Category: ARPG

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Game Ramblings #37 – Mass Effect: Andromeda

More Info from EA

  • Genre: ARPG/Third Person Shooter
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: PC (Origin), Xbox One

I’ll be the first to admit that I thought the original Mass Effect trilogy was not as good as most people thought it was.  While I definitely enjoyed the games, they always struck me as being solid, but not overwhelmingly good ARPGs.  Their combat was always the high point for me, but I never considered it up there with the quality of a typical Bioware title, let alone even being their best sci-fi series.  With that being said, you can expect that I came into this with a lot lower expectations than a lot of the general internet public, and I suspect my impressions of Andromeda will also follow that.

It’s somewhat appropriate that this is the first Mass Effect that the newer Montreal team is working on, as in a lot of ways, this game follows a similar pattern to the original Mass Effect.  It’s very distinctly a start to something bigger that will be established in future titles.  The story starts to establish a lot of starting threads, but only hints at the larger problems that future games will definitely establish.  The gameplay has also leaned back toward the original, with a lot more emphasis on exploration of open environments while travelling around in a vehicle, rather than the more structured linear levels that the later games started to head towards.  At the same time, it shows a lot of rough edges like the original that I can only assume will be worked out as the team gets their feet under them on titles of such large scope.  So, in the end is the game actually good?

The core combat is definitely a high point here.  The core of the combat is still there from the original trilogy, with the core third-person shooter elements backed up by the use of biotic and tech-based powers.  Like the originals, the skills are earned and powered up via skill points given when leveling up.  Where I think things start to depart is that the Montreal team has leaned even heavier into the action elements that the first game sometimes had a tendency to avoid.

There’s no longer options at all to pause and aim mid-combat, so there is significantly less time spent in menus queuing up skills.  These are now loaded into profiles that can be hot-swapped, allowing you to setup a number of preset configurations based on what style of loadout you need.  It also felt like there was a much larger emphasis on dodge and cover mechanics, with enemies flanking me within encounters, leading me to jump between cover on the fly as I was picking off enemy targets.

Especially important is that the guns feel fantastic.   The weapons I used felt like they were appropriately powerful, with steady but manageable amounts of recoil, stat-modifiable accuracy, and obvious power.  I largely did a soldier main-class build, so most of my upgrades were in supporting weapon damage and my own defense stats, so my main emphasis wasn’t on heavy use of skills, but in finding weapons that I was able to quickly and efficiently remove targets from the encounters.  While I ended up finding a handful of favorite weapon types that I was most comfortable with, each weapon category had a large variety of individual types.  For example, assault rifles had anything from high rate of fire pray and spray weapons, to small magazine burst fire, to single-shot pseudo rifles.  This variety extended through the other types as well, so I’d imagine it would be hard to not find some weapons you like, whether you want to use sniper rifles to pick off enemies from a distance, or shotguns to get up close for big damage.  Also worth noting is that you can hybridize a lot of weapons through mods, adding anything from scopes to stabilizers to bring aspects of your favorites to other weapons.

Where things really started to lose their shine was when I was out of combat.  While the core lore surrounding the Andromeda galaxy was interesting, the individual character interactions ranged from simply being decent to being downright bad.  The voice acting in general was all over the place, with a lot of the larger moments accentuated by lifeless voiceovers.  It’s also worth noting that the larger internet complaints about the facial animations are pretty accurate.  I’m not going to fault the team that much for going with a more procedural-based animation system given the scope of the game, but it’s pretty clear the system could have used some more time cooking.  It also didn’t help them that Frostbite games in general have never handled facial animation that well (seriously, take a look at Mirror’s Edge Catalyst), and you can really see the weakness of the engine in trying to handle heavily story-based content.

The lack of polish also extends to the UI.  There’s a number of places where the UI flow just did not work well at all.  Crafting was generally a chore, having to first learn recipes, then back out to a different screen to craft them.  Comparing items within the inventory was a crap shoot at best.  The scanning of worlds within the galaxy map was an extremely slow process, despite the inclusion of a cutscene skip button within the last patch.  This is on top of the fact that pretty much any of the game’s soft locks that I ran into happened because the UI would get into a bad state and block input into other areas.  I’ve heard from more than one developer that this is not an uncommon problem with Frostbite, so again this goes back to an unfortunate situation where the engine seems to not really be ready for this kind of large scale single-player experience.

