Lum wrote: The problem is that I'm not good with the kind of gameplay the other games were focused on. I know that the stories and characters were great, but I didn't like the gameplay. Since Andromeda will be open world, maybe I can take the time to improve myself and learn to enjoy the gameplay mechanics enough to enjoy the game as a whole, not only the cutscenes and the time in the ship *shrugs*

Protip: play vanguard, never use a gun, just go wheeeeee BOING KABOOM wheeeee BOING

Curiosity Bioware seems to have a racism issue lingering (google up the media coverage about Manveer Heir, one of its game designers)

Personally I don't care about the people IN the company, just what the company produces. If a bunch of supposed Racists make a very good neutral political view game, I really don't care, and I will buy it if I like it.

I don't care for some of the comments Heir has made, or the attitude, but I'm choosing to believe the team will produce a story for this computer game that isn't about smacking me in the face with metaphorical attacks against aspects of modern-day Western society.

I'd rather be a part-time optimist than a full-time pessimist.

First 13 Minutes gameplay:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p_wFVfDxJQ

No open world? Oh well, if the maps are big enough. In the end, TW3 wasn't purely open world...

I can't watch that video where I am (thanks bad Denver internet!) is open world really not a thing in Andromeda?

Bioware games are very story driven, lots of dialogs and larger plots.
An open world setting would hinder telling the story in that way, as an open world has to keept plausible and accesible, wich can conflict with
changes in the story. (characters get killed, environments change)

And mainly, you have to limit the player from exploring freely, as this could break a logical flow of events in the story.

The new video they released about it better explains what they mean by exploration, looks like a nice balance of both story and a bit of freeroam.

Damocles wrote:Bioware games are very story driven, lots of dialogs and larger plots.
An open world setting would hinder telling the story in that way, as an open world has to keept plausible and accesible, wich can conflict with
changes in the story. (characters get killed, environments change)

And mainly, you have to limit the player from exploring freely, as this could break a logical flow of events in the story.

Because the witcher 3 totally failed at telling a story

Witcher 3 was one guy riding around only like 3 open world areas. All stories where linking from those areas.

Mass Effect was based on many different locations, (planets, ships, stations) and staged missions there. Every location had a specific purpose, narration an
levelflow. They had to be physically deteached from each other. Revisiting those locations would be quite boring.
And mostly the combat is centered on cover-based short distance attacks. Enemies-groups where placed along the levelpath.
In a completely open environment like a forest (where you could approach from any side), that team-coverbased shooter gameplay would not work.

The best they could do in Andromeda is to have a larger planetary surface that can be traversed freely, and then trigger closed missions/levels at specific points.

so now that we agree on that you dont have to exclusively use tube levels to do storytelling

Discrete areas dont change the basics, its just a different kind of door between rooms.

Skyrim has a lot of those and its very open world anyway

And just because ME did it that way until now doesnt mean that they have to do it that way again.
Embed the big main story dungeons into the world like everything else and dont just make every single area single use.
Some areas can be single use, or single time interesting
But not the largest part of the damn world, so much time in level design wasted because its just a run-through area.

And for encounter design and cover gameplay:
Design the encounters that there is cover in all directions that the player could use to get there (y'know, like proper para-/military post design) and/or give the player and NPC's the ability to create and destroy cover objects. (Tech/biotic barriers, environmental changes with grenades or biotic kinetic pulses, blah).

They also already showed "freerange" encounters with that desert outpost which was seemingly in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by mostly flat terrain.
So the encounter design cant be that large of a problem when bioware with decades of game building does it in the fourth installment of a game series

I will probably stay away from this one. Perhaps pick it up on a sale or if it gets good reviews from trusted sources.

Bioware lost it's magic a long time ago and I have seen nothing that shows he it's learned anything from it's previous blunders.

Mass Effect 3 was an over all poor game that only had appeal because of the previous two. It took the whole "illusion of choice" thing to a whole new level, to the point the illusion wasn't an actual illusion. The trend of streamlining and removing choices over all three games shows no real evidence of not continuing.

The last Bioware game I played was Dragon Age 3, and to be fair, I did get enjoyment out of that one. It wasn't without it's major faults though. The heavy handed real life political messages, the cliffhanger ending that needed a DLC to complete and the overly restrictive classes. It did score some points with a semi-open world, character development that could go to various extremes depending on the player, some pretty nice voice acting and of course the fact that they didn't shy away from boobs and butts this time. Like Mass Effect 3 I didn't get more than one play through with this one however. To be fair, it was worlds better than Dragon Age 2...

Anyway, I don't see much appeal to this new Mass Effect. I watched the videos and felt "meh".

What I felt watching videos of ME:A was that the uncanny valley is quite bigger than in TW3. Sometimes they don't know what to do with the eyes of the characters... Even the least important character in TW3 feels more real than the main characters in the ME:A that I watched so far. It was a little odd...

Lum wrote:What I felt watching videos of ME:A was that the uncanny valley is quite bigger than in TW3. Sometimes they don't know what to do with the eyes of the characters... Even the least important character in TW3 feels more real than the main characters in the ME:A that I watched so far. It was a little odd...

I noticed the eye thing too. The whole eye and to a lesser extent body movement reminded me of when motion capture first became a thing, actors tended to over move because they knew everything they did was being recorded. Sort of poor for a triple A game in 2017.