Mass Effect Andromeda (Gaming)

by Kahzgul, Friday, December 09, 2016, 17:16 (2906 days ago) @ SonofMacPhisto

If you haven't played No Man's Sky since the update, you should.

I'm having a blast in survival mode. It's hard as hell, super stressful, and really, really fun. I've died at least 16 times so far (it has a counter, so you know), of which 8-10 were before I even got off of the first planet (damn you, Zinc. Why were you so hard to find!?).

Base building is cool, and they actually thought about how to pace out goals this time around to keep you going. Survival, especially, forces you out of your ship and walking around the worlds, which is where the game really shines anyway. If you got bored with it originally, give survival a try. It's awesome.

Can't wait until I save up enough to buy a freighter!

Not to hyjack, but I was just thinking about how Mass Effect Andromeda's latest gameplay trailer had a real No Man's Sky vibe to it. Did you see it, and if so, would you comment on that?

I assume you're talking about this one:

It looks AMAZING.

It's certainly similar to NMS (except with good combat! And plot! Better crafting!). Hard to say if the worlds are procedurally generated and nearly infinite a'la no man's sky, or hand crafted and finite as with ME's past, or some combination thereof (more likely - I'd guess the worlds were procedurally crafted first, and then hand-adjusted to add in plot-relevant characters, locations, etc..., just based on what we're looking at in this trailer). Given the animations for the animals and their complexity (especially for the killing anims) I'm going to say that the enemies etc. are all pre-set and not generated as NMS animals are. Again, that also makes sense as they have more robust combat - you'd want a degree of control over what your enemies can do so that they can behave in more complex ways. It's possible there will be variants like in Diablo, where each enemy picks 3 from a list of 10 different abilities they could have, or something like that. Unknown and hard to tell).

Definitely has a similar collection vibe for resources, but the crafting is more complex, it seems, and the combat is obviously miles beyond NMS's very basic shooting.

In Short, I'm really damn stoked for ME:A. If they can recapture the magic of ME3's multiplayer and put that feel into a glorious NMS-style near-infinite galaxy, I'm going to be really, really, really excited. Even without near-infinite worlds, 30 or 40 can feel that big since they're clearly so large.