#andromeda critical

[luna-drinker]

A lot of people on here are vocally anti-capitalist but will lick the boots of companies that engage in anti-consumer practices

[mass-effect-anonymous]

CONFESSION:

I'm a gay man. I wished that I liked Gil more. I wish that I liked him even a little. I like his actor! The character falls flat for me and for several friends. I'd say that he needs a total redesign, but given his popularity in parts of the fandom, maybe just a slight tune up?

[potatowitch]

I think I may have figured out why I’m struggling so much to get into the story of Andromeda, as opposed to the story of the original Mass Effect trilogy. Sticking this under a cut because it’s a long, semi-nonsensical rant about a game I haven’t even finished because try as I might I cannot stop myself from getting an hour into a play session and getting bored.

With the OT, you’re almost immediately thrust into the “we’re being attacked” mindset. You walk into your first mission and all of a sudden there’s geth attacking, a Spectre going rogue and humanity is threatened. You’ve got a clear goal of “figure out what Saren is doing and stop it”. That energy is carried over through all three games - with 2, you get the “human colonies are being attacked. Figure out what is happening and stop it.” With 3, you get “what did I tell you? The Reapers are here. You have to stop them before the galaxy is wiped out.”

Your overarching mission is straightforward. Your motivations for being there are clear. Your involvement feels meaningful. You have a sense of urgency.

With Andromeda, I couldn’t give less of a shit about my mission. We all decided to cryofreeze ourselves and fuck off 600 lightyears away into a new galaxy and we ... didn’t expect shit to immediately go tits up? Are you serious? Why did any of us agree to this? For ... exploration? Out of boredom? Okay. Valid, I guess. I get you, I do, but that doesn’t change the fact that we put our damn selves in this position. Why do we not have a million failsafes in place? Why do we not have a “The Nexus Hasn’t Been Built Yet Because Hostile Aliens And Weird Space Anomalies” backup plan?

I love the characters in Andromeda. I love the way you can play Ryder as a young, confused dork who is just trying their best with what they’ve been given. It’s one of my favourite character types to play. But I just cannot get past the feeling that everything that’s happening to the crew of the Nexus should have been expected, and I think that’s why I don’t feel particularly strongly about saving everyone’s ass. The game tries so very hard to drive home the sense of “we need to find homes for these people before we run out of resources or get attacked by the Kett” but I can’t for the life of me connect to that sense of urgency the way I could with the original trilogy.

I don’t give a shit about the game’s antagonist. I don’t feel any particular sense of foreboding about the Kett or the big nasty space cloud. They’re just sort of ... there. In little packs of troops that show up at inconvenient times, in little cutscenes where my pilot has to do some gnarly evasive maneuvers ... but they don’t feel like a threat the way the Geth or the Collectors or the Reapers do. They’re also not visually as terrifying - they look a lil silly, ngl. Collectors make me feel uncomfortable with their whole bug hivemind assimilation aesthetic - makes my skin crawl a little. The Geth and the Reapers have this whole techno-horror vibe to them that I adore. They’re a scary enemy. The Kett are ... not.

I don’t know. I don’t even know if this makes much sense. Andromeda is, in theory, a beautiful game. I love the combat systems - though I do prefer Mass Effect 2′s approach - and the jetpack jumping brings me immense amounts of joy. I love that you have the Ryder twins, and that there’s always this worry in the back of your mind about how your sibling is doing. I’m fascinated by what’s going on with the Remnant. The overall story just feels hollow. I can’t connect to Ryder’s motivations the way I can with Shepard’s and that is a massive downfall in the game’s story design.

[dragonageconfessions]

CONFESSION:

I really hope Bioware recycle the DA:I animations, engine and everything for the next game. Not only it would buy them a lot of time, but Inquisition looks really beautiful and good enough. The colours are stunning, the scenarios are on point and all the characters looks really nice. It still amazes me how some mouth animations are so good I can read their lips if I remove my headphones. They look realistic, but not uncanny. I hope they don’t change a thing or try to do something super realistic and end up like Detroid or ME:Andromeda (to me, they are quite uncanny)

[dirtybiowareconfessions]

... but asari do have vaginas. banshees, which are reaperfied asari have vaginas just hanging out. doesn't matter that peebee is an alien or not, because we know they have vaginas, so for peebee to be grinding on a cis sara ryder like that, she'd literally be humping air and getting no stimulation. it's lazy and homophobic on bioware's part because they straight up prioritized m/f in favor of f/f, as always.

