Video Games: Dawn of Waaaaagh!

[Fez]

32 minutes ago, MerenthaClone said:

Basically nobody who worked on ME1 or ME2 is still at the company.  

A lot of them left, but there are some still around. However, they almost all work at Bioware Edmonton, which made the OT and has been working on some new IP the past several years, or Bioware Austin, which runs SWTOR. Bioware Montreal made ME:A.

[matt b]

I spent yesterday dying a lot in the Ringed City, the new (and final) Dark Souls 3 DLC. I'm enjoying it a lot, but it seems I enjoy DS3 more than most so that's to be expected. Seems like they may have dialed up the difficulty for this one. Made it past an enemy who kept summoning legions of ethereal archers only to be pushed off of a ledge by an ambush I should've seen coming. I thought, "At least I'm not going to have go through those archers again, they won't make that guy respawn.....will they?" They did.

 

[Corvinus85]

I am considering returning Andromeda, if I can. I do not like what they've done to the combat. I think it's a terrible mistake to not have control of your squadmates. Most of the time I don't even know where they are and what they're doing. I don't even know how it's possible to unleash a combo in a fight with multiple enemies. I don't even like the radar system - dots on a bar. Now I have no idea if an enemy is behind me. And there are the other features, like consumables - for one, I don't even know how to use them, and two, why make stuff like incendiary ammo consumable. In the OT I always played as a soldier, I liked the grinding cover-to-cover fighting. Now, it's all about jumping around, occasionally going to cover. I find very little enjoyment in the combat. I'll try for a few more hours, to see if the rest of the game offers enough enjoyment to just switch the difficulty level and go "narrative". But between the combat, the awful face animations that do break immersion, and even the Nomad lacking weapons, I am not pleased.

[DunderMifflin]

Not controlling squadmates does royally suck. The only way I've found to do cross character combos is the mates have certain cues they will say before they do certain moves

[Centrist Simon Steele]

8 hours ago, briantw said:

Finished the original Darksiders.  Solid game.  A bit too heavy on the combat.  I'd have preferred 2/3 Legend of Zelda and 1/3 God of War rather than the other way around, especially since the combat is a little slow and clunky.  And some of the combat sequences just feel like they go on forever.  The Warmastered Edition ran pretty much perfectly, though, which was nice.  Only bug I got is the screen would get displaced when I restarted the game (I play in a borderless window), but that was an easy fix just toggling the display option back and forth real quick.  

On to Darksiders 2 now.

 

I loved Darksiders 2 compared to the first. It's much bigger and more open--more focused on exploration, I felt. Death is a bit better of a character than War too, but in these games, saying "character" sounds silly. All of it is pretty ham-fisted. The atmosphere of the second game is a lot cooler too. I saw a lot more of the "Zelda" comparison in the sequel that I'd heard so much about in these games. Big overworld, dungeons with puzzles, items that allowed you access to new areas. A lot of fun to be had.

8 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Geez there seem to be a lot more bugs than what's in that list.

That's what I have heard--I think Bioware needs to really own up to the mess they've made. It sounds like they've released a game in "early access" mode, which is fine, a lot games are doing this now and charging for it. I've played quite a few really fun early access games and the cool thing is when you get to something really crappy, you know it can be fixed by the devs because they are actively working on it. I think Bioware just needs to take this stance with Andromeda--if not officially, at least practically. Continue to fix and massively update the game until it is what it should be. The future of the franchise is on the line.

 

6 hours ago, MerenthaClone said:

Basically nobody who worked on ME1 or ME2 is still at the company.  

True, and I guess this is a testament to how hard it is to develop new, young talent. Blizzard seems to have done a nice job keeping some of the originals around to guide/mentor the new talent, and you wish Bioware could have found a way to do it in similar fashion.

[Werthead]

Not a coincidence that the people who used to work at BioWare have left to join Beamdog (although we've not seen the fruits of that collaboration yet) and found Stoic, who made the excellent Banner Saga games. I think there may be one or two at Obsidian as well.

The pool has run thin indeed.

[Pliskin]

Guys, you're scaring me.

When it was the animation meltdown, I didn't care at all, and still thought that if that's the main problem, then I would enjoy the hell out of the game. But now, you're telling me we don't control the squadmates?! What?!

I'm going through DA:I, and the loss of the power wheel is already a pain in the ass, so I was scared that Andromeda would follow the same route. But it is actually much worse than what I would have imagined...

What is ME without biotic combos?! What's the use of squadmates if you can't control them? I don't get it.

[KiDisaster]

Squadmates feel mostly useless in combat in ME:A. If I stand there and do nothing and just let them fight it takes them forever to kill a single enemy. My damage seems to exceed theirs by leaps and bounds so I just do everything. 

