Bioware General (Mass Effect/Dragon Age/Other)

[Spartanburger]

Andromeda's IMDB page updated with the full cast

Archon is played by Robert Kazinsky
SAM is played by Alexia Traverse-Healy
Ali Hillis (Liara), Ash Sroka (Tali), Brandon Keener (Garrus), and Ike Amadi (Javik) are all listed as "additional voices."

[Someone With Mass]

Andromeda's IMDB page updated with the full cast

Archon is played by Robert Kazinsky
SAM is played by Alexia Traverse-Healy
Ali Hillis (Liara), Ash Sroka (Tali), Brandon Keener (Garrus), and Ike Amadi (Javik) are all listed as "additional voices."

I think I'll wait with believing any of that until next week.

[TheodoricFriede]

I can see a conceivable scenario that say, Tali or Garrus were contacted shortly after the battle of the Citadel to be in a new story or maybe read off a codex entry or two for the Nexus, whether the realized it was for the Andromeda Initiative or not.

You have to admit, it would be neat if the codex hologram for quarians was Tali explaining quarian traits.

Javik is the only one that doesn't make any sense.

[Alienmorph]

Yeah, either some olovid in the aftermath of the battle of the Citadel, or maybe some interview bits about Shepard after his/her presumed death, since the Arks left right before Cerberus put the commander back togheter. That would have much more sense to be in the game than those... other audio logs with that other guddamn character.

But Javik... ? Dafuq?

[HellBovine]

At this point it's clear there's no way I'm gonna be able to finish my trilogy playthrough in time for release. I think I'm gonna just take my time and let some of the big problems get ironed out before starting on the campaign. Maybe try out the multiplayer.

Maybe the whole fish eye thing will be fixed by the time I finish ME3.

[Raga]

Then they either canonized that those characters survive or there is some minor capacity to "import" decisions.

[Alienmorph]

Then they either canonized that those characters survive or there is some minor capacity to "import" decisions.

That would potentially be even worse. If Shepard's crew is somehow still alive 600 years in the future, could mean that Shepard is canonically dead and that the crew left a fucked-up beyond repair galaxy with the second wave of Arks.

So I'm gonna hope it's just some audio and videologs cameos and we can at least keep our headcanons...

[Spartanburger]

Well, some could be voicing logs of some sort, like with Liara.

However, I suspect it's more of a "same actor, different character" kind of thing. Kinda like how Mark Meer had a ton of different roles throughout the original trilogy, despite also being the male player character.

The characters they play aren't listed. Just "additional voices." I only listed their Original Trilogy character next to them in case someone who doesn't really follow voice actors (like me) would know who I'm referring to.

[TheodoricFriede]

Then they either canonized that those characters survive or there is some minor capacity to "import" decisions.

Its more likely exactly what they are doing with Liara. Having her read a passage from her own book.

[Croatsky]

I have a tip for you guys if you plan to play Trial.

DON'T PLAY ON INSANITY! It took me over 9 hours to complete what most people completed in 5-6 hours. For that I fully missed out on multiplayer.

[SciFlyBoy]

I plan to run my play through on the hardcore equivalent.

[TheodoricFriede]

Normal please.
I've beaten all the Dark Souls Games, I dont got shit to prove.

[Dragaros]

Andromeda's IMDB page updated with the full cast

Archon is played by Robert Kazinsky
SAM is played by Alexia Traverse-Healy
Ali Hillis (Liara), Ash Sroka (Tali), Brandon Keener (Garrus), and Ike Amadi (Javik) are all listed as "additional voices."

Huh.

I could see how the Andromeda Initiative collected news reports about the Saren-Geth-Sovereign attack on the Citadel, or about Shepard himself/herself, which included interviews from Tali and Garrus. It would be very important for the historical record.

Or the Initiative asked the quarians for an interview for their cultural center and Tali, being someone who'd just gotten back from her pilgrimage as a friend and ally of he famous but presumed dead Commander Shepard, and with some relatively good press and popularity about her right after the battle of the Citadel and familiarity with aliens having served on the Normandy, was appointed by the Conclave to record a vid explaining quarian culture and history. Especially since we now know without the quarians, the Initiative would have gotten nowhere. The quarians came to them with the data collected from the geth's super-relay-telescope.

