Mass Effect Andromeda – 50 Hours In

Possibly some spoilers below if you haven’t reached Kadara.

So this game has pretty much taken over my life, as I figured it would. Honestly I think this is why I put off playing Mass Effect 3 for so long. These Bioware games are really hazardous to your health. :) The first three games took over my life, too, but I played them more quickly than I might have at the time they came out. With Andromeda, I can savor it at my leisure, because it could very well be another five years before the next one.

Except I’m still kind of paranoid about story spoilers, so I feel like I need to get out ahead of the Internet. I think for the next Bioware game that comes out, I will quickly speed-run through the main storyline only, and then go back and play it a second time to do all the optional side stuff (ie. the fun part).

Here’s my dilemma with Andromeda: I’m torn on whether I should pursue the main story and go back to do side quests, or “finish” each planet before moving on with the main story.

I want to explore all the planets and do all the things there are to do (narratively, at least, I don’t care so much about “collect X things” quests which are just busy work with no story payoff). But I want to do it in a way that optimizes the narrative as much as possible. Right now I don’t know what’s tied to what. I don’t know what things trigger other things. What if I miss something because I did something in the wrong order? It’s maddening.

And it bugs me that I always have to pick only two squad mates. I want to see every squad mate’s reaction to every situation. Not just the two I happen to have with me at the time. Grr.

This game is so massive I’m not going to play it a second time, at least not for a long time. (I might one day play as Sara I guess.) So I feel like I have to get it right the first time. My goal is to time it so that I’m ready to head into the final story ending just as I’m finishing up all the open world side quests, then put the game away forever. I’m probably not going to play anymore after the main story ends, in other words. (For example, after finishing ME3’s story, I had zero desire to continue playing to finish up all the side missions. I mean, why bother?)

Here’s where I am: In the “priority” story arc, I’ve gone to Kadara, sprung the dude, and had the meeting aboard The Tempest where you have to choose your next destination, one of three places I think. I’ve done Cora’s and Liam’s and Jaal’s loyalty missions. I’ve gotten 100% viability outposts on Eos, Havara, and Voeld. I’ve done a lot of exploring on Eos and cleared away most of the quests there.

I feel like I went “too far” in the main story, and went back to catch up on the planets. Somehow I initially skipped right over Havarl and settled Voeld, so this week I settled Havarl. After that, there are a lot of quests left to clean up on Voeld. Then I have the entire world of Kadara to deal with. Not to mention I’ve been ignoring what I assume is Drack’s loyalty mission this whole time, the investigation of Spender and The Nexus. And of course every time you turn around on The Nexus, somebody is piling more quests on you. Then maybe I’ll continue with the main story by picking one of those three directions.

I haven’t been this overwhelmed by a game since Black Desert Online.

I’ve gotten used to the “Normal” combat, by the way. It’s not as hard as I initially thought. With my Engineer build, my squad can do most of the work while I sit behind cover and watch. I have turrets and “Zap” to rely on. (One time on Voeld I literally ran in circles while my squad and turrets killed three big monsters.) I do agree that it’s the best the combat has ever been in the series. It’s challenging but doesn’t overstay it’s welcome…

…except for those Architects, that is. There have been some boss fights in Mass Effect before (Saren and Big Half-Finished Reaper Guy), but there’s never been anything like these monstrosities. These are more like MMORPG boss fights. That is, they are mechanically fairly simple, but because the boss has so many hit points, the fight goes on and on forever until you start to go stir crazy from the constant cacophony of explosions and gunfire in your ears and will do anything to get it over with. I hate those kinds of boss fights. The “challenge” is to stay attentive for what seems like an endless amount of time. It’s like they’re trying to make a therapy program to cure ADHD more than trying to make a game.

But I digress.

The other thing that irks me about the Architect is how the best strategy is to abandon cover and run constantly. That goes completely against the Mass Effect series combat model, which has always been to stay in cover. (Maybe it was just my build, but my Ryder got decimated when trying to remain in cover, because the Architect shoots right through it.)

I haven’t done any multiplayer. Can’t say I’m terribly interested in trying it, either. I could see where it might be fun with this combat, but, you know, random Internet people. Yuck. Admittedly I’m in a cynical mood these days, but random people pretty much ruin multiplayer games.

Overall Andromeda is a fantastic game (the jury is still out on the story), but there are a few things that bug me:

I would like the jump jet a lot better if it weren’t for that annoying pause of animation lock every time you land. I’d also like to meet whoever thought that jumping puzzles was that one key thing the Mass Effect series really needed. (I don’t usually have a problem doing them, it just bugs me whenever there is a time sink between me and my destination.)

Speaking of animations, it’s really “immersion-breaking” to see Ryder doing anime-style jumps. Makes me think Andromeda started as an open world fighting game or something. :)

I get literally angry with rage every time one conversation is interrupted by another one. First there is the problem of walking around crowded spaces where incidental background conversations overlap each other and you hear them simultaneously. And of course you can’t trigger them again.

There are a lot of audio balance problems where conversations are just too darn quiet. I have the sound on “Medium” dynamic range so there isn’t that ridiculous 20dB difference between dialog and gunfire, but it sure doesn’t help those background extras.

What really irritates me is when you’re driving around in the Nomad, and your squad mates start talking. That part is awesome, right? But if you happen to drive close to something that triggers more dialog, it interrupts and ends your squad’s conversation. And as far as I can tell, they never repeat the same conversation twice. So that interrupted conversation is gone forever. Whenever I hear the squad start talking, I now stop the Nomad to make sure I hear the end of the conversation.

There is another issue when fast traveling inside the Nomad. When you arrive, the squad will often start a conversation, but you usually miss the first part because it fades the audio in. So you’ll hear like the punchline to the joke but not the setup. Arg!

The dialog issues particularly annoy me because that’s literally the main reason I’m playing this game. I couldn’t care less about the design of the combat or how much fun it is to fight the bosses. (I would enjoy Mass Effect games exactly the same if you simply walked from NPC to NPC without encountering a single enemy.) But missing a few words of dialog is a punch-the-monitor rage-quit kind of moment for me. (Possibly that’s an eccentricity on my part.)

Also: The Nomad is still not as fun as the Mako was. Where are my guns??