Games | Superior Realities

I think it says something that even after spending almost 100 hours on my first playthrough of Mass Effect: Andromeda, I was still left chomping at the bit for more.

Thus, while it took me months and a couple excellent DLCs to convince to play Inquisition a second time, I started on my second playthrough of Andromeda quite quickly.

At times I regretted doing it so soon, as the game was still quite fresh in my mind. It did feel like a bit of a grind at times.

But more often than not I continued to enjoy myself. Andromeda is a truly special game the likes of which we are rarely privileged to see. I still have trouble fully articulating in rational terms exactly what I love so much about it — most likely it’s a confluence of factors — but regardless it’s a game that clicks for me in a way few others do.

I made it easier on myself by skipping most optional content and focusing almost entirely on the essentials: main story, crew missions, finding Arks, and of course Ryder Family Secrets. It only took me about half as long as the original playthrough.

I tried to make a lot of different choices, which allowed me to examine just how much your choices actually matter in Andromeda. It seems to depend on the choice, sometimes unpredictably so.

It does seem to be well and truly impossible to permanently sour your relationship with any particular character. Having been buddies with Jaal the first time, I resolved to do everything in my power to piss him off this time, but while he spent a lot of the game giving me the silent treatment, he nonetheless ended the game by telling me I felt like family. In this context it seemed bizarrely out of the blue.

On the other hand, I did somehow get a totally new (to me) scene with Drack at the end of the game this time. I’m guessing this is because I made more choices he liked?

Also, be prepared for a surprising amount of heartbreak if you don’t convince Avitus to become a Pathfinder.

Overall, I’d say choices in Andromeda are more meaningful than they seemed to be the first time I played, but there’s still definitely room for improvement on that front.

On the subject of choices, I opted to romance Cora this time around. It’s much less of a disappointment than Suvi’s romance, though I have seen better. It’s a lot of flirting and very little actual relationship stuff, which is a bit strange, but on the plus side it does make Cora feel a lot more three-dimensional by allowing her to show a softer side, and I think that’s the best thing an in-game romance arc can accomplish.

I was going to complain that Scott feels rather flat as a character, but then I remembered I felt the same about Sara. I still think I’d prefer her a little, if only because she takes up a lot less screen space. Scott is surprisingly huge, and it was quite a jarring adjustment after playing exclusively female characters in my Mass Effect career to date.

One other thing I want to address is the new game plus mode in Andromeda. It’s fantastic.

The only thing of any significance that doesn’t carry over is AVP, and that hardly makes any difference anyhow. Your inventory, your skill choices, your credits, your strike teams, your Nomad upgrades, your research data… it’s all carried over.

You can continue with the same character, design an entirely new Ryder, or swap to the opposite Ryder twin while keeping the same custom appearances of both. The last is what I did this time, meaning my Sara from the original playthrough was an NPC this time. That felt a little strange at times.

This playthrough saw me hit the gear cap of level eighty. I farmed up a trove of crafting materials and proceeded to craft myself a final set of optimized gear.

Not only did I make all the items I need for my current build, but I constructed weapons and armour to support every build I can ever see myself attempting. On any subsequent playthroughs — and oh, there will be more — I won’t have to bother with crafting, or picking up mineral nodes, or scanning every little thing, or mining with the Nomad, or hunting down those stupid hidden caches, or even looting enemy corpses. I never have to worry about items or resources again. I can simply focus on the story.

I am free from the tyranny of loot.

My only complaint is that it took one and a half playthroughs to get to this point. This is how the game should have been from the start.

Over the years, I’ve mostly been consistent about blogging on every game I’ve played, but there are exceptions. Usually games that I didn’t play for very long. I don’t have enough to say about each one to fill a whole post, but I thought it might be interesting to collect them together into one quick list. Today, the unblogables will come to light (all right).

This isn’t necessarily an exhaustive list of games I’ve played but not blogged about, but these are the more noteworthy ones.

WildStar

I played WildStar during its open beta, and I actually wrote up a fairly extensive impressions piece for a paying client. Unfortunately, due to circumstances outside my control, the article never saw the light of day.

The fact that I never returned to WildStar after the beta should give you some idea of what I thought of it. I did like the housing, at least. Every MMO on the market should be rushing to steal WildStar’s housing system wholesale.

The combat was also pretty fun solo, though it turned into an incomprehensible rainbow spew in a group setting. And the environment art grew on me — like playing a Dr. Seuss MMO — but I never did learn to like the character models.

Overall, though, I found the glacial pacing, grindy gameplay, and obnoxious forced humour were enough to turn me off the game pretty fast.

I regret that my article never saw the light of day, because I feel like I was one of the few who predicted WildStar’s collapse early on (if anything I underestimated how badly it would crash and burn). But now I can’t prove that, so my opportunity to gloat has been denied.