In the end my opinion of Andromeda is really not much different than my opinion of the original trilogy.  Without a doubt this game has some rough edges, and definitely should have had another 3-6 months to clean some things up.  That said, I absolutely enjoyed the experience, and got 50 hours out of it before hitting the end of the game.  If there’s anything that I think is unfortunate about the situation, it’s that the team was probably stuck between a rock and a hard place here.  EA very likely mandated release in March to beat the end of their fiscal year.  They also definitely mandated the use of Frostbite 3 over UE3 or UE4, so there was a complete loss of knowledge of the toolset used to make the original trilogy.

Hopefully by the time Andromeda 2 comes out, development will be a bit cleaner, but at least for now we’re starting off in a place where things can grow into something great.  If nothing else, they can lean on the combat systems they’ve built and go from there.

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Game Ramblings #35 – The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

More Information from Nintendo

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Wii U

I kind of expected this one to not live up to the hype, especially given the reviews it was getting up to release.  However, for me it definitely nailed it.  Even given the quality of past Zelda games, this is a tremendously special game.

As far as open world games go, there’s a certain set of expectations involved with what you’re going to see as a player.  Most of them have some form of collecathon of things all around the world, a relatively loose structure in how you get between different quests, and more recently, some way to reveal portions of the map to the player as they explore.  Breath of the Wild certainly sticks to some of these conventions, but in doing so they’ve also shaped the conventions in a way that make the game still feel distinctly Zelda.

Nintendo went all the way with the story being entirely open world.  Once you finish the tutorial you’re given a couple quests as is typical of the genre.  What isn’t typical is that one of them is literally to go kill Ganon.  From this point forward, you can either explore and do things that will expand your repertoire, or you can literally go finish the game.  More than any other open world game I’ve played, this very quickly establishes the expectation here.  You can do whatever you want, whenever you want, and finish the game whenever you feel like it’s time to do so.  Everything else that is typical of Zelda games falls into this setup.  What also isn’t typical is that the tutorial gives you all of the items and skills you will earn within the game, upgrades not withstanding.

Despite some of the lead in news, dungeons are there, but you have to earn your way to them, and they can be done in any order.  The dungeons themselves focus more on puzzles than combat, and tend to be somewhat shorter than past games.  However, what they lack in length, they make up for in quality.  The core theme here is puzzles tied to environment manipulation.  Upon completion of the core puzzle, there is of course a boss fight, this time acting as proof of mastery of the skills earned at the start of the game.  While not being a necessity anymore, the quality of the dungeons absolutely made them worth completing, if for no other reason than the story elements they provide showing the past of the world.

It’s also worth nothing that despite the reduction in dungeon count and size, the world itself provides more than enough to cover this missing element.  Within the world you can find over 100 individual shrines to complete, as well as towers that provide the map viewing coverage typical of open world games.  While these things do provide the way to fast travel, these are also the main puzzle element present in Breath of the Wild.  Each tower tended to focus one on specific skill in manipulating the environment to get to the point where you could climb and complete the tower.  On the other hand, each shrine effectively acts as a fantastic mini dungeon, with a huge variety in what is available.  These ran the gamut of what was available in the game.  Some of the shrines were just simple combat rooms.  Some shrines had a focus on individual skills like manipulation of air for gliding, or the use of fire-based weapons to burn a path to the end.  Still some of them were there purely for amusement, like one physics-based minigolf shrine.  While completing the shrines did ultimately give rewards that resulted in heart and stamina upgrades, they also provided a nice way to break up the game as I traveled around the world of Hyrule.

Despite all the changes from the usual Zelda formula, the one that was most striking to me is how they changed the use of music in the game.  Outside of towns, there is hardly any music, apart from some sporadic piano melodies.  Even within towns, the music was typically fairly subdued, and the bulk of what could be called the soundtrack was composed of ambient noise from the abundant wildlife throughout the environment.  When the music does kick in though, they definitely aren’t shy about bringing in some hints of the past whether it’s night or day.  Overall while it’s not as in your face as is typical, this soundtrack is another memorable one in the books for this series.

