I don't think it is just the women though, the ugly stick covered pretty much every human character in the game. The two most prominent human males, Cockney Dredlockney and default Pubeface Ryder are fucking ugly men when you think about it. They skirt that edge of boyish "could be gay, could just be a weak chinned beta" looks and unkempt homeless person. Then you have the others like the mutton chopped enginqueer who looks like he just stepped out of an early 2000's game with his painted on TV static sideburns. They all look bad, it isn't just the women... although some of the women look particularly terrible.

And nearly every "randomly generated" human I see looks like a five pound bag of dildos filled with 10 pounds of king size gorilla dongs. Between the "unknown race generic brown people" with neon colored hair, the ginger afro'ed human ghost that wanders around the Nexus docks, the "not quite asian because we don't know how to make asian eyes" homunculi, and the unisex multicolored cornrows haircut genderless transhuman weirdos I keep seeing in Pirate World, it looks like they just set their broken character creator to "random" half the time and just said fuck it to the results they got out of it.

I'm not so sure it is 100% SJW's to blame, it feels more like a clunky unpolished character creator run amok. Sure it cuts down on the "there's that exact same guy" deja vu you used to get by seeing the same character model in five different places, but at the same time it really creates some downright fugly and monstrous NPC's.

Meanwhile all the NPC aliens look alike, except for very minor texture changes on the models (just like the first three games).

I have about 30 hours in and ive given up. There are just too many things that bother me and i cant enjoy playing anymore.

Im so sick of how they set up the "inventory" system. Its fucking infuriating. I cant just open my menu and change my load out around whenever i want. I HAVE to be ON a planet, and i HAVE to be next to a supply beacon. OR i have to be leaving the tempest for a mission (not all missions). Just let me fucking change my gear, mods and weapons easily for fuck sake. Sometimes ill go back into the tempest to change my gear into something cool i just got, with the intention to go off planet then back onto the planet so i can pick the stuff i want. Dealing with the bullshit transition screens off then back onto the planet. Only to be put into some movie setup on the re-entry and put into a scenario that doesnt require weapons and i cant choose my loadout. I get they are trying to keep us from "abusing" load outs when on planet and forcing you to pick a setup and stick with it for a mission. BUT IT TAKES AN HOUR TO EQUIP A NEW AWESOME WEAPON YOU PICKED UP IN THE FIELD!!

The transition scenes are total bullshit. Im so fucking sick of them. I could almost guarantee ive spent twice the time in transition screens than in actual combat or even on planet.

The crafting system can suck my short, fat, white dick. Fuck you Bioware. Your fucking crafting system can fuck right off into bullshit fuck off land. Is to the point where i dont even want to research anything anymore. I dont care. Also, i dunno if i fucked up something but i was all excited to make a new weapon. I had my augmentations picked out and i was ready to go. I added the "change to plasma" mod, +2 slot mod, then went to pick my other two mods and i COUDLT PICK ANY OF THEM! THEY WERENT AN OPTION?? I know you cant pick plamsa, then lighting or whatever. But i had a bunch of cool ass mods i wanted to use and i couldnt? Why? What was stopping them? I tried a few more times and there was no rhyme or reason as to why i wouldnt use them? I was so pissed.

Ryder the guy is a total pussy. Total. Pussy. His team doesnt even respect him or give a shit. I dont give a shit either ryder. I hope you die.

Im sick of the glitches. Dudes appearing out of no where. Important bosses stuck in walls then needing reloaded. Enemies just hovering way above you. It happens alot.  Not just a little bit. Im sick of it.

I also got to finish my first "Solve the racist white male abusing a position of authority" mission! Yahhh!!!

WHY ARE ALL THE KROGEN OLD FAG HAGS??? WHAT THE FUCK?? WHO DECIDED TO MAKE THEM ALL HAVE A LISP AND SOUND LIKE A WOMAN?? WHO DID THIS? WHO. DID. THIS?

Seriously, everyone you meet in this game is either A) Alien B) A woman C) POC. There are no white males. At all. None (except for the racist white male in a position of authority mission).

Im sick of it. Im done. Anybody wanna buy a copy of ME:A for xbox one?

