TexAgBolter said:

---

I love the original Trilogy, but after Andromeda and other recent BioWare work, it's hard to get excited.

---

I agree - Andromeda and the last Dragon Age game weren't that great in my opinion. Didn't help that I put down Dragon Age to play the Witcher 3 years ago and it felt like such a major difference in quality between the two that I never really wanted to go back to Dragon Age.

Bioware, like Blizzard and a few other developers, don't really move the needle anymore.

Lots of people ae suggesting this will be a sequel to both the original trilogy an Andromeda

Claude! said:

---

They better not **** it up.

---

This

I have read some opinions that after a few years of patches and some decent rework that Andromeda is actually a pretty good game. Has anyone played it recently?

Its solid. I really think the combat was a ton of fun. At this point, its an ok game that falls short when comparing it to the originals because of its character development and story. It runs fine as a game now.

It may run fine now, but the characters and story are still trash.

Claude! said:

---

YouBet said:

---

I have read some opinions that after a few years of patches and some decent rework that Andromeda is actually a pretty good game. Has anyone played it recently?

---

I second wangus. The combat is fun, though the companion AI is a little shoddy. The story is serviceable, but doesn't have the highs you see in the original trilogy. That's not helped by the fact that the available companions are overall pretty lackluster. None of them come close to Garrus or Mordin; heck, I'd put most of them below James Vega in Mass Effect 3, a character so forgettable that I had to look up his name before I could finish this sentence.

---

Better than me. I only remember Garrus from your post.

James Vega? Sounds like a night club performer.

I've played through Andromeda on both my PC and my Xbox. I always thought it was a good game. I just think it had a lot of hype around it that it failed to overcome.

I saw EA mentioned too there at the end of the trailer....are they with BioWare now? I'm out of the loop.

Sucks if true, EA games are terrible.

Huge Mass Effect fan here, never played Andromeda though.

dcaggie04 said:

---

Chipotlemonger said:

---

I saw EA mentioned too there at the end of the trailer....are they with BioWare now? I'm out of the loop.

Sucks if true, EA games are terrible.

Huge Mass Effect fan here, never played Andromeda though.

---

You've really been out of the loop. Bioware's been owned by EA since 2007.

---

Ha! Fair enough! I guess I still liked ME2 and ME3 enough. ME I think was the most fun, probably because of the novelty of it all and compelling story. But the gameplay in some of the others was even better.

Wildmen03 said:

---

I've played through Andromeda on both my PC and my Xbox. I always thought it was a good game. I just think it had a lot of hype around it that it failed to overcome.

---

I'll second that but with the PS4 version. I enjoyed enough so that I'm an insanity run away from a platinum. IMO the original trilogy didn't leave anywhere for the plot to go that wouldn't come out completely forced but Andromeda has plenty of room to grow. If I had to guess that's where the next game will take place, but possibly with a new main character and the one from the current game no longer the main.

I didn't play it upon release, or even until just a few months ago but the bugs are definitely something they need to exorcise on the next goaround. Nothing would be reviewed very well with the bugs it still has a couple years after release and in its original state I'm sure it didn't have a chance. It's like they didn't even bother to do any QA.

I'm as wary of bioware these days as anyone. Andromeda was awful (at launch, I've never bothered to try it since), Anthem was a joke, etc.

That said, ME was incredible, ME2 refined a lot of the clunky mechanics that were present in ME and is easily in my top 5 (probably top 2), and ME3 (after all the patches relating to the ending and whatnot) was a fairly satisfying end to the trilogy.

I'm not saying this is a must-buy (are any games these days? it's so much easier to tell what games are worth purchasing now than 15 years ago), but it's certainly a must-watch as far as the development is concerned.

Hopefully they do this justice. Might be my favorite gaming IP out there.

I think we will see a game set 600-700 years after ME3. That's why Liara is still around. Somehow a new bridge between Andromeda and the Milky Way has been formed. Game start

Don't F it up Bioware/EA

Anthem was apparently entirely the **** show of BioWare and had nothing to do with EA.

I wouldn't trust a thing BioWare does after anthem.

ME2 is my favorite game of all time.

If nu-Bioware is making this a direct sequel to ME3, then I think they've failed already. ME3's ending is too open-ended to force a canon. My ending might have entire races present that yours killed off.

They've said a million times that Shepard's story is over. I don't want to see him again and I don't think they could possibly have a story for 4 that is worth contradicting everything in 3 to tell.

Also... just revisited Andromeda. There's a lot to almost-like in there but it just misses the mark on a lot of things. Specifically, much of the story is a ME1 rehash and none of the characters hold a candle to the original trilogy's. Lots of genericness in there.


