#and all bioware did with it visually is.... make him look tired? or rather. make him look normal? have very real normal features?

[emmavakarian-theirin]

i knew it was only a matter of time before it happened but to actually see beardless lucanis and on my dash?? BEGONE

[annakie]

Thoughts on Andromeda, Part Three

*edit* I’m going to just call all my Andromeda text-and-pic posts from here on out Thoughts on Andromeda and remove that “First few hours” since I want to make this an ongoing thing.

I finished the trial, and by that I mean, I played 10 hours.  I did not get to any “end point”, haha.  I game slow and methodically, talking to everyone, scanning every thing, etc.

Spoiler free: I can’t wait to play more.  I’m so mad I can’t finish up what I was in the middle of.  I can’t believe I have to wait until TUESDAY to continue, and even then I have to go to work all day first.  It’ll be torture.

Also, since apparently the trial I downloaded wasn’t the special edition I’d ordered, I didn’t get the items I was supposed to etc. for the edition I ordered.  I uninstalled the trial version I got and am re-installing the correct version now. I’m not sure if I hope I can pick back up where I was or if I’d be cool with starting over.  I’m sure I can make it back to where I was in more like, 6 hours knowing what I know now about where to go, what’s useful and what’s not, knowing what conversations are going to happen where, how to solve some quests, etc.

Did I have more graphics glitches?  Yep.  Were they anything more than minor distractions?  Nope. Am I enjoying the hell out of myself and this game? Hell yeah.

OK enough with the spoiler-free.  Let’s get into it, with abounding spoilers.  And screenshots!

When I left off, I was wandering around Habitat 7, trying to find all the things.  I was feeling a bit overwhelmed and lost as I stopped playing Thursday night, but I was also super tired so, that played into it.   Picking back up finally this morning, I was ready to go.

I quickly appreciated how, although there were a lot of mountains and pits in the area, there were still a couple of routes to get to / from each objective in the area.  I was slightly annoyed that I was pretty far away from the storyline objective when Cora started calling for help, since I still had a couple of other things to get to.  So I put her on the back burner and tracked to the couple of objectives I still needed to get to.  One of which, I’d already been to.  I would have liked some kind of “Hey you’ve seen what you need to see in this location” marker.

Found Cora, helped out, and started at this point to get combat a little better, especially after my first level up and putting some points into some things.  I’d already explored the area where Dad had made his way to, it was nice to get a bit of dialog from Liam mentioning we’d already been there.

I’m going to spend most of this review posting a screenshot and talking about the person or scene in that shot, rather than just big blocks of text.  Incoming!

It was, honestly, a comfort seeing that N7 armor again, even if “I” wasn’t wearing it.  The mission with Dad was a bit reminiscent of ME3′s opening with Anderson, though it was nice to keep both Cora and Liam with me.  The entire charge was hectic, and fun, and I felt like I barely had time to scan things and maybe missed some loot along the way.  

----------

I’d bumped my graphics settings up to Ultra for this, just to see how my 4gb GTX 960 would handle it. The rest of my system is starting to get pretty dated, though I still am at or above minimum specs, with the graphics card hitting near rec’d specs.  I dropped from 60fps pretty solid at High settings to 30fps at ultra, but nothing else was too bad.  I later bumped back down to High, and couldn’t tell too much difference.  

I super appreciate the already nice textures.  Nothing looked mushy, like most things do in the first three games.  Except for hair, hopefully nothing NEEDS to be re-textured.

I’d been spoiled about Alec Ryder’s fate thanks to not having my spoiler tags set up yet, or maybe just poking my nose into posts where it shouldn’t have been yet, and it was sad, but also a great scene.

And absolutely visually stunning.  It did a great job of setting up mystery.  So far the opening hours have been setting up question after question, every little bit you learn opens up dozens more questions.  

----------

I would have liked to have a little bit more emotion out of Ryder when learning her father’s fate.  I had been choosing almost all emotional answers... upper right when available, lower right if only the lower options are available, and tried to RP Ryder as being as close as possible to her father, or at least understanding, so I hoped for maybe a little more shock and sadness about her father’s death but... maybe there’s more to come than I’ve seen of that so far.

----------

I want to just send some love and applause to Natalie Dormer for her work as Lexit T’Perro.  She’s so good I actually forget I’m talking to Natalie Dormer. I’m SO GLAD she’s gonna be on the ship with us full time!

-------------

My heart melted a little when Liam gave this look.  Liking Liam more and more as I spend time with him.  The “shooting the dead thing too much” scene was a little cringe-y, I admit, but way less than some reviewers have lead me to believe.

Still loving his VA.

--------- 

This cutscene was... interesting, I feel like we don’t know ANYTHING about the Kett or their motivations so far, but also, let’s give Bioware some time to set up a story.  The Geth seemed to be set up to be the villains of the series when all we had was Eden Prime.

When I was watching the scene I thought “Someday, I’m going to play through the game a second or tenth time and finally care about this scene and understand its motivations.”  Right now it felt like a generic baddie reveal, there to put forth even more questions.

---------

That said, I was ready to start getting into the meat and potatoes of the game, and was excited when things started progressing and we got to the Nexus.

My heart skipped a little, seeing it so reminiscent of the Citadel, and this scene clearly was made to echo that first, iconic Citadel approach, but with something very, very wrong. I almost could have done with a little more creepy abandoned Nexus atmospheric exploration, but there will be plenty of time for exploring creepy abandoned places, I’m sure.

---------

It was a fun introduction to this guy, though.

I wonder how many Shakarians immediately went to google to see if he’s romanceable. :)  I admit, I actually wondered. I like him so far.

---------

The game did a great job of introducing you to the important characters on the Nexus.  My ONLY quibble is that it did the “Oh here’s 4 people to talk to in ANY ORDER feel free to go in any order but if you talk to a certain one of them first the quest completes!” thing.  I had to reload, but just mashed spacebar over the dialog I had to see again.

Oh that’s a neat feature -- if you hit the spacebar once instead of auto-skipping dialog it brings up a small dialog box saying “Press Space to skip” so you get an extra chance to not accidentally skip dialog if you didn’t want to.  That came in handy once or twice.

So anyway... 

---------

I love her and want to subscribe to her newsletter.  So glad we get a regular female Krogan around again.  Really interested in finding out more about her.  I am kind of torn on their Genophage semi-cure thing, but I am glad they addressed it.  It’s a believable explanation, at least.  I like to think Mordin had a hand in the genetic improvements.

---------

Not a fan of her, though we’re clearly not supposed to be.  I’m guessing she’s either going to turn out to be evil or your “person you hate but they save your ass anyway” frienemy at some point.

---------

Look, I want to not like or trust him, because there’s fairly strong echos of Anoleis here, but he’s voiced by Kumail Nanjiani, who I adore so.... I kind of love him already.  

---------

I know he was just part of a side quest, one I have already finished, but I hope he hangs around.

---------

I got a little teary-eyed at this.  Glad to see we’re still going to be collecting ships.

And I mean... I totally did get a little choaked up hearing Liara’s letters and log entries.  It was a really great slice of “home”.  Liara is far from my fave (I like her and all, just... not in my Top 8) but... it was great to hear her voice.

---------

I really appreciated Mom-Ryder actually looking like my F!Ryder.  And seeing the Citadel again, even just a small room, and people talking about the council and all, another small slice of home, even one that happened before ME1.

---------

Okay, that’s part 1.  Since we have a long wait til the game unlocks tomorrow, I’ll probably do a Part 2 at some point, because I have so. many. thoughts, and haven’t even finished talking about the Nexus or started on the Tempest or planet scanning or Eos yet.