And every now and then you encounter an alien woman of color (like the green faced female Turian at the Nexus).

I keep seeing a ghostly white guy with the biggest, Bob Ross meets Ronald McDonald ginger afro in the Nexus docks. His appearance is so dramatically over the top stupid that I keep wondering if it is intentional, or if it is just a glitch of the random character generator.

The digital Benetton ad thing doesn't bother me though. I still find it all unintentionally hilarious. When you think about it, it feels like the white folks back on earth shoved all the minorities into the ark and skittered them off to another galaxy in some zany Golgafrinchian Ark B final solution. Which also explains why they are all so inept, intolerable and prickish.

Update dropped, new Addison vs. old:

Yep, ME:A forums are talking about that the eye changes alone have had a huge impact on how "nice" the characters look, with some thinking they changed more than just the eyes because it just seems "better".  Not great, but movements, facial features, all just a bit more polished.

For anyone interested, there's a video on youtube where i guy explains just what went wrong, and why the humans all looked so bad.  In a nutshell, over-reliance on 3d scanning of actual human models and then outsourcing cleanup of said scans to a no name EA shop in Romania while Bioware worked on all the more alien looking species.

Another interesting note pointed out on ME:A forums, apparently all of the patching has been outsourced as well, and that said company doing the patching recommended two months ago that the release be delayed until June and EA/Bioware declined.  Also of note, the new patch is roughly 2GB, but the patch that the outsource company sent to Bioware was actually 5GB, so there are significantly more items to be patched coming down the pike.

Left one looks hangry, but less like a clown. Which one is the new one?

I thought it was funny when you have a meeting at one point on the Tempest, everyone discusses, then leaves... and Ryder's like...."Uh guys... i didn't say dismissed yet....".  That sure as hell would have never happened to Shepard.  I get the intent, but it's too in your face disrespectful.  Yes, he's wet behind the ears, that doesn't mean everyone treats him like shit when they obviously like him, as demonstrated in the numerous one on one conversations.

The transitions and inventory are supposed to be fixed on the patch that drops today.  Whether that fix helps with your issues, not sure.

My only real complaint with the R&D system is that they give you all this cool shit to build, yet you can only really build maybe 10% of it because research points and mineral resources are so catastrophically limited.  Now... while that might be "realistic" given the scenario, it's not that much fun.... and last time i checked, we all play these games for fun.

The easy way for them to fix it is to allow you to in-line upgrade your already built items, using fewer materials than a full-on new construction.

They also need to adjust the "can be built" items to reflect items you have already acquired in the game. It makes no sense that you can pick up a level 6 rifle, yet when you go to build another one with your mods you have to invest tons of points in researching levels 1-6 before you can build another one.

And of course the already constantly mentioned "why can't I use certain mods" complaints that are never fully explained in the game. You have the parts but they won't appear in your crafting options.

Edit: Cora and Liam have new outfits

you can equip the new shiny weapon off the bat. the problem is then you are stuck carrying it till the end of mission. in the pick up screen there should be an option to equip

Did those twats make her tits smaller? 

I thought the exact same thing the instant i saw the picture.   She's one of the few characters who looks very good in her armor, even bordering on slightly busty.   While her casual outfit wasn't quite as nice, it was still noticeable.  It could just be the angle of the shot, but it does appear that they've downgraded her "assets".

If so, it will be more proof of their desire to SJW things to death, and ruin the game while doing so.

Mother fuckers they are determined to make ALL females look like men....(pretty sure that is what they want...androgynous role reversal is the SJW long term goal I am convinced)

The only "hottish" one is the doc from Game of Thrones (and mostly cause the actress is frickin hot).....and you cannot bang her WTF!!!

Seriously I think humanity shipped off the dregs to this God forsaken Galaxy lol.

As of this game...done with Bioware.  

Wish I could return it...I just didn't believe they would do this to ME games....WTF.

THEY FUCKING DID!!! FUCK!

Also, i had a legit moral dilemma last night playing. I landed on the planet with all the scavengers.

