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Mass Effect: Andromeda releases Patch 1.05 Thursday, details more changes for future

Its like they knew the problems before shipping the game. But they had to release before last quarter.

I think they have been working on these fixes for a while.
 
Blastoise said:
Its like they knew the problems before shipping the game. But they had to release before last quarter.

I think they have been working on these fixes for a while.
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EA gonna EA. Really shitty how they'd rather have the fiscal year pop and risk ruining one of their key franchises over another few months delay.
 
Sanojio said:
I don't understand. I mean I know enough that many trans people hide their status and blend in without the label and some are "out" and open with their status and proud of that label. Even unprompted. Was it insensitive or something?
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The character talks about needing a fresh start, but brings up the past identity unprovoked. It's often referred to as "dead naming" and is indeed frowned upon by the trans community.

More sloppy writing than intentional malice. Their heart was in the right place, but it wasn't handled as well as the subject matter deserves.
 
Jharp said:
Was hoping for:

Added a goddamn cell phone so you don't have to backtrack to the Nexus or some planet you don't have any quests on in order to talk to one NPC for eight seconds.

These fucking sidequests.
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Yeah, they already have a communicator in the Tempest, would have come in useful to avoid having to planet hop across the system just to have the NPC tell you to go back to Havahrl to get a plant sample :-/
 
Garlador said:
The character talks about needing a fresh start, but brings up the past identity unprovoked. It's often referred to as "dead naming" and is indeed frowned upon by the trans community.

More sloppy writing than intentional malice. Their heart was in the right place, but it wasn't handled as well as the subject matter deserves.
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Ah so it was the unprovoked bring up that was problematic. That makes sense and i didn't pick up on it. Thanks.
 
Jharp said:
Was hoping for:

Added a goddamn cell phone so you don't have to backtrack to the Nexus or some planet you don't have any quests on in order to talk to one NPC for eight seconds.

These fucking sidequests.
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I don't think the side quests in this game or in most open world games like this now are really made to play straight through. You can't have tunnel vision with one quest. They're made to gather up and then when you're in an area for something bigger you go complete a few others. That's usually what I do. I pretty much never go to the Nexus for a side quest. I'll go there for like 3 or 4 and a main quest or something.
 
Sanojio said:
I don't understand. I mean I know enough that many trans people hide their status and blend in without the label and some are "out" and open with their status and proud of that label. Even unprompted. Was it insensitive or something?
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It's a male to female trans person who matter of factly told Ryder their old male name.

I didn't even know what "deadnaming" was until this. That's what people seemed to be upset about mostly.

EDIT beaten. I guess they didn't think of a more subtle way to way to identify the character as trans other than shouting "hey I'm trans!"
 
Garlador said:
The character talks about needing a fresh start, but brings up the past identity unprovoked. It's often referred to as "dead naming" and is indeed frowned upon by the trans community.

More sloppy writing than intentional malice. Their heart was in the right place, but it wasn't handled as well as the subject matter deserves.
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Oh I remember that, the black woman on Eos. I noticed that but I didn't think anything of it. She called herself Sean or Steven or something. I've met a transwoman in college who brought up her old name just like that in a social justice class. "Well, if you didn't know already, my name used to be ....." unprompted. But I see how that would piss some people off
 
Can't patch a boring story. I loved the original trilogy so I'll get around to playing Andromeda at some point. It'll be much cheaper and fully patched by then.
 
RDreamer said:
I don't think the side quests in this game or in most open world games like this now are really made to play straight through. You can't have tunnel vision with one quest. They're made to gather up and then when you're in an area for something bigger you go complete a few others. That's usually what I do. I pretty much never go to the Nexus for a side quest. I'll go there for like 3 or 4 and a main quest or something.
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While true, it kills the story telling in sidequest as when you do that they get all jumbled together and you forget who gave you what, what the context was etc. by the time you move to the next step or turn them in.

These games just need to get away from this quantity over quality approach to side quests and just have a smaller number of more fleshed out quests with better stories--like the best ones in this game or Witcher 3 or Horizon. Get rid of the fetch quest shit, or things that have you going to a bunch of locations all over the map and just use them to flesh out the story and characters. Not add busy work to run up play time and meet some amount of content checkbox.
 
