#ok but seriously i need someone at bioware to explain to me - in detail - what is happening here

[braddourifscareertrajectory]

i'm not jealous of neve because of the lucanis thing (or her getting to have little wisp friends that hang around her room all the time and play cute little pranks, or getting a special nickname for manfred, or getting to be like sisters with bellara while rook can't even get a book club invite 😒) i'm jealous because she gets to have cute little casual fits while my rook is stuck with whatever the hell this is

[annakie]

Thoughts from the first few hours of Andromeda

Part one, I’ve run out of time right now, hopefully will finish up with a part 2 later.

I’m keeping it non-major-stuff-spoilery as possible as to plot stuff,but if you want to stay 100% spoiler free to all of the stuff like, what the loading screen looks like, what character creation is like, some of the opening moments of the game etc. and haven’t played any of the trial yet, keep away!

Startup - Game-breaking Issue

Apparently, if you use a Corsair mouse like I do, you can’t even launch the game (you get the black screen, game won’t even really launch) with the Corsair utilities installed.  This means that I had to un-install the Corsair utility engine, the thing that lets my MMO mouse actually use the 12 keypad buttons that I bought it for, even work.  Really, really freaking annoying.  So if I want to play SWTOR I’ll have to reinstall the Corsair utilities, but to play ME:A I have to uninstall it?  This is pretty unacceptable.

A Corsair employee took to EA’s forums to say they’re working on providing a proper solution, so the issue shouldn’t plague the game after release. For now, if you’re using their software for mouse configuration, you’ll have to do without your custom setup and macros.

Let’s hope that’s true.

Load Screen

The load screen is really pretty, most reminiscent of ME2, and the atmospheric music is more reminiscent of “Vigil” than any of the other games I think.  I really do like the music, and the load screen is pretty, though I still think ME1 still gets the best load screen award.

Controls

The menus are a bit frustrating, and the UI definitely feels more designed for controllers than keyboard and mouse.  I’m already considering getting a controller. Would love to feel how people who’ve used both feel about this issue.  It’s especially frustrating without being able to use my mouse number pad like I’m used to, instead of hitting number keys with my left hand.  

The biggest menu/ui annoyance to me right now is that you can hit M to get to the planet map, but have to hit escape twice to get back into the game.  I check my map a lot, this got really annoying real quick.

It looks pretty, though!  I haven’t dug too much into the quest log / codex / weapon & armor outfitting though.

Character Creation

Oof.  Not completely happy here.  I can see what others were complaining about.  You basically get 9 heads to choose from, if you choose to customize, and can make some changes to those heads but not really enough to make a lot of the Ryders who also chose that head to look basically the same outside of hair color/style and eye color... maybe a scar and/or tattoo for flavoring. 

So I wanted a F!Ryder with a basically round head.  I found a head shape that I liked, though the Ryder’s facial appearance was of Asian descent.  I thought.. no problem, I’ll just pick a different set of eyes, amongst a few other changes... but nope.  There are no options for other eyes.  You can change the height, depth, and color of those eyes but that Ryder head will always have an overall Asian look.  I had to pick one of the caucasian looking options and use the limited controls to bring her head into more of a round shape.  I did OK, but overall it wasn’t the look I wanted.  You get no options for lip shape, eyebrow shape etc. outside of those 9 basic heads.  

The hair options went from OK to Oh God Why.  The color options were plentiful, at least.  The makeup options were pretty good in the eyeshadow, eyeliner and lip categories, but the blush had 3 options, all of which were comical, so it’s better to just turn those off.

Interesting to note that your M!Ryder can have full makeup options, as well.

Overall, I came out looking with an acceptable-looking F!Ryder, but character creation was not what it was with ME3.

Customizing M!Ryder was about the same, and I really felt like, despite doing my best to try and pick a Scott that would match my F!Ryder I wasn’t able to do that so well.  I did the best I could, but I think my two came off looking more like cousins than siblings.  This also translated into the character’s father not looking much like his daughter.  Overall the father didn’t look much like either of his children, tbh.  Just the skin color seemed a few shades too dark, like the character generator didn’t notice that I bumped the skin color up a couple of notches.  If I have time, I’m going to create a set of dark skinned twins and see if it’s the same going the opposite direction.

Me:

Almost every screenshot I have of her so far (not many) has those same... wild looking eyes.

Dad:

I don’t have a good screenshot of my Scott, argh.

I’ve seen rumors that Bioware is supposed to give us more options soon, I really hope soon means at launch, and not a bunch of DLC hairstyle packs or whatever.

Finishing up character creation, you get to choose if Commander Shepard was male or female.  There’s no ME3 Save importing, which we basically already knew.  So far, making this choice hasn’t made a difference in Andromeda, but I’m still, you know, barely into the game.

Graphics

Maybe it’s me, or my just-Ok-now graphics card (Nvidia GTX 960), but parts of the graphics looked really.... crunchy.  The shadows in hair and reflecting off the floors in the opening ship were particularly bad.   I don’t expect to run the game on ultra or anything, but I will definitely want to tweak the settings more to see if I can get rid of that once getting rid of it doesn’t take up my precious 10 hours I have to play the game over the next few days.  I’ve already used up 2.5 of them.

I had a, what seems pretty common, graphics glitch with Dr. Lexie’s arms getting stuck open wide through basically her entire character introduction.  That was super distracting and a big disappointment, since she was one of the characters I was most looking forward to meeting.

But I did manage to hold a pretty steady 60fps most of the time I played, and aside from Dr. Lexi’s glitch and the shadows issue, everything looked and performed great, even once I got down to the first planet. 

There were some things that I thought were either weird or cool, though, like, could someone tell me if my Ryder is sweating inside her suit here, or being rained on? Both are kind of neat details, but I couldn’t decide which was happening.

The Game Opening

A nice speech from Dad (from the always welcome Clancy Brown), a last glimpse of Earth and you’re pretty quickly thrown into the action.  It definitely felt reminiscent of the ME1 opening moments, but without that big, epic walkup scene with the screen panning to reveal your face.   The face reveal is more reminiscent of ME2′s.

I did appreciate, though, once you have control of your character there’s a lot to take in all of a sudden.  There’s a whole “hallway” area connected to the medbay where there’s a couple of sets of people having conversations and giving background. There was so much to see and interact with just in those few moments that a couple of times I accidentally stopped a conversation by clicking on something else. Seriously, take your time walking around and talking/listening to everyone.  It’s a “oh no things are happening we’d better hurry up and go!” situation but really you have all the time in the world.  I’d have spent longer on all those opening moments, but, you know, 10 hour trial, and the minutes were ticking by.  I was almost an hour in character creation.

I also felt like the game expected you to know what was happening pretty right off. After talking with Dr. Lexit there wasn’t a crapton of exposition and ten characters explaining the same things to you over and over to nail it into your head like some games do.  It’s great for those of us who know our Mass Effect like scripture.  I wonder if any of this would be confusing to anyone who’s coming in fresh to the universe.  What was there felt more organic and ignore-able.  My 5th time through the game I won’t feel as compelled to make sure I talk to the NPCs that don’t have full dialog trees like I feel like I always need to talk to Joker, Kaidan, Pressley, Chakwas and Jenkins before heading to find Anderson in ME1.

There were enough touches here and there to connect you back to ME1-3 if you were looking for it.  Things like the red medical cross & the red medpack boxes around the medbay, some crates that looked straight up taken from ME2&3, etc.  One crewmember talks about a familiarly named planet that isn’t Earth & something that happened there.  But nobody was going “OH MAN I sure hope Commander Shepard saved the Milky Way from the Reapers!!”

Gotta run, got lots more thoughts.  Part two later!