn't possibly be as terrible as the kickback it got on release.
I’ve played Andromeda - quite a lot, actually, because before I started PC gaming, and after my PS3 broke, the only way to get my Mass Effect fix was to play Andromeda.
I think Andromeda got a bad rap. Or rather, people were a lot harder on it than it deserved, because the game was rough and, more importantly, Ryder wasn’t Shepard. Ryder is a very different character and folks wanted Shepard in a different skin. They wanted Paragon and Renegade when BioWare went with a more Inquisition feel to developing how Ryder can react. Add to that how the beginning act was easily the least polished section of the game at launch, and so people just dragged it. And once The Gamers as a collective decide a game is only fit to be made fun of, that’s it.
Now, Andromeda wasn’t perfect at all. The facial animations are not the best, and I still have no idea why they thought Ryder’s running animation was ok. I also really think the writing needed at least another two rounds of editing. But. The game play is really solid, easily the best of any Mass Effect game, and there was something there in the story (it just needed some rewriting). BioWare also made the mistake of putting in more for the sake of more - Inquisition was too big, and they decided to try to make Andromeda bigger, and there’s a lot of filler quests that shouldn’t be there.
I actually really enjoyed playing Andromeda, for all I got really irritated by a lot of the things I mentioned here - and I got irritated because I could see how close they were to something really, really special, and how they needed more time to get there, but didn’t have because of the mess they made of early development. There were enough things and decisions that I really wanted to see how they played out down the line, and I’m sad I probably won’t get to.
The best way to enjoy Andromeda is to go in thinking of it as less of a “Mass Effect” game, and more as a game set in the Mass Effect universe, if that makes sense.
It seems like it was cursed with "how the heck do you follow that up?" Syndrome. And sadly the facial animations seemed at the time to be the critical anchor that all the general issues surrounded and were exemplified by.
I hope in the future Bioware steps back from adding those "MMO side quest" style side content they began including for Inquisition, it did really change the feel of the whole game having those there.
Interesting to hear about the first act dragging, I actually think this is a problem echoed by Starfield, whose first 12 hours are confusing as you don't understand where and how to access the different types of gameplay at will, and it's too early on in your character's development to be able to really fully engage and figure out the ship and outpost construction. By then the people who don't have patience or weren't interested in the game to begin with have likely already had their opinions begin to solidify.
I wonder if Bioware will try an Andromeda 2 down the line, I think that universe deserves another shot.
I wonder if Bioware will try an Andromeda 2 down the line, I think that universe deserves another shot.
Sadly, with the closure of BioWare Montreal and them deciding to go back to the Milky Way for 5, I don’t think we will. Which is a really shame, because I still think Andromeda 2 could have really been special, because the Montreal devs said they learned a lot from Andromeda and had big plans for 2 and improving things.
A lot of people also compared Andromeda to the entire ME trilogy, which really wasn’t fair to it.
BioWare had a good idea with trying to do something new, but sadly, often times True Fans don’t want something new; they want the exact same thing. They couldn’t - or wouldn’t - let Andromeda be Andromeda.
That's sad news about the studio. I suppose some people forgot that the original Mass Effect had quite a few issues and it wasn't until 2 that it got real good, and having that bar set at a payoff that was only possible through three games of narrative choices and carryover was impossible to hit for Andromeda.
I was close to the end last week, but I’ve finally finished Pillars of Eternity. It only took 8 years. I’ll not start with the expansions right away, but to do them I’ll have to load a save before the final dungeon, which kinda sucks.
I’m also taking a break from Quake 2 currently, although not by choice. It’s because of a bug halfway through the second mission pack, Ground Zero, where my game would crash consistently. Maybe restarting the level could help, but I’ll just wait. An internet comment I read mentioned that the devs are aware, and it’ll get fixed in a patch, hopefully that’ll happen soon.
Next, I finished two more games, first Shadowrun Returns. It wasn’t that good. I’m not a big fan of tactical turn-based RPGs, and this game didn’t help. As for the story, it’s like they got two completely separate scripts and stuck them together. After like two thirds or something, the game takes a sharp turn and goes completely off the rails. The first part was really clichéd and predictable, but I still enjoyed it, and I wish it could have ended there. The “class” I chose also sucked, I guess, a melee hacker (or Decker in this universe). The hacking is 90% useless in the game, and melee feels like it’s just massively disadvantaged, compared to ranged attacks. The game is also a bit buggy at times and the UI can be really clunky. I don’t think I’ll play the other two games in this trilogy unless I get really into TRPGs in the future.
