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Mass Effect: Andromeda New Gameplay Trailer from Nvidia conference

I'll say I don't think the footage itself looks bad. This marketing campaign though has been among the worst for any major AAA game I've ever seen
 

Ivory Samoan

Gold Member
Came to post this.

I think the gameplay looks fine. But for me, Mass Effect lives and dies by its characters and story/lore.

Yeah this is true, but would you really want much story spoiled before release? I'm guessing a lot of ME fans would not.

Lore on the other hand, that's getting dolled out as needed in the AI Initiative vids, they're doing the 'close to release' blitzkrieg by the looks: so let's wait before we spill out worry about the story since they aren't showing any or much (which I, for one, prefer).
 

Jarmel

Banned
I feel like this game is a pump and dump by EA. It's literally less than three months till release and we haven't seen shit nor has Bioware explained shit. It comes across as though either Bioware or EA has no faith in the game.
 
I'm not really getting the poor animation quality. Other than the melee attack, it seemed quite similar to how I remember ME3. I'll grant you BioWare haven't done a good job selling the story, but I feel like negativity about specific features is bleeding into everything else. That isn't to say no one should feel that way (by all means, do so if it prevents you from pre-ordering). It just seems like everyone's opinion is unnecessarily divisive.
ME3 was 5 years ago and its animations were mocked on release so
I'm only buying this for multiplayer but the gameplay looks so lame I might just skip it.
Does it even have multiplayer? We're less than 3 months away from release and haven't seen jack shit of it, can't even use the spoiler defense there. I really hope for its own sake it's delayed.
 
Looks like soldier cant slow time any more even in single player if that menu is the only place for the class skill to be shown

That sucks. I play vanguard mostly anyway but it would have been fun to mix it up.
 
I feel like this game is a pump and dump by EA. It's literally less than three months till release and we haven't seen shit nor has Bioware explained shit. It comes across as though either Bioware or EA has no faith in the game.

Colin from Kinda Funny hinted the game may have had some major development issues at some point
 

alt27

Member
Thought it looked great. Cant wait for this. Dont think cover based games are really that good anymore so love the new combat style
 

PBalfredo

Member
And how does this rectify anything? Those same people will just do Soldier for the entire playthrough anyway.

More players will be exposed to different play styles than your typical TPS run-n-gun. In previous games, a player who chooses Soldier at the time of character creation will never have the ability to try biotics. Here a player who started as a soldier, but unlocks biotic or tech abilities will be able to switch classes and try them out. Maybe some will just stick with soldier, and that's fine, but some will and maybe the poor Engineer class can finally get some love.

It also allows the game designers to make more interesting use of the abilities without having to worry that extending the capabilities of some skills will put certain players in a disadvantage in some situations due to them being locked in to a class for the game. Like if they wanted to make a secret area that the players can access by using Biotic Charge against an enemy across a gap, they could do that here since any player can change into any class. In previous games that would be something only a Vanguard would ever be able to access.
 

Skux

Member
The problem is that Mass Effect isn't just a third person cover shooter. The thing that makes Mass Effect special are the characters and the relationships you can forge with them. This is something they have completely failed to show is even a thing in Andromeda.

To be fair, that isn't something you can show in a two minute clip, and something that previous DA and ME publicity has never really featured for that reason.
 
Yikes. As everyone else has been saying, this game's marketing has been atrocious. Either they're choosing the absolute worst parts of the game to show off, or the game really is that unremarkable.

Hopefully it's not the latter.
 
Some of the decisions that have come out of EA in the last few months make me think that some people in the company are intentionally sabotaging things.
 

TheChaos

Member
To be fair, that isn't something you can show in a two minute clip, and something that previous DA and ME publicity has avoided.

DAI showed blurbs of all the characters in the months prior to release and there were TWELVE of them. Why is Bioware being so secretive?
 

Agent_4Seven

Tears of Nintendo
I think that the camera is way too close to the main character and the field of view is 60 at best. I really hope that there will be options in game to fix this.

Also, I really do think that they need to go with mobilty and agressivness in combat a little bit further to something like.... 007 Blood Stone or Quantum Break.

It's just... when you shooting things and burning them up, it feels way to limited in terms of combat, movement, melee abilities and so on which is really sucks. I wan't to be able to punch people in the fase or take them out with a cool melee finishing move or something like that, cuz shooting alone is really not that compelling along with biotic abilities which you can use when you close to an enemy.

Say what you will about 007 Blood Stone, but the combat in this game was great, agressive, dynamic and very satisfying, not Jason Bourne great, but close to it. And I know, ME is not about martial arts, but I'm sure they can do something about it and I refuse to believe that N7 operatives haven't been trained to use CQC.

I don't know, that's just how I feel.

