Retrofluxed
Member
https://twitter.com/tibermoon/status/840673174912151552
Just as I thought. I'm ok with that.
Ian Frazier said:
Just as I thought. I'm ok with that.
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The Mass Effect Community Thread
- Thread starter shinobi602
- Start date
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Yeah I'm pretty disappointing hearing about the no alternate outfits -- I mean at all? Not even through story/game progression? Very strange decision.
And yes I would imagine that if they release alternate outfit packs for money again they'll be quite the uproar. If they're free, then okay. Better late then never then.
And yes I would imagine that if they release alternate outfit packs for money again they'll be quite the uproar. If they're free, then okay. Better late then never then.
prag16
Banned
What romance mess?
shinobi602
Member
Correction: Reviews will be up on March 20th at 3 AM eastern, not 9 AM.
LegalEagleMike
Member
ruined my sleep schedule. They can't get away with this guys.
The general hoopla fans have about romances, I'm trying my best to ignore most of it.
Also Just watched Liam's mission from Pax and I think I'm gonna love him and Cora.
I can't tell if you're joking or not.
Blue Ninja
Member
You clearly didn't pay attention during Arrival.
Was gonna go with Jaal and Drack but the Pax gameplay has me suprisingly interested in Liam.
Could be a great Bromance between him and Maleryder
Officer.Sanchez
Member
Reviews go online March 20th at 3 AM eastern, 2017. Forums are removed from strategic defense. The metacritic score begins to drop at a geometric rate. In a panic, people try to cancel their pre orders.
Try as they might, we have a legion of Sara Ryder gifs at our disposal to warn people.
We will not go quietly!
What a brilliant and well explained rejoinder to my post. Such contributions always help a discussion.
I don't like it on paper but the a.i practically carried Ian in that one mission so I don't know.
As someone who never messed with other characters in combat and pretty much tried to let them do their own thing most of the time and focus on Shepard, I'm pretty okay with them being purely AI controlled with smart detonations.
Hopefully they're good with cover and you don't have to direct them out of getting shot in the face by a close range shotgun enemy.
Hopefully they're good with cover and you don't have to direct them out of getting shot in the face by a close range shotgun enemy.
It might not have a huge practical effect but I don't like control being taken away. DAI's AI was great about closing class combos: still would bave preferred rules to tell them when to do it.
Agreed.
Officer.Sanchez
Member
I still don't know why the Deviant thread is still open, it's like they ran out of gifs and need to go 5 years to the past to keep shitting on bioware.
DevilDog
Member
This triggers me so much, it's unbelievable. A game that should be about finding a way to stop the reapers, that ignores the reapers and makes everyone an idiot in it for ignoring the impending destruction of the universe, is fine on its own and as a follow up to ME1...
A games that retcons half of the lore and makes most of your choices mean nothing or shifts the weight to the third game, is a good follow up...
Admins are probably okay with it. I remember someone linking me the DA2 OT and it was made by an admin just to shit on Bioware. At least it was hillarious though.
Three costumes for $1.99, or 160 Bioware Points!
The REAL question is whether one of those outfits will give PeeBee an outfit with camel toe or not.
Yikes. I'd almost forgotten that since I barely used EDI and stuck with the destroy ending. Hopefully Cora and Peebee get some hardsuits.
DeadlyParasite
Member
I look back at that artbook picture with all the cool armour outfit variants for Vetra and I get sad that we'll never have stuff like that for any of the characters (at launch).
It worked for me. The reapers from ME1 were not in any possible way an iminent threat - there was zero possibility of them arriving anytime soon in the original game. That's why Sovereign altered the Rachni, and then did the Saren / Geth thing - because they couldn't get here from dark space without outside help. In that context, the mysterious species that's kidnapping entire human colonies is a fine thing to explore, and you learn through the game that it's another back up reaper assault.
That's my point re ME3 - at no point in the first two games did I ever get the impression the end game would be the reapers turning up a few years down the line. That's what broke it for me. Why the hell Sovereign even bothered risking itself when an unbeatable armada was only four years away? For an enemy that's millions of years old they didn't seem to appreciate the benefits of patience!
DevilDog
Member
But at the end of ME2 it clearly shows them moving to our galaxy and things get all hyped up and stuff. Everything you're blaming ME3 for, is ME2's doing.
Also, regarding Sovereign my theory is that Walters had no idea what he was doing with the story, like always.
Another one is that the reapers could win anyways, and the Citadel attack is just a + tactical element of surprise and convenience for them. But that ruins the theme of an overpowering enemy even further than the death of Sovereign in the first place.
And disregarding all of that, I find it interesting how you though that a trilogy, featuring a huge enemy in the 1st game, wouldn't bother with us fighting them at some point.