[DarkStorm]

https://www.twitch.tv/totalbiscuit playing the multiplayer right now

[Alienmorph]

Angry Joe is also about to livestream some ME:A.

Just had 10 minutes of loading screen with ME3's depressing as fuck music. Yay...

[TheodoricFriede]

Angry Joe...

i dont know. That guy complains about stuff thats spectacularly stupid.

He complained that his Nintendo Switch moved in the dock when he was holding the dock in mid air and shaking it.

[Alienmorph]

I was just saying he's streaming too. I've actually switched to TB. I'll spoil myself properly the singleplayer once proper let's plays of it are avaiable.

[Deano]

Hey I only looked up one thing. You'll have to ask someone willing to dig through more.

But if you want to know what i found, check my post in the spoilers thread.

It was the one thing that mattered to you, but I've checked the thread anyway.

[TheodoricFriede]

It was the one thing that mattered to you, .

Indeed.

[magnuskn]

At this point it's clear there's no way I'm gonna be able to finish my trilogy playthrough in time for release. I think I'm gonna just take my time and let some of the big problems get ironed out before starting on the campaign. Maybe try out the multiplayer.

Maybe the whole fish eye thing will be fixed by the time I finish ME3.

Yeah, I've stopped the ME2 playthrough. I am tempted to just start ME3 to freshen up my combat skills, so that I can play Insanity without trouble. Or I may just play World of Tanks for a few days.

[Vol]

Finished ME2. The leap in quality is intense, at least at first. As you go through, the reused assets and lack of unique art does become noticeable, but it's still a fantastic game. Did get a number of hard locks, game breaking glitches, and some wonky animation, more than I ever remember. And the inconsistency between areas that loaded off a timer (parity) and actual load time (SSD) was interesting.

This game made the characters into characters. ME1 hinted, ME2 was meat. For the most part. Garrus really didn't get much, I was surprised at how few convos he had, given how he's made turian super-Batman/Shepard's best friend. DLC was pretty good, LotSB being the standout, though the shooting gallery in Arrival was kinda fun. Dialogue was constraining at times, when I wanted to be nice to someone but couldn't, or mean but couldn't (ARIA), but by and large I had decent choices. Ended full Paragon/third Renegade or so.

Tali still was the best squaddie, so that hasn't changed. Writing, personality, quests, romance, A+. Funnily enough, people on other sites still harbor anger at Talimancers, even after all these years.

I found myself less annoyed with Legion this time around, I suppose the years have calmed my righteousness. And reminding EDI that AI isn't crew was mean, but cathartic. It's still rail-roady, like in ME1 where you have to defend Geth to Tali's face, but my jimmies are less rustled.

Samara was great still, even if her Code seems even stupider than before. Her loyalty mission was even more explicit in why helping Morinth would be fucktarded than I recalled. There's literally zero reason if you do the conversations and know what Morinth's about. Romance triggers were much less sensitive, Miranda's was easy to avoid, though Jack's seemed to end in hurt feelings even if I never flirted once, couldn't get a post-base convo out of her because of it.

Yada yada, ME2's still a solid sequel.

[HellBovine]

Couldn't stand having to defend the AI's in ME1, always just said goodbye when that part of the converation popped up instead of trying to say quarians were bad for trying to destroy the robots which killed more than 99% of their population.

Only conversation that was worse was the Wrex conversation where you compare how the humans suffered due to the first contact war to the genophage. That one especially makes Shepard look completely ignorant.

[Sites32]

I've been playing the trial now for hours and felt I haven't really done that much, been talking with anyone I can, been enjoying it for the most part. I haven't really noticed these terrible animation problems I keep hearing about. A few glitches here and there but nothing that says this game is shit. I'm really enjoying it.