You can prime and trigger your own combos so you don't need them for that. Every once in a while the timing will line up and I'll trigger a combo off of an ability they just used, but basically they're just there for the ambient dialogue. How it seems to me so far anyway. Maybe on insanity they play more of a role, and I'll probably find out soon. I pushed the difficulty up to hardcore and most combat encounters still feel trivially easy. I might just be really over leveled or something though. 

[briantw]

1 hour ago, Simon Steele said:

I loved Darksiders 2 compared to the first. It's much bigger and more open--more focused on exploration, I felt. Death is a bit better of a character than War too, but in these games, saying "character" sounds silly. All of it is pretty ham-fisted. The atmosphere of the second game is a lot cooler too. I saw a lot more of the "Zelda" comparison in the sequel that I'd heard so much about in these games. Big overworld, dungeons with puzzles, items that allowed you access to new areas. A lot of fun to be had.

I'm through the first dungeon (the Fire of the Mountain one or whatever) in Darksiders 2 and I see what you're saying.  It definitely seems less combat-focused than the first game.  There is combat, sure, but I don't feel like any of it is going on for as long as many of the tedious fighting bits in the first game.  It feels more focused on exploration.

I also agree that Death is a far more entertaining character than War was.  War was just kind of boring and monotone.  Death actually seems to have a sense of humor, and I like how he gives people shit when they try to send him on fetch quests.  He still does them, but he's a dick about it.

I'm enjoying the new world they created for the second game as well.  While I really liked the idea from the first game of dungeons that were formerly human buildings, it's nice to get away to a pure fantasy world in the second because it allows for a lot more creativity from the designers.  The first game did a great job with the setting, but artists can inherently go a bit more wild when there are no real restraints.  So far the highlight was walking across a field as a volcano erupted in the background, sending fiery debris (which can't actually hurt you...it's just for show) falling to the ground all around me while the ground quaked.  

[The Anti-Targ]

To be fair, Mass Effect was always light on the control of your squad mates, and I rarely issued combat commands. My most common thing was positioning them pre-fight. Sometimes I would get a biotic character to use an ability to set up a combo. So loss of squad mate commands is not a huge deal for me. It's not like Dragon Age where you can actually play the game in control of any squad mate.

Having played Uncharted and The Last of Us I am complete comfortable with having companions that are mostly there for the banter, but will occasionally help out in combat. I guess squad mates are also there to be bullet sponges, so they are like a couple of extra health bars.

Technical glitched notwithstanding, I think the loss of developer staff at Bioware is not all that big of a concern. When it comes to Mass effect and Dragon Age it's the writing talent that is the concern. Can they still write a good story, can they still create good characters and can they still produce good dialogue? 

[Fez]

1 hour ago, KiDisaster said:

Squadmates feel mostly useless in combat in ME:A. If I stand there and do nothing and just let them fight it takes them forever to kill a single enemy. My damage seems to exceed theirs by leaps and bounds so I just do everything. 

This was always the case (or at least it was in ME2 and ME3, I don't remember about ME1). If you go back and look the descriptions of party member skills when you were going to upgrade Garrus or whoever, the damage was always way lower than what Shepard did and the cooldowns were always way higher. That's why it was always better to spec them towards CC or tank, since their DPS sucked (scrubs!).

The only difference was that they were more reliable for creating combos since you could direct them to do so; but the combos were only effective damage sources if Shepard set them off, since party member damage was so low.

[The Anti-Targ]

5 hours ago, Fez said:

This was always the case (or at least it was in ME2 and ME3, I don't remember about ME1). If you go back and look the descriptions of party member skills when you were going to upgrade Garrus or whoever, the damage was always way lower than what Shepard did and the cooldowns were always way higher. That's why it was always better to spec them towards CC or tank, since their DPS sucked (scrubs!).

The only difference was that they were more reliable for creating combos since you could direct them to do so; but the combos were only effective damage sources if Shepard set them off, since party member damage was so low.

My main control over squad mates in Mass Effect was to hit the down button on the D-pad on my controller to call them back into formation because they'd rushed on ahead and got themselves into a situation where they were more likely to die. I almost never directed them to cover, because then they would just stand there and not engage in combat.

[Fez]

I finished the third stage of the apparently game-long 'Ryder Family Secrets' quest and...holy shit...

Spoiler

 

They're actually tying ME:A back to the original trilogy aren't they? The benefactor is gonna to turn out to be The Illusive Man and the "something big coming to the Milky Way" is clearly the Reapers. But that data pad said Jien Garson was told about the "need to get 100,000 people to Andromeda" in 2179, which is four years before ME1 took place; and if I recall my timeline, at that point the only people who knew about the Reapers (really just Sovereign) were Saren and a handful of unlucky researchers in the wrong place. Not even The Illusive Man knew that early on I think. So the game's apparently introducing an all-new mystery.