P.S. Skill trees, omg, they really went crazy with them this time around. Good. GOOD, BioWare!
 

Renekton

Member
Not true. ME1 was about building relationships with characters as well. The genophage confrontation with Wrex, learning about the quarians from Tali, influencing the views Garrus has about law and justice, etc. Does ME1 place more importance on exploration? Abso-fucking-lutely, but those character relationships are there in ME1.
The ME1 characters are made first and foremost to service the world-building. Wrex to the Genophage history and disintegration of Krogan society, Tali to the Quarian nomadic status after the disastrous Geth conflict, Liara (inter-marriage) and Garrus (bureaucratic structure) to respective cultures. That is a far cry from ME2.

World-building is #1 in ME1, Andromeda is leaning towards that.

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=28874

The point is, these aren’t just personal stories; they also double as foundational elements of worldbuilding. They add detail to the world of Mass Effect 1. In contrast, Jacob’s story is just a story about Jacob, and it blows a vital opportunity to give us a viewpoint where it might seem reasonable to work for Cerberus.
 

bigDave

Member
More players will be exposed to different play styles than your typical TPS run-n-gun. In previous games, a player who chooses Soldier at the time of character creation will never have the ability to try biotics. Here a player who started as a soldier, but unlocks biotic or tech abilities will be able to switch classes and try them out. Maybe some will just stick with soldier, and that's fine, but some will and maybe the poor Engineer class can finally get some love.

It also allows the game designers to make more interesting use of the abilities without having to worry that extending the capabilities of some skills will put certain players in a disadvantage in some situations due to them being locked in to a class for the game.

no, selecting classes at will simply kills replayability

edit: and for the last sentence, i prefer a game where you can choose a specific class,with pro and con, instead of being an immortal warrior that devast everything because you can select every skill
 

kennyamr

Member
That didn't look good to me for some reason.

Every time I see a new trailer it de-hypes me...

I really hope it's a good game, ME2 is one of my top 5 ever, but man I'm not feeling it for this one.

We will see I guess.
 

EatChildren

Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
Does it even have multiplayer? We're less than 3 months away from release and haven't seen jack shit of it, can't even use the spoiler defense there. I really hope for its own sake it's delayed.

It has a multiplayer that uses the same hoard mode and fixed class characters as Mass Effect 3. Any other changes to the multiplayer have yet to be detailed.

It's just... when you shooting things and burning them up, it feels way to limited in terms of combat, movement, melee abilities and so one which is really sucks. I wan't to be able to punch people in the fase or take them out with a cool melee finishing move or something like that, cuz shooting alone is really not that compelling along with biotic abilities which you can use when you close to an enemy.

Biotic abilities include ranged and dash-like attacks along with shields. As do tech. And the gameplay trailer showed both sword and warhammer melee attacks.

I'm surprised people are kinda flaky on the combat. It looks exceedingly similar to Mass Effect 3 with added mobility. And Mass Effect 3's combat was fucking great, particularly in the multiplayer, where certain additions (aforementioned sword and warhammer) in Andromeda are clearly pulled directly from.
 
That's what I was thinking

Before playing the clip, Aaryn literally said that it was gameplay, and the Nvidia CEO said that it was directly captured gameplay.

Also, I can not possibly be the only person in the entire world who has even a modicum of patience. Like, I get it, we're all used to endless bombardment of marketing, and multiple E3's worth of information with other games, but god damn guys, we still have a couple of months where we're probably going to get a decent amount of information at the very least. DA:I had livestreams, they've got the whole Andromeda Initiative going. Just. Wait.
 

Patchy

Banned
+ In-engine footage 3 months from release
+ That animation is still very, very poor
+ Numerous frame-rate issues are evident, and it was running on a GTX 1080

I am looking forward to this game, but I am getting seriously concerned. The game has had a very troubled development from all reports.

Every other game 3 months from release would have had a lengthy gameplay demo by now. We've had a couple of 4 minute trailers.
 

Jarmel

Banned
More players will be exposed to different play styles than your typical TPS run-n-gun. In previous games, a player who chooses Soldier at the time of character creation will never have the ability to try biotics. Here a player who started as a soldier, but unlocks biotic or tech abilities will be able to switch classes and try them out. Maybe some will just stick with soldier, and that's fine, but some will and maybe the poor Engineer class can finally get some love.

It also allows the game designers to make more interesting use of the abilities without having to worry that extending the capabilities of some skills will put certain players in a disadvantage in some situations due to them being locked in to a class for the game.
If a person was choosing Soldier to begin with, they had pretty much nil interest in space magic anyway. Remember who are the people like to pick that class in the first place. It's not like there was only Adept and Soldier with no class inbetween. Do you really want to base a RPG combat system around the COD crowd?

