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[semiconscious]

Facial animations being worse than it's 10 year old predecessor isn't really a witch hunt or opportunism or cherry picking or one-up-manship or any of that though.

first post. just spent my first several hours with this, & i feel much of the negativity is quite justified: in both look & feel, this game, the 4th in an established, quality series, is, very surprisingly, pure retro euro-jank. i'm still in, but i've never taken really taken the series seriously, & can understand the disappointment of those who have done. if this was one of my favorite series, say, persona, or ratchet & clank, i'd be pretty disappointed, as well...

 

[Zemm]

It's really easy to get caught up in the storm of negativity regardless if the game deserves it or not.

Personally I got caught up in the ME:A one because I only really get my gaming news from this forum so when there are 5 threads all discussing how awful the game is and stuff you can fall into that mindset quickly. I'm watching my girlfriend play it and she's loving the game and it really struck home to me that getting caught in that extreme negativity loop (because that's what it was, it wasn't really constructive criticism) isn't something I want to do again, even if the gifs are funny. If that means visiting the forum less on big release weeks then maybe that's the best way of going about it.

 

[Brhoom]

A AAA game lives on its marketing and it's graphics. This one fucked up the graphics.

This.

 

[Strakt]

This.

He should of reworded that to "game looks graphically bad on consoles"

 

[Soul of the Beast]

It's not like people want the game to flop....
If anything, most people are actually quite excited.
The same thing literally happened to No May's Sky. What's their point?

 

[stuminus3]

Oh precious little snowflake.

And you wonder why people are writing articles about hive mentalities. :jnc

 

[firelogic]

The Order deserved it's bullshit though the developers literally said they choose 30fps and were actually considering 23fps because it was more "cinematic". Sadly for them 23fps was too much of sacrifice in input response but it's no wonder the game ended up the way it did and got ripped on the way it was.

So they deserved all the bullshit because they made their game 30fps and at one point in time considered 23fps and decided against it? Man, Naughty Dog should be put on blast for making Uncharted 4 30fps. Why did they get a free pass?

So it needs to be darker and have rain?

*referring to Drewtons post.

The one on the left looks like a finished product. The one on the right looks like the characters are standing in front of a green screen in a fully lit studio.

 

[Scientist Supreme!]

It's really easy to get caught up in the storm of negativity regardless if the game deserves it or not.

Personally I got caught up in the ME:A one because I only really get my gaming news from this forum so when there are 5 threads all discussing how awful the game is and stuff you can fall into that mindset quickly. I'm watching my girlfriend play it and she's loving the game and it really struck home to me that getting caught in that extreme negativity loop (because that's what it was, it wasn't really constructive criticism) isn't something I want to do again, even if the gifs are funny. If that means visiting the forum less on big release weeks then maybe that's the best way of going about it.

I'm right there with you. No only is it a waste of time but just generally unhealthy.

 

[Tomeru]

And... not true, you're the reason this article exists

He is, in fact, correct. Go back and play the previous games, heck even DA. It was never the best parts of the game, but the facial animations were never this low quality. It's like watching bad actors act. If you take no issue with it, it doesn't make it false, it just means you don't care for it as much as some do.

It's really easy to get caught up in the storm of negativity regardless if the game deserves it or not.

Personally I got caught up in the ME:A one because I only really get my gaming news from this forum so when there are 5 threads all discussing how awful the game is and stuff you can fall into that mindset quickly. I'm watching my girlfriend play it and she's loving the game and it really struck home to me that getting caught in that extreme negativity loop (because that's what it was, it wasn't really constructive criticism) isn't something I want to do again, even if the gifs are funny. If that means visiting the forum less on big release weeks then maybe that's the best way of going about it.

What kind of constructive criticism can make a different for a game that is already out? In the department that is being criticized, there is nothing that can be done now. It's like asking for constructive criticism on a movie that is already out.

 

[danm999]

I'm just disappointed and maybe Klepek is right that I need to admit to myself the storytelling and atmosphere in the original trilogy was just a fluke.

Dumb animation problems are honestly one thing but if the game nailed engrossing storytelling, characters and exploration I'd be so much more willing to give other things a pass.

As it is this game looks like a shade of cooler ideas from more talented people.

