Argentus
Well-Known Member
well let's be honest, EVERYTHING of the original trilogy will blow you away in comparison.
Mass Effect: Andromeda Thread
- Thread starter NightAntilli
- Start date
well let's be honest, EVERYTHING of the original trilogy will blow you away in comparison.
Chapstick
Well-Known Member
Eeeeehhh I'll see if I want to get it or not mostly I wanted to get these since I've never played them and know next to nothing about the original trilogy. If I end up really liking them I'll probably get the dlc. Hopefully it's cheap lol
It wasn't really the story of Andromeda (it was pretty blah) I just liked the overall game. Interactions between characters, the combat with jetpack shenanigans, exploring the (imo) pretty environments, changing worlds to be more hospitable with the vaults, exploring space, romancing Jaal.... up until the sex scene that made me extremely uncomfortable
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P2p1mbs
Well-Known Member
You can skip out on the dlcs from the first game, those werent very good and have little impact in the next games (the first dlc mission is free though). Its not recommended that you play 3 without playing the dlc missions from 2, many of the actions you make in those will carry over to 3, especially the last 2 dlc missions, those pretty much act as prequels to the main story for 3. There are also some free dlc missions but they are short and only the Zaeed mission has any impact in the next game. As for 3, I believe that the extended ending dlc is free so you can probably get that. All the other dlcs for 3 are all really good but are overpriced.
Argentus
Well-Known Member
No the dlc is actually pretty important to the story.
Get all of it except
Pinnacle station
the single player weapon dlc
Those serve no purpose.
BUt say, Bringing down the sky of 1 affects an ally faction of ME3, and you need to get ALL Of the dlc for ME2, ESPECIALLY Arrival, and then get all the dlc of 3 as well.
This, we cannot stress enough how much you need to do everything in me1 and me2 before playing me3, INCLUDING the dlc (Except pinnacle station). Whether it be an offhand mention, and npc returning, or a story crucial event, all the it comes back in some way or another.
NightAntilli
Well-Known Member
Nah... Not everything... Andromeda is still better in;
- Combat mechanics
- RPG mechanics (as in crafting, modding etc)
- Graphics
- Dynamic interactions between characters
- Dynamic character locations
- Exploration
The trilogy is better at everything else though. That includes;
- Conversations
- Characters
- Plot
- Sub-stories
- Immersion
- Memorableness
- Antagonists & enemies
- Romances
- Bring Down The Sky (ME1) This will be relevant across the whole trilogy.
- Lair of the Shadow Broker (ME2) REALLY REALLY MUST HAVE
- Kasumi - Stolen Memory (ME2) You'll get the best SMG in the game, and a character available for the whole game and the story is quite good.
- Overlord (ME2) It's one of the most unique in the whole series.
- Arrival (ME2) Best played after finishing the whole game.
- From Ashes (ME3) REALLY REALLY MUST HAVE
- Leviathan (ME3) REALLY REALLY MUST HAVE
- Citadel (ME3) Arguably the most feature rich DLC the Mass Effect universe has known.
I disagree on Arrival being particularly more important than the other ones, but it is still significant enough to deserve a mention. The ones where I CAPSed after it, you really cannot allow yourself to miss out at all. You HAVE TO get those. No questions asked. The rest are significantly important too, but to a lesser degree. Let's say the CAPSed ones are a car without tires, and the other ones are a car without doors and windows. It can run, but you'll be missing key parts still.
As for the others that weren't mentioned;
- Pinnacle Station (ME1) focuses too much on the combat, and ME1 combat wasn't great. You get an apartment, and some messages by your mother depending on your chosen background.
- Appearance packs (ME2/ME3) are just that. Not really important at all.
- Equalizer pack (ME2) is just some armor that you won't use anyway.
- Aegis pack (ME2) is another armor plus a sniper that you won't use anyway.
- Firepower pack (ME2) is some weapons. The standard weapons are sufficient.
- Genesis (ME2) is only a useless tool to allow players that never played the first to make some basic choices that ultimately don't matter much.
- Firefight pack (ME3) is just weapons you don't need. Same goes for the groundside resistance pack.