So im driving around and i start engaging enemies. But they arent regular enemies. They are human beings. They are "Scavengers". Why am i shooting my own people? People who came over on the nexus? Why? They just attack me and im supposed to shoot them all dead and blow up any supply stations they have. Why?

Why shoot my own people? What did they do? SAM is telling me i have to just kill them without a second thought, but why?

Shitty fucking writing, thats why.

They actually had a hand-wave explanation for that.

Did you do the quest where Doctor Blugery Tyrell has you scan Scavengers for her on Krogan Tatooine?

Pre update

You can tap X to skip the planet jumping cut scenes....

That ginger bob ross guy is the best.  I see him every time I make it back to the Nexus.

I didn't really think the fundamental single player issues were going to be patchable. Seems like they can patch some of the quality of life stuff which is good... but I was expecting them to be able to salvage the multiplayer. I have lost all faith in these idiots after the MP patch notes, some serious division stuff going on.

"Ok guys, we've heard you. Melee was the only viable play style so we went ahead and nerfed it. I know those weapons were already piss weak but we went ahead and nerfed all of them except for a couple pistols (phalanx out DPSes the mattock). Oh, and if that wasn't enough we went ahead and buffed the AI across the board to go with all those weapon nerfs. Git gud and buy more packs scrubs"

Shit, so essentially they made it so Gold in this game is basically like Platinum. Except none of the Characters have powers strong enough to cheese or bring down the bosses, right? And weapon builds are out the window I take it?

I guess people have been cheesing gold on firebase against outlaws. From what I gather they have been going solely by in game data metrics much like the division did. So if the playerbase tells them it's not funn and most builds aren't viable they turn around to see dating showing them that plenty are crushing gold and assume the game is too easy. I mean, the division got really easy but it wasn't fun so massive tried to artificially inflate the difficulty by nerfing everything. Bioware appears to be doing the same. Hopefully they pull their heads out of their asses but I doubt it. Maybe I'm just spoiled by overwatch/titanfall devs having very active community managers that take player feedback into account above their in-game data collection.

Overall, I'm really happy with the changes so far, though I've only played it a little since the patch.

Skipping the travel animations and upping the carry weight are huge quality of life fixes that vastly reduce the amount of time I'm fucking around/staring at the screen rather than playing the game.  The facial animations/eyes stuff makes some of the worst NPCs better, though it's not perfect by any stretch.

Still don't understand how some of that shit, particularly the unskippable travel animations, took a public outcry to fix vs them realizing it was bad before release.  How useless must their beta testers be?

I don't play MP so I can't comment on changes to that.

Just completed the single-player story. As soon as I was done I met this nice glitch...



It actually scared the crap out of me because I was trying to look at her updated eyes.

I only played for about a half hour last night to check out the new patch. I would have played longer but honestly my interest in the game is waning... I'm trying to finish the story and I think I'm about 75% through the game, but the story is pretty bad, the characters are pretty unlikable and the gameplay is becoming really, really stale, repetitive and boring at this point.

My opinion of the patch right now is "what changed?" because I can't see a lot of differences outside of some minor things they made worse, like adding numerical keys to all the text options and the skip travel prompts that really only save you about 2/3 of the time (any time savings is better, but why do they still put you into the closeup that has to zoom back out?). Everything else feels the same. The characters are all still ugly, janky mwap mwap mwap lip sync'ed plastic faced things that I care virtually zero for, the inventory management and crafting are still clunky, I still saw glitches like animation pops and enemies spawning in mid air in my brief time back on Eos, and I -think- (but I don't know for sure) that they nerfed your weapons in single player as it feels like it takes more hits to kill everything now.

I guess I was expecting more out of this patch... either that or the problems this game has go deeper than they can quickly patch.

Was it something something "brain chemical imbalance" or something?

Yep that was it. She had you scan them to determine they had some sort of stasis related psychosis that turned them crazy. It was a total "oh yeah let me rummage a reason out of my bag of loopholes" moment to explain why the generic human enemies shot on sight.

Hitler Reacts to Mass Effect Andromeda  

(Insert youtube link button not working here)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RwpRQiILHU

I'm pretty sure they didn't change any of the weapons in single-player mode.

