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Brief First Impressions after 7 hours (Updated a week later)
Iselin
Member LegendaryPosts: 18,719
I've spent a good part of the day today playing ME:A. I got to a point in the exploration of a planet where progress is locked until tomorrow's release at 9:00 PM Pacific.
Graphics and Performance:
The game gave me a message when I first tried to run it to get the latest nVidia driver so I did that. It ran flawlessly with no crashes or hiccups of any kind the whole 7 hours I played. It ran great maxed @ 1920 X 1200 (i4770k + nVidia 980)
The graphical improvements you'll see right away are the skin textures. They're the best I've ever seen. Faces are textured complete with minor flaws that add a great level of realism. Aged faces (eg. your father's face) look very naturally aged without the usual exaggerations most games resort to in order to simulate aging. You'll see for yourself but skins are just outstanding.
Expressive eyes is the other big one. Although I also acknowledge the impressive tech at work here, they didn't quite nail this one as they did with skin. Most of the time the eyes work just fine but they occasionally seem to overdo their expressiveness for no particular good reason. They are just "off" enough at times to nudge the game into uncanny valley territory.
Game Play:
If you've played Dragon Age inquisition you'll notice some of the similarities. It is still very much an ME game but the planetary exploration in particular will remind you of the openness of DA:I. There's a lot to do and discover in those planets. The game feels definitely 10X more open than any previous ME game in a very good way.
The use of cover in firefights is also very well done. It's automatic and intuitive: you just move near something that should provide cover and it does putting you in cover mode with no fuss.
If there is a way to pause in the middle of fight to issue orders and use abilities, I didn't find it in my preview. It might be there but I didn't look for it and just fought in real time. In that sense it feels much more like the multiplayer ME3 mode than the single player portion. At any rate, combat is well done, fast paced and enjoyable even with my limited lowbee abilities.
Crafting:
I consciously decided to not focus on that for my preview but saw enough of the interface to know that there is a lot you can research and craft. Much more than in any previous ME or DA game.
Interface:
This takes some getting used to. There seems to be more nesting of menus than is actually necessary and some of their interface choices are odd. By the end of 7 hours I was getting used to it but I can't say it was an enjoyable experience. Navigating the menus for quests and many other things just seems to require too many keystrokes and often not the keystrokes you would think. OTOH, it doesn't really get in the way during combat but I'll still put this one in the "con" column.
Overall it looks very good to me and I can't wait to get the full unlock tomorrow,
Graphics and Performance:
The game gave me a message when I first tried to run it to get the latest nVidia driver so I did that. It ran flawlessly with no crashes or hiccups of any kind the whole 7 hours I played. It ran great maxed @ 1920 X 1200 (i4770k + nVidia 980)
The graphical improvements you'll see right away are the skin textures. They're the best I've ever seen. Faces are textured complete with minor flaws that add a great level of realism. Aged faces (eg. your father's face) look very naturally aged without the usual exaggerations most games resort to in order to simulate aging. You'll see for yourself but skins are just outstanding.
Expressive eyes is the other big one. Although I also acknowledge the impressive tech at work here, they didn't quite nail this one as they did with skin. Most of the time the eyes work just fine but they occasionally seem to overdo their expressiveness for no particular good reason. They are just "off" enough at times to nudge the game into uncanny valley territory.
Game Play:
If you've played Dragon Age inquisition you'll notice some of the similarities. It is still very much an ME game but the planetary exploration in particular will remind you of the openness of DA:I. There's a lot to do and discover in those planets. The game feels definitely 10X more open than any previous ME game in a very good way.
The use of cover in firefights is also very well done. It's automatic and intuitive: you just move near something that should provide cover and it does putting you in cover mode with no fuss.
If there is a way to pause in the middle of fight to issue orders and use abilities, I didn't find it in my preview. It might be there but I didn't look for it and just fought in real time. In that sense it feels much more like the multiplayer ME3 mode than the single player portion. At any rate, combat is well done, fast paced and enjoyable even with my limited lowbee abilities.
Crafting:
I consciously decided to not focus on that for my preview but saw enough of the interface to know that there is a lot you can research and craft. Much more than in any previous ME or DA game.
Interface:
This takes some getting used to. There seems to be more nesting of menus than is actually necessary and some of their interface choices are odd. By the end of 7 hours I was getting used to it but I can't say it was an enjoyable experience. Navigating the menus for quests and many other things just seems to require too many keystrokes and often not the keystrokes you would think. OTOH, it doesn't really get in the way during combat but I'll still put this one in the "con" column.
