The Press Box - 'Achievement Oriented' on 'Mass Effect: Andromeda' and 'Moral Combat' (Ep. 289)

Episode Date: March 24, 2017

The Ringer's Ben Lindbergh and Jason Concepcion have a spoiler-free discussion about their impressions of the perplexing 'Mass Effect: Andromeda,' Bioware's brain drain, and the ways in which recent releases have raised the bar for big-budget games. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And tell us what you recommended with the hashtag Tripod. That's TRYPod. Thanks for spreading the word. And welcome to Achievement-oriented, the ringer's official gaming podcast. My name is Ben Lindberg and I'm a writer for the ringer.com. And on the other line, wearing the dead-eyed stare that can only come from being a Mass-Effected Andromeda character or from listening to Mass-Effected Andromeda's dialogue. It's my colleague, Jason Concepcion. Hi, Jason. Wah, wah, wah.

As you just said to me before we started recording, it's not that it's bad. I just hate everything about it. Yes. That is true. I mean, it's not a bad game. Yeah. But every detail about the game could be improved in some way. Yes. And we will lay out exactly what those ways are in just a second. Later in this episode, we're going to talk to Patrick Markey and Christopher Ferguson about their new book, Moral Combat, why the war on violent video games is wrong.

But first, we have to inflict some verbal violence on a video game, I'm afraid. and you and I have done a dialogue about this game for The Ringer, so you can go read our thoughts there, but we're going to share them now. So as promised, we've been playing Mass Effect and Dramana. We've been playing the PS4 version. We haven't finished it yet because who could ever possibly finish a video game in 2017 when a new good one comes out every week that's 60 hours long. But we've gotten far enough into it that I think we have. grasped the structure and the problems. So do you want to lay out the backstory here and the premise of this game for anyone who hasn't played the Mass Effect trilogy as we have?

Sure. This is a completely new story from the previous trilogy. And gosh, what is it about that second trilogy that second sci-fi trilogy that peers have problems with? So you play as either a male or a female captain rider, who is kind of like your new shepherd allegory. And it's basically a space colonization game now. You've been sent out to Andromeda, to a golden planet, to lead 200,000 souls to, you know, this new planet that you're going to inhabit. But when you get there, the long-range scans were faulty. There's something wrong with the planet. Now you have to figure out what.

And various things happen that I don't really want to spoil. But that's basically what it is. You need to explore this planet. Find out what we're wrong. There's an alien race, the Ket, that's kind of opposing you. You don't know necessarily what their goals are, but you need to find out. And so in the course of exploring this planet, you know, romance your subordinates as usual and various adventures take place. Yeah.

So the idea is that this is a reboot. This is going to be a new kind of Mass Effect. It's no importing from previous saves. This is completely different. It's a new protagonist, a new ship, a new galaxy, but it's really not that new. It's basically Mass Effect, at least in its structure. And Mass Effect One, you know, like really the feeling of Mass Effect One where you can see the promise, but also it's a highly imperfect game and you're not really sure what it's going to end up being. Right.

And that's strange because in video games, often sequels get more refined as they go. I wrote about this a little bit in our dialogue, but we don't really have the same apprehension about sequels in video games that we do about, say, movies. Because I think historically they haven't been as story and writing dependent. And so when you find a gameplay formula that works, you can recycle it over and over and tweak it and make it look prettier. but it's still fun and we'll still keep coming back for more. And maybe that's changing now that a lot of games have raised the bar for story and Mass Effect played a part in that. But now the same old Mass Effect, I don't think, has the same impact as it did when it first came out.