 

[Nostremitus]

He is, in fact, correct. Go back and play the previous games, heck even DA. It was never the best parts of the game, but the facial animations were never this low quality. It's like watching bad actors act. If you take no issue with it, it doesn't make it false, it just means you don't care for it as much as some do.

With the number of people on here who preferred male Shep, they should be used to bad acting.

 

[Maintenance]

Contrary to the game press bubble, a lot of people REALLY HATED DA:I. So it is the game after the stinker that is suffering from the backlash. Ask Ubi how this works.

Yep, you reap what you sow.

 

[Tomeru]

With the number of people on here who preferred male Shep, they should be used to bad acting.

I get what you're saying, I really do (femshep is best shep), but that doesn't mean that it's something to just accept and be done with it. People mind.

 

[Deleted member 752119]

I don't understand why you're spending so much time saying this stuff when you could be busy having fun in the new Mass Effect game.

To be fair, that's a big problem with GAF.

Many people do just play and enjoy games and don't post as often as the miserable, negative people that spend more time bitching about games (that they often aren't even playing) rather than playing them.

So it's nice for some enjoying things to state that in such threads so this place isn't an even more miserable echo chamber of negativity than it already is.

 

[Ploid 3.0]

i dont think it looks like ass. at least on ultra on pc it looks very good, specially the aliens. animations are wonky, dialogue is bad too, but you know...its not as bad as everyone says it is. bought it when i said i was not going to even touch it.

Yeah I was just about to comment on how good it looks. Currently watching a stream, and being able to see the outside of your ship on a planet you landed on looks pretty jay dropping. The open world exploring looks great too. PC though, which is the version I would get. I'll get it when it's the deluxe edition for $20 as usual with ME games, thankfully their dlc isn't the bioware point stuff anymore.

 

[Davide]

A AAA game lives on its marketing and it's graphics. This one fucked up the graphics.

And the marketing was pretty meh too.

 

[george_us]

Andromeda's biggest problem is that it's releasing at a time where we finally don't have to put up with that level of jank anymore in open world games. Had it released at the tail end of last generation or towards the beginning of this one, it'd probably be scoring 8s and 9s left and right. I'm enjoying the 6 or so hours I've put into it so far but I can also see that a lot of the flaws in Andromeda won't be tolerated any longer.

 

[Hatty]

My problem with Andromeda is that they went through the trouble of bringing us to a brand new galaxy but there are only two new races in the game.

 

[MetroidPrimeRib]

The GGer witch hunting is disgusting but that shouldn't override actual criticism of the game.

I feel like the animation messup - while funny - is overshadowing other, actual larger issues with the game as a whole. Kind of like AC Unity.

Bioware also has to deal with the increasing number of games like Torment and Pillars, let alone Witcher 3, after having games like Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3 which have slowly eroded good will, even from fans.

 

[Harmen]

The more gifs of crappy glitches and weird facial animations I see, the better. It is hilarious and there seems to be a lot of it (I have watched some footage of random players and I noticed a lot of weird shit in all of them).

And that has nothing to do with me wanting the game to fail. I enjoy Telltale, Ubisoft (AC), and Bethesda games a lot, but I'll shit on those titles any day and they get a lot of deserved shit as well.

 

[Psoelberg]

.... well.... we could have had a pretty interesting about snowballing effects on the social medias, the role that we as forum users take on a platform such as Neogaf, about how Neogaf is becoming a growing part of the problem by turning into an echo chamber... but instead of constructive and valuable discussion about this forum (which definitely is part of the problem), we have a bunch of users who clearly haven't read the article... great.

 

[AlexFlame116]

EDIT: You know what never mind.

 

[GinoFelino]

Bullshit.

Played the game before the GIF nonsense started and was still immensely disappointed.

The game just won't be universally loved and there's plenty of valid reasons for that.

 

[Tsukumo]

Loving the game and I'm sad to see people are piling on it, but Bioware deserves it for bullshitting people with five years of teasers made of concept art and a multiplayer campaign which got pulled a week from the release on EA Access.
Possibly the worst marketing campaign of this decade, tied with the Order.