Overall it looks very good to me and I can't wait to get the full unlock tomorrow,
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Post edited by Iselin on
Comments
is it an mmorpg?
guess I should google it and see whats up.... wasn't one of the coming games supposed to be a new, better, bigger, faster EVE?
anyway, thanks
Sz
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Companion AI, OTOH does feel a bit rough around the edges: standing in weird spots and sometimes not taking cover when they should. Jump jets and a bit of parkour are a new thing with ME:A. That might be what's making them misbehave.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Watching twitch i don't see a lot that i like in the design.Map loaded with markers,somehow you can magically change your land rover right out in the middle of a snow storm,including color,not realistic at all,like who would do a paint job in the middle of a snow storm?NOBODY.So much for DISCO when you just aim right for the markers on the map,thanks for removing the fun of discovery.
It doesn't seem to impress many other people either as it never hit top 5/6 like every new game does,in around #16.Geesh PlayerUnknown hit 2 today and that is not even a good game,it is nothing more than a H1Z1 clone.
The Cutscenes??Wow i was getting incredibly bored and fidgety trying to sit through them,i was praying the streamer would skip through the boring dialogue.
To me it looks a lot like SWTOR ,imo sort of cheaply done.
Multiplayer looks barely ok,has some cover but the weapons are boring as heck,i cannot handle anymore machine gun pew pew anymore,i need to see exciting creative weapons.Then watching a streamer dicker over deciding on a weapon for 15 minutes really makes it boring.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
But it's funny that you say it looks like SWTOR to you when SWTOR adopted the ME style of story telling... not the other way around.
If you want to skip cut scenes and get to the action, this is probably not your kind of game in the first place. I like action RPG games that tell a good story well with good production. There's no way I'd skip through the cut scenes in the first playthough. That'd be like skipping pages in a book to get to the good action bits.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
There is definitely a different amount of TLC that went into the textures/details that didn't carry over to the animations. The contrast is fairly striking.
I thought you meant general walking, running and shooting. Those are just fine in a Bioware ME and DA kind of way.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
This is not aided much by the shear amount of cut-scenes, dialogue, build up phase of early game where you don't have a whole lot to distract from how bad they are.
Just like any other Bioware game but with better graphics, I prefer total open world and less story.
Bioware have a bad habit of leading you.
A lot of the voice work is just terrible, like the things they say have no relation to the context or gravity of the conversation. It's like taking 2 people from 2 different conversations and piecing their responses together, and trhe corniness of some of the reples, oh god...
Here's to hoping their are many, many more gems to be found in this great-for-all-the-wrong-reasons game.
You should try it with fat lips in char creation, laugh a minute.
Speaking of they should add a convo minigame ala fallout, press an arrow key hmmm, Blah blah blah, are you STILL talking?
Something I really like is the Pingu style lip movement, hilarious.
https://gfycat.com/PhysicalImaginativeAmericanriverotter
They seem to suck their lower lip into their mouths when they talk as well, it looks so damn weird.
And I love this one, she looks so confused, for some reason it reminds me of Jubal Early from Firefly.
https://gfycat.com/RightHotAustraliansilkyterrier
Also, I'm still in doubt to buy the game. The footages that I've seen shows a pretty linear path and maps to be railroaded (much like previous ME titles). This alone is quite unacceptable for me in 2017. Back in 2008 it was okay-ish, but now..? No, BioWare should have made the world (universe) more open.
Guess I'll just wait for more REAL PLAYER reviews to come out and not the journalism reviews (like OP and this site) who are looking through that obviously purple and paid for glasses...
The OP is paid for this thread? At first I thought wizardry said the dumbest thing in this thread (like usual). But you sir take the cake.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
I have no idea why is there so much hate for Bioware, is it just because they are with EA now? Because honestly all of their games were great, no exceptions. Even the latest DA:Inqusition, which was heavily hated on the internet won quite a lot of GOTY awards.
My biggest gripe with ME:Andromeda are the facial animations, they aren't bad, but neither are they great. When the rest of the game is AMAZING, it's hard to understand why didn't they bother to improve them. Hell they are way better than those in Fallout 4 (which are really bad), yet somehow FO4 is still better than 99% of the games released in this decade.
This is definitively a GOTY material. If 2016 was a pretty disappointing year for gaming (in terms of GOTY contenders, and in general game quality), then 2017 is definitively shaping up to be way better.
A section of the community feels they are superior to everyone else, and they "prove" that by hating everything that's popular. Big name studios are prime targets.
They probably secretly play these popular games and enjoy them, but they'll NEVER admit it on any games forum..
p.s.: I read that it was a memory problem in ME:3 for the consoles.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED