BRING MASS EFFECT BACK

[LordMelda]

We as a community need to do something to bring back the mass effect universe!!! They had so much planned for the game and it tanked because it became cool to hate something, We as a community can bring this back.

[Fred_vdp]

At least two key people at BioWare have expressed interest in bringing the Mass Effect series back (Mass Effect producer Mike Gamble, and General Manager Casey Hudson). They're focusing on Dragon Age 4 at the moment, which is still very early in development, so it will be a long while.

[freault]

I hope they do, they can still do a lot with The Mass Effect Universe.

[AeromusPrime22]

It would be nice, but unfortunately it was a bunch of the community that turned on game because they couldn't deal glitches and didn't get the same exact thing from the previous games. Granted publishers need to give developers sufficient time that they don't launch bugged games but people also needed to realize that ME itself had to move on.

As Fred_vdp said, Bioware plans on returning to ME but it's going to be a while. Of course that depends if Bioware survives the mess that is Anthem.

[mushashi7]

Mass Effect Andromeda has a great base story and characters. The graphics are stunning and the music is epic. The main layout and design is typical Bioware/Mass Effext.
The idea of a pathfinder gives Bioware an option to build sequels as they did with the original trilogy.

I really like this game a lot. I do. And I play it from time to time. Like right now.

There is one thing I think is overdone, and that is the departure and arrival cutscenes showing the Tempest. Too much time is spend on these. These scenes are really nice designed and the Tempest is a beautiful vessel. But, well, how shall I put it? It feels as the entire game is an advertisement for the Tempest, so to speak. It tend to get boring looking at these cutscenes over and over again. Every time you travel you see them. Maybe short versions could have been used to avoid the feeling of repetition? I tend to become annoyed having to watch them so often.

But again, in my worl Andromeda is definetely a Mass Effect game. I compare it with the very first Mass Effect. It feels like ME Andromeda is the first part of a trilogy designed in the same way:
You travel from world to world while you are introduced to characters, races and technology. The story gets more and more complicated but also more interesting. There are some really nice personal interactions and stories. Very touching as well. You have the romance options as before and influence on the outcome of every ingredient.

I could imagine a reunion with the characters in a sequel would have a similar effect as the in the first trilogy.

[AeromusPrime22]

The Tempest cut scenes are annoying, but they are the loading screen so I doubt much could be done. It's also why you can't fast forward through them.

I would agree MEA is most like the original for the reasons you stated and I believe the developers mentioned at some point they wanted to go back to exploration but fix all the issues from the original (i.e. the aggravating landscape transversing with the Mako). I would also say MEA suffered from an issue of the original in that all the buildings you came across felt much the same; I'd like to see more diversity in that, plus more large settlements.

For the most part I wasn't big on the characters, but a lot of that has to do with the hellish development. I wouldn't mind seeing them back but they definitely need to be enhanced.

I really wish EA had ignored the tantrum throwers and put out more DLC; even one more planet to explore would have been nice. Hopefully there will be a sequel that adds to Heleus.

[Fred_vdp]

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@mushashi7 wrote:

There is one thing I think is overdone, and that is the departure and arrival cutscenes showing the Tempest. Too much time is spend on these. These scenes are really nice designed and the Tempest is a beautiful vessel. But, well, how shall I put it? It feels as the entire game is an advertisement for the Tempest, so to speak. It tend to get boring looking at these cutscenes over and over again. Every time you travel you see them. Maybe short versions could have been used to avoid the feeling of repetition? I tend to become annoyed having to watch them so often.

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@mushashi7  Those scenes are to mask loading screens. The issue is that they're timed for the current generation of consoles, which run on extremely outdated 5400RPM mechanical hard drives by default. If you have the game installed on an SSD, the videos are indeed a whole lot longer than it should take to load the map.

There is a PC mod that does exactly what you want: https://www.nexusmods.com/masseffectandromeda/mods/467/

I wonder if this will change in the future for console version. The PlayStation 5 will have an NVMe drive and will be fully backwards compatible. A demo shows that Spider-Man's load times when fast traveling were reduced from 15 seconds to less than a second. I really hope, with PS5 in mind, that BioWare releases a patch for the PS4 version that makes these cinematics skippable.

[mushashi7]

@Fred_vdp 
I suspected this. And after all it's better to look at the Tempest than a black screen?

I have the game installed on an HDD so I guess it's ok.

Some games are extremely fast loading. I remember Fallout 4 before they patches it. The maps loaded almost immeadiately. I guess it's all about good scripting?

[Fred_vdp]

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@mushashi7 wrote:

Some games are extremely fast loading. I remember Fallout 4 before they patches it. The maps loaded almost immeadiately. I guess it's all about good scripting?

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Possibly. I noticed that Dragon Age Inquisition loads a lot of assets on the spot, which was a problem for me when I first played the game in 2014. Sometimes companion characters wouldn't be at their spot because they hadn't loaded in yet, so you had to leave the room and come back for them to pop up. The issue got away when I upgraded my graphics hardware and switched to an SSD.

I also noticed that load times in Frostbite games are significantly longer when Mantle is enabled as the API instead of DirectX. EA doesn't seem to use Mantle anymore, however, probably because it's an AMD feature and very few people use it.

Some more load time shenanigans that I found in Dragon Age Inquisition: 1. Disabling Origin in-game can make the initial startup take over a minute. 2. Applying a shortcut command to increase the framerate in cutscenes has the welcome side-effect of significantly reducing load times.

I didn't have any load time issues in Andromeda once I applied to shorter cinematic mod. Anthem, on the other hand, is a bit of a joke in that respect. Maybe I could try the Inquisition trick, but I have no interest in reinstalling Anthem, so I won't bother.

[JamieK81]

I would like a new ME game, as long as they don't release it with severe amount of plot holes and if they plan to release completions to these plotholes via DLC, then they should release them no matter how well or poorly the game does in sales.

I mean why make poltholes if you don't plan on fixing it eventually?