And the fact that Garson was secretly murdered after the arrival in Andromeda means its not just the game giving backstory, this has current impacts.

 

Maybe this all gets resolved later in the game, but the fact that something so important is in the non-critical path of the game makes me think this is setting up the sequels.

I really hope the game's doing well enough to justify that happening. The only number I've seen so far is that ME:A had roughly the same number of week one physical sales in the UK as ME3 did. Which a lot of people on the internet seem to think is disappointing. But ME3 was five years ago; there's a lot more digital sales now then there were then.

[Corvinus85]

6 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

To be fair, Mass Effect was always light on the control of your squad mates, and I rarely issued combat commands. My most common thing was positioning them pre-fight. Sometimes I would get a biotic character to use an ability to set up a combo. So loss of squad mate commands is not a huge deal for me. It's not like Dragon Age where you can actually play the game in control of any squad mate.

I constantly used the command hud. Especially since thermal clips could sometimes be scarce, I relied a lot on power usage from me and the squadmates. I miss that in ME:A

[The Anti-Targ]

51 minutes ago, Fez said:

I finished the third stage of the apparently game-long 'Ryder Family Secrets' quest and...holy shit...

  Reveal hidden contents

 

They're actually tying ME:A back to the original trilogy aren't they? The benefactor is gonna to turn out to be The Illusive Man and the "something big coming to the Milky Way" is clearly the Reapers. But that data pad said Jien Garson was told about the "need to get 100,000 people to Andromeda" in 2179, which is four years before ME1 took place; and if I recall my timeline, at that point the only people who knew about the Reapers (really just Sovereign) were Saren and a handful of unlucky researchers in the wrong place. Not even The Illusive Man knew that early on I think. So the game's apparently introducing an all-new mystery.

And the fact that Garson was secretly murdered after the arrival in Andromeda means its not just the game giving backstory, this has current impacts.

 

Maybe this all gets resolved later in the game, but the fact that something so important is in the non-critical path of the game makes me think this is setting up the sequels.

I really hope the game's doing well enough to justify that happening. The only number I've seen so far is that ME:A had roughly the same number of week one physical sales in the UK as ME3 did. Which a lot of people on the internet seem to think is disappointing. But ME3 was five years ago; there's a lot more digital sales now then there were then.

ME:A was the number 1 selling game for the week in the UK, and it was the thrid highest opening week for 2017 behind Horizon Zero Dawn and Legend of Zelda (not sure which is #1, I suspect LoZ). And this is only counting disc sales. Only 4% of disc sales were for PC, so I'm sure there were a very decent number of PC sales digitally, and pretty sure it would have done decent digital sales on PS4 and Xb one, especially now that PS4 has implemented external HDD support.

Interestingly PS4 got 55% of sales and Xb one got 41%, in the UK. Unless a lot more Xb one owners are buying digitally that's quite a big spread given the franchise was more tightly associated with Xbox in the trilogy. And apparently PS4 and Xb one are quite close in use base in the UK, so not all of that difference can be attributed to the respective numbers of consoles out in the wild.

Given the relative ease with which games can be developed for those 3 platforms I suspect even if individually those platforms only generate moderate sales, the total sales should still make the game profitable, and hopefully allow for continuation of the franchise. I assume Bioware was aiming for another 3 game story arc, hopefully they will be able to see that through. But maybe that will be all she wrote for Mass Effect and there won't be a 7th game. And I think I'd be OK with that if the Andromeda series gets a satisfying ending.

[The Anti-Targ]

4 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

I constantly used the command hud. Especially since thermal clips could sometimes be scarce, I relied a lot on power usage from me and the squadmates. I miss that in ME:A

Only time I ever ran out of thermal clips was with the Carnifax. So I basically never used it.

[DunderMifflin]

I'm really starting to question all those pre release bad reviews from the proclaimed "mass effect fans". Not that they don't legit think the game stinks but not one of them mentioned the no squadmate control. That at least deserves a mention from a ME fan, it's a far bigger travesty than some bad facial animations.

[Pliskin]

Yes, talk about priorities...

I guess, it's not surprising in the era of social buzzshit. Memes are harder to make when it's about something as fundamental as gameplay and game controls. So who cares about something with no funny memes.

[KiDisaster]

The impression I get is that most people didn't use the squadmate controls in the OT so they don't notice the lack of squad controls or don't care. It was perfectly possible to play without them before if you wanted to. 

[Pliskin]

Playing a biotic without combos with the rest of your team is not very interesting, so if you're not aware of the squad controls, you're basically playing a soldier I guess? So you're telling me people were playing ME as any third person shooter game. Talk about some fans...