RDreamer said:
I don't think the side quests in this game or in most open world games like this now are really made to play straight through. You can't have tunnel vision with one quest. They're made to gather up and then when you're in an area for something bigger you go complete a few others. That's usually what I do. I pretty much never go to the Nexus for a side quest. I'll go there for like 3 or 4 and a main quest or something.
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And if you don't have any quests on those planets and don't get any more?

I think the most annoying example was at the end of the Sloane/Reyes quest where
Reyes is revealed to be the Charlatan
. After the action, Sloane jumps on a drop ship and you have to go talk to her back at Kadara port where she says nothing of importance, doesn't give you anything, and just closes out the sidequest. She couldn't have said those three lines of dialogue when we were still in the cave and before she got on the drop ship? Really? I had to run back to Kadara port just to talk to her instead of going straight to the tempest and letting her contact me by vidcom or, hell, just fucking call me on my built in comms device and let the conversation play out automatically?

And there's been tons of instances where I was turning in quests on the Nexus, then got another menial step that required me to go to a different part of the Nexus just for the next step in that one quest. Real fun running to trams and looking at loading screens just to listen to one character wax on about absolutely nothing, or scan something so SAM can say "yup, sure is an EMP device."

Truth be told, any moment in this game where you don't have your gun out is tedious, boring, and competely terrible. That said, game has some really fun exploration and the best combat in the series by far. It's the first Mass Effect game I've actually wanted to try out different builds and loadouts in. Combat is so goddamn fun, but anything on Aya, Nexus, Kadara Port, etc. just sucks.

They have a difficulty option for people who just want the totally-rad-and-not-embarassingly-shit story that makes gameplay easier, but why not the opposite? Abridge conversations and only give me a choice when it leads to something drastically different, and otherwise, let me spend 90% of my time killing stuff. Because I'm 45 hours in, and I have to imagine at least 10 of that was running back and forth in non-combat areas talking to people about plants, their lost briefcase, or god knows what.
 
Jharp said:
And if you don't have any quests on those planets and don't get any more?

I think the most annoying example was at the end of the Sloane/Reyes quest where
Reyes is revealed to be the Charlatan
. After the action, Sloane jumps on a drop ship and you have to go talk to her back at Kadara port where she says nothing of importance, doesn't give you anything, and just closes out the sidequest. She couldn't have said those three lines of dialogue when we were still in the cave and before she got on the drop ship? Really? I had to run back to Kadara port just to talk to her instead of going straight to the tempest and letting her contact me by vidcom or, hell, just fucking call me on my built in comms device and let the conversation play out automatically?

And there's been tons of instances where I was turning in quests on the Nexus, then got another menial step that required me to go to a different part of the Nexus just for the next step in that one quest. Real fun running to trams and looking at loading screens just to listen to one character wax on about absolutely nothing, or scan something so SAM can say "yup, sure is an EMP device."

Truth be told, any moment in this game where you don't have your gun out is tedious, boring, and competely terrible. That said, game has some really fun exploration and the best combat in the series by far. It's the first Mass Effect game I've actually wanted to try out different builds and loadouts in. Combat is so goddamn fun, but anything on Aya, Nexus, Kadara Port, etc. just sucks.

They have a difficulty option for people who just want the totally-rad-and-not-embarassingly-shit story that makes gameplay easier, but why not the opposite? Abridge conversations and only give me a choice when it leads to something drastically different, and otherwise, let me spend 90% of my time killing stuff. Because I'm 45 hours in, and I have to imagine at least 10 of that was running back and forth in non-combat areas talking to people about plants, their lost briefcase, or god knows what.
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This just makes me remember all the "we learned from Dragon Age Inquisition quests" talk leading up to the game, but it's really one of the worst aspects of Andromeda. Quest structures are plodding and ridiculously time consuming without feeling engaging or rewarding.
 