And the bar has been raised by a lot of indie games, a lot of recent big budget games. So this game has a tough assignment because not only does it have to measure up to, Mass Effect's legacy. We really like Mass Effect. It has to be as good as those games or better. And it also has to be as good or better than the games we've played recently, which are really, really good. I came to this game directly from Breath of the Wild, came to that directly from Horizon Zero Dawn. Those are both fantastic games that really do everything Andromeda does better than Andromeda does them. So it's a tough assignment. And that's probably part of, of what's affecting my reaction to this game, but definitely not all of it. Yeah, should we talk about specific things that we don't like about it? I would say obviously the most famous, the most infamous thing right now, it would be the animations, not just the facial animations, which certain loud segments of the video game playing world,

they're taking way too much of an interest in, but the animations really feel clunky. There's a choppiness to them. There'll be, there's a thing you'll see when you kind of trigger a cut scene or a dialogue scene where your NPCs will kind of like teleport into the last few feet or a few meters into the animation. This is the first Mass Effect game on the Frostbite engine, you know, whatever that means. But one could imagine that, you know, creating a whole new game on a whole new set of tools where you have to create the tools, create the systems. that create the game from scratch would create obstacles. And, you know, the overall effect is just that it feels not quite finished graphically.

And, you know, I don't even like, like, even the camera angle that follows you. Yeah. Feels too wide in it. Like, so that there's things that happen in the distance and you can barely. And sometimes you can't, you really can't pick them out. It's just, it feels, you know. And during a lot of the. the in-engine cutscenes, you can control the camera, but it will default to a certain view that

often is just way off, like your character will be in a corner of the screen or you won't even see who you're talking to. And then you'll remember, oh, I can move the camera around. But there's no real reason to need to do that, except that often the action isn't centered in the frame. There are a lot of little things like that. And that hurts the game because this is a series that's pretty dependent on storytelling. and liking the characters that you spend all this time with and reading tons of text and going deep into dialogue trees.

And when the characters aren't emoting at all or aren't emoting appropriately and the performances, the vocal performances don't match the faces. And the faces are just scary and inhuman to begin with. It's just it kind of takes away from any emotional resonance that would be there. and I'm not sure how much of it would be there anyway because the writing is just noticeably weaker than it was. And I think we've both been trying to review our memories and wonder whether because we were younger when we played those games or because gaming wasn't as sophisticated when we played those games were the originals not really as great as we remember is the difference not so stark, but really is. I think from what I can tell, there are just a lot of. lines that will make you cringe in this game? Yeah, I went back and I watched a bunch of Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 gameplay,

just to kind of get a sense of, am I overthinking this? Is it just me? The problem with the dialogue and the writing happens on several. One, there are corny lines that happen. There's one thing, there's a battle early on where you're fighting the cat really for the first time, and they have these, this isn't much of a spoiler, but they have these kind of of like alien creatures, four-legged animals that help them, that cloak themselves. And one of the, one of the, you know, space colonists you're with is like, are those dogs?

It's like, we're, you know, we're on the far-flung corner of the galaxy. You're a hard, you know, like you're a hard-bitten space marine. Well, these aren't dogs. Like, what are you talking about? And so there's that. And then there's also the problem that you touched on with this kind of like, emotional and tonal responses that don't sync with what the emotional tenor of the scene is or what the prompt is. I wrote about this a little bit in the thing that you come across.

One of the dialogue that you can get into on the home, like the space base, the arc is with a very distraught alien woman. And the tones of writers' responses are like, okay, sure. You know, it's like this weird flippancy to that doesn't match this kind of like the desperation of the scene. And that happens quite a bit. And then there's, there'll be like lines that are repeated a lot and kind of like in the flow of play. It's just not great for a game that historically has been based on dialogue. Yeah. And the landscapes and the vistas, I think they'd look good in a vacuum.

No pun intended. I think that it suffers somewhat from comparisons to games I just played because nothing, at least on a console, looks better technically than Horizon Zero done, and nothing really looks better artistically than Breath of the Wild and Andromeda falls short in both of those areas. It's a good looking game, I think, but it doesn't blow me away the way that those games do. If there were an easy snapshot-taking mechanic in this game, I don't think I'd be using it. So that's part of the problem But I think the bigger problem is that I just don't get the sense of discovery That I'm supposed to get from this game This is a game about traveling to a new galaxy

A wild distant galaxy And you're the pathfinder And you're supposed to explore and set foot on these worlds That no one has ever set foot on before And it just doesn't give me any of the same sense of discovery That I get even from going to Nintendo's new high roll It's just there's a lot of handholding. I mean, I think there's more exploring than there was in previous Mass Effect games.

