descender wrote on Mar 31, 2017, 21:07:
It's the reason why their games were pulled from Steam in the first place. You are free to educate yourself to the extent that you are willing to put in the effort.

It's not just you, it seems that this question comes up everytime a new game comes out on Origin. At some point, people need to know why things happened that happened 6 years ago.

Perhaps, but if a person asks, I'll now be able to simply answer their question without the snark, as you so graciously did with me. Thanks, again!

It's the reason why their games were pulled from Steam in the first place. You are free to educate yourself to the extent that you are willing to put in the effort.

It's not just you, it seems that this question comes up everytime a new game comes out on Origin. At some point, people need to know why things happened that happened 6 years ago.

descender wrote on Mar 31, 2017, 16:35:
So long as EA sells DLC "in game", EA games will never appear on Steam again. We don't have to keep wondering why every time they release a new game.

Thank you for providing the WHY because asking such a question implied the lack of an obvious answer.

descender wrote on Mar 31, 2017, 16:35:
So long as EA sells DLC "in game", EA games will never appear on Steam again. We don't have to keep wondering why every time they release a new game.

THIS, and don't forget the obvious, They Already Have Their Own Marketplace So Why Pay Steam.
It's not like this is rocket science we're dealing with.

So long as EA sells DLC "in game", EA games will never appear on Steam again. We don't have to keep wondering why every time they release a new game.

Dacote wrote on Mar 31, 2017, 14:02:
Is there a facepalm emoji, your search did not include steam. Google can't read minds, at least not yet.

I asked why MEA appears on Uplay's platform and not Steam. Your search results are less helpful as they don't explicitly explain the WHY. Anyhow, here's a cookie for the attempt. Thanks.

Kxmode wrote on Mar 31, 2017, 12:35:

Dacote wrote on Mar 31, 2017, 12:26:

Kxmode wrote on Mar 31, 2017, 00:35:
Launched UPlay and noticed MEA is available for sell. How is MEA available on UbiSoft's distribution platform, but not Steam?

What planet do you live on that does not have google, wikipedia, common sense or basic comprehension?

I know right? How ridiculous of me to ask a simple video game question when a quick search for "mass effect andromeda uplay" produces no usable results. The gall of me!

Is there a facepalm emoji, your search did not include steam. Google can't read minds, at least not yet.

Dacote wrote on Mar 31, 2017, 12:26:

Kxmode wrote on Mar 31, 2017, 00:35:
Launched UPlay and noticed MEA is available for sell. How is MEA available on UbiSoft's distribution platform, but not Steam?

What planet do you live on that does not have google, wikipedia, common sense or basic comprehension?

I know right? How ridiculous of me to ask a simple video game question when a quick search for "mass effect andromeda uplay" produces no usable results. The gall of me!

Kxmode wrote on Mar 31, 2017, 00:35:
Launched UPlay and noticed MEA is available for sell. How is MEA available on UbiSoft's distribution platform, but not Steam?

What planet do you live on that does not have google, wikipedia, common sense or basic comprehension?

Mashiki Amiketo wrote on Mar 31, 2017, 04:10:
Also, having played nearly 60 hours at this point? It wasn't as terrible as people say, there's bugs and glitches. The dialog in spots is as people said very campy and low-quality sci-fi. Overall some of the things are annoying, transiting from region to region for one thing. I haven't had a single crash yet though, even when I played for 12hrs yesterday. The biggest problem I've run into is there is a memory leak, and it causes degraded performance especially if you're alt-tabbing a lot.

I don't think anyone said it was terrible, its just a mediocre fucking experience for something that got 40-50M thrown at it and was in dev for 5 years. It is a B studio game and it shows in almost everything save for the visuals. Some people like B studio games, that's ok, enjoyment is subjective.

Valve and EA had a pissing match over DLC pricing(how much each party got a cut of) when ME2 was released

EA was trying to put in app purchases into its titles that bypassed Steam and cut Valve out entirely while making them take on distribution costs. I try not to take sides when corporations fight because who fucking cares but EA was being ridiculous and still is. Also Origin was long planned, back then there was pressure from shareholders to improve margins in the PC space or re-evaluate due to 'piracy'.

Asmodai wrote on Mar 31, 2017, 01:29:

The Half Elf wrote on Mar 30, 2017, 16:51:
There are just some BAD things that no-one thought out in the game.

The Andromeda Init. is the invaders/aliens. Granted the Kett aren't nice but, "Humans" travel 600 years, don't expect anything to change, show up like they are entitled to everything, go around stealing shit left right and center from poor purple aliens just trying to survive on an ice planet.