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
It was by Evilore the owner of the site. He's a big fan of BGII and enjoyed DAO so the OT for DAII was expected.
Well, it WAS DAII.
The Revenge of Shit Mountain was a glorious OT.
AWizardDidIt
Member
DA2 had so many good ideas. I'm not sure who between EA and Bioware made the decision to rush that game out in a little over a year but I'll be damned if some of the devs on that game didn't really try to do something special.
shinobi602
Member
Bioware tried to fight it. They didn't win of course.
EA under Richitiello wasn't pretty. Wilson is 10x better.
prag16
Banned
So.... origin access... in the client I just paid the $5 via paypal. After payment it went back to the main client screen with a blank white dialog box over it. I closed the box. I clicked Origin Access and it is acting like I'm not registered, still prompting me to sign up and pay. Dafuq...
Origin website also acting like I don't have Access..
EDIT: Order history is stuck on "Pending" status. How long does this take?
EDIT: Took 57 minutes. Now I'm in.
Origin website also acting like I don't have Access..
EDIT: Order history is stuck on "Pending" status. How long does this take?
EDIT: Took 57 minutes. Now I'm in.
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
There's no doubt EA meddling mangled Dragon Age II. BioWare admit as much, along with it being one of their biggest failures, in the Game Informer article. In that respect, regardless of some of the good shit buried away in that game, the community piling on it was deserved. The production scope and design vision had shifted so intensely and radically from its predecessor, at a time when publishers were already being critiqued for "dumbing down" franchises for mass market appeal. Perfect storm for a game that became the eye.
I had a quick squiz at the PAX footage, not too much out of fear of spoilers, and I think it's all coming together very well. Facial animations are really only the glaring weak spot and I'm convinced they won't be a whole lot better at launch. I'm not too fussed about it as I appreciate the difficulty of detailed animation work in a game of this scope (and my guts say this game has had a turbulent dev cycle), but if anybody from BioWare is reading this please take my armchair advice and for future titles allocate a little more animation resource to character eyes. As they say, eyes are the windows to the soul, and it couldn't be more true in video games where nothing is truly realistic. Weaker animations elsewhere (including lip syncing) will be more subconsciously forgiven if the eyes are convincing. Psychologically we're attracted to the eyes and surrounding muscle movements to express emotions and intent; so much of our subconscious body language is isolated in this area. A little more attention here goes a long way to avoiding that "dead expression" look.
Nevertheless I don't really mind in this case. The PAX footage looks wonderful. Landing on Eos and its opening mission gave me strong Eden Prime vibes. Graphics look gorgeous, particularly the more advanced lighting and shadowing system. Frostbite does atmospheric scattering so very well, and those dusty sunrise vistas look incredible. Combat encounters also look fantastic; reminiscent of Mass Effect but clearly with a broader sense of control over the main character. Looks so much smoother and less rigid than the trilogy.
I really cannot wait to sink hours into this game. Very, very excited.
I had a quick squiz at the PAX footage, not too much out of fear of spoilers, and I think it's all coming together very well. Facial animations are really only the glaring weak spot and I'm convinced they won't be a whole lot better at launch. I'm not too fussed about it as I appreciate the difficulty of detailed animation work in a game of this scope (and my guts say this game has had a turbulent dev cycle), but if anybody from BioWare is reading this please take my armchair advice and for future titles allocate a little more animation resource to character eyes. As they say, eyes are the windows to the soul, and it couldn't be more true in video games where nothing is truly realistic. Weaker animations elsewhere (including lip syncing) will be more subconsciously forgiven if the eyes are convincing. Psychologically we're attracted to the eyes and surrounding muscle movements to express emotions and intent; so much of our subconscious body language is isolated in this area. A little more attention here goes a long way to avoiding that "dead expression" look.
Nevertheless I don't really mind in this case. The PAX footage looks wonderful. Landing on Eos and its opening mission gave me strong Eden Prime vibes. Graphics look gorgeous, particularly the more advanced lighting and shadowing system. Frostbite does atmospheric scattering so very well, and those dusty sunrise vistas look incredible. Combat encounters also look fantastic; reminiscent of Mass Effect but clearly with a broader sense of control over the main character. Looks so much smoother and less rigid than the trilogy.
I really cannot wait to sink hours into this game. Very, very excited.
Me sinking a tremendous amount of hours into MEA was a given. However, if the SP campaign is bad you will see me driving a very substantiated bus over that point. I will be very clear about why C is a poor representation of X.
As a qualifier I present to you my Platinum of Horizon and my free admission of how even an 88% metacricitic is an overrated embellishment.
As a qualifier I present to you my Platinum of Horizon and my free admission of how even an 88% metacricitic is an overrated embellishment.
