Eventually, I came to realize that any conversation with an NPC that did not involve my Ryder taking her helmet off was not worth having and the quest was probably not worth doing. But Andromeda, and many BioWare games, try to drown players in interactions, the vast majority of which are not substantive or engaging.īioWare is particularly guilty of combining this idea with quests, where you can have an NPC with 20 lines of dialogue, but they ultimately just give the same type of fetch quest as the last 40 people you talked to. There is a reason that stories usually focus on a core cast of characters.
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It’s like watching a TV show and having the main character stop every five minutes to have a conversation with their barista, mailman, dog-walker, and the person stuck in traffic next to them. Even if there is a good story or script buried in each of those, it's going to get drowned out by all the extra crap.
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To me, that’s like saying a new book is 2,000 pages long, or a movie has an ensemble cast of 500 speaking characters. They were using that as a point of pride, but in practice, it’s actually a detriment. In the run-up to Andromeda, BioWare was bragging that you could have detailed conversations with 1,200 characters and there was more dialogue than ME2 and ME3 combined. It’s so big that in order to be that big, it has to be stuffed with fluff and filler, and all of that heavily dilutes from the main story and interactions/quests that are actually worthwhile. The other issue I mentioned is a much larger one, and has to do with BioWare’s entire RPG philosophy that has really come to a head in Mass Effect: Andromeda. I have to believe that BioWare will take this feedback and make this aspect of their games a priority moving forward in order to avoid a repeat of this situation. But with everything looking so great, that’s why these poor human/asari animations stand out so severely. Seriously, if you’ve played it, you know what I mean, from the environments to the armor and clothing to the non-humanoid alien races. Similarly, this is an especially stand-out issue in a game like Andromeda because everything else is flat-out gorgeous. Instead, that clearly wasn’t the case, and in some instances it seemed like the game had actually moved backward.
This has never been Mass Effect’s strong suit, as lord knows there were bad facial animations in the old games, but the hope was that five years later, significant improvements would have been made in this area. You can do all the world-building on Earth, but as soon as two characters start talking to each other and they look like a pair of RealDolls, all of that gets thrown out the window.