As for your second paragraph, that's what your party members were for. Not to mention difficulty settings.
 
Class change at will?

FUCK OFF

Looks a bit stiff in that demo

This might be an odd question, but was the FOV in past games like this? That view felt more claustrophobic than I remember it looking.

These responses kind of sum up my immediate impressions.

Changing classes at will just seems to kind of negate the point of playing this as an RPG where having a class is a choice/consequence in itself and would theoretically make you utilize your squadmates to get stuff done too.

The combat animations, especially a lot of the transitions, look really stiff. I guess that's not new for modern BioWare but still disappointing.

And the FOV did seem really up close. Its been a long time since I played any of the ME games so I don't really recall what it was, but I don't remember your character basically taking up half of the screen like that gameplay demo.


Just about every alarm / red flag is going up for me with this game. I'm definitely not expecting Baldur's Gate 2 or anything of the sort, but frankly, I'm not really sure this will be as much an RPG as Mass Effect 2 at this point. The game looks a bit rough and the combat looks unappealing to me and all the old leaked survey bits regarding the Inquisition style grinding content have me not wanting to get anywhere near this game until the smoke has kind of cleared from it post launch.

I feel like this game is a pump and dump by EA. It's literally less than three months till release and we haven't seen shit nor has Bioware explained shit. It comes across as though either Bioware or EA has no faith in the game.

LIke, its one thing for EA to not go full on with their marketing hype machine for a franchise like Battlefield until 3 months or so before launch. Those kinds of games are known quantities, more or less. Here with Mass Effect though, even though it is technically another Mass Effect game, its been a while since we've had one of those and this one is effectively completely detached from ME1 -3 story wise, so its almost like a new IP launch, in a lot of ways. And yet they're about 2.5 months out and barely showing anything? This seems very odd, even with EA's shorter marketing windows of late.
 

Ivory Samoan

Gold Member
ME3 was 5 years ago and its animations were mocked on release so

Does it even have multiplayer? We're less than 3 months away from release and haven't seen jack shit of it, can't even use the spoiler defense there. I really hope for its own sake it's delayed.

Sigh...they've stated many times how the multiplayer works and it's Nexus based integration into the SP gains you rewards both ways.

Maybe do some research before stating things like this: I'm not trying to be annoying, but when you follow a game and know things about it, it irks me when people make statements that are utterly unfounded in truth/research/knowledge.
 

daftstar

Member
This here. Why are they so cagey about letting us see any real gameplay besides short 1 minute snippets? CRPR showed off The Witcher 3 giving you basically a 15 minute gameplay slice of a quest. You got to see the open world, you got to see a lot of dialogue between characters, you got to see some choices, and then some combat. And, most importantly it was a jump cut of all these parts it was one continuous flow as part of one quest. That is what we need for Mass Effect.

How can I get excited about some dude blasting some robots I have absolutely zero context about? Mass Effect isn't Gears, I don't give a shit about cool explosions, give me some story.

They need to put out a good 10 minutes of uninterrupted gameplay or something. These little snippets have all been awful.

Was gonna post this too. Hopefully they release a proper vid in the coming weeks. Cause as of now, it feels like they're not very confident in it..
 

Enduin

No bald cap? Lies!
Unsure. I really liked pausing combat in ME and coordinating abilities. Sad if that's gone. Still not sold on the very jumpy combat.

So it looks like you can select any combat profile and it will give you certain perks related to it, likely increased the more you level up that class. Skill points seem to be universal, but you probably need certain Class ranks to unlock higher tiers and abilities? Want clear from what at I saw, might just be limited di to higher Skill point cost for better Still upgrades. Then you can choose any the Skills regardless of Class in your load out, but are limited to three, and likely any Skill not under you current class will miss out on class bonuses.
 

Fanuilos

Member
The ME1 characters are made first and foremost to service the world-building. Wrex to the Genophage history and disintegration of Krogan society, Tali to the Quarian nomadic status after the disastrous Geth conflict, Liara (inter-marriage) and Garrus (bureaucratic structure) to respective cultures. That is a far cry from ME2.

World-building is #1 in ME1, Andromeda is leaning towards that.

They are not mutually exclusive. I'm not sure why you're treating them as such.
 

Mechazawa

Member
Again, other games like Bravely Default, FF Tactics, A, A2, and FF5 all let you change jobs with no consumption, it still worked.

Add Dragon's Dogma and Final Fantasy XIV to this list.

Freaking about being able to change classes midgame is making much ado about nothing.
 