Hrm, I seem to recall we also helped out those same aliens to *mild spoiler* fix up their home world vault which was deactivated and slowly killing them...

And there is dialogue that explains we are also the aliens now etc, so their is some realisation about that.

Everyone speaks english (least it was Basic in Star Wars, but still).

There are references to translators in the dialogue, including some bits where NPC's will respond with "that didn't translate properly".

The Citadel was suppose to be finished before you got there but even after 14 months (how the fuck were they suppose to survive, cause if the Hyperion's golden planet was golden then they wouldn't have gone directly to the Citadel/Nexus/whatever it's called).

No one anticipated the scourge which turned everything in to a worst case scenario, and the premise was that colonisation would be established at the same time that connection to the nexus would be.

Why is noone salvaging all the shit all over the place. You can't make 1 shuttle with all the shuttle halfs all over the place?

Yeah, on two hellscapes which kill people if they rove outside safe areas for too long, with limited manpower prior to the arks full of people showing up.

I get the feeling you spaced past a lot of the dialogue at this point.

And WTF is up with the Tardis/Tempest? "It's bigger on the inside" no shit, and why can't I just board the fucking Tempest without going into orbit?

Will give you those two points, climbing on top of the tempest = feel like you're at least 5 times bigger than you are inside it, and yeah, boarding on the ground rather than fucking around launching in to orbit would make more sense.

The transitions are load screens that aren't a static image with a load bar. I don't know if that's better or worse, but it is what it is.

All in all we can agree that he was nit-picking and ignorant at best. Good retorts. Saved me the time and energy.

A friend of mine played both PC and PS4 editions. He says the ME:A hate originates from console players because the console version is abominable. Hilarious how most of us PC gamers weren't aware of that little fact. Look how that bias turned us into little fucktwat whiners ^^

EA and Ubi have had a crossover sale agreement for a long time alreadeeeh (2013 https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/02/19/lakes-boil-ubisoft-and-ea-to-sell-each-others-games/) because they ain't such fucking Nazis as Valve with regard to their stores.

By the way, the "pissing match" wasn't so much about DLC pricing. It was more about selling DLC from within the game, i.e. EA had clickable links in their games which would take you to an EA website where you could buy DLC.

The greedy fucks from Valve disagreed with this practice, of course, since this bypassed their 30% of every sale cut cemented in their TOS. And then EA was kicked from Steam due to their violation of the TOS which they insisted on because they wanted to reserve the right to sell their content their way and not Valve's way.

Steam fantards made a much bigger deal out of this than it really was ("OMG EA no longer sells games via the holy Steam platform OMGOMG!!111"). In reality EA and Valve were pretty relaxed and cool about it all.

Kxmode wrote on Mar 31, 2017, 00:35:
Launched UPlay and noticed MEA is available for sell. How is MEA available on UbiSoft's distribution platform, but not Steam?

Uh you don't know? Old news, Valve and EA had a pissing match over DLC pricing(how much each party got a cut of) when ME2 was released. Origin was the result, and selling on anyone else's platform was the result.

Also, having played nearly 60 hours at this point? It wasn't as terrible as people say, there's bugs and glitches. The dialog in spots is as people said very campy and low-quality sci-fi. Overall some of the things are annoying, transiting from region to region for one thing. I haven't had a single crash yet though, even when I played for 12hrs yesterday. The biggest problem I've run into is there is a memory leak, and it causes degraded performance especially if you're alt-tabbing a lot.

The Half Elf wrote on Mar 30, 2017, 16:51:
There are just some BAD things that no-one thought out in the game.

The Andromeda Init. is the invaders/aliens. Granted the Kett aren't nice but, "Humans" travel 600 years, don't expect anything to change, show up like they are entitled to everything, go around stealing shit left right and center from poor purple aliens just trying to survive on an ice planet.

Hrm, I seem to recall we also helped out those same aliens to *mild spoiler* fix up their home world vault which was deactivated and slowly killing them...

And there is dialogue that explains we are also the aliens now etc, so their is some realisation about that.

Everyone speaks english (least it was Basic in Star Wars, but still).

There are references to translators in the dialogue, including some bits where NPC's will respond with "that didn't translate properly".

The Citadel was suppose to be finished before you got there but even after 14 months (how the fuck were they suppose to survive, cause if the Hyperion's golden planet was golden then they wouldn't have gone directly to the Citadel/Nexus/whatever it's called).

No one anticipated the scourge which turned everything in to a worst case scenario, and the premise was that colonisation would be established at the same time that connection to the nexus would be.