[Spartanburger]

After about half a day of reinstalling (twice) to fix some leftover errors of failed mod installations and finally getting both the Extended Galaxy Mod and A Lot Of Textures (ALOT) working, I've started ME3.

Two things I've noticed.

1. The underlying unreal engine debug code in ME3 is volumes better than in ME2, and even moreso than ME1. Particularly in the way it takes tiled screenshots. Those are the screenshots that force the game into a resolution that is a multiple of the game's current running resolution, so you can take 8k screenshots on a 1080p monitor if you wanted. In ME1 and ME2, this was done by "moving" the screen to different locations of the shot and zooming in, such that a 2x2 tiled shot would move the screen around to four different locations and stitch them together. You could set a blur amount that would take more tiles and blur the edges together to prevent artifacts between shots, but ME1 had a darkness filter over the screen that darkened the view towards the edges of the screen. This filter is not removable, and shows up in each tile, so you get these dark bars throughout your shot. ME2 had a similar issue where any and all post-processing effects (lens flare) were also calculated based on what the camera was seeing, so a tiled shot in ME2 that had a significant lens flare would be merging different intensities and types of flares due to the different positions of the camera, preventing a number of good shots from being made.

ME3 however, makes these commands super easy. The tiled shot command forces it all into one tile, in such a way that you don't get any of those artifacts. Plus, entering the freecam mode automatically disables the HUD, so you no longer have to enter another command to do that.

I dunno, it's a small thing. It made me really pleased. ME:A supposedly has a similar thing via NVidia Ansel, but that's hardware and software locked to Nvidia cards and GeForce Experience for completely arbitrary reasons, so fuck it.



3. Mass Effect 3 is a lot better than I remember. I still don't like the tone very much, but holy shit, the animations, the sound, the shaders, the cinematography, the voice acting, the gameplay, all seem miles better than what I had just experienced in ME2. If this is truly going to be my final run through of the series, I believe I am finally hooked in the way it was intended to be.

[magnuskn]

Yeah, also just started ME3 to get prepped combat-wise for ME:A. But, man... as Spartanburger said, the animations, voice work and combat are really high quality. Honestly, what I've seen in those 1 1/2 hours of playing the game in terms of facial animation leaves the videos I've seen of ME:A in the dust. Yeah, yeah, it's "fine", but that isn't the same as "good" (with The Witcher 3 being "excellent").

Combat on Insanity actually is easier than in ME2, because the combat controls are far better. If ye olde Biotic Charge / Nova combo works as well in ME:A as in ME3 (with some Pull in-between to round things out), the game will be a breeze to play through. Having the Cerberus Harrier does help, though.

[TheodoricFriede]

If ye olde Biotic Charge / Nova combo works as well in ME:A as in ME3 (with some Pull in-between to round things out), the game will be a breeze to play through. Having the Cerberus Harrier does help, though.

Amusingly, I was a pretty diehard Vanguard, but my last playthrough of ME3 has made me never want to play that class again. I felt like it only ever worked about 50% of the time.

[Raga]

Then they either canonized that those characters survive or there is some minor capacity to "import" decisions.

Its more likely exactly what they are doing with Liara. Having her read a passage from her own book.

Yea, but that would necessitate them surviving all 3 games because there would be no point asking them before that. They are literally just some random turian and quarian before ME3. Why would anybody care about getting them to record something for the Andromeda Initiative before that?

[TheodoricFriede]

Yea, but that would necessitate them surviving all 3 games because there would be no point asking them before that. They are literally just some random turian and quarian before ME3. Why would anybody care about getting them to record something for the Andromeda Initiative before that?

Battle of the Citadel.

Rockstar crew of the Normandy.

I think that's more than enough.

[Someone With Mass]

If ye olde Biotic Charge / Nova combo works as well in ME:A as in ME3 (with some Pull in-between to round things out), the game will be a breeze to play through. Having the Cerberus Harrier does help, though.

Amusingly, I was a pretty diehard Vanguard, but my last playthrough of ME3 has made me never want to play that class again. I felt like it only ever worked about 50% of the time.

