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technologyasyouwish-blog · 7 years

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Ten Things I Wish I Knew When I Started 'Mass Effect: Andromeda'

This week has been interesting. This is probably the most hours per day I have ever put into a game in order to hit an embargo in such a short time span. I woke up every day at 6 AM, started up Mass Effect: Andromeda, and played for 10 or 11 hours straight. 60 hours of the campaign later, plus some multiplayer, and here I am.

My official scored review went up yesterday, which is 3,400 words of detailed thoughts and opinions about the game. I suggest you go and read that if you want my full analysis, as today, launch day, I have a different task: To impart some practical wisdom from all that time spent with the game.

This is a game where you’re going to want to know a few things up front to help with your experience, so hopefully my advice will be useful. Here are ten things I wish I knew before I started Mass Effect: Andromeda. No story spoilers follow.

1. Don't Use Default Sarah Ryder

All anyone can talk about in the run-up to the release of Mass Effect: Andromeda has been the often awkward animations with human characters. While this is something of an issue, and I do wish more improvement had been made in the last five years, it does not define the experience. One thing I would recommend, however, is not using the game’s default Sarah Ryder model.

While Scott Ryder is a perfectly normal pre-rendered face, something is just off about Sarah Ryder’s visage. It’s based on a real-life model, but something got lost in translation, and it just does not look right in the game. A lot of the early game footage you’ve seen has her talking and it just looks uncomfortable. If you want to play female Ryder (as I did), I would definitely design your own rather than using Sarah. I spent a decent amount of time making my Ryder look acceptable, and lo and behold, that does translate into the game itself. While there are animation issues elsewhere in the game, I found that my custom Ryder never looked as strange as Sarah Ryder has in all these previews. Not to say whoever you make has to be some supermodel, but Sarah is not the ideal face for this game purely from an animation perspective, so I would suggest forging your own path in that regard.

2. Don't Quit After The First Two Planets

I said this in both my early preview and my review, but Andromeda does a very poor job introducing players to the new open world concept because of how bad the first two planets are. Eos is a radioactive wasteland that throws up invisible walls in the form of a toxic environment when you stray too far. Havarl is a confusing mess of a jungle planet where you cannot even use your car, and fighting enemies you can’t even see through overgrown shrubbery is a nightmare.

I’m here to say it gets better. Without getting into specifics, you’re able to make Eos a lot more friendly to exploration as the zone expands dramatically in size with its toxic barriers lifted. And the last three planets you find, Voeld, Kadara and Eladeen, are without a doubt the game’s strongest environments, both in terms of their visuals, and how fun they are to navigate. There’s also a bonus planet you’ll find later that’s the most fun to drive around by far, but I’ll leave that one a surprise. My point is that even if you think Andromeda has made a serious mistake going open world judging by the first two planets (which is exactly what I thought), power through and get to the other environments, which are way better.

3. Turn The Nomad Into The Mako As Soon As Possible

Part of how much you’re going to enjoy the open world is how much you enjoy driving around your Nomad, and for reasons that remain unclear to me, the vehicle is designed to make you hate it when you first start using it. It’s slow, sluggish and can barely navigate even the most basic of terrain like mild slopes.

You have the power to change this, and upgrade the Nomad into something more accurately resembling the Mako from the original Mass Effect. In order, the upgrades you should research in implement are six-wheel drive, which lets you climb slopes faster, a longer boost capability, better top speed, and a longer hover capability. Combine those together and you can race up pretty much every cliff in the game and get hang time over sand dunes and mountains alike. These upgrades were the key to enjoying navigating these planets, so get them as soon as you can. They’ll be in your R&D station, and new ones are added as time goes on or you find/buy more.

4. Invest In The Cache Finding Upgrade

As you play, you will get points to invest in the Nexus, unlocking different “cryo pods” that give you passive bonuses in the game, rather than specific bonuses to your character like the R&D system. A few of these are useful, like getting materials and such delivered to you regularly, but I would only deem one upgrade absolutely essential: the cache finder.

This upgrade will put a smattering of treasure chests across any planet you explore. These chests are in such remote locations most of the time, you would usually never find them without this upgrade, and they often contain very valuable gear that would have been much harder to find, craft or purchase otherwise. These caches will scale to your level, so don’t hunt them down all at once, and spread them out over the course of the game.

5. Here's How The Ridiculously Confusing Crafting System Works

I really, really hate the crafting system in this game, but by the end I mostly have it figured out. It’s convoluted and awful, but it can be used to make the best items in the game. Here’s what you need to know.