I could just see that this was a game that didn’t know who its audience was. It has a deep backstory, but Twitter-style word count limits on quest text. Its constant humour and silliness screams casual game, but the actual gameplay is a brutally grindy homage to the days when MMOs were more like second jobs.

Skyrim

I can definitely see how Skyrim could be an amazing experience for a certain kind of gamer.

I’m not that kind of gamer.

Really my gripe is that it’s mislabeled. It gets classified as an action RPG, but it’s not. It strikes me as more of an exploration sandbox/kleptomania simulator. And again, that’s fine, and they do it well enough, but it’s just not what I’m looking for in a game. The phrase “a mile wide and an inch deep” does come to mind.

EVE Online

I thought it’d be the infamously cruel and ruthless community that drove me away from EVE — I did love how the very first thing the tutorial tells you is “don’t trust the other players” — but actually it was the clunky UI and stiff gameplay that I couldn’t get over. After a couple hours, it was just making my brain hurt, and not in a fun TSW kind of way.

Lord of the Rings Online

As a big fan of both Lord of the Rings and MMOs, LotRO seems like a game I should love. But when I finally got around to trying it, I barely lasted an hour.

It’s the same old story: It’s a WoW clone, through and through. When I want to play WoW, I’ll just play WoW.

And more importantly, if there’s one setting that doesn’t belong in that mould, it’s Lord of the Rings. In a Lord of the Rings game, I do not want to be doing meaningless kill ten rats quests for faceless NPCs. I do not want to be an overpowered god who can one-shot any foe with a dirty look. I want to feel the texture of the world’s history and challenge myself against epic foes.

Give me The Secret World: Middle-Earth Edition, and we’ll talk. I’d also settle for Elder Scrolls Online: Middle-Earth Edition.

I also found it a profoundly unappealing game from a visual perspective. I know Lord of the Rings Online is considered one of the most beautiful MMOs out there, but for the life of me, I’ll never understand why. It’s not just that it hasn’t aged well (although it definitely hasn’t aged well), but the fundamental art style is just unpleasant. Everything is muddy and dull and bland and just… ugh.

Ironically, the character models — the one aspect of the graphics that does usually garner complaints — was one aspect of the graphics I didn’t mind. They’re not great, but they’ll do.

I will grant that getting to visit the Inn of the Prancing Pony was really neat, and I am often tempted to give it another try. Maybe I’d like it better with a different class (I was a hunter), but the only other one that strongly appeals to me on paper is warden, and you have to pay for that.

Pay-gating classes is a really good way to make sure I won’t play your game.

I suppose if any LotRO players out there want to suggest a (free) class they think I might like, I’ll take it under advisement. Despite how my above ranting may come across, it’s a game I want to like.

Viking: Battle for Asgard

This was some no-name title I picked up dirt cheap on a Steam sale just because Vikings.

I actually made it pretty far in the game before I called it quits. It’s very mindless and has no real plot, but the combat was delightfully brutal, and it was enjoyable in a simplistic sort of way. I was also impressed by some of the huge battles you can participate in; it’s surprisingly rare to find games where you can participate in large scale battles as one of the boots on the ground.

The main problem was for some reason the developers decided to stick a bunch of mandatory stealth missions throughout the game. They felt totally out of place compared to the rest of the game, they were very frustrating, and after a while I just couldn’t be bothered anymore.

The Witcher

I didn’t like the combat.

That’s pretty much all there is to say. I gave up after about an hour because the core gameplay was just too unpleasant for me.

I know everyone’s over the moon about Wild Hunt these days, but having seen Moiren stream some of it, I’m not getting what the fuss is about. Seems like a very standard open world fantasy game to me. It certainly doesn’t look bad or anything, but I also feel confident that I’m not missing much.

Transistor

I think the surest sign video games are now being taken seriously as an art form is that, as in all art forms, there are now emperor’s new clothes situations where incomprehensible titles are praised simply for being incomprehensible. Enter Transistor.

They just sort of dump you into the game with little to no explanation of the controls, the game mechanics, the story, the characters, the setting, or much of anything else. You’re just left to fumble blindly and hope for the best. I feel like it might have been an interesting story if I’d had the faintest clue what was going on, but I didn’t.

As frustrating as that was, it was losing abilities upon death that soured me on the game permanently. That’s a strong contender for the worst design decision I’ve ever seen in a game. It’s the traditional RPG formula in reverse: Every time you fail, it gets progressively harder. It makes for the most unbelievably miserable experience.

I did like the artwork. I’ll give it that.

Superior Realities

Category Archives: Games

Mass Effect: Andromeda Second Playthrough Complete

Gaming: The Unblogables

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