Even though I never played Vanguard in the singleplayer, I know how frustrating that class can be. Especially when you CHAAAAARGE the big baddies like the Banshee, Atlas or Phantom.

[TTTX]

Yada yada, ME2's still a solid sequel.

I would rather say that ME2 is a solid game rather then a solid sequel.

Shepard isn't important for this plot and isn't really needed, unlike ME1 where Shepard was touched by the beacon and such. ME2 you could put Garrus or Vega in the main role (and they kinda did in the movie he was in) and the plot wouldn't change all that much.

[magnuskn]

If ye olde Biotic Charge / Nova combo works as well in ME:A as in ME3 (with some Pull in-between to round things out), the game will be a breeze to play through. Having the Cerberus Harrier does help, though.

Amusingly, I was a pretty diehard Vanguard, but my last playthrough of ME3 has made me never want to play that class again. I felt like it only ever worked about 50% of the time.

I remember it working almost always as intended in my last insanity playthrough (four years in the past by now ^^). Of course I had played multiplayer extensively at that time and as such my combat skill was a lot higher than now.

There are some moments on Thessia where you got unreachable enemies and then it gets a bit dicey, but that's what your squadmates are there for. One just has to take a second gun, so that you have some spare ammo.

[magnuskn]

Found a video where someone goes through all the skill trees (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhd8cgv5kcw in case someone else is interested). Charge/Nova works a bit differently now. Complete shield restoration is one of the two last options (the other is 75% cooldown reduction, you normally get 50% shields restored) and there is no half-nova option and Nova has a 12 second CD now. You can choose the last skill tree option to have it consume shields and have no CD, so you can do the old combo, but not with half your shields being used.

Charge has a base CD of 8 seconds. You get a base 35% reduction on the CD of Charge as your second point into the tree, so that's base 5,2 seconds recharge.

That probably kills the old "Use Double Nova to bridge the CD for Charge" trick which made combat on Insanity such a breeze for me in ME3. However, with enough points invested into the biotics tree (You can get 15% base in the "Offensive biotics" (snicker ) tree and another cumulative 2% for every point invested into the entire biotics tree) so I think there is a good chance that the cooldown can be brought down so substantially that Charge/Nova will become a good combo for the mid- to later game, and of course for NG+ runs. We'll have to see if weapon weight can improve the CD on abilities (ye olde 200% recharge time you could get with mods in ME3), which would be another factor. There are weapon weight reduction skills in the combat tree.

[Someone With Mass]

Yada yada, ME2's still a solid sequel.

I would rather say that ME2 is a solid game rather then a solid sequel.

Shepard isn't important for this plot and isn't really needed, unlike ME1 where Shepard was touched by the beacon and such. ME2 you could put Garrus or Vega in the main role (and they kinda did in the movie he was in) and the plot wouldn't change all that much.

I seriously doubt that the dirty dozen would follow either of those on a suicide mission.

[TTTX]

I seriously doubt that the dirty dozen would follow either of those on a suicide mission.

most of the dirty dozen aren't there for Shepard, only Legion, Tali and Garrus are.

Grunt is a tank Krogan, he wouldn't care who lead him as long the leader is strong.

Samara is there because of a favor Shepard did for her.

Zaeed is there because of the money.

Kasumi is there because of the favor Cerberus promised.

Miranda and Jacob are there under TIM's orders.

Thane is a dying man that wants to do some good before he dies, which is why he joins.

Jack is there because Cerberus files she wants.

Mordin is there again favor Shepard did and he likes the challenge.

[Dragaros]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UojW3AGFZA

[Dragaros]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lz9dj30wwQo

[Dragaros]

[Dragaros]

[Dragaros]

[Someone With Mass]

When pyjaks become gremlins.

[magnuskn]

I'm not sure I like the new Turian model. They seem much more gangly than the ones from the trilogy. I liked the more "solid" version.

[Deano]

Where does this come from? I pre-ordered the deluxe edition but have none of my single player extras.

