Mass Effect Andromeda was worth every penny of the $11 I paid for it. I took some screenshots along the way.
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EA Blames Zelda for Mass Effect Andromeda’s Failure
- Thread starter Megalith
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wow, great website ... transparent HUD for ME series ... excellent !!! Thanks
think I'll wait on the DLC dll and see if EA handles it in the next few days
What made Bioware games stand apart was their attention to the characters. The gameplay has always been a buggy mess in their games, and the story hasn't exactly been great, but the characters made the worlds feel real. They lost sight of this in Andromeda.
AlphaAtlas
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So it wasn't a game you wanted to buy (or demo, or watch in a stream). Thats fair. But you can't go around saying "it's shit", because that implies you played the game enough to judge it. If you're just relaying some reviewer's opinion, you need to be clear about that.
I didn't buy Zelda despite being a lifelong LoZ fan or ME..What now EA? Actually I didn't buy ME because it looked like a fucking train wreck and was. I didn't buy LoZ because I utterly hate that art style and voted against it with my wallet.
Too bad about LoZ... I think its its best game I have played... Ever. No I am not 10 years old heheh... But get it if one doesn't like something, the one doesn't of course.
motomonkey
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That only works is someone wants to pirate your game.
It's so solid there are articles about why it failed.
I don't have to give my money to something to be able to qualify it. But I'll rephrase if that makes you feel better: most people think it's shit.
viscountalpha
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The age of lack of accountability is here. This is why I have a "NO EA" Rule.
EA can Eat my Ass.
EA can Eat my Ass.
Comixbooks
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There are just too many games out there looking for attention you might as well blame pick a number game.
M76
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Yeah, it was made to look like a fucking train wreck, and it wasn't. Not even at release. There were some bugs, but nothing that we hadn't seen a thousand times with rushed releases.
I only need one paragraph to tell you why it failed: Because EA decided to show it to everyone who had an EA access subscription one week before release. And this meant thousands of people who had no freaking idea about Mass Effect has descended on it like vultures, and created youtube memes out of every bug or glitch they found, and made it look like that those bugs were the state of the game, and completely unavoidable. When in reality when you played the game normally the chance to encounter those bugs were minimal at best, and they didn't affect my experience even on release date before any patches were out. So that's that. Same goes for weird animations as well. If someone would've went trough the previous 3 ME games with the same comb they went trough Andromeda to find the weirdest animations, they could easily come up with the same compilations of shame.
It's utterly ridiculous that you try to argue about something you only have second hand information about. I tell you that your second hand information is completely distorted.
That's false to begin with. Most people who played it actually think it's good. Have you been to the thread about the game, where people who actually played it talked about it? Because you could see that the opinions that match the popular opinion are almost non-existent, or are also by people who haven't actually played it.
The people who say it is shit are like yourself, taking the highly biased first looks as the gospel and then make it their duty to tow the party line.
I get frustrated when people slag off a game they haven't played too, but saying that the quality of ME1-3 animations makes ME:A's ok in comparison is setting a pretty low bar.
I would have put ME:A's animations on par with ME1...but remember ME1 was released just under 10 YEARS before ME:A was released. It is unacceptable that so little progress had been made over that time. Animation is one of those areas where gaming has made massive strides over that timeframe, but you wouldn't know from ME:A, and for me it was really jarring.
And this will probably be controversial, but I don't 100% blame EA for ME:A coming out rushed. Bioware worked on it for 5 years, at some point the publisher (who is footing the development bills) needs to yank the chain and snap the developer out of perpetual scope drift. Should EA given them another month or two? Absolutely, but Bioware to my mind are the ones that should wear most of the blame.
AlphaAtlas
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You're proving my point. You're taking the articles at face value without even looking at the game itself.
Though a few reviews were good, my personal experience with Andromeda was totally different than the picture most articles painted.
Yes, exactly.
That opinion is fine, and phrasing it that way shows you didn't play the game.
Going into the game blind, I was immediately struck by how good Andromeda's movement animations felt, actually. When you change direction, for example, Shepard would just kinda hover/moonwalk in place, while Ryder actually turned around with his/her feet in a fluid motion. Same with snapping in/out of cover.
If we're strictly talking facial animations, the original ME trilogy was a high bar, IMO. Andromeda did have a little jankiness though.
And yeah, if those Kotaku "insider info" articles are even half true, Bioware screwed up more than anyone.
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Yes what EA deserves is for people to simply ignore their crap and move on. Good or bad who cares its EA. lol
Really though if a game is panned by EVERY reviewer that is saying something. I don't need to play that game to know its likely terrible.
Frankly if you enjoyed a universally panned game your likely an outlier. Just like the folks that enjoy movies with 10% ratings on rotten tomatoes. You can be the 1 in 10 that finds any of the transformers movies watchable... but I don't have to watch any of them to know they are terrible.
This guy blaming Zelda... reminds me of the Movie moguls blaming rotten tomatoes for their crap movies performance. Yes reviews have an impact on sales... why shouldn't they.