I just have to do some random quests on Elaaden and I'll be up to 100%.

What's weird is that I've been 100% on EOS for a long time, but I've done maybe 30% or more SINCE THEN.

I'm starting to wonder if I'll be able to finish the game.

I also ran into some weird performance issues last night, but I think it was related to me having firefox open in the background. I am talking framerates dropping into the single digits... oddly.

So i had my first legit bug that made me cringe.   Yes, i've had plenty of other bugs, yes the writing is off sometimes, yes the facial animations are a bit wonky at times.... but this one actually made me mad, mostly because of how impactful the scene was meant to be, and the bug completely ruined it.

It was a cutscene where the entire Ryder family was supposed to be together.... only they weren't.  Why?  Well..... it's an Alec Ryder memory, so i keep seeing him stare off into space while Ellen, momma Ryder, is talking.  Sara is also there..... so i'm wondering, Where is Scott?  Yeah... that space Alec kept staring off into.... he was staring at Scott..... who was invisible.  And then i get to see Sara leave and put her arm around thin air, aka invisible Scott.

Normally i'd just laugh.. it's a bug.  But it was such an important moment.... and it sucked.

Previous night I was two-shotting base bad guys with a Sandstorm 5, first shot staggered them second shot killed them.

Then last night post-patch the same Sandstorm 5 was taking three shots to kill. Same as before first shot staggered them, second shot -almost- kills them but leaves them with a smidge of life that takes a third shot to kill them.

Nothing changed except for the patch... My savegame was on Eos fighting Kett, game was patched, I stayed on Eos fighting Kett... my equipped Sandstorm 5 went from a two shot killer to a three shot killer.

So I went and built a level 6 Sandstorm with a bunch of damage buffs and it is back to being a two-shot kill again.

The only thing I can think of is every time you level up the enemies get stronger. They scale to your level. Also, all the weapon damage is range dependent, so you could have been at different distances.

Sandstorm got buffed majorly in MP.

I don't remember leveling up between play sessions though. And I loathe the game trope of leveling enemies. I wish they'd throw MORE enemies at me the higher level I got instead of just the same amount buffed higher... because all you do is just buff your gear and doop the difficulty curve flattens out again and it is like you never leveled up at all. You don't feel "stronger", you just feel like a guy who has to go build a new gun every now and then.

Then again leveling up in this game once you get past 30 is pretty much pointless. You've already maxed out the combat skills you want to use, so you just sort of throw points away on stuff just to spend them. They gutted the RPG elements of the game by removing any speech checks since there is no charisma stat to buff, there is no paragon / renegade meter to try to max out (you remain neutral milquetoast Ryder no matter what choices you make), and since you now have access to every single skill tree with every single skill at all times (and can just go and reset and respec at any time) they have to flood you with upgrade points so you feel like you are doing something.

Edit: I also miss the other tech based skills like console hacking and vehicle repair, even though the simon says minigame was kind of shitty it is just odd that every container in the game is unlocked and the best they can do is give you bonus skill points (which are totally superfluous) for doing the extra Sudoku puzzles. And no more Biotic Amps, no more upgraded Omni Tools... no gear items at all but combat related items and the odd craftable quest items (that have a goofy permanence in your crafting list for some reason).

I feel like your number of 30 is quite low.  I'm almost 50 and am just now getting to a point where all of my primary skills and passives are all at level 6.  Sure, if you don't care about passives it doesn't take long to get 3 primary skills to 6, but given how crucial passives are to what you can do, you should fill them out.   I have no real issue with it, because leveling up isn't like other games where you get significant boosts to HP and shields.  Most of that is still largely drive by gear and skills, and gear only gets minor boosts every 10 levels.   The higher levels don't really make enemies or you that significantly stronger, what they offer is diversity of skill load out.  You can start picking secondary skills and actually using the skill swap feature to adjust your loadout based on circumstance.   Tactical Cloak is great when you're caught out in the open whereas Barricade or Backlash are awesome when you're in an enclosed space where it's virtually impossible for them to flank you.

I've been powering through as a barebones soldier, which is how I always play Mass Effect games. I had my passive and combat skills maxed very early. And with the ammo and health packs everywhere I really have to fuck up bad to get killed in combat.