Why is noone salvaging all the shit all over the place. You can't make 1 shuttle with all the shuttle halfs all over the place?

Yeah, on two hellscapes which kill people if they rove outside safe areas for too long, with limited manpower prior to the arks full of people showing up.

I get the feeling you spaced past a lot of the dialogue at this point.

And WTF is up with the Tardis/Tempest? "It's bigger on the inside" no shit, and why can't I just board the fucking Tempest without going into orbit?

Will give you those two points, climbing on top of the tempest = feel like you're at least 5 times bigger than you are inside it, and yeah, boarding on the ground rather than fucking around launching in to orbit would make more sense.

The transitions are load screens that aren't a static image with a load bar. I don't know if that's better or worse, but it is what it is.

NetHead wrote on Mar 30, 2017, 22:20:

eRe4s3r wrote on Mar 30, 2017, 18:36:

..And nobody even yet bashed the voice acting enough imo. The female Ryder is TOTAL SHIT. 0 Emotion in the voice anywhere.

Male Ryder is at least decent. But the VA quality like everything else is just not there. Nothing compared to a Witcher 3 or even original Mass Effect

I don't mean to defend the voice acting, it's often poor and moments that need emotion, exertion etc are worse, also there are a few voices in there which have no business being there even if they didn't sound like they recorded it themselves on their phone while on the toilet.

Though (big but here), I think for a lot of that sub par to crappy voice acting I'm not sure it's the fault of the voice actors. Even taking examples of ones that seem bad are sometimes accomplished actors, have a lot of acting under their belt, previous VO experience and reappearances in shows, things which wouldn't be the case if they always performed as they do in Mass Effect Andromeda.

Basically I strongly suspect there was completely inadequate directing and possibly information given to the voice actors. Expecting someone to put the appropriate emotion etc into dialogue without knowing all the details is foolish, no matter how good they are they can't without detailed context and character information.

Even a single actor's performance changes through the game, sometimes it's fine others times it's poor. Unless all the VO's were deliberately tanking it, which I don't believe for a moment, the blame lies with those who should have been directing them, blame falling back at the studio responsible for it all aswell as signing off on it.

Guess I'm not so much defending the voice acting as the actors, I just don't see it being their fault looking at those things like how their performance changes and past experience.

This game bares the markings of a management disaster if not incompetence. $40+ million, 4/5? years, and EA still apparently willing to wait longer, there is no excuse for this to be the result.

When something succeeds it's almost always a team effort, when something fails management has made a mistake, and this thing has grubby fingerprints blemishing almost every part, a hallmark of the problem being higher up.

Well, I admit that animation and VA play together with management, directing and writers, and you make a really good point that not all of it is bad. I think my real problem (call it a character flaw) is that I can not unsee bad VA+facial animation, but I don't notice good VA as good, I just take it for granted as not being bad. And of course not all VA was bad, it was just not what I expected for a game of this budget level. I had a pretty good impression of male Ryder for MOST of it, that one scene, with the cardinal, is where I actually looked up fem ryders response, and the difference is like night and day. It's as if female ryder had no information about the situation maybe?

Btw, I have to add that I also checked the German VA for 20% of my playtime, and if you think the english VA's have "bad moments" then be VERY THANKFUL that you did not play on German, in German the entire game is a "bad moment", none of the voices fit, and especially Turians ;p

All things to me, the real problem isn't good or bad VA, the problem was that the game threw me out of the immersion hard nearly constantly. Tiny glitches, bah, I played Witcher 3, I've seen the horse do things that would warrant exorcism, but this was a quirk, it was unique. It actually improved my opinion of the game, because everything else was so polished. And when I saw the addon areas I was blown away, I felt like I could really be there.

Maybe it is simply higher expectations mixed with more experiences through being older and having played all these games. I don't even NEED VA as a requirement, but if you put in VA, then it has to be good nearly always or it reduces my opinion of a product.

And finally, and with that I call it day when it comes to Mass Effect:A, I also played several games with great writing (Nier:A) and/or voice acting (Witcher 3 + Addon) recently. And obviously this changes perception, oh well.

I was using Hyperbole when it came to fem Ryder VA, obviously because I had not seen VA being talked about anywhere. Everyone is stuck on animations and faces, but what makes or breaks things for me is the VA attached to those horrors ;p When face does not match what is *said* which in fem ryders case, is nearly every 2nd dialog due to globfaced grinning disorder that they call the default face, well then things are just worthy of Hyperbole, and I didn't like fem Ryders voice from the getgo, I don't like that actors voice, like flat out, so I may not have given it much chance beyond that... but that is subjectivity...