There are definitely bigger outdoor areas. But everything is gated in some way. There are walls and barriers. You can't just go wherever you want. And there's always an arrow pointing you to your next objective. There's never really a question about what you should do or where you should go. And so most of the aliens return from the old Mass Effect games. there are a couple new species that just kind of look like the old ones.

So it just doesn't feel like a different place that I am the first to settle. I just don't get that exhilarating sense of discovery and adventure that some games give you, even though that's supposed to be the premise of Andromeda. Well, I think the one thing that I think we both agree on that really hampers the feeling of exploration is the scanning mechanic. Oh, yes. which is crucial to acquiring resources and minerals and things for crafting and for ranking up and research and development. So what it is is you have this kind of wrist-held device that you can use to scan objects to find out if they contain anything useful. The problem being there's no visual cue at all about what you can scan and what you can't.

And you can scan everything. I've scanned rocks and they've been useful and I've scanned like this. you know, kind of like abandoned shipping container and it's been useful. And then other times it hasn't been. You can scan machinery, alien machinery. Sometimes it's useful. Sometimes it isn't. But there's no rhyme of reason and there's no, you know, gameism glowing thing.

There's no pop like pop up alert that you might get on your wrist thing. Like, oh, I sense that there's, you know, the computer senses that there might be something useful in the earth. There's none of that. So what happens, what ends up happening is you scan everything. You're constantly scanning. everything with your scanner up, it slows you down, it slows your movement down, and it's just, it's just so annoying. Yeah, there's one scene where you land on a pretty picturesque alien world,

and if you take out your scanner, the aliens you meet tell you to put it away because they don't trust you. And so for this one scene, you can't use the scanner, and it's so liberating. I just had to look around and not have to worry about scanning any vaguely technological looking thing. So I agree about that and also just the menus and the user interface. Again, I'm comparing to horizons, which I thought worked really well and was very streamlined and I didn't mind the crafting or anything. And in Mass Effect, it's just really hard to tell if a certain weapon is going to be better than the one you have or if they're all just divided into tiers and affiliations.

Like there's a remnant tree of weapons and there's a milk. way tree and an endrometer tree and it's just so convoluted and it takes so much time to navigate to anything you want to get to and like any bioware game this is just so stuffed with side quests it feels like overkill at times almost every NPC you meet it seems like gives you some sort of task that is often fairly repetitive and good luck keeping track of all of those things because they're just like it's just it's so difficult compared to again horizon which just divides everything into like priority tasks or you know side missions or just chores and you can easily see everything that's active and how important it is and in mass effect it's all just

sort of piled into this folder inside another folder and there's just so much like clicking from screen to screen that that just adds to the length which is Already ridiculous. Yeah, well, games are too long as we keep saying to each other. Another example of just like the small details that just make you scratch your head about this game, your MAKO, which drives actually quite well. You hit triangle to get into the MAKO, but it's circle to get out of it, which is like, what? And so when you're in the MAKO, if you hit triangle and you hold it, you basically evacuate back to

space back to your ship, which I did the first, like, a couple times because it's like, why do you make the button to get in and out of your vehicle different? I don't, that doesn't make any sense to me, but they did do that. And those are just little things that are like, why, you know, like, that you figure a game of this lineage from a, from a studio of this kind of renown, they would catch that. And also like, you know, when you refill, there's ammo boxes kind of scattered around the world. You just kind of walk on to them to, to replenish.

your ammo, but, and then there's a very, very small text box that says ammo refilled. And it disappears like in a half a second. So if you don't see it, you don't know. And there's no, your controller doesn't shake. There's no sound. There's like no feedback other than this very, very, very small text saying, ammo refilled that disappears like very fast. Yeah.