The moral of the andromeda story is... if you rush release a turd your going to get shit on, and only outliers find that sort of thing entertaining. Of course EA has clearly not learned that lesseon... its Zeldas fault. lol
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AlphaAtlas
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If you look in ME forums/communities, alot of people enjoyed the game. Not every pro review was entirely negative either... It has a Metascore of 72.
Andromeda has the same problem NMS has. It had sky high expectations and has serious issues, especially launch issues. But it aquired a social media stink that it doesn't really deserve.
It doesn't work that way. Second hand information was all I needed to not go see The Last Jedi, or play ME:A. Or are you saying that all those that watched/played it and disliked it are lying? And graphical glitches and bugs were not the only issue people had with the game.
Actually, you can't actually know what most people who played it thought, as neither do I. Most people who reviewed it, though, didn't like it. And if you decided to give your money for a game with such bad reports, you were more likely to be a fan and to end up liking it. Most decide to pass.
So, it got trashed in user reports and reviews, there are discussions about how it failed, its publisher is listing excuses for its bad performance and dropped support for it less than half a year after its launch. But you and others exist that liked it, so it's not really a failure and I can't qualify it as shit. Uh...
M76
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I'm not saying that ME:A's animations are great. Far from it. Just stating that the series has a history of weird animations. Like the running animation in ME3. Or the many glitches in ME2? The problem is that it is being judged on the worst examples that were cherry picked. I played the game 80 hours, and in that there were about 4-5 moments where animations really stood out as bad.
You can't expect perfect animations for a game that has dozens of hours of spoken text. Those animations are not hand crafted but made by a number of algorithms. That was another mistake that people try to compare the animations in ME, to games like Tomb Raider, where there is no more than an hour of cutscenes, where they can afford to hand craft every vowel and design every facial expression on it's own.
Could it have been better with some polish? Yes. Did it make a game an unplayable turd? No. If you read the background of development, ME:A was basically made in two years from scratch. For a two year development it is goddamn amazing.
People have a tendency to remember an idealized version of older games. If you say the animations are exactly the same in ME:A and in the first game, you should really look at that old game again, and see how rigid and limited the facial animations were. So there was significant progress. What ME:A lacked is fine tuning, they seemed to have used a pool of canned expressions that weren't always appropriate for the situation. But the underlying technology is far superior to previous games.
That may well be... and after a few patches it may be one of the most amazing games ever made.
It doesn't change at all how and why the game failed.
Its clear to pretty much everyone accept EA it seems that they rushed it. I have not doubt a large portion of the bad press came from experiences with the version that launched on day one... reviewers may have even got a slightly older build if they got early access as is often the case.
What EA should be taking away is that if they had just given the developers a few more weeks or months to polish the game... those early reviews for sure would have been better. Instead EA is blaming their failure on a game on a completely different platform with a very different target market... may as well blame people going to see the Last Jedi or binging netflix instead of playing video games, its as logical an excuse as Zelda stole our thunder.
A lot of people liked the new Ghostbusters, too.
It has a user Metascore of 4.9. 3% of critics' reviews were negative compared to 44% of users'. What does that remind me of...oh, yeah:
M76
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Yes it works exactly like that. You can choose not to see a movie based on what others say about it. But adopting their opinion as your own without actually seeing something is not appropriate at all.
The early reports where they cherry picked the bugs is not representative of the game at all. That's what I've been saying all along. And I just also mentioned that when you go into a discussion board with people who genuinely played the game you see that they're mostly satisfied with it.
There were issues, and no one questions that it is nowhere nearly as great as the trilogy, but everyone also agrees that it is not a bad game, and it doesn't deserve half the shit that was flinged at it.
I know the opinion of most people who choose to express it on forums that I visited, including this. And guess what: the prevailing opinion is the one I've been trying to convince you about. I never believe professional reviewers opinions anyway. That's the worst source of information about games. They tow the party line to get the views / clicks. It's inevitable. Going against popular opinion would be suicide for them.
I already purchased the game on pre-order when the shitstorm started, and they also managed to convince me that I made a mistake. If I hadn't already bought the game by then I certainly wouldn't have. So I agree the slagging off was very convincing, but as I started to reluctantly play the game a week later, I realized that it was mostly false and unwarranted.
Who said it is not a failure? It is a failure, but not because it is shit, but because they managed to convince most people that it is shit. I was convinced that it is shit as well, until I checked it out for myself!
AlphaAtlas
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Oh Andromeda is definitely still flawed after some patches. And it was an utter disaster, yes, can't argue with that.
I just disagree with with the reasons. Like I said, I think EA and Bioware released it half-baked, but it's still a reasonably fun Mass Effect game with mixed animations, not utter trash with animations from 2000 like so many reviews make it out to be.
I think there's a big difference between end general quality, commercial performance, and public perception. Kinda like how alot of cult movies were critically panned when they came out, or how some old masterpieces don't age well.
It was worth every penny I didn't pay for it (I played it through Origin Access). It was a decent game, but I think a lot of the frustration comes from the fact that it could have been a great game.
M76
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I think it's more to do with the fact that it is trendy to hate on EA nowadays. Many who got the game on origin access early, were out for blood. They were looking for reasons to hate the game. So they can use the pre-determined headline: "Look how EA has ruined this too"
Before someone suggests: No I'm not saying it was organized. I'm saying that EA's bad reputation had finally bitten them in the ass, and ME:A was the one suffering for it.
