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Mass Effect: Andromeda releases Patch 1.05 Thursday, details more changes for future
- Thread starter Garrett Hawke
- Start date
Cyber Caesar
Member
The update looks good. EA should support this game and franchise longer because of the potential it still has. This franchise was on par to surpass Star Wars. I just hope they can turn it around before the fans sour on it.
Need a comparison pronto. That was the scene where my wife just lost it.
CarbonFire
Member
Looks like they didn't actually "fix" it, they just changed the angle of that shot and the new eye shaders make the eyes look less horrifyingly dead.
Doctoglethorpe
Member
Wat. No.
semiconscious
Member
i'm not saying time, in and of itself, isn't a factor. but to say that, in this (or any!) instance, talent is irrelevant, or insinuate, with no evidence whatsoever, that, no matter how talented the montreal studio was, ea's demands were still unreasonable, is, unless you are willing to substantiate this, bullshit. & making blanket assumptions, or seeing all instances of a particular situation as identical, is bullshit, as well...
Saucycarpdog
Member
Thank god. That was one of the times where it becomes impossible to ignore the bad facial animations. It ruins what's supposed to be a romantic scene by making Scott look constipated.
So is jumping to conclusions that "it's bad so they MUST suck" despite EA's demonstrable record of rushing their developers, EA's timing to meet their financial quarterly, employee testimonials defending and explaining their workflow, and this very team's superior work on prior titles being accessible to anyone with eyes and ears.
There is far more circumstantial evidence in favor of time constraints rather than incompetence.
RedAssedApe
Banned
asian probably didn't need to be in there. i just thought the created creator looked good in that particular scene. just thought create a creators all looked pretty bad from the examples i've seen of people posting videos. no personal experience with it myself so i stand corrected. i'll be happy though if i end up wanting to create an avatar that more closely represents myself
GavinUK86
Member
maybe she just learned how to apply her makeup better.
i'm actually pretty impressed that you were able to make a decent looking asian ryder. did the patch make your particular character look better?
not my ryder, it's from a video. i do have a male asian ryder though and he does look a bit better. like every other model, the eye shader makes a ton of difference.
this is my ryder:
thepenguin55
Member
The story definitely seems to be very divisive. Personally, I'm liking it better than ME3's story so far.
prag16
Banned
I haven't tried it, but apparently the setting for it changes FOV in both holstered and combat mode. This possibly makes it too wide in holstered mode if you increase it for combat.
LightofRohan
Member
Oh man, this change has helped so much. I don't cringe when I see my Ryder talk anymore. Really helps me be more immersed and just listening to the dialogue without these bright ass Buzz Lightyear eyes staring back at me.
This game is fucking great though, the deeper I get into it the more I'm confused why it got so panned. They really sell the idea of being a pathfinder and getting everyones shit together, fixing up the planets.
This game is fucking great though, the deeper I get into it the more I'm confused why it got so panned. They really sell the idea of being a pathfinder and getting everyones shit together, fixing up the planets.
Slackbladder
Member
Is it just me or are the noses of Asari just too big? I know they virtually all look the same but something is definitely off with their faces and I'm sure it's the nose. Compared too Mass Effect 1-3 Asari's they look generally a bit weird. Maybe there won't be a fix for this if it's just my imagination.
prag16
Banned
Nah, the face just doesn't have that hollywood nosejob supermodel nose (neither does the default Ryder).
The bigger issue as you mentioned is that every face (aside from Peebee) is exactly the same other than mild reskins.
semiconscious
Member
i've never claimed one explanation was more likely than another. & i've also never seen any 'circumstantial evidence' (& i don't mean employees defending themselves) to back one explanation more than another, & would enjoy seeing any you can produce
...& i never said 'so bad they must suck'. what i did say was 'so apparently straight-forward to fix, that it does raise some questions'...
Sterling's_Gold
Member
Yeah, this is the main problem. Replaying the trilogy currently and there are obviously repeating faces (like any rpg) but there is still enough of a variety to not be distracting, especially with different skin tones/facepaints used.
And I'm pretty sure these faces are only from ME1-2.
I guess you could dismiss the employee testimonials. And, you know, EA's documented history of rushing incomplete games to market to boost their quarterly reports (DA2 immediately springs to mind), or the fact this same development team developed content with superior textures, animations, and performance on the game's predecessors, or my own testimony on how I as an animator do my work (along with everyone I work with).i've never claimed one explanation was more likely than another. & i've also never seen any 'circumstantial evidence' (& i don't mean employees defending themselves) to back one explanation more than another, & would enjoy seeing any you can produce
& i never said 'so bad they must suck'. what i did say was 'so apparently straight-forward to fix, that it does raise some questions'...
I mean, I guess if you do exclude recorded history, employee and animator analysis, established business practices, and prior track record, then sure. It's equally valid. I guess.
The biggest issue also is that we have 5+ years of development and far more capable hardware. So you wouldn't expect them repeating the same mistakes of the past. Imagine if Uncharted 4 barely looked better than Uncharted 2 or worse in some areas. These things are also so elementary level, was there no one there like oh shit the Asari are identical this is messed up. Or oh damn, these characters look like shit in the cinematics and dialogues.
jowell24
Member
I've been playing post patch for a couple of hours now and I realise how much the change in look of the eyes affects the game.
At some point I just started looking at the subtitles instead of watching character's faces as it irked me how they used to stare. The new expressiveness of the characters (it's not a huge step but it's something) let's me enjoy the interactions and conversations more now instead of just pressing the skip button on dialogue.
Essentially I can already feel myself enjoying the game more. It genuinely makes a bigger difference than expected.