- Omega (ME3) was good, but not critical to the story. You can get it if you really like Aria in ME2, or if you want to see the first female Turian in the series. And oh, she is related to someone in Andromeda.
- Genesis 2 (ME3) is the same story as Genesis in ME2.
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Chapstick
Well-Known Member
I just added it up and that'd be $66.92 for just this stuff. I got all three games for $13.50 lol
Thing is it'd kill me if they did a remastered trilogy for PS4 at some point with all of that included
NightAntilli
Well-Known Member
Yeah that's one of the drawbacks of the DLC... They never go on sale.
I'm wondering if EA Access gives you discount on the ME series DLC... I doubt it, but it's possible.
I'm wondering if EA Access gives you discount on the ME series DLC... I doubt it, but it's possible.
Argentus
Well-Known Member
Also don't forget Zaeed Masani dlc for 2. but Arrival dlc is what sets up the beginning of ME3, so it's important too.
well you don't have to get it all at once. for ME1 all you need is Bringing Down the Sky, so just get that for now while you play through ME1.
by the way don't skip sidequests. Do literally EVERYTHING. It matters in various ways.
P2p1mbs
Well-Known Member
Bring down the sky and Zaeed dlc are both free.
NightAntilli
Well-Known Member
The truth comes to light... Some quotes;
Full article;
http://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-troubled-five-1795886428
Mass Effect: Andromeda was in development for five years, but by most accounts, BioWare built the bulk of the game in less than 18 months. This is the story of what happened.
Another of Lehiany’s ideas was that there should be hundreds of explorable planets. BioWare would use algorithms to procedurally generate each world in the game, allowing for near-infinite possibilities, No Man’s Skystyle. (No Man’s Sky had not yet been announced—BioWare came up with this concept separately.)
There were some hiccups, however. One lingering question for the Andromeda team was how they could possibly implement a BioWare-caliber story in a game with procedurally generated planets. Some teams felt perpetually understaffed, and there were technological difficulties. BioWare’s level designers used a tool called WorldMachine that could simulate erosion and build realistic mountains on each planet, but other teams had trouble figuring out how to generate high-quality worlds without getting in and doing it by hand. “Unfortunately that was the only team that was able to figure out how to do stuff more procedurally,” said a person who worked on the game. “No one else had the resources.”
The Mass Effect: Andromeda team knew they were going to run into major technical barriers with or without procedural generation. Over the past few years, one of BioWare’s biggest obstacles has also become one of EA’s favorite buzzwords: Frostbite, a video game engine. An engine is a collection of software that can be reused and recycled to make games, often consisting of common features: a physics system, a graphics renderer, a save system, and so on. In the video game industry, Frostbite is known as one of the most powerful engines out there—and one of the hardest to use.
DICE made first-person shooters like Battlefield, and the Frostbite engine was designed solely to develop those games. When BioWare first got its hands on Frostbite, the engine wasn’t capable of performing the basic functions you’d expect from a role-playing game, like managing party members or keeping track of a player’s inventory. BioWare’s coders had to build almost everything from scratch.
Engineers on Andromeda had to design many of their own features from scratch, including their animation rig. “Frostbite is wonderful for rendering and lots of things,” said a person who worked on the game. “But one of the key things that makes it really difficult to use is anything related to animation. Because out of the box, it doesn’t have an animation system.” (Frostbite was later attached to an animation system called ANT, that source said, but it was full of “duct-taped issues.”)
Pre-production on Mass Effect: Andromeda was a tale of two cities. Several people from the team described 2013 as one of the best years of their professional lives and 2014 as one of the worst. Whereas 2013 was full of possibilities for the developers of Andromeda, 2014 was full of politics. Conflicts emerged between BioWare staffers at the company’s two main studios, in Edmonton and Montreal. Developers in Edmonton said they thought the game was floundering in pre-production and didn’t have a strong enough vision, while developers in Montreal thought that Edmonton was trying to sabotage them, taking ideas and staff from Montreal for its own projects, Dragon Age: Inquisition and Dylan. By the end of 2014 at least a dozen people had left BioWare Montreal for other studios, and it wasn’t clear to the remaining staff whether those positions would be replaced. The animation team in particular was understaffed, sources said, and when people left, their positions sometimes weren’t refilled.