Nafensoriel
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While I will never forgive EA for killing C&C as a base-building game in ME:As case... they arguably saved rather than hurt the title.
There are countless internal accounts on the subject but what we the players got was a 2-year title.. Not a 5 year one. For a 2 year title it was decent but buggy. It did not deserve the hate it received if it was a 2-year title.
The problem is it was a 5-year title and most of that time was wasted by a development team that had no one controlling the bus. To much focus on making the dream big and not nailing down limits tends to do that. Over 75% of the budget of the game went into an engine that was never used the way it was designed to be used. This was not EAs fault. This was the development and project leads. EA only entered the scene in year 3 and rapidly attempted to save their investment as any sane business would do.
Could they have added another 2 years to the title and turned out a great game rather than a mediocre title? Yes. The question is do you trust a team that required intervention to even achieve marginal success with more money?
What was that saying about throwing good money after bad? The fan hate at the end was just the effects of mob mentalities. Humans need to include and exclude. The moment the "in thing" to do was hate the game.. it was hated. Welcome to why mob politics is a terrible idea.
There are countless internal accounts on the subject but what we the players got was a 2-year title.. Not a 5 year one. For a 2 year title it was decent but buggy. It did not deserve the hate it received if it was a 2-year title.
The problem is it was a 5-year title and most of that time was wasted by a development team that had no one controlling the bus. To much focus on making the dream big and not nailing down limits tends to do that. Over 75% of the budget of the game went into an engine that was never used the way it was designed to be used. This was not EAs fault. This was the development and project leads. EA only entered the scene in year 3 and rapidly attempted to save their investment as any sane business would do.
Could they have added another 2 years to the title and turned out a great game rather than a mediocre title? Yes. The question is do you trust a team that required intervention to even achieve marginal success with more money?
What was that saying about throwing good money after bad? The fan hate at the end was just the effects of mob mentalities. Humans need to include and exclude. The moment the "in thing" to do was hate the game.. it was hated. Welcome to why mob politics is a terrible idea.
DeathFromBelow
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Oh, right. Nobody ever lies on the internet. Nobody.
Meeho, why do you troll Star Wars constantly? You even said you didn't see the movie. Are you really so insecure that you need a conservative social justice crusade over a female lead character? Your posts are the perfect example of the kind of dishonest and manipulative internet commentary being discussed here.
It seems like every worthwhile forum has been flooded with various justice warriors and bots 'shaping the discussion' for political and commercial interests. It's sad.
Oh, right. Everybody always lies on the Internet. Everybody.Oh, right. Nobody ever lies on the internet. Nobody.
Troll Star Wars? I don't know what you mean. It's a valid example of a terrible movie applauded by critics. I saw the movie, I just didn't pay to see it.
Please keep your insecure identity politics to yourself, it has no bearing on this discussion.
So, you never ever form an opinion on anything based on experiences and facts not based on your own? Interesting. Or hypocritical. My money is on the latter.
I have neither political, cultural or commercial interest in ME:A, nor have I posted anything of the sort here. You're projecting hard. How insecure are you, really?
Andromeda "did not get a fair shake" because reviewers were too harsh
I read that in donald trump's voice.
everything is unfair.
I read that in donald trump's voice.
everything is unfair.
Sad
M76
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Almost my exact thoughts. ME wasn't killed by EA, it was killed by FUD. In both senses of that phrase. Fear / Uncertainty / Doubt met with FUcking Disinformation.
SecretStash
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really?
Well in that case maybe I'll give the game a look once it hits the bargain bin ...
This too. As an open world action shooter, it was decent. But people don't buy Bioware games for their combat, or random open world encounters. That, and the first two hours of gameplay were the most unpolished. Usually the first part of the game is the most polished. It's the part that most reviewers will see, and it has to hook the audience so they want to play more. The first two hours of ME:A were a buggy mess, and lacked direction. The middle part of the game was a repetitive slog that is common for open world games, but not usually seen in Bioware games. It did actually start feeling like a Bioware game toward the end, and then they announced that they wouldn't be finishing any of the story arcs.
It probably would have been better received if they didn't call it "Mass Effect".
A franchise that was in the 90% was reduced to a 70% title. A valid 70s.
MEA was buggy, but beyond that the characters where largely forgettable, the game play took no risks, the story took way to long to pick up (it only really starts rolling at 2/3rd done). For such a potentially rich setting, they achieved so little it's impressive.
Yes it's more Mass Effect, but it's also not as good as ME2&3. They need to take this back to the oven and bake it longer, but not all the way back to the kitchen to start from scratch.
M76
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I mentioned those exact problems in my review.
You couldn't realistically expect it to be better or even as good as ME2&3. I had hoped it would be close, but it isn't as close as I wished. Still that doesn't justify the way it was dragged trough the mud.
M76
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This brooding sarcasm doesn't do you any favours if you wanted to save face.
You can admit that this sounds just as stupid:
ME:A is the worst game ever, and your second hand opinion trumps my first hand experience.