What became quickly apparent playing this game was just how polished it was, and it’s always in the little details.  There’s a ton of wildlife around, and it’s not just there for show.  It can be hunted, and the supplies you earn from doing so can be cooked into food to heal Link in battle.  Because you CAN climb anywhere, you end up climbing just for the sake of it.  Because shrines are then typically glowing orange against the background, climbing anywhere typically gives you new goals on the horizon to go for, further providing you with new things to do.  Large scale bow aiming with the analog stick is there, but subtle motion controls provide an extremely fast and precise way to accurately aim in small amounts for things far in the distance.  Camps of enemies can be cleared in straightforward combat, but it’s also just as practical to roll a rock down a hill onto the group, send fire arrows into explosive barrels, or lead enemies into traps by chucking bombs into their midst.  Those are all little separate things, but I hope it’s making my point here.  The amount of polish in place is of a level that only a few other companies ever attempt to approach. This is on a level typical of companies like Naughty Dog or Rockstar, and I’d dare to say it surpasses them.

All that said, weapons that can break are still a terrible idea.  It’s not that weapons are hard to find in BotW, but when you’re trying to fight a boss and you run out of weapons from lack of preparation, it can be extremely frustrating.  This did push me to collecting Korok seeds to upgrade my inventory, and by the end of the game was a non-issue, but boy were early large scale fights super obnoxious when weapons started running out.

I’m the type of person that will pretty much buy hardware on launch without fail.  Regardless of how many games are coming out, there’s going to be something in there I want to play.  What is rare is that I recommend other people to buy hardware just for one game.  Breath of the Wild is one of those.  If you have neither a Wii U or a Switch, you should get one just for this game.  Go grab a system for yourself or go grab one from a friend.  Just find a way to go play this.

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Game Ramblings #33 – The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages

More Info from Wikipedia

  • Platform: Game Boy Color
  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Also Available On: 3DS Virtual Console

I figured it was about time to start getting into the Zelda spirit again.  I’ve always been a big fan of the portable Legend of Zelda titles, going back to getting Link’s Awakening as a pack-in with my original Game Boy.  Back when the two Oracle titles came out, I made the effectively random call to buy Seasons, and never really made it back around to playing Ages.  With the upcoming release of the Switch and Breath of the Wild, I figured it was a good time to get back to it.

As classic as it is, the base gameplay of the top down Zelda games has always been pretty much the same, and Ages is certainly no different in that regard.  You’ve still got a pretty decent sized overworld, with movement restrictions slowly opening up as you gain more items.  Combat is still simple, with four-direction sword attacks and a series of combat items that can also be used for damage.  However, Ages does have some of the more interesting takes on items in the series.  Rather than a hook shot to pull you to places, you have a switch hook that switches the locations of Link and the object he hits, giving an effective reposition mechanic against both enemies and environmental obstacles.  Rather than a bow and arrow, you gain a seed shooter, which can shoot a variety of seeds with different effects, and importantly can shoot in eight directions.  And then there’s the Cane of Somaria which….makes boxes (yes, it’s actually useful).

Like Link to the Past’s Dark World, there’s a second form of the world, this time centered around a past/present time travelling mechanic.  Initially the two versions of the world simply act as a way to enter individual dungeons in specific time areas.  However, as Link gains more ability to freely travel through time, puzzles start spanning across both time zones as plants grow, islands move, and later generations of people flourish.  There’s also a number of spots where actions in the past influence changes in the world of the present, giving some of the better logic puzzles that any of the games, both 2D and 3D, have had in the series.

Given its age, this game has really aged quite well.  For as good as the 2D Zelda games have typically been, I would be pretty confident putting the Oracle games at least close in quality to A Link to the Past, and certainly better in quality than the rest of the 2D entires.  Even now the game is absolutely worth playing, with both high quality gameplay, and a well put together world.  Visually it’s pretty obviously an old Game Boy game, but the emphasis the development team put on smart color use and clean sprite designs has meant that everything still looks pretty damn good to this day.

Do yourself a favor and pick this up on the 3DS Virtual Console, as well as both Oracle of Seasons and Link’s Awakening DX.  If you’re looking to scratch that 2D adventure itch, you aren’t going to find better than these.