To be fair, Mass Effect tends to draw people who simply ignore the missions for as long as possible in favor of exploration. Maybe the game opens up nicely right after that one mission, but he put it off way longer than most people would.

Still, the designers should've taken those people into account, so your point still kind of stands.

I'm perhaps not far enough into the game to give it a complete recommendation, but I'm about ten hours into the game, a couple of hours beyond Eos, which is the first real mission in the game that really shows you what Mass Effect Andromeda is.

If it takes you 8 hours to get to the first good part of a game, that is some shitty design.

I didn't say that. For me, the game is immediately appealing and good, it's just broken up into a few gameplay segments that introduce the new galaxy and the new Citadel. Eos is the first mission that lays the foundation for what the game is, it's the first place you need to go after you are given the Tempest (the new Normandy). Eos starts at about two hours in--it's just a big explorable world that took me a few hours to complete. You can probably do the thing the story needs you to do within an hour or little more.

Seriously? Horizon has great faces, they're just not animated well. The lip syncing is so bad it feels like I'm watching a dubbed anime. A litte hyperbolic maybe, but honestly not much.

It's better than the hot mess that was Mass Effect 3 by miles.

Well... the ending is, for sure.

I think overall ME3 had better writing especially in the conversations. They just knew your crew so well by the third game that they nailed so many great little scenes and moments. I think Andromeda is a little weaker on that front. Not a ton, but a little.

I will agree that ME3 has better conversations and dialog, but I think that game is pretty disappointing overall. Other than Tali's stuff and the stuff with Legion and the Geth, and I don't really think ME3 did a very good job of making good on it's promises to make your choices relevant. Maybe that's asking too much, but I just don't think it wrapped anything up particularly well. I actually didn't have many problems with the proper ending because the entire game fell short in wrapping up the things I cared about. Add into that that the best parts of the story and game were hidden behind Day One DLC, and it's a pretty disappointing game for me.

And there some stuff I'm not going to talk about now, but I'd be interested to hear what you thought of. Come back once you're finished.

At first I was sort of disappointed by the Remnant stuff. Oh, cool, another mysterious ancient alien thing. But just from the stuff on Eos, I'm totally bought into that mystery.

But yes, I think Andromeda really got that sense of exploration and pioneering and managed to be about more than you being the invincible Shepard who is always right and always the only one who can save the galaxy. Keep playing, the best is yet to come. :)

I'm enjoying that aspect so far. I really enjoy the exploration stuff a lot--it really is fulfilling that promise from the boring rando planets of the first game.

Yeah. I mean, I think Shepard and his crews could wipe the floor with the Ryder's and their crew in combat, but the Ryders are far better explorers and diplomats and just have more enthusiasm and wonder at the world around them.

Some of the reviewers acted as if no other Mass Effect game had bad character animation or the occasional awkward pause in a conversation or two. Andromeda is very much a Mass Effect game with the good and the bad that that entails. But, after like fifteen years they finally made a ground vehicle that is fun to drive and planets that are legitimately big and have things to do. That alone brought back that element of exploration that had been missing or been pushed away by the Reapers.

Andromeda is a fine addition to the series and I hope it has done well enough to support good story DLC and a sequel.

For me, Andromeda has captured a certain not-completely-definable feeling that I haven't gotten since Mass Effect 1.

That actually makes me feel good and gives me a bit of hope. I think Eos was the thing that started to get me there, and I hope the rest of the game continues in that direction.

I'm a little torn right now about that. I think it's partly just nostalgia--the first Mass Effect was so long ago and time tends to erase the flaws. Stepping onto the Citadel felt like taking a giant plunge into a massive universe, and I don't think Andromeda has or will match that. Partly, it's nostalgia, like I said, but partly it's just that Andromeda isn't necessarily trying to. In the first Mass Effect, humanity is joining an already established larger galaxy with a bunch of history that you get to learn about. That's true of Andromeda as well, but that game is much more about being a pioneer in an unknown galaxy, versus learning the ropes of an already established coalition of species. It's . . . I don't know. It's simultaneously not exactly what I wanted and sort of disappointing, but also really enthralling. It's just a matter of tone, I think.

Yeah, it's still class based. You've still got your Engineers and Inflitrators and Soldiers and so on. It's also stilll wave based. Kill specified enemies. Everyone huddle around something to hack it. Go find the devices so someone can hold down a button for several seconds while the others defend him. Extraction. It's all there. We're all still pretty low level with crappy guns but we're slowly starting to tackle Silver missions now... It's still fun! :)

You've acknowledged the hyperbole, but still, it bears calling out that the biggest issues in Horizon's animations is lip-syncing (which received a patch shortly after launch, and will reportedly continue to improve), whereas in ME:A, the animation issues are more prevalent, from lazy, untouched mo-cap to wonky character movements and cringe-inducing algorithm-based facial animations, it really pulls you from the experience. When the attention to animation detail in HZD is good enough that articles have been written to highlight it, I can live with the occasional lip-syncing issues.

First of all, I don't find that gif impressive at all. The fact that they thought about that shows an attention to detail, but it damn sure doesn't look natural to me. It looks goofy. I'm more talking about facial animations, though. There are a few instances in Horizon where the facial animations are outstanding, but I'd say they're few and far between. They're mostly good, but not amazing, and occasionally downright awful.

I haven't seen any of the real goofy shit that's showing up in gifs, so, despite what the internet would have you believe, it's not like people are crab-walking everywhere.

I mean, I can live with a few bugs, and the occasional enemy standing ten feet above the floor, but the countless little things that show a lack of polish really do cause you to feel like you're playing an unfinished game, and that's before you really run into any big issues.

But why not just wait until they fix a number of the issues and it drops in price?

I haven't actually seen any terrible glitches or bugs that have pulled me out of the experience. I'm not saying they're not there, and I can't pretend like I'm even very far into the game, so I maybe it'll happen.

In any case, I'm not trying to tell people to go buy it right this instance. I'm more just telling folks not to forget about it. I very nearly wrote the game off entirely, and probably would have skip it altogether if Raga hadn't been talking about it. His posts literally convinced me to give a shot. I just don't think it's as bad ass the internet is making it out to be, and it's well worth playing, whether now or in a year.

Like I said, it's a downgrade to previous ME games, and while I mostly understand the story reasons for cutting a majority of the species from the game, it kills a lot of the love that I have for the series, and it contributes to the sense that it was made by a far-less talented team than the one that handled ME3.

I don't disagree with that at all, and it's my main issue. The game feels emptier than a Mass Effect game should. The best I can say is that it makes sense within the story, and what the game is doing grew on me enough that it doesn't bother me as much.

It's better than the hot mess that was Mass Effect 3 by miles.

People whining about ME3's ending aside, it was a pretty outstanding and polished game out of the gate. The gameplay was on-point, characters were likeable, the stories and side missions were great, and the closure to almost all of the characters was a fitting culmination of what you'd done before (pretty much all of these points in Andromeda have received criticism in one review or another).

I'd strongly disagree with that. Technically, it's a fine game, but I'd argue that ME3 feels just as rushed as ME:A does pretty much all the way through, despite being technically more competent. I don't think ME3 wraps up any storylines particularly well (aside from Tali and the Geth stuff, which I liked). I'd love to point to specifics, but I actually can't remember just about anything that happens in that game, which I think speaks volumes, as I can still recall just about every ME2 loyalty mission. I can recall being incredibly disappointed with ME3 as a package, an especially disappointed in the story (regardless of the ending).