ThoseDeafMutes
Member
Frostbite is a weird engine to me. It looks stunning in some ways but also obviously takes shortcuts in others for the sake of maintaining high performance. Battlefield 1 looks gorgeous sometimes but then weirdly primitive in other situations. And Bioware is definitely not as technically inclined as DICE, so Inquisition was very rough in some places despite not targeting 60hz on consoles. I think I would have preferred it if Bioware had stayed with Unreal Engine, because they seemed a lot more comfortable with it.
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
Rendering complexity falls to pieces in Frostbite when a scene demands more than what the engine is built to accommodate where another engine in a previous generation, like UE3, would have simply baked in effects for more a immediate, if less dynamic, solution. Lighting and shadows are the best example. Frostbite 3 is clearly more capable, but the push to keep so much if not everything within the game rendering in real time leads to odd situations where the effect loses believably. Like going from a nicely lit outdoor area to somewhere inside lacking any immediate or prominent light source and instead relying on a flat, uniform lighting solution where nuances in shadow gradients are completely lost. Where in UE3 the interior lighting solution would be rigid and baked, less dynamic but still convincing, Frostbite 3's insistence to attempt a real time approach can lead to an usual 'unlit' image. And in those cases, which I feel more or less every Frostbite 3 game falters at one point or another, the games actually look pretty awful.
You've got moments in Battlefield 1 which are utterly incredible, and I'd argue these are the majority, when the engine is being used to its strengths. But then you'll run inside a flat lit bunker or something and everyone looks like they're being rendered in a map maker viewpoint before any lighting was added at all. Mirror's Edge Catalyst is guilty too. Battlefield 1 is also odd to me in the respect that it's very clearly holding some engine and asset scalability back to maintain performance. Detail textures pop in constantly and I can't help but wonder if it's an outright engine limitation or just a quirk for this game. Rendering of reflections is also very cheap and legitimately broken unless you're using TAA.
I don't mind BioWare shifting to Frostbite for the advantages it brings, particularly open landscape rendering efficiency. And even though I know it's up to the developers in the end, Frostbite's proven satisfying hitreg and feedback for shooting should translate well to Mass Effect. That and, of course, the audio. My gut says that even with Inquisition under their belt the tools for Frostbite when making games like BioWare's are still a bit rough. If we look at the Frostbite 3 portfolio there's still nothing really like what BioWare make backed by the engine. It's mainly shooters and racers.
shinobi602
Member
I think the benefits of Frostbite far outweigh any negatives. I'm not incredibly technically savvy but I thought DAI was a beautiful game in its own right and MEA even more so. Metal surfaces, lighting, particle effects all look substantial. Some things look crude but that's every engine.
I feel like BioWare's games have gained a lot more than they've lost in the visual department.
I feel like BioWare's games have gained a lot more than they've lost in the visual department.
DeadlyParasite
Member
With how well Mass Effect 3 holds up (for the most part) it really makes you wonder what they could've done with Unreal Engine 4.
I have to wonder why Destruction isn't pushed more with BW games on Frostbite, seems they gave it a good shot with DAI's alpha footage and then quit.
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
This is mostly how I feel.
Probably a lot, but to the trilogy's credit a lot of its visual legacy can be contributed to the abundance of baked effects and clean, elegant rendering. UE3 at its peak towards the end of last generation was an absolute gem for high resolution clean IQ and shaders/effects that scaled accordingly. UE3 games with forced SGSSAA and texture filtering are among the cleanest, sharpest looking games you can have on PC. The engine just found a magical sweet spot.
With modern engines we hit a wall with how many shader and effect algorithms are no longer baked but rendered in real time, the performance costs associated with this shift, and the difficulties in making the effects clean/high quality while retaining the intended dynamic effect. A lot of effects in UE3 (like shadows) are very, very basic and baked and not actually reactive to the environment (nor are characters/objects reactive to the shadows). Reflections too; simple cubemaps and cheap reflections in UE3 are convincing enough to emulate the desired effect even if it's not technically accurate or fully real time, and scale beautifully. Now reflection shaders (eg: Frostbite 3) are happening in real time. It's super neat to see distant explosions and gunfire reflected with positional accuracy on the rain wet barrel of your gun in Battlefield 1, but in order to keep performance stabilised the quality of the effect isn't all that great even if the real time technical complexity is greater than a baked effect in UE3.
I kinda feel they would have had similar problems in UE4, but who knows.
shinobi602
Member
Moving to a new engine always has growing pains, sure. But it'll blow over eventualy.
Working in Frostbite is much more beneficial in the long run. Instead of being the sole EA studio working in Unreal and having to work with Epic on any issues, internal EA teams share that knowledge with each other. Each team adds to the pipeline (EA Sports, DICE, Visceral, NFS, Bioware etc). DICE has been regularly available for engine resources and its helped tremendously.
You'll continue to see each Bioware game improve in technical standards.
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