Edit: the first half of the video sounds like First Contact but that is 100% Liara at the end.

tv1113 said:

---

Anthem was apparently entirely the **** show of BioWare and had nothing to do with EA.

I wouldn't trust a thing BioWare does after anthem.

---

Oh don't worry, EA shared much of the blame in the CF that was/is Anthem forcing Frostbite on the dev team combined with not giving them the internal Frostbite support resources needed was a big part of the issues with both Andromeda and Anthem. Anthem suffered additionally due to the revolving doors at key leadership positions in the studio, again due to EA meddling.

Believe me I blamed it on EA at first because well... SWTOR, Sim City, WAR, etc. but there was a really damning article someone put out that basically EA gave them plenty of time and the **** show was primarily all on Biowares complete lack of leadership and direction.

Im pretty sure the game will be a a few hundred years in the future. We won't be seeing Shepard but i bet he will certainly be talked about. Will be interesting to see what they do and how he is treated will he be a hero or monster as it seems the cannon ending will be destroy.

tv1113 said:

---

Believe me I blamed it on EA at first because well... SWTOR, Sim City, WAR, etc. but there was a really damning article someone put out that basically EA gave them plenty of time and the **** show was primarily all on Biowares complete lack of leadership and direction.

---

That's probably the Kotaku article. It did place the majority of the blame on Bioware's poor management and lack of direction for the game, but EA's diktats about the Frostbite engine (including staffing issues) did not help matters.

A few hundred years in the future is a good idea. Still, you have some major things to explain away without outright invalidating peoples' ME3 decisions.

Spoilers just in case:

- One person has the Quarians exterminated, one has the Geth destroyed, another has life and AI united
- One has peaceful cured Krogan, one has them at the edge of extinction, another has them swarming the galaxy with a cure and under Wreav's violent leadership
- One apparently has Reaper wreckage everywhere, another has them leave, and another united them with all organics to preserve the memory of all prior life forms

You can explain away a few of those things but not all.

Now maybe this is ONLY a sequel to the Destroy route (and, say, my Control ending ended right there), but even then you have some serious hoops to jump through regarding Krogan and Quarians.

Claude! said:

---

YouBet said:

---

I have read some opinions that after a few years of patches and some decent rework that Andromeda is actually a pretty good game. Has anyone played it recently?

---

I second wangus. The combat is fun, though the companion AI is a little shoddy. The story is serviceable, but doesn't have the highs you see in the original trilogy. That's not helped by the fact that the available companions are overall pretty lackluster. None of them come close to Garrus or Mordin; heck, I'd put most of them below James Vega in Mass Effect 3, a character so forgettable that I had to look up his name before I could finish this sentence.

---

Watch Paragon Lost, you won't forget James then...

As far as Bioware, it seems like for Andromeda that they put a major effort into developing procedure generated planets and kept hitting dead ends. By the time EA stepped in they shifted the A team to Anthem and left the C team in charged of MEA, ironically it had been the team that made the multiplayer for ME3 so the combat mechanics were actually pretty good. Regardless after too much of a leash EA came down on Bioware directing them to make a Destiny competitor. After the Anthem debacle and the hype over Cyberpunk, I really hope they will get back to the RPG roots as that market has significant potential. It seems in the last year or so EA has figured out not to piss off fan bases with micro-transactions or other shenanigans, but they need a good writer to right the ship after 2 whiffs in a row(ME3 ending and MEA bugs/forgettable story and characters).

Hopefully they will show long term consequences for the Quarian/Geth power balance, the Krogan, and etc. From there just canonize the Destroy ending(which most people pick anyway) and ME4 can be setup quite nicely!

I'm not sure if it's cause for concern or for optimism, but Bioware has seen quite a few relatively high profile departures in the past year or so, including the executive producer for the next Dragon Age game and Casey Hudson, who ran herd over Mass Effect for quite awhile.

For what it's worth I think Casey Hudson's role is overstated. Drew Karpyshyn is the main author for ME 1 and 2, including the beginning books.

ME2 is easily in my top 5 games of all time. Andromeda was meh, but I ended up buying it for like $10 on a GoG sale

I picked the merge ending and halfway through thought, WTF?

And I'll agree with Andromeda being a great value when it's at a steep discount. It was definitely worth the $15 I paid but at full price I'd be pissed even if it had the amount of bugs that the final version had at launch.

The only option that allows for exploration again is the destroy option because it destroys every single mass relay and leaves everyone isolated. This effectively cripples the galaxy and makes long distance travel impossible. They would need to rebuild the entire mass relay system to do it.

It could be interesting if they go that route.

Alright, I need to go catch the different endings on youtube now.