Mass Effect: Andromeda First impressions, Day 10

Warning, cannot confirm this blog post will be spoiler free. 

After 10 days of exploring remnant vaults, destroying kett constructs, exploring the city’s on Aya and Kadara, placing on other worlds, and just generally blowing shit up on theses new worlds, I’d like to report on what else I like about ME:A and what i dislike about it.

First the plus’s:

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1. The new worlds are impressive to explore, with obviously more detail than ME1, released 10 years ago now, with massively improved textures, shaders, mesh’s and antialliasing. The Frostbite engine is still running wonderfully so far.

2. The story’s sped up a lot since I got set loose on my first open world, Eos. There was a good number of side missions on every planet so I’m busy enough. After exploring and reactivating each remnant vault on each of the 7 designated “golden world” and establish an outpost, it’ll open up new questline’s to pursue, most notably an encounter with a remant architect, a massive serpentine robot that has to be sent into orbit to make it safe for your outpost to explore and expand (you can actually find the architect you sent into orbit if you rescan the planet.)

Now let’s talk about the things that I didn’t like, Hated or just ticked me of:

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1. The stiff, rigid facial animations. This is really just when it comes to humans, actually, but still. I mean, seriously, what happened? The animations in ME1 was way superior too what its new progeny is. I’m pretty sure the colonial director, Addison, was breaking the fourth wall when she said, “I’m sorry, my face is tired.” You think Bioware would, with 5 years to create this, would spend a little more time on this. Or maybe thats part of the story , as we’ll find out in one of the upcoming downloadable content packs. Who Knows? Maybe the kett are stealing other races facial expressions. as well as their lives. So either it was a major fail or major boon when it comes to DLC time (if you haven’t already figured it out I’m sarcastic, very sarcastic.)

 

 

 

 

 

Did Mass Effect: Andromeda Mess up with the New Alien Races?

Spoilers ahead, read at your own peril. 

In Mass Effect: Andromeda, two new alien races are introduced, the militaristic kett and the emotional yet tough angara who the kett are in direct conflict with. The kett follow a military hiearchy that’s sort of like a religion. For example, the Archon (their

The Archon, a semi-religous autocratic military leader

leader in each theater of war) they refer to as “the Highest one.”

Next we have the angara. They’re emotional, tough, wary at first of new species and …. well they’re pretty just like humans in a lot of ways, ways that make them extremely uninteresting and boring.

 The angara are pretty alike to us in other ways, like their facial structure which resembles humans in many ways (similar bone structure over soft exterior tissue.) There speech patterns match our’s after a translation program has been established and

Boring me since 2017

 synced to your omnitool (a universal device and weapon if need be.) There government also appears to match ours with layers of beaucracy and commerce laws to regulate their exceeding small market.

The kett, on the other hand, are somewhat interesting, Mainly because of how military and religion seem mix together. While they don’t believe in any sort of higher power, they worship something called exaltation. Because all kett are sterile, they need to convert other races in order to reproduce, like they’ve been doing with the angara since they’ve arrived in the Heleus Cluster. There are many stages to leading up to exaltation, including gene testing, selection, preparation and entrancement.

while the angara may seem more realistic, there just not as exciting and interesting as the kett are. I think Bioware made a huge bumble in not working more on the angara to make them more alien and therefore more interesting to players.