Garlador

Member
Perhaps Mass Effect 2's marketing just spoiled me...
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By this point, we were getting countless "meet the crew" trailers, giving us a clear idea of who our teammates would be and what they would be like and why we should take an interest. We had a "meet the voice cast" video. We had plenty of behind-the-scenes vids that hyped us up with clear presentations of what they were aiming for. We had a kick-ass E3 trailer. We had a lot of really substantial story beats (without spoiling too much). We got to meaty gameplay rather quickly after the game's reveal, in fact. We got big introductions to the new planets and locations we'd visit, like Omega. Their messaging was crystal clear - from the Blade Runner aesthetics taking over for the Star Trek look, to the focus on squadmates first and foremost ("earn their loyalty or anyone can die"), to the stakes ("Fight for the Lost", the slogan declared). We got character bios, strong trailers, great public demos...

And perhaps I'm just not remembering it correctly, but I believe so much of this was months and months and months before the game was supposed to come out, keeping our interest and keeping fans hooked with each new reveal that also felt satisfactory and met expectations.

I still think/hope Andromeda will be good, but the marketing is beyond bizarre at this point. The gameplay slices they're choosing are just... I don't want to say "dull", but, well, yeah. Dull.

And I think the main reason for that is they've poorly explained the mechanics of the game. They show off the powers in a mass of chaotic destruction in cluttered areas in poor lighting. It's a visual mess. The systems behind the gameplay are obfuscated.

But, more importantly, Mass Effect to most was always about the characters. Garrus, Tali, Wrex... Even ME2's whole main marketing thrust was centered on your squadmates. THEY were important. You had to earn their trust. You had to work for their loyalty. Lives hung in the balance, and they were the fulcrum upon which the galaxy rose or fell, even if we had no idea who Mordin or Miranda or Thane were yet.

Andromeda has shown us squat with the squadmates. The most we know are their races and that Peebee "doesn't like social niceties". That's it. That's... hardly substantial. It's hard to care for an abstract idea, blank faces, empty vessels. I'm sure there's some great characters there, but they just won't SHOW us... and instead focus on chaotic, fast-paced combat, as if that was the thing that hooked Mass Effect fans in the first place.

At the end of the day, the franchise was always about the characters first and foremost. Saving the galaxy was always the excuse to get to know them, but rarely the crux of the whole narrative. The game was about shooting bottles with Garrus, about Tali's pilgrimage, about Wrex and the genophage, about Mordin's questionable ethics, about Thane's struggles with impending mortality, about Samara's oath versus desires, about Jack's struggle for self-worth and meaning, about so much more than "bad guys threaten to blow up the galaxy"...

I don't know a thing about PeeBee - her goals, her desires, her reasons for sticking with you. We know nothing about Vetra. Nothing about Drack. Nothing about Cora. Nothing about Liam. We don't know anything... and because the series relies so hard on characters, and they won't tell us much about the new cast, it's just hard to care.

Trust me, I want to care, and I'm confident I probably WILL care... but they're sure biding their time and showing off a whole lot of pedestrian material until then.
 

JayEH

Junior Member
Looks like this will be a wait and see title for me. Not like there is a shortage of RPGs in the first 6 months of the year.
 

Rozart

Member
DAI showed blurbs of all the characters in the months prior to release and there were TWELVE of them. Why is Bioware being so secretive?

Yeap. It built hype and it was fun speculating who everyone was and what role they might play in the game. The little blurbs didn't take anything away from the final game.

I don't why Bioware is keeping mum on things now. :
 

HardRojo

Member
Looks and feels like Mass Effect, which is all I need to know to be honest. With that said, they need to kick things up a couple of notched for the next 3 months so it becomes much more appealing to the masses.
 
ME3 was 5 years ago and its animations were mocked on release so

Were they? Beyond that running animation and some facial stuff, I thought they were quite nice. They certainly didn't diminish my experience with the combat. In Andromeda the running animation seems improved, the facial animation stuff is supposedly getting tuned, and the combat still looks fine to me, so I'm not complaining.
Does it even have multiplayer? We're less than 3 months away from release and haven't seen jack shit of it, can't even use the spoiler defense there. I really hope for its own sake it's delayed.
Would EA throw away a money printer like that? Like I said, negativity seems to be bleeding into places it shouldn't. But yes, multiplayer has been confirmed, just not shown. Supposedly they're part of these "strike mission" things which tie into Andromeda's plot (like ME3, but without affecting the narrative this time), so actually, showing multiplayer might fall into spoiler territory if these strike missions reveal information about the nature of our enemy. Not that that's a good excuse for not showing it. This game needs better marketing.
 

Jarmel

Banned
Sigh...they've stated many times how the multiplayer works and it's Nexus based integration into the SP gains you rewards both ways.

Maybe do some research before stating things like this: I'm not trying to be annoying, but when you follow a game and know things about it, it irks me when people make statements that are utterly unfounded in truth/research/knowledge.
And yet how much footage do we have?
 
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