The Mass Effect: Andromeda team was also having trouble executing the ideas they’d found so exciting just a year ago. Combat was shaping up nicely, as were the prototypes BioWare had developed for the Nomad ground vehicle, which already felt way better to drive than Mass Effect 1’s crusty old Mako. But spaceflight and procedurally generated planets were causing some problems.
“We started to realize by summer 2015 that we had great technological prototypes, but we had doubts they would make it into the game,” said another person who worked on the game. The Andromeda team had gotten systems like spaceflight up and running, two people said, but they couldn’t figure out how to make those systems fun to play. “I think production reality hit hard and they had to make some really strong cuts.”
Many of the gameplay mechanics—the combat, the multiplayer, the driving—were on time and proceeding smoothly. Those weren’t touched by the rescope. But the content—the story, the levels, the cinematics—was way behind schedule after Andromeda’s messy pre-production cycle. That was a problem.
“What you see [in the final game] is writing that has been done in the past two years rather than the full five years of writing,” said a developer on the game. “The writing team—writing the characters and everything—was unleashed too late, just because of too many discussions about the high-level direction.”
It wasn’t just the writing. Almost every Andromeda developer who spoke to me for this story said the bulk of the game was developed during that final stretch, from the end of 2015 to March 2017. Most of Mass Effect: Andromeda was made in just a year and a half, by those accounts.
“For the last few months of the game, we spent most of our effort just trying to keep it together rather than polishing,” said an Andromedadeveloper. “Just trying to stay ahead of how quickly it was falling apart.”
One critical issue, said two people who worked on the game, was that the animation team remained understaffed throughout development. “The biggest problem with the animations was manpower,” said one of those people. “You use motion capture for in-game stuff, but the actual work of bringing that animation into an engine so it responds to your controls, that’s not something you can motion capture. It takes people and it takes time. They had very few people. They’re actually quite talented people, but if they had ridiculous schedules, then it just makes me sad to see the end result.”
Another of Lehiany’s ideas was that there should be hundreds of explorable planets. BioWare would use algorithms to procedurally generate each world in the game, allowing for near-infinite possibilities, No Man’s Skystyle. (No Man’s Sky had not yet been announced—BioWare came up with this concept separately.)
There were some hiccups, however. One lingering question for the Andromeda team was how they could possibly implement a BioWare-caliber story in a game with procedurally generated planets. Some teams felt perpetually understaffed, and there were technological difficulties. BioWare’s level designers used a tool called WorldMachine that could simulate erosion and build realistic mountains on each planet, but other teams had trouble figuring out how to generate high-quality worlds without getting in and doing it by hand. “Unfortunately that was the only team that was able to figure out how to do stuff more procedurally,” said a person who worked on the game. “No one else had the resources.”
The Mass Effect: Andromeda team knew they were going to run into major technical barriers with or without procedural generation. Over the past few years, one of BioWare’s biggest obstacles has also become one of EA’s favorite buzzwords: Frostbite, a video game engine. An engine is a collection of software that can be reused and recycled to make games, often consisting of common features: a physics system, a graphics renderer, a save system, and so on. In the video game industry, Frostbite is known as one of the most powerful engines out there—and one of the hardest to use.
DICE made first-person shooters like Battlefield, and the Frostbite engine was designed solely to develop those games. When BioWare first got its hands on Frostbite, the engine wasn’t capable of performing the basic functions you’d expect from a role-playing game, like managing party members or keeping track of a player’s inventory. BioWare’s coders had to build almost everything from scratch.
Engineers on Andromeda had to design many of their own features from scratch, including their animation rig. “Frostbite is wonderful for rendering and lots of things,” said a person who worked on the game. “But one of the key things that makes it really difficult to use is anything related to animation. Because out of the box, it doesn’t have an animation system.” (Frostbite was later attached to an animation system called ANT, that source said, but it was full of “duct-taped issues.”)