Banhees are what (human) Shepard sees, and Asari are known to imitate the appearance of whoever’s looking at them. Plus, how seriously do we take modified by Reapers parts? Cannibals have guns merged with their bodies, it doesn’t mean Batarians naturally grow guns. Husks don’t have genitals at all, it doesn’t mean all humans have smooth groins with nothing going on there.

It’s not a justification by any means, just a reminder people are allowed to headcanon the problem away.

Wlw aren’t the only ones who got the short end of the stick in Andromeda. Out of three F/F romances there’s only 1 with a sex scene, but at least there were 3 options from the start, 2 of them squadmates. M/M had only 2 options when the game shipped, neither were squadmates; one wasn’t even part of the crew, and the other had a blatantly homophobic plot where he’s more of a prop for his straight female friend than his own person.

They’re always going to prioritize straight people over us, because we’re the minority and they need to sell a product. I wish things were different, but… one step forward, two steps back. Honestly, I’ll take an oddly animated sex scene over “how dare you, I’m Straight™” nonsense any time of day.

Hey, at least we finally have a Turian lady to smooch. -edi

[dgcatanisiri]

For anyone who questions why people consider Gil and Jill's relationship to be toxic: What we get of their friendship is one-sided. Gil talks about her more than he does himself. He admits that their relationship involves her talking shit about him, where she calls out how he's 'part of the problem' for being gay, for not having babies the 'traditional' way (which, you would think, given her job as a procreation tech, would instead make her happy, since if he did want a biological baby, he'd have to go to her). When the issue of having a kid comes up, it's about HER, it's HER idea, HER desire - "Jill wants a baby." "Jill wants me/us to be the dad/s." One of these things could be acceptable. All of them together paint a picture where Gil ends up prioritizing her and her feelings at his own expense. And, from the perspective of gay people in our world in 2017, a presumably straight person telling a gay person that they're a 'problem' for their reproductive choices is itself a problem - that is a claim that many people in our world argue makes gay people 'broken.' And I would hope that by the time Andromeda is set, we'd be past homophobia in its myriad forms. BUT, since we live in a world where that is the case, fiction brushing it off and accepting it so casually hurts people by showing that 'oh, well, it's okay if it's just teasing!' Ultimately, it really feels like Jill is a more developed character, despite her barely appearing. Her presence in Gil's life looms over a big chunk of his screentime- she is an unavoidable part of roughly half his character conversations, you need to meet with her to lock in his romance, he brings her up in the finale, even if you aren't having kids with him. She gets an arc, going from procreation tech to expectant mother. Gil's 'arc' is supposedly about him maturing, but this is TOLD, not SHOWN. The Gil you meet when getting the Tempest and the Gil on Meridian have no discernible differences. His development as a character depends on her. If Gil's story gave him more focus, if Gil were a more involved character in his own narrative, then there wouldn't be as many alarm bells going off for people. But considering that Jill ends up being a more developed character with a more solid arc than Gil - he is a supporting character in her narrative, not the lead in his own. THAT is why this relationship is deemed toxic. Because what is in the game prioritizes her, the picture that's painted is of a relationship where he is dependent on her.

[justshepardthings]

/watch?v=MYvJhe9dMtU This video does roughly explain the isses Andromeda had in production that explains the issues behind it. Androemda was really under staffed aparently

Here’s a direct link to the video:

I’ll have to give this a watch later. It sems like this is heavily referencing the Kotaku article that dug into the behind-the-scenes of Andromeda.

[thunderheadfred]

I try not to harp on Andromeda TOO MUCH, cuz i know how much development hell this game went through but......

THE U.I. IS JUST. UHGHGHGHGG. I’m a little surprised no one has modded in a new one yet - maybe it’s not possible or something but yeahhhhhh