 

[TheEndOfItAll]

There seem to be a series of AAA games that are failing to live up to expectations. It would be one thing all of these games were failing, but it's the comparison to those that blow away the industry to leave the criticism as wholly warranted. Especially when you compare the companies producing them and see that devs like CDPR, Guerilla Games, and Atlus are hardly considered AAA studios, and yet are producing results that rival and even surpass that of big names like Ubisoft, Bioware, and Square Enix. Instead of pointing to the groupthink, which is its own separate issue, and can both rocket a game higher or lower, the games industry should be examining why these games fell apart.

 

[shawnbuddy]

Never trust the pile on. It sort of grows and grows until it becomes its own game and everything gets exaggerated. It happened to Dragon Age: Inquisition, too. You'd think that's perfectly fine game was absolute dogshit.

 

[TheChaos]

As like other folks said, Mass Effect prides itself on its story and characters and when the writing and facial animations are poor, people are going to notice big time.

In retrospect, Inquisition got way more hate than it should. The quests were not the greatest but the writing was solid and the graphics and gameplay were pretty jank-free.

Destiny 2 and Red Dead Redemption 2 are not out yet

LOL, RDR2 ain't coming out this year.

 

[Unaha-Closp]

Everyone is a lot of people. 7 Billion is a rather large number. Hyperbole in Headlines?? Never!

 

[Cornbread78]

In and of itself, no it's not.

But, at least in my experience, the animations are rarely as bad as the moments the internet has chosen to highlight. Which in turn creates the perception that some are scouring for moments to pick at, which is dumb.

Welcome to the internet mentality of this century. It's all shit unless it's perfect, lol.


Everyone loves their pitchforks and torches though.

 

[Team Filler]

The dogpiling and misogyny aren't okay (like, at all, fucking please stop with this shit you cunts), but I feel like this sort of furor and scrutiny is going to continue for any middling/mediocre-to-bad release from the big pubs as long as these games are pushed out too soon at "AAA prices" and riddled with microtransactions. Good/great games and "modestly-budgeted" titles are more easily forgiven for missteps, but even the very best aren't immune to this manner of backlash (thinking of BOTW and some of the vitriol surrounding it's expansion pass and amiibo functionality).

And then to add to that general mentality, you've also got fans specifically coming into this sequel with concerns of quality due to the previous entry's reception.

 

[Deadstar]

Mass Effect 3 happened.

Seriously this isn't very complicated, as to why people don't have very much patience for this brand.

Mass Effect 3 wasn't a bad game. It just had a bad ending. My main issue with ME3 is that the entire game seemed much smaller than the world in 1 or 2. The Citadel was more closed off and the game was more of a corridor shooter. Everything just seemed far more narrow in scope than the previous two games. I don't care about the end, it's 1% of the actual time I spent in the game. What makes a game good is the journey to the end.

 

[Akronis]

I dont really mind, playing the game upscaled to 4k or even 1440p on PC looks absolutely stunning on the different planets and its opitmized insanely well. I guess textures/lightings like those would matter for console players though.

Yea I just played a match in MP and I'm blown away how good it looks.

 

[tuxfool]

They're not wrong tbh. People are being vitriolic about a middling game

In this case it is slightly different in that it has precedents, and has built-in expectations.

It is also a deviation from a pattern.

 

[jayu26]

Remember when many thought that that one gif showing bad animation in one side quest in Horizon represented the whole game? Then the actual game shut everyone. Point is, if Mass Effect had quality, it would have weathered the strom.

 

[Riposte]

This game's deeply troubled development ripped this game to shreds.

The hand-wringing over negative feedback reaching meme status tends to be unpalatable, even if it sometimes has a point. I personally have a strong distaste for bandwagon movements, but I think the whole "entitled gamers" angle leaves a larger mark. At least the writing was on the wall for this game since almost the time it was announced and its PR flopped a whole month before its release, so this situation has taken a less serious, mocking tone than a resentful one, like ME3.

 

[Joey Ravn]

It is a deja vu from No Man's Sky...

I feel it's exactly the other way around. NMS was promoted as the end-all be-all of space games. The game to end all games. I've barely seen anything regarding ME:A since it was announced. If anything, it seems EA has been trying to bury it as much as it could until the very last moment.

 

[tuxfool]

I'm just disappointed and maybe Klepek is right that I need to admit to myself the storytelling and atmosphere in the original trilogy was just a fluke.

