Board 8 > Happy first birthday to Mass Effect Andromeda, the last Mass Effect game.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Horizon is great !
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more like mass effect blandromeda, m i rite
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TheRock1525 posted...

more like mass effect blandromeda, m i rite

LOLOLO u r rite
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SmartMuffin posted...

Andromeda was a great game and I'm still super pissed that trolls and haters killed off my favorite modern videogame franchise =(

The people that killed it were EA.

They can Frostbite my ass.
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scarletspeed7 posted...

I know it's unrelated by I just want to say that Dragon Age II was actually pretty enjoyable.

I will second this. Snarky Female Hawke remains a miracle of the universe.
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Personally I really like it as well as all three DA games.
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iiicon posted...

KamikazePotato posted...

Not everything needs to tell a message.

Then don't write a fucking story.

What? It's much more important for a story to be emotional or entertaining than to tell a message.
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Since when is "tell a message" a phrase people use? That sounds really off

Also I Iiked Andromeda and I think with a trilogy I'd have ended up retrospectively liking it more (like with ME1). But Horizon dances all the fuck over its face. Terrific game.
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iiicon posted...

it shifts focus to the importance of Aloy and her emotional journey

That said I don't get how focussing on a character's development and "journey of self-discovery" or whatever is a bad thing? It sounds like you're arguing against it being character-driven, which I have to admit I've never seen before - to see someone arguing against putting character first.

If that's what you're saying.
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I can't speak to Horizon at all since I haven't played it, but I'm not playing video games for a good moral lesson or for the symbolism or anything like that. If it has it, that's nice, but I certainly don't demand it.
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I do like MGS2 a lot more now I realize how prescient it ended up being. Not the whole thing, but parts of it. Like the codec before the final boss. Gave me a totally different appreciation of it over a decade later.

And I have a soft spot for Legion clearly being Robot Jesus in ME3 because that's hilarious to me. But beyond a few very specific examples, it's not a big thing I look for.
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It was a disappointment, but fucking hell it didnt deserve to destroy Mass Effect.
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I can definitely appreciate certains works for having really well-done themes (MGS2, Nier Automata, even Undertale might qualify) but I woudn't care anywhere near as much for those works if they didn't pack an emotional punch as well, and there's plenty of things I love that are strictly character-driven.
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XIII_rocks posted...

That said I don't get how focussing on a character's development and "journey of self-discovery" or whatever is a bad thing? It sounds like you're arguing against it being character-driven, which I have to admit I've never seen before - to see someone arguing against putting character first.

If that's what you're saying.

it's not

this is a specific conversation about how horizon obfuscates events as a storytelling crutch, and in critical moments when it should reflect on what it has set up it shifts focus, leaving things unresolved and missing opportunities to leave a lasting impression

and it is in comparison to andromeda, which never has any ambitions. it's amateurish vs. aimless
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iiicon posted...

in critical moments when it should reflect on what it has set up it shifts focus, leaving things unresolved and missing opportunities to leave a lasting impression

Could you give an example? I'm not being facetious.
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iiicon posted...

it's amateurish vs. aimless

(this flattens the comparison a little bit because there's more to say about each title. horizon in how it's written by a games writer who in the past has written indigenous stories with racist jokes and no understanding of indigenous people, and how he continues to write through his ignorance, make the same mistakes, and try to tell our stories better than we can rather than learn or use some of the colossal resources at his disposal to hire us; or andromeda in how a publisher's need to create a franchise under very specific terms can harm the creative process and stifle ideas. but amateurish vs. aimless gets the idea across well enough)
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voltch posted...

Oh, I didn't know Horizon was a pile of garbage.

Guess I won't need to add to my PSN watchlist!

it's not a pile of garbage

i thought it was fantastic and i enjoyed it more than i enjoyed persona 5. in fact, it's my favorite game from last year, and IMO I don't think anything else was quite on the same level. it has an 89 on metacritic. i think the strong majority opinion is that it is a pretty good game

icon just didn't like it.
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It sounds like icon had a history with the creators involved and went in with a bad attitude.

I've been there.
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I am no great fan of Horizon but it's not comparable to Andromeda, even if we just boil it down to story. For all of Horizon's narrative faults it at least has a clear cohesive story with a pretty reasonable narrative arc. Mass Effect Andromeda does not have that.
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IMO the Killzone games absolutely had bad stories. I've played all of them except the one on the PSP and I can safely say this with no hesitation. They kinda painted the enemy in a way that made you slightly sympathetic, and you almost admired them for their ability to fight back.

Only Mercenary (on the VITA) had a good story, and it was mostly because the game took itself less seriously. You were just a hired gun, whoever paid you is who you fought for. So you had a reason to keep playing, but you didn't really get the feeling that the devs were trying to push for a greater story than they were capable of telling, so the story did its job. And the gameplay was pretty great and it was cool. Shadow Fall had a decent story but I wouldn't really call it good. It was close I suppose! But not quite there.

Horizon, on the other hand, is way past any of the Killzone games, and I think straight up saying that Horizon has a bad story is 1 of 4 things (again, this is just what I see):
1) being overly critical of things that aren't errors by my standard
2) having a bias against the developers' past abilities
3) being upset that it didn't do what you wanted
4) some combination of the above 3

I'm not saying icon's opinion is unjustified, but I'm saying I heavily disagree because I think icon is doing #1 and maybe a bit of #3. Many things he's criticizing that story for, I either didn't see myself when I played and don't remember it that way or I directly think the opposite.

Also, I will agree that stories don't need to have a message. The way I feel about songs is that if I can connect emotionally to it or the instrumentation is able to connect with me, it's probably gonna be one of my favorite songs. And I feel the same way about games. Uncharted 4 is one of my favorite games partially because of the polish, but also partially because I really got emotionally invested into it. It didn't have a message and I didn't care.
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Shadow Dino posted...

scarletspeed7 posted...

I know it's unrelated by I just want to say that Dragon Age II was actually pretty enjoyable.

I will second this. Snarky Female Hawke remains a miracle of the universe.

"That does ring a bell. Hard to remember...I've killed so many things"

I enjoyed my first playthrough of Andromeda more than I enjoyed my first playthrough of Inquisition. The combat is a pure joy, and while the game is filled to the brim with meaningless sidequests, every single one of them feels 10x as impactful as any DA I sidequest. It feels like I'm having some effect on the world doing them.

The worst thing about PB is that they spent so much time on her, when they should've spent time on Vetra and making Drax not just a Wrex-clone.

Or the story a clone of the original trilogy.

Or making it not a chore to go from planet to planet with those excruciating load times.
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RyoCaliente posted...

Or making it not a chore to go from planet to planet with those excruciating load times.

And they were FAKE.

THEY HAD THEM FOR ATMOSPHERE.

IT'S INEXCUSABLE.
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The worst thing about PB is that they spent so much time on her

I will fight you
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I believe it takes little more to prove how terrible the game and PB specifically are than the last two posts.
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