#####

TL;DR, I just expected way more. But you are right, 5 years smells of a management disaster, I didn't even consider that. And if that is really the source of the problems then I am sorry for hating on the VA's, the actors are good people, and some of them are great actors for sure. But I can only judge what I hear and see in this game, I don't stalk an actor through their career (sadly, In case of fem-ryder VA I did, and I did not like the voice at all, in no situation) that is super strange, and not really TL;DR anymore

Drayth wrote on Mar 30, 2017, 21:42:
ere4s3r, totally serious inquiry.. are you playing on console? A friend and I at work were wondering where all these crazy ME:A flip out videos are stemming from. On PC I've only seen the occasional NPC warp into place, which actually happened far more for me in DA:I (seems to happen when I turn to face an NPC, like the system isn't always updating their position in the map when you aren't looking at them).

Another work friend states that his EA Access trial of ME:A was awful on his XBox One in terms of framerates tanking at times, so it's left me wondering.

Nah, I play PC only, but I did play the trial a bit before the 0-day patch and transitioned my save over after accidentally uninstalling the files (don't ask, I had a brain fart), which is how I know that they actually changed Ryders face to be globzilla the grinning alien, I stopped playing as femRyd at that point. Before that 0-day patch (And I am 100% serious here) she looked just fine even in animations and that is what really got me in a bad mindset from the start, the patch seriously changed my characters face. I did, btw, start an entirely new game when the final release came (VPN unlock) and so I saw everything post 0 day patch as well. That time I played male Ryder, which is how I know his VA and facial anim is better.

All the issues I had where in the "real" release version on PC. But thinking about it you are right, it always happened when I looked quickly in 1 direction and then another, especially when things got wacky (biotic throw and stuff) I had seen enemies standing in the air, and stuff like that too. But I dunno how to cause enemies to phase into walls, I think by not looking when you threw them way away the physics somehow glitch out...

On Nexus I definitely had REALLY weird issues though. Mostly involving bumping into people, and whenever dialog initiated.. sometimes characters just flat out phasing out of the world, sometimes they'd get bumped into me or stuff like that. As I learned from a twitter convo, the thing that prevents this is in dialog setup is called "denial zones" and the game somehow does not remove NPC's within denial zones properly when it can't find a path for them "out" this is how you can end up standing within someone and.. well, crazier things

Launched UPlay and noticed MEA is available for sell. How is MEA available on UbiSoft's distribution platform, but not Steam?

Here is a GREAT example of how it should be in the voice actors studio.

Not to add insult to injury here (I do like the game) - but I think the voice overs aren't so great because if I remember correctly there was a voice over contest for pure amateurs to get in on it. I remember I even took a shot at it, have a Reaper audio file around here somewhere but never sent it in. That could possibly account for the less than desirable result (because it wasn't all voice-acted by ME!! lol)

eRe4s3r wrote on Mar 30, 2017, 18:36:

..And nobody even yet bashed the voice acting enough imo. The female Ryder is TOTAL SHIT. 0 Emotion in the voice anywhere.

Male Ryder is at least decent. But the VA quality like everything else is just not there. Nothing compared to a Witcher 3 or even original Mass Effect

I don't mean to defend the voice acting, it's often poor and moments that need emotion, exertion etc are worse, also there are a few voices in there which have no business being there even if they didn't sound like they recorded it themselves on their phone while on the toilet.

Though (big but here), I think for a lot of that sub par to crappy voice acting I'm not sure it's the fault of the voice actors. Even taking examples of ones that seem bad are sometimes accomplished actors, have a lot of acting under their belt, previous VO experience and reappearances in shows, things which wouldn't be the case if they always performed as they do in Mass Effect Andromeda.

Basically I strongly suspect there was completely inadequate directing and possibly information given to the voice actors. Expecting someone to put the appropriate emotion etc into dialogue without knowing all the details is foolish, no matter how good they are they can't without detailed context and character information.

Even a single actor's performance changes through the game, sometimes it's fine others times it's poor. Unless all the VO's were deliberately tanking it, which I don't believe for a moment, the blame lies with those who should have been directing them, blame falling back at the studio responsible for it all aswell as signing off on it.

Guess I'm not so much defending the voice acting as the actors, I just don't see it being their fault looking at those things like how their performance changes and past experience.

This game bares the markings of a management disaster if not incompetence. $40+ million, 4/5? years, and EA still apparently willing to wait longer, there is no excuse for this to be the result.

When something succeeds it's almost always a team effort, when something fails management has made a mistake, and this thing has grubby fingerprints blemishing almost every part, a hallmark of the problem being higher up.