#is it obvious yet that I’m really picky with male designs

[hutaoloves]

Halloween merch transparents!!<3

Men coming…later…maybe…

[sleepy-savior]

I normally don’t do this, but I really need to write down my thoughts on Mass Effect Andromeda.

So I’ll start with this; Before you defend Andromeda, let me explain. It has come to my understanding that a lot of the animation bugs don’t happen to everyone. I have them bad, but I have friends who flat out don’t have them, characters are animated fine for them. So, I am talking about my bug riddled experience.

Character Creation

It sucks. There are virtually no options, you can really only take the default faces and tweak them a TINY bit. Usually making them look uglier. Females are slightly better looking, but that’s because all the males look like they’re in their 50′s and out of shape. Animations

So this one is the most obvious complaint. Animations suck. Faces are static, emotionless stares, and most of the time they don’t even stare at the right spot. My character has spent the entire game staring in roughly the direction of faces, but not once has it seemed like they’re actually looking at who they’re talking to. it’s game breaking. And walking, every character walks like they’re trying not to shit themselves. All the time. As for everything else, movements, camera angles, picking things up, interactions, it all looks like a rough draft. Graphically and animation wise the entire game looks like an Alpha for a game two years from release. It’s bad. Voice acting

This has been one of the worst aspects of the game for me. I can handle bad animations, but the voice acting falls just as short. Without the facial expressions, I have no idea what emotion characters are having. Everything just sounds like they’re reading a script with no emotion. The timing is off so people say something and the next person responds IMMEDIATELY after. An example would be that it sounds like “Hey how are yougoodandyou?” and to top it off, the characters tones don’t match, they don’t sound like they’re interacting, they sound like they read lines completely separately from each other. Map design

I might be in a minority here, but I hate the maps. Same issue I had with DA:I, the maps are just... Wrong. They’re simultaneously too crowded and empty. The designs make no sense, layouts of settlements and ruins are just scattered in nonsensical ways. They all look like map designs that would be great in first person, but in third person everything is super far away, yet it also feels like you have no space. I don’t know, I’m picky with map designs, I spent a ton of time as a kid designing maps, cities, all that stuff, so bad designs just really bother me.

New races

The new races feel... Old. They’re just more ‘aliens’ that look like humans in costumes. It takes place in an all new galaxy, they could have gone as crazy as they wanted, and instead the new races just look like a combination of previous races. One looks like the offspring of a Drell/Prothean, the other like a Krogan/Asiari. There’s nothing new or alien about their designs, just more of the same.

Setting

The Andromeda Galaxy setting feels entirely pointless. There are only two new races, the currency, government, everything just feels like the Milky Way still. I have not seen any reason why the game couldn’t just be set at the edge of the Milky Way. They had a fantastic opportunity with this, a whole new home, a six hundred year journey across the blackness of space. New species to discover, new alliances to join or fight, possibly an entirely new system of government to try and figure out. But they focus on none of that.

Story (Spoilers?)

The story is, for me, the most disappointing aspect of the game. It’s just the same story we already had. There was massive opportunity, a massive group of aliens that just showed up to make a home unannounced. They could have made the story about us trying to prove we’re peaceful to species that don’t understand us, made translators useless because the aliens don’t use language like we do. There were was a perfect story lined up, ready to go. and they ignored it and told the same story we just finished. An alien race is using ancient technology, colonies are disappearing, you need to go find out why. They set up for an epic story about overcoming adversity and making peace with radically different species, and instead gave us Collectors with new faces. The stupid (spoilers?)

Deserters. The fact that right off the bat you start running into people that gave up, abandoned mission and defected to do their own thing? Fuck that. These people gave up their home system, traveled millions of light years over six hundred years, and within a year people gave up? That is the dumbest plot device I have ever heard. Again, six hundred years and millions of light years, and they gave up almost immediately. An Ark didn’t show up on time, so they gave up hope. There was no margin for error on that massive journey? Even a 0.00000000001% speed differential than expected would delay or advance a ship by possibly years, and they had absolutely no plans for the most minuscule error margin? Just purely expected everything to go flawlessly while traveling to a new GALAXY? Laziest writing I’ve ever seen.