Zero fancy skills, zero biotic powers. I let my sidekicks Vetra and Drack do all the crazy powers and other shenanigans. Just max grenades, max portable cover and the little remnant guy peepants made under the tech tree (who is all but useless, I just like seeing him peeter around looking confused). I've started only carrying one rifle and killing everything with my Asari sword just to throw some wackiness into things.

Gotta live a little. Biotics are the best. I love the pull / shockwave combo of blasting people hundreds of yards away from you.  Although I did manage to kill 5 Kett chosen with one Singularity / Shockwave combo.

I recently found out that if I use indendiary ammo that's a combo primer for lance or shockwave. Which is frankly a bit OP.  Shoot them for 2 sec and then blow them away.

LOL

If you saved the alien AI instead of giving it to the Angara, Ryder does this every single time he talks to it at the Nexus as well.

I think the idea is also that they hate the Nexus since they were part of the rebellion.  That whole thing didn't bother me too much, especially since once you resolve the situation on Kadara, whichever faction you side with is no longer hostile on either Kadara or Eladen.

According to patch notes, the only weapon things they changed in SP was to up the fire rated of the mattock and the base model pistol.

They also nerfed the stats on some of the raiders and the remnant, supposedly.

FYI, putting double ammo powers gives a x4 damage boost to weapons. Regardless of ammo power level.



ETA: Time to cheese

I played for a bit more last night and I swear I'm seeing MORE bugs and glitches now post patch than I was before. I even did another repair just to make sure it wasn't a bad install again.

My menu backgrounds flicker every now and then now, I keep getting email notifications from Sam on the Tempest when I have no email (same thing with Strike Teams and ADP), I'm getting a lot of transitional clip stutter now (moving between planets / systems in the map every now and then the game hiccups and drops frames), I'm getting the same stutter when driving the Blomad (everything smooth then hiccup and back to smooth), walk cycle stutters, plus my aforementioned issues with enemies still spawning in midair (sometimes jumping out of invisible drop ships on Eos), spawning on top of each other (three guys standing in the same spot), appearing out of nowhere (kind of like at the big Kett base on Eos, except now at random places on the map), etc.

I also noticed they amped up the reflectivity of the eyes as well as adding a top shadow to them. They look ok indoors but when I'm talking to some people outdoors in the shade they look like they are tripping on goofballs. For example I talked to Peepants in Mos Eisley as part of her quest on the balcony and she looked like she had just dropped a bunch of windowpane... you couldn't hardly see her pupils behind the glossy, reflective eye effects. So they went from dead doll eyes to overdosing on Ben Stein's cleareyes.

I also noticed my custom character has an eye glitch as well. There are some bad UV's or something at the top of his eyelids where they meet his eyebrows. This little section that is lighter than the recessed eyelid area in a perfect square... and when he blinks that area stretches weird, like it is a malfunction in the skinning on the face generator whatever. And now that I've noticed it, it is all I can see... its maddening.

Any elemental round is an auto combo primary.  Same goes for the cryo glove and flame sword.  You hit them with that and then Lance/Concussive Shot/Shockwave them and it combos.

Crazy overpowered is Cora and one of her level 6 passives. Can't remember which one, but gives you the option to have all her shotgun attacks apply cryo ammo automatically.  So everybody falls over frozen, primed for combos, no power needed.

My current build is Concussive Shot, Incinerate, Cloak.  I could probably exchange cloak for barricade, but I like being able to disappear, shield up and flank guys.

is there really any point in actually doing the vaults if my viability is already 100% story/ending wise? I really hate doing the monoliths and the vaults

I could be wrong but I think a lot of the later side missions are only unlocked by doing the vaults.

My only real complaint about the vault missions is that they are all cut-n-paste level design (then again the whole game suffers from this). If you've played one, you've played them all and they become really boring and grindy after the second one. So I just barrel through them, half the time ignoring any bonus chests. Its not like those bonus chests give you anything decent anyway, just more crap for the pile of crap.