At some point I just started looking at the subtitles instead of watching character's faces as it irked me how they used to stare. The new expressiveness of the characters (it's not a huge step but it's something) let's me enjoy the interactions and conversations more now instead of just pressing the skip button on dialogue.
Essentially I can already feel myself enjoying the game more. It genuinely makes a bigger difference than expected.
The rumour going around is that the management people put more emphasis on ships and armour than on characters and outsourced most of the character art to a different EA studio, rather than letting their in-house artists work on it.
That rumor is stupid. Outsourcing human character doesn't mean they put less emphasis on them. Outsourcing is standard practice in the industry for pretty much everything these days.
The lack of assets variety is puzzling but as little to do with the fact that they were not done in house
semiconscious
Member
there's nothing you've mentioned here that, imo, even circumstantially indicates that this was an instance of ea making unreasonable demands, time-wise, as opposed to bioware simply mismanaging & under-delivering on a project. i mean, isn't it also true that ea has also brought finished games to market? & are you seriously implying that competence at one point in time somehow endows a development team with some sort of infallibility? or that if a finished product can't be brought to market in a timely fashion, that is always, by its very nature, the fault of the publisher? period?...
if you're more comfortable defaulting to the 'evil corporation' narrative (&, as an animator yourself, i can understand why that might be), that's your choice. but there's nothing of genuine substance to say that, definitively, this is the correct explanation in this instance. to do that, we 'd need much more substantial information than we're likely to ever get
...
OmegaDL50
Member
there's nothing you've mentioned here that, imo, even circumstantially indicates that this was an instance of ea making unreasonable demands, time-wise, as opposed to bioware simply mismanaging & under-delivering on a project. i mean, isn't it also true that ea has also brought finished games to market? & are you seriously implying that competence at one point in time somehow endows a development team with some sort of infallibility? or that if a finished product can't be brought to market in a timely fashion, that is always, by its very nature, the fault of the publisher? period?...
if you're more comfortable defaulting to the 'evil corporation' narrative (&, as an animator yourself, i can understand why that might be), that's your choice. but there's nothing of genuine substance to say that, definitively, this is the correct explanation in this instance. to do that, we 'd need much more substantial information than we're likely to ever get
Consider the following.
1) Mass Effect Andromeda was released March 23rd.
2) The first fiscal quarter reports are made at the end of March.
3) Said patch in this topic was released a mere two weeks after the game.
4) The sorts of changes in the patch are the sorts of fixes that take a considerable amount of time. Not two weeks time.
It's not hard to deduce the QA was not finished for the game, and it was pushed out the door to fall within the Q1 fiscal reporting deadline.
Optimization is one of the very last things done in a development cycle. Also optimizations and fixes aren't something you rush because an implemented fix needs to be thoroughly tested to ascertain when it's included in the main code base it does not break something else in the process.
We can argue this this back and forth all day, but it's evident the dramatic fixes the patches done and the short time frame they were released makes a point that QA on the game was not finished, and by Bioware Montreal's admission is still not finished since apparently there is even more things they want to address over the next two months.
Mass Effect Andromeda should have been a Q2 release and not Q1.
your ryderlooks really nice, yopu got a pic of the preset/ sliders you used?
Sure but outsourcing and putting less emphasis on something, while not at all analogous, can still go hand-in-hand which, I believe, is what the rumour was implying. But it is just a rumour and I'm not certain where it originated.
RedAssedApe
Banned
i want to see more examples of people's updated custom characters
Ivory Samoan
Gold Member
I agree with everything in this post: +1
Are we seriously also going to ignore they got 5+ years to make the game? I mean eventually EA had to come down hard. 5 freaking years for a development time is ridiculous these days. If MS can cancel Scalebound due to delays and issues, I wonder how close EA was to canning the project especially when Casey left and then Austin and Edmonton had to be brought on to help.
I'm on the Bioware-fault camp.
Having said that, the game is feature complete. In fact too feature-rich (ignoring polish for a minute) including unnecessary planetary transitions, crafting, over-explicit sexy scenes, sidequest overload and mobile app. So the 5 years was definitely productive, just not in the areas we would like.
HP_Wuvcraft
Banned
You leave Mrs. Cora Ryder out of this...
As a salty Vetra-shipper, NEVER.
AgentOtaku
Member
SolicitorPirate
Member
I am weirdly upset that Addison is no longer a grotesque facsimile of a human being
prag16
Banned
As long as they never remove the "face is tired" line I'm good.
Heckler456
Banned
Who says it had 5 years of full-on development time?
How did the dead eyes even make it to initial release? Alot of things can be forgiven or over looked. Eyes are the connective feature between people. Our brains probably flag something is wrong and an unsettling feeling is produced - there is artificial and then there is truly unnatural.
The eyes were all wrong at release.
The eyes were all wrong at release.
The lack of AO and self-shadowing on the eyes was the first thing I pointed out in the old "downgrade" thread. I have no idea why they turned that off in the release build, but it was present in a few of the older, pre-release trailers.
What a bizarre release.
Some Nobody
Junior Member
This is absolutely true, but...if it was really a matter of "This game is mostly ready, but we need two months for QA fixes" and EA was like "Nah fuck that, we need it out before the fiscal year's up." then that's on EA AND Bioware. Bioware should've had it done, but shipping a complete game that hasn't had proper QA? Fuck outta here EA, you know better.
Nobody, but that's not what people want to believe :/
They did not start working on Andromeda the day after ME3 was released, this is ridiculous. There was an entire year of DLC, for starters.
Didn't the devs themselves say they were working on it for 5 years?
LurkingFear
Member
BrassDragon
Member
They announced full-on development in Q4 2012 on their blog. Before that, Casey Hudson made some references to early design on social media.
So four years and some odd months, not including creative strategy and vision meetings.