Dumb animation problems are honestly one thing but if the game nailed engrossing storytelling, characters and exploration I'd be so much more willing to give other things a pass.

As it is this game looks like a shade of cooler ideas from more talented people.

Yup. As memetastic and awful looking the faces are, one could overlook these aspects if other aspects were better. Unfortunately everything they did in regards to characterization, lore and story is utterly rote and poorly executed.

 

[Fahzgoolin]

In and of itself, no it's not.

But, at least in my experience, the animations are rarely as bad as the moments the internet has chosen to highlight. Which in turn creates the perception that some are scouring for moments to pick at, which is dumb.

While that is true, it's still inconsistent and a technical mess.

Even if the animations were incredible, the writing is consistently mediocre imo.

 

[Spyder_Monkey]

The problem is that Mass Effect looks like your standard open western RPG. I does nothing new in its genre and continues to rest on its laurels in addition to doing nothing to get potential newcomers interested to the game looking like it's been rushed out to meet the end of EA's fiscal year.

 

[Grisby]

Interesting to finally read his article after listening to the podcast earlier today.

There's a lot of factors when it comes to Andromeda. I agree with Patrick in the line of thought that some of these reactions could be ranging from latent me3 feelings to people's adverse opinion's of EA.

But the pure and underlying bottom line is that the animations aren't that great and since this is a massive Rpg people have got a lot of examples to choose from. Doesn't help that Horizon, another big AAA game from a AAA studio just came out a few weeks ago and with far more expressive characters.

It's a shame, since the few hours I've played of Andromeda haven't been all that bad really.

 

[lumzi23]

Yes, *all* reviews are wrong. The game is being unfairly criticized. lol

To be fair, not *all* the reviews are negative (though I suppose that never really the case). Okay, I am being silly. A few good reviews do not outweigh the bad ones.

Tbh, I haven't gotten far in the game yet but I do perceive some of the criticisms as being justified thus far though I'll admit, I want the game to be good. Since Kotor there is only one game I have genuinely disliked (Jade Empire). I loved both Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age Inquisition. I disliked DA2 but didn't get far enough to give it a fair impression. DAO was decent but too old school CRPG for my personal taste.

 

[ryseing]

He should of reworded that to "game looks graphically bad on consoles"

Where do you think the majority of players will be? Just because the game looks good on your PC doesn't excuse the poor performance on the consoles.

 

[MTC100]

Most of the reviews are good.

If you consider a 6 or 7 good in the days of the 9s for games that are just okay, yes. then most of the reviews are pretty good I guess.

There's a reason why metacritic marks everything below a 7.5 as yellow and a "mixed" review. I truly want to believe Mass Effect Andromeda is a good game but the scores don't reflect it, the game fails horribly to live up to its expectations, to live up to its predecessors.

It didn't help that Mass Effect launched after two major OW-Hits, most likely ME:A would have scored way better if it was released in February.

 

[SolVanderlyn]

Undeserved; the game seems great. The jank and animation problems are undeniable though.

Then again I also greatly enjoyed ME3.

 

[Hello? This is Hailun!]

"Don't celebrate a game for being bad"

I mean, it's that or let it die and never talk about it. Also, liking something because of how bad it is is basically its own cottage industry. John Waters is awesome because of how outlandishly "bad" his movies are.

 

[Strakt]

Where do you think the majority of players will be? Just because the game looks good on your PC doesn't excuse the poor performance on the consoles.

Never said it should be excused. I was simply correcting his statement of "the game looks like shit graphically in general"

 

[The Hermit]

It is a deja vu from No Man's Sky...

Hardly, people were very anxious and had great expectations from it.

The radio silence from the devs, inumerous bugs, and lack of features did all the backfire. You can argue it was dogpilled later, but they are not to blame

 

[RAIDEN1]

How come the PS4 version was coming in at 75, and the Xbox-1 version at 77? Even though reports said between the 2 the xbox-1 version was inferior?

 

[Nikana]

Andromeda to me is like when I order a pizza from my favorite pizza joint, I'm expecting it be great, but suddenly it ends up tasting just ok. I'll still eat the pizza, but I expected a lot more.

 

[disappeared]

Streisand Mass Effect: Andromeda