The final game I finished was Katana Zero, which was a bit mediocre, with some bright spots. It’s an action side-scroller where you need to kill every enemy in a room, without getting hit, to move forward. Dying resets the current room, and you have to start from the beginning, à la Super Meat Boy. However, there was a bit too much randomness in enemy placement and movement, to really get that perfect run done. The story could be interesting, but I didn’t like the way it was told at all, however I did like the dialog system. When talking to someone you get a timed response, which you can hit, while the other is still talking, interrupting them, or wait for them to finish and choose from a few options. I really liked that. The game also looks great and has very good music. It’s pretty short, I clocked out after less than four hours, but you’re supposed to play through it at least twice I guess, because of the story. I didn’t care for the basic gameplay enough, so I’m fine with just my single run.
For what it’s worth I 100%'d the game before all the major patches. It was a good game. Marketing overhyped it and the E3 reveal that was a vertical slice gave us features that would never be present in the actual game.
That stuff aside? Strong stories in the side quests, a pretty decent main quest with good use of the cyberpunk setting. Fairly dynamic gameplay depending on how you class and a strong fashion side.
The only actual bugs/issues I encountered in the game were 1 quest would bug if you scanned something (which is actually a cool mechanic if it were intended.), meaning the quest needed to be completed a certain way. Other than that, crafting was time consuming because you had to press the button over and over. My last issue is just an issue I have with open world games, when it’s “over” the game just sends you back to your last save.
From other people online the main complaints seem to be “immmersion”, little ability to engage with the city, cops were broken and features that were promised weren’t in the game (wall climbing mantis blades…)
Well, playing through the game normally there’s 0 reason to ever open fire on police. Yes, they’d spawn behind you and etc but cops just aren’t a part of the game in terms of you being an antagonist that they have to stop. Basically, if you want to become a cyberpsycho and just mass murder, you can but it’s just waves of teleporting cops. There’s no purpose to doing it in the first place.
There’s a lot of comparisons to this game and GTA which I just don’t understand. A much more apt comparison would be the similarities between 2077 and Starfield, where 2077’s world is really visually compelling and a lot of the quest flow feels really well done, whereas Starfield has the engagement with the setting done impeccably but some of the quests flow are a little dull (go here, talk, go there, talk, go back to here, talk, completed…). GTA is pretty much just a physics sandbox with tasks.
All this said, unfulfilled is a good word for the potential of 2077 as there were a lot of points where the game would have gone beyond above and beyond if they’d accomplished what it seemed like they wanted and it seems that the 2.0/PL update will bring some of that polish. I think the key factor here is the relic upgrades - an entire slot just unavailable for the game.
I agree with pretty much everything you said. I will say though that I was (and still am) disappointed by how remarkably dead the city felt. While GTA 4’s traffic density slider did prove that it’s really really frustrating driving through traffic jams, even when I turned up the ped and traffic density as high as I could manage, it still felt like I was traversing a city of like 200 thousand instead of over 6 million which was kinda frustrating.
I also disliked the lack of things to do in a lot of the areas outside of the city. I felt like I’d get rewarded for exploring but it was really just more desert / oil fields / protein farms / solar farms. I know those areas are used for some of the main quests and a couple side quests, but it just was annoying not being rewarded for exploring when you are rewarded in the inner city for doing just that. There are a lot of unmarked goodies though, but the density of them really tapers out once you leave city limits.
Also I don’t wanna spoil anything but there are a couple cybernetic upgrades that straight up break the game. IDK if they’ve changed anything since I last played about 6 months ago… but some of them making missions incredibly easy and others allow you to just go out of bounds which I thought was funny.
It’s not really buggy anymore. Just unfulfilled. If you choose to play, I wouldn’t go in expecting anything promised at E3. I thought it was a stunning game, but it’s just different from what I expected. Also it’s not a GTA-like, I don’t know why people thought it would be…
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