The Research half of crafting uses three types of tech, Milky Way, Kett and Remnant. You get points in this tech for scanning objects in the wild. Everywhere you go, always check with your scanner to see if there’s something to add. If so, it will glow. Scan every type of enemy you come across as well, living or dead. Your controller will rumble if you’re by something very valuable to scan, but ABS – always be scanning. You have to research each level of an item, and there are 10 levels of every item, not just five the way it initially appears. The problem with this system is that even if you have a lot of scanning currency, you will use up almost all of it on just a few items per class if you’re researching upgraded versions of items. Pick your favorites, and stick with them. Do not bother researching N7 armor. It will obviously be attractive, but eventually you unlock a Nexus perk for vendors who will sell more “special gear,” and guess what? A full N7 set is part of the product line. I wasted probably 1,200 Milky Way research credits on this. You can add mods to weapons and armor as you craft them, which will give you innate bonuses. But when you upgrade to the next level of an item, those bonuses are gone, right? No. The game does not explain this at all, but you can dismantle your old crafted item and get all those mods back for future use. You only get a fraction of the minerals and materials, but all the mods should come back. It is crazy this isn’t made clear.

That should get you started. I hate this system but focusing on a few specific weapons, I did manage to craft some pretty great stuff by the end of the game.

6. Squadmates You Don't Like At Hour Three You May Love By Hour Thirty

I’m going to take a guess and say that many of the characters, particularly the crew members, you meet in Mass Effect: Andromeda you won’t take to right away. I felt this way about the initial two squadmates the game gave me, Liam and Cora, and then I thought that the hyper Asari Peebee was going to annoy me all game. That was true at first, but you have to give them a chance.

Having conversations with everyone, taking them on missions, and doing their loyalty quests will make you bond with them. Liam and Cora became two of my best buds on the ship, and Peebee uh, well let’s just say we became more than friends, even though my original intention was to romance my science officer Suvi. I just spent so much time with Peebee that I liked her, and it seemed like the right path. These kinds of relationships take dozens of hours to develop, so don’t expect to love everyone right away.

Also, side note. At a certain point, your romantic “choice” seems to be permanent. While I could flirt with everyone for a long time, once Peebee and I declared we wanted to be “exclusive,” I no longer even had the option to flirt with anyone else in conversation. So if you’re presented with that sort of ultimatum by whoever you’re romancing, know that’s what it probably means. But yes, I know there is a way to have a three-way in this game, but you can find that on your own.

7. Loot Containers Are Very Easy To Miss

One thing I don’t really get about Andromeda is its desire to hide loot containers from players. Many games will highlight them either on a minimap or in the environment, but Andromeda does neither so they are incredibly easy to overlook.

One problem is that pretty much any shape in the environment can be a loot container, so you have to wander around pretty close to almost everything to see if you get a prompt to open it. Some containers have a light blue shading that highlights them a bit but many don’t and it’s often hard to see. Scanning does not reveal containers either.

Nearly all landmarks will have at least one “big” chest with more stuff in it, so don’t leave until you find it. Cleared landmarks with no more stuff to get in them will turn blue on your map, but I swear sometimes I couldn’t figure out what I was missing. Also, at the end of story missions during boss fights, look around for a big loot container that will usually have a hefty prize in it. I am positive I missed quite a few of these during my first few missions before I figured this out.

8. You Can Save Preset Skill/Specialty Loadouts

Combat is a lot of fun in Mass Effect: Andromeda, and it’s made even more fun by its flexibility. It took me a while to figure this out, but you can actually save up to four preset power/class loadouts for your character in the skills screen. This will save the three powers you’re using and their assigned buttons, but also your class. Unlike past ME games, you can actually switch classes on the fly, based on how many points you’ve sunk into Combat, Tech or Biotics. For example, I had a hybrid Biotic/Combat build which let me pick between Soldier, Adept or Vanguard classes that I could flip between. Pick your skills and your class and even in the middle of combat you can totally change your play style.

9. Shotguns Are Stupidly Overpowered

I would rarely call for something to be nerfed in a PvE game like Andromeda, but by the end, the damage imbalance between my shotguns and everything else I was using was absolutely crazy. If you have even a halfway decent sustain build (like mine, which focused on shields), you can shred pretty much every single enemy in the game with nonstop shotgun blasts. At first, shotguns are limited by their small ammo pool, but upgrades and skills fix that, and it got to the point where if I felt like if I was using anything else, I was just being inefficient. If you don’t know where to sink combat points, you really cannot go wrong with shotguns.

10. You Can Keep Playing Normally After The Story Ends

I am certainly not going to get into ending spoilers here, but in a game like Mass Effect, players are going to want to know if there’s a hard or soft ending -- meaning if they beat the game, if they can keep playing and do the stuff they missed. The answer is definitely yes.

The ending of Andromeda is structured that you can not only keep playing the game and doing missions you missed with no penalty, but it’s not even one of those situations where you’re playing in the final save point before being told to go to the last mission. No, the main storyline can end and you are free to keep doing stuff.

With that said, if you want to be safe, you may want to consider doing at least your crew’s loyalty missions and the main planetary story missions before the last few missions. I do not actually know if there’s a downside to not doing that, but that’s been the case in past games, so it’s possible you might be risking something here. But since I did them, I can’t say for sure what happens if you don’t. But yeah, the point is don’t worry about finishing every little thing before the end, which is what I did. It isn’t necessary.

Alright, that’s all the advice I have for now. I may be back with more, but that should be enough to get you started. Happy exploring, and enjoy.

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