Pre-production on Mass Effect: Andromeda was a tale of two cities. Several people from the team described 2013 as one of the best years of their professional lives and 2014 as one of the worst. Whereas 2013 was full of possibilities for the developers of Andromeda, 2014 was full of politics. Conflicts emerged between BioWare staffers at the company’s two main studios, in Edmonton and Montreal. Developers in Edmonton said they thought the game was floundering in pre-production and didn’t have a strong enough vision, while developers in Montreal thought that Edmonton was trying to sabotage them, taking ideas and staff from Montreal for its own projects, Dragon Age: Inquisition and Dylan. By the end of 2014 at least a dozen people had left BioWare Montreal for other studios, and it wasn’t clear to the remaining staff whether those positions would be replaced. The animation team in particular was understaffed, sources said, and when people left, their positions sometimes weren’t refilled.
The Mass Effect: Andromeda team was also having trouble executing the ideas they’d found so exciting just a year ago. Combat was shaping up nicely, as were the prototypes BioWare had developed for the Nomad ground vehicle, which already felt way better to drive than Mass Effect 1’s crusty old Mako. But spaceflight and procedurally generated planets were causing some problems.
“We started to realize by summer 2015 that we had great technological prototypes, but we had doubts they would make it into the game,” said another person who worked on the game. The Andromeda team had gotten systems like spaceflight up and running, two people said, but they couldn’t figure out how to make those systems fun to play. “I think production reality hit hard and they had to make some really strong cuts.”
Many of the gameplay mechanics—the combat, the multiplayer, the driving—were on time and proceeding smoothly. Those weren’t touched by the rescope. But the content—the story, the levels, the cinematics—was way behind schedule after Andromeda’s messy pre-production cycle. That was a problem.
“What you see [in the final game] is writing that has been done in the past two years rather than the full five years of writing,” said a developer on the game. “The writing team—writing the characters and everything—was unleashed too late, just because of too many discussions about the high-level direction.”
It wasn’t just the writing. Almost every Andromeda developer who spoke to me for this story said the bulk of the game was developed during that final stretch, from the end of 2015 to March 2017. Most of Mass Effect: Andromeda was made in just a year and a half, by those accounts.
“For the last few months of the game, we spent most of our effort just trying to keep it together rather than polishing,” said an Andromedadeveloper. “Just trying to stay ahead of how quickly it was falling apart.”
One critical issue, said two people who worked on the game, was that the animation team remained understaffed throughout development. “The biggest problem with the animations was manpower,” said one of those people. “You use motion capture for in-game stuff, but the actual work of bringing that animation into an engine so it responds to your controls, that’s not something you can motion capture. It takes people and it takes time. They had very few people. They’re actually quite talented people, but if they had ridiculous schedules, then it just makes me sad to see the end result.”
Full article;
http://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-troubled-five-1795886428
Chapstick
Well-Known Member
Finally started ME1 and wow the sniper aiming at the start of the game sucks. I used a sniper rifle my entire Andromeda playthrough and had zero problems, in this it takes like 20 seconds to line up a shot because the aiming is fighting me so hard while wobbling all over the place.
P2p1mbs
Well-Known Member
Are you aiming from cover? there is less scope sway that way. also, which class are you using? only the infiltrator and soldier classes can use snipers by default.
Chapstick
Well-Known Member
Infiltrator. I looked it up and apparently a lot of people had this problem starting out and the only way to fix it is upgrading your sniper abilities & using weapon mods
P2p1mbs
Well-Known Member
Stick with the pistol until you get better guns, pistols are the best guns overall for the first game; I started with both a soldier and vanguard and found the vanguards pistol much easier to use early on than the soldier's rifle
NightAntilli
Well-Known Member
Yeah it's like that for all weapons really. Most of them have really shitty aiming at the beginning. Pistols are the 'best' at the start. After upgrading, snipers become very good though. But no one plays ME1 for the gameplay lol.
Argentus
Well-Known Member
also go for high explosive rounds and max damage/max overheat. You can you turn your sniper rifle into a rail gun!
P2p1mbs
Well-Known Member
UpSideDownGRUNT
Well-Known Member
Thing is, had Andromeda had a few more months - a year it probably would have been fine. This is what happens when you rush a game out the door before its even complete EA.
Anthem looks cool, but not my thing.
Anthem looks cool, but not my thing.