And we’re looking at adding more cosmetic items to single player for free.
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This makes it sound like they were originally going to charge for squadmate's alternate appearances. That would have been bullshit considering the lack of customization present in the first place.
 
Fata1moose said:
This makes it sound like they were originally going to charge for squadmate's alternate appearances. That would have been bullshit considering the lack of customization present in the first place.
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Probably over-reading it. Companies use the word "free" very liberally.
 
Thanks for paying full price to beta test our game. We look forward to offering a superior version in a few months for people who pick this up in the bargain bin.
 
prag16 said:
Some people were probably hoping for free story DLC.

I'm not expecting that; I just hope the cost to content ratio isn't as questionable as some of the ME2 and ME3 content. $15-20 for a couple hours of content in some of those cases was... not ideal.
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Bioware giving free story DLC? Hahaha, people should know better by now.

I actually don't mind buying story DLCs for the game, since I really enjoyed it. But yeah, the pricing has to be right. Especially after stuff like Witcher 3 expansions or even just recently the Gladiolus DLC for FFXV, Bioware can't get away with those prices anymore.
 
Mezoly said:
Obviously my point was anecdotal. I'm playing on ps4 pro as well. My point was not to say it doesn't have bugs/glitches as I had some but I encountered much more in the Witcher 3 and so did a lot of people and that's the nature of the beast with those big games. The Witcher 3 had tons and tons of patches to fix bugs and unfortunately so will Andromeda.
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I don't think there was any open world games that didn't have bugs on release.
GTA5 had plenty , witcher 3 had some, and even small releases like infamous 2 or second son weren't exempt of these despite their reputation. For the sake of the argument i'm not een touching the bethesda games , lol.
I wish i had played horizon , but i haven't (yet)

But GTA5 or Witcher 3 never had so many progression bugs..there comes a moment where you have to say : " this needed a few more months in the oven" ..ME : A reached that point..

Like how the heck am i supposed to react when cutscenes aren't doing what they should ? Witcher 3 had patches ... but that was small fixes and improvements based on feedback... This isn't the case Here .. the problem with andromeda aren't a small issue that got too big , they are a big issue that needed a statement from the devs less than a week after release. .. not even the same thing.
 
Madness said:
As someone who has this digitally and physically, I agree. If you haven't started yet, you may as well hold off. We are beta testing this game. It took them just 2 weeks after launch to say they'll fix things like loading issues, facial animations, eyes etc. What if another 2 months from now they have fleshed out sidequests better, changed up some dialogue, added better assets? You may as well wait of you aren't in a rush. Playing through ME3 with the full DLC and extended cut is a much better experience than vanilla.
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This isn't two weeks work - they have probably been working on this since before launch, seeing as they had a day one patch ready. That would've had to go through cert, so it was probably done 1-2 weeks before launch.

Same situation here, this stuff was probably ready a week ago and I imagine they chose the date after it passed cert.
 
I like the galaxy map animations.

While I've been enjoying the game so far, the game will greatly benefit with these patches especially with expanded customization options down the line.

I hope they'll finally fix that annoying scanning bug that forces me to reboot the game in order to fix it. When certain parts of the game requires scanning you'd think that feature would have minimal problems.
 
HariKari said:
EA gonna EA. Really shitty how they'd rather have the fiscal year pop and risk ruining one of their key franchises over another few months delay.
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They've also not invested much. Only 40 millions for one of their key franchises? I bet ME2 and ME3 got at least 100-120 (if not more). But still, millions of bugs and other QA problems aside, it's amazing how much they did with just 40 and EA has nothing to do with it, they are just greedy bastards 8[
 
Games like MEA really cements my belief that games shouldn't be played day1. Wait for the first major discount and most issues will be sorted out. By the time the price drops below 50% most of the glaring nits won't be so easily picked.
 
OrionX said:
Yeah, Jaal was pretty much the only hope for having a m/m squadmate option. Liam has explicit "no homo" lines, and for whatever reason they don't seem to want anyone romancing Krogans lol. Also, I don't believe Scott even has the option to flirt with Jaal so he technically hasn't been rejected yet. ;)
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I can understand why Drak isn't a romance option. Be kinda weird to have a romance with someone who refers to you as "kid". I mean, even his granddaughter is older than you.
 