[SciFlyBoy]

Have they mentioned how we are supposed to get the Elite helmet we watched the six Initiative videos for?

[Croatsky]

Here is my Non-Spoiler ME:A Trial impressions:

Mass Effect Andromeda starts out with first elephant in the room. Character Creator. Not only is it a downgrade from what we got in Dragon Age Inquisition, but it's also more limited then CC from ME trilogy. While it does introduces new hair styles, facial hair styles, more hair colors, eye colors, tattoos and scars, Bioware still removed hair styles and facial hair styles from previous games along with eyebrows. While surprisingly you can make good looking Ryder easily, it is still an utter disappointment on how options are limited on how you want to create your Ryder.

After you're done with CC, you start the game and are introduced with an amazing in-game cinematics, very well created tutorials, lot's of fun platforming and exciting new combat. Addition of jetpacks truly did changed this franchise's combat into something, give you a ton of versatility and flexibility. With that combat is founded deeply with it's RPG roots, with a ton of options on how you want to play this game and more tools to switch things to defeat your foes. With that you are also challenged by very competent A.I. that will use tactics to defeat you. However your squadmates A.I. is lacking, way too aggressive and they get themselves killed too easily. On Insanity, you will need to use squad commands a lot to make sure your squadmates don't go where they shouldn't go.

Side quests are very well developed and fun, there's very few generic quests you'll encounter. Explorations is fun and varied, however Nomad handles poorly on keyboard. While a major improvement from Mako, it is clearly made for controllers in mind.

Sound is just absolutely amazing in this game, there are very few games that are on same level. Music in other hand is good. I can name only a couple of OST's that are close to being great, making it a disappointment due to how iconic and memorably ME trilogy OST was. Level design is amazing, a perfect synergy of combat balance and world design.

Lack of manual saving in Prologue and no quick save option at all are a big issue, due to my personal paranoia of game crashing. Speaking of which, game performed decently well for my medium range rig. Game did froze to me more then once, but it's fixable by turning off overcloacking for your CPU.

Without going into spoilers, introductory story is very good while characters initially are also pretty good. Ofcourse it's all too early to judge, but I'm liking what we have so far.

Overall this game feels great and it's lots of fun. While it has it's negatives, it's positive far outweigh them. I am pretty much impressed by the trial and can not wait for it's release next week.

[DarkStorm]

the CC?

[TTTX]

the CC?

character creator.

[TTTX]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blvX0FFQwmA&list=WL&index=14

[Deano]

Have they mentioned how we are supposed to get the Elite helmet we watched the six Initiative videos for?

I could just equip from my loadout, it's the only bonus gear I've got for single player.

Played some MP, its a lot a harder from before. But it's still the fun it was in ME3. Shame I was having audio glitches where I could hear my teammates noises and abilities, as well as big enemies like they were right next to me. That will need patching soon.

Edit: Annihilation field is busted, try it out.

[NCLanceman]

Here is my Non-Spoiler ME:A Trial impressions:

Mass Effect Andromeda starts out with first elephant in the room. Character Creator. Not only is it a downgrade from what we got in Dragon Age Inquisition, but it's also more limited then CC from ME trilogy. While it does introduces new hair styles, facial hair styles, more hair colors, eye colors, tattoos and scars, Bioware still removed hair styles and facial hair styles from previous games along with eyebrows. While surprisingly you can make good looking Ryder easily, it is still an utter disappointment on how options are limited on how you want to create your Ryder.

*snip*

I'm going to nitpick for a second here. Bioware didn't "remove" anything from Mass Effect character creator, for the good and simple reason that in the switch from Unreal Engine to Frostbite they had to rebuild everything from the ground up. It's a bit like saying that a building that didn't get rebuilt after the great 1909 Chicago fire was removed by city planners. Having some idea of the work involved here, that bit is slightly unfair.

That being said, overall it sounds like my rampant impatience in preordering might pay off after all!

[HellBovine]

Don't see why they couldn't have shared assets with Inquisition to get the human faces. Other than the sweaty look of the skin, human faces looked significantly better.