All of the exploration planets (Nomad drivable) besides Voeld require you to run the vault prior to allowing you to place an outpost.  Reality: Vault is most important on Elaaden and Eos as it removes the environmental effects that screw with your ability to explore.  Vault on Voeld appears to leave cold hazard intact (at least it has for me) and dodging the water on Kadara is no big deal.

As JS stated, they are a bit repetitive in that the puzzles are different, but in the same vein, each requires a fair bit of platforming, and each is a run like hell, don't mistime jumps ending.  The biggest reason to run the vaults is to get the Remnant cores, although i don't know what that mission does from a story standpoint as i haven't completed it yet, but you must run the vaults to get all them.

I'm a bit of a completionist, so i try to gather all of the containers if possible, but the reality is that most vaults have a "quick" path that lets you turn it on quickly and get out if you don't care about all the extraneous stuff.

Has anyone else's glitch count gone UP since the patch?

I was playing this weekend and kept seeing glitch after glitch after glitch, many of them in spots I never saw anything wrong in before. For instance, my loadout menu background erratically flickers now on the companion selection screen, Sam keeps telling me I have email when I have none, I'm getting a LOT of framerate hiccups when driving the Nomad (everything going smooth at 100+ FPS then -urgkh!- and back to smooth, tends to happen right around the point at which I'd expect the game to load section data), and probably the worst of the worst I'm seeing a LOT of cutscene problems now (background characters contorting into bizarre poses, cameras pointing in the wrong directions, characters vanishing, dialog clipping or vanishing completely, Ryder's head spinning around like a top, etc.).

I've run the repair and that seems to do nothing, I have the current nVidia drivers... I'm thinking the patch broke more for me than it fixed. I think I'm pretty close to the end of the game now, so hopefully I'll be able to wrap this up and move on to something else.

Edit: I also propose that we introduce a new term into the video game pantheon... everyone knows "Nintendo Polish", I say we start using "EA RushedRust"...

I haven't played that much since the patch came out since I can't find the motivation to play it anymore after completing it, but I have noticed that there is still a lot of graphics shit and bugs that still need to be fixed.

I've also noticed a couple articles from gaming websites commenting on how a lot of people are experiencing more bugs and glitches than before the patch.

I'm pretty sure in my original game, I didn't do the vault on elaaden, but I still have a settlement there. It's not a huge inconvenience, I never spend that much time outside my nomad anyway.

I think I'm on the home stretch, did the Meridian mission last night... and it did not disappoint (for all the wrong reasons). In the group meeting on the Tempest leading into it all of Drack's dialog was missing, so when he spoke it was just lips moving with zero sound.

A few minutes into the mission Vetra died but before I could revive her, a second clone Vetra appeared. Her first dead body with the red "revive me" icon was still there but I couldn't revive her as her replacement was already here. As I played through the mission the red "revive me" icon was persistent and remained throughout the whole level and every time Vetra appeared in a cutscene... she didn't... she was invisible (but you could hear her dialog). And every now and then Drack would get "stuck" frozen in place until I got past a cutscene then he would be ok. And then on the home stretch where the big Remnant ED209 fights Gorilla Grod at the entrance to the last part, something happened and Gorilla Grod suddenly got launched a billion feet straight up in the air, nary to return. No skin off my teeth, I just played through while he orbited the planet.

Beat Meridian, got my traditionally awkward Bioware "end of game coming soon" sex scene, and started wrapping up loose end companion feelgood / homoerotic tension missions... and while on Eos I was driving along in the Nomad and saw vehicle tracks hovering in the air, more Kett spawning in midair, and then magically blooooop the Nomad just totally vanished and ejected my squad into the middle of nowhere. I had to fast travel back to a base station and respawn the Nomad. I thought it had to be a glitch until I saw someone else had the exact same thing happen to them in almost the exact same spot on Eos online, which makes me wonder... glitch or feature?

Any chance this game had to be taken seriously with me is long gone, this thing is pure unintentional comedy run amok. I've played some buggy games before but this thing takes the cake.

yeah so far I haven't done the elaaden vault but yeah it seems to be the only one you don't technicly need to do...I'm tempted to do it just to see if i can go after that cloaking worm thing afterwards