That you've refilled your ammo. And these, these little feelings compound to create a feeling of just a game that's unfinished. It feels very unfinished. Yeah, I didn't mind that so much because I'm just sick of pressing buttons to interact with things. And it was kind of nice just to walk in the vicinity of something and have it work. And we should say, while we're saying vaguely complimentary things, that the combat is better. We both enjoy the combat. It does sacrifice some ability to manipulate your squad mates, but it gives you the ability to allocate your skill points across different classes so you can invest in biotic abilities and also be a shooter essentially. And I like

that. There's a new jet pack which adds some verticality to the encounters. So the combat, thus far as I think my favorite thing about the game, and that's maybe not the best sign with the Mass Effect game, which have depended on action to varying degrees, but have always been largely story driven. And here it's more of the combat. that's keeping me going. Yep. I agree. You know, at any time that you can put me in control of a character that has essentially Jedi powers,

I'm into it. Yeah, the combat is just as good as the kind of polished stuff that was in Mass Effect 3, particularly. But yeah, I mean, I don't necessarily play Mass Effect to fight people, but I'm happy that that's good. Yeah, right. And there are some other nice little touches. Like, I do like that the dialogue options don't always. is divide up neatly into the good guy response and the bad guy response, the paragon and the renegade.

They're often four options and it's not totally clear what the morally right answer is and you're not going to ruin your relationship with someone based on one response. So I like that. I'd like it more if the dialogue were better, but still a nice touch, I suppose. And I don't know. You've pointed out that it feels unfinished. and it does in a lot of ways. And it shouldn't because it's been in development for five years, which I don't know,

maybe that's just not long enough to make a game this huge anymore with the level of quality that people expect. Or maybe as we touched on on the site, there's just been a lot of brain drain from BioWare. And this is the first Mass Effect game since the company's last remaining co-founders left, since Mass Effect's creator and project director left, since I guess it's the second Mass Effect since the lead writer of the first two games left, although he has since returned to work on Star Wars stuff.

And the game even lost a lead writer and a senior developer during development. So there have just been a lot of people emigrating from BioWare for one reason or another. there's been an exodus and maybe that's because the company is kind of a victim of its own success and everyone wants to get the people who were responsible for Bioware's past successes working on their own games like the lead writer who left during this game's development went to Bungee to work on Destiny 2 which I'm sure could use some help in the story department too so that's a problem and as you mentioned there's a new engine too so having to deal with a new engine and a new creative team and essentially a new trilogy all in one game is a lot to ask and

it shows. Yeah, and it's it's the first game created by BioWare Montreal rather than instead of BioWare Edmonton, although in the past Montreal and some of the other cities have been involved. It's the first time Montreal has has the creative lead and that's because Edmonton's working on some unnamed other project. Yeah, there's just a lot of change behind the scenes and I think you combine that with a new console generation, with a new story, with new characters. It's just too much churn overall. And I think in that sense, probably BioWare should be lauded for a game that's as good as it is. I mean, you know, we really, I think we, it might have been too big an ask, really, to

considering all the changes that have gone on with this company and with the development arc behind the scenes to think that, you know, they just come up with this world crushing AAA, you know, ancestor to one of the greatest series of all time. I think we just, we probably expect it a little bit too much from them. And I think we're both planning to finish it. It's not so bad that we're just going to stop. It's a good game. Yeah, I mean, maybe that's partly just because we're fans of the franchise

and I feel almost obligated to see where it goes just because of all the time. I've invested in this series, but I'm having enough fun to keep going. And I'm curious to see if it improves in any way. And so if you haven't played the previous Mass Effect games, well, don't start with this one, I guess. But if you haven't, or if you haven't just come off of Zelda and Horizon Zero done, maybe you'd have a more positive reaction than we did or if your expectations were lower coming in. because there are things to like here, and it's definitely a lot of content if you're just looking

for something that's going to occupy you for a while. Andromeda will definitely do that. But for us, it just doesn't live up to the past precedent of the series and of recent AAA titles. And so ultimately, we're disappointed. Yes, unfortunately. Sad to say. In the rest of this episode, Jason and I talk to Patrick Markey and Christopher Ferguson. about their new book, Moral Combat,

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