HariKari said:
EA gonna EA. Really shitty how they'd rather have the fiscal year pop and risk ruining one of their key franchises over another few months delay.
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Can you really put all the blame to EA tho considering they have 5 years developing this game.

Also:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42-3GCq6gqo

If that video is to be believed, apparently they outsourced the facial animation while the internal art team only handled stuff like ships and buildings. And for some inexplicable reason when the art team offered to help with the facial animation, the person in charge of the overall project--meaning, a guy in Bioware--refused to give the team that ability.
 
Laughing Banana said:
If that video is to be believed, apparently they outsourced the facial animation while the internal art team only handled stuff like ships and buildings. And for some inexplicable reason when the art team offered to help with the facial animation, the person in charge of the overall project--meaning, a guy in Bioware--refused to give the team that ability.
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If the team was outsourced, then it was a cost-saving measure. To put the main team on those animations would have cost a lot, I assume.
 
kinoki said:
Games like MEA really cements my belief that games shouldn't be played day1. Wait for the first major discount and most issues will be sorted out. By the time the price drops below 50% most of the glaring nits won't be so easily picked.
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Dragon Age: Inquisition finally made me take this sentiment to heart. Since then I have only bought two games at launch. Ratchet & Clank which wasn't a full priced game and Horizon: Zero Dawn which was my most anticipated game this gen. Horizon ended up being one of the most enjoyable games I've ever played so that exception was well worth it. Every other game I have passed on buying at launch, I am extremely glad I did.
 
This is the kind of shit that makes me wish quarterly financial reports didn't exist. Two more months to get the fixes in. I guess I have enough stuff to play in between. But ugh. The zeitgeist is fleeing!
 
Well I'm perfectly content just playing multiplayer for another month until this is decent. I'm glad I haven't started a playthrough yet.
 
Once the dust is settled on ME:A (all the patches and DLC are complete), I think it will be quite a different experience than it is now. Holding off on a second playthrough until a few patches hit. Good thing I have a ton of other games to play at the moment.
 
Exploratory said:
It's. One. Line.
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Let alone nowhere near as bad as this was.

850ae8acc36338818ca9b46f03e5e45b.jpg


I mean, one is one line that people single out and the other one literally painted the series into a corner from a plot standpoint.
 
Improvements to male romance options for Scott Ryder
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Sadly I can't think of any eligible male characters in this game that I want to romance. All of them are flops to the N-th degree. Bring back Kaidan or Garrus.

Gamezone said:
Better creator after everyone has created their Ryder.
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Plastic surgery center for everyone. Come on, Bioware. If Bethesda can do it, you can do it too!
 
I'll buy the complete version with all the DLC later. Sounds like it will take a while to sort this game out and even then there is only so much you can do
 
Merc_ said:
lol at people thanking them for this. The game should have never been released in this state to begin with.
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Yeah, this game needed another 2-3 months of development and fine tuning. EA rushed this out before the end of their fiscal year. I'm still enjoying the game, but there's too many things that still need to be addressed.
 
Laughing Banana said:
Can you really put all the blame to EA tho considering they have 5 years developing this game.

Also:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42-3GCq6gqo

If that video is to be believed, apparently they outsourced the facial animation while the internal art team only handled stuff like ships and buildings. And for some inexplicable reason when the art team offered to help with the facial animation, the person in charge of the overall project--meaning, a guy in Bioware--refused to give the team that ability.
Click to expand...
Well, ultimately all comes down to reduce the cost of development and to not extend it beyond given budget. BioWare Montreal was given 40m to develop MEA and not a cent more. And who's giving them money and funding the project exactly? Well, you sure as hell know who and can you honestly blame the developers for all this? It;s like expecting too much (the quality of the very first film at least) from another Universal Soldier movie with a budget of 20m (or less) at best. But the thing is, MEA is not utter shit like every Universal Soldier movie beyond the first one, not even close.
 
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