Bioware discussion (from Random Rants)

[Commodore]

There were some fairly ludicrous facial expressions to start with, but the human/Asari facial fix made those much less obvious.

I must have been lucky then, because the faces always looked fine to me, even before the patch.

 

[Arakhor]

It was more the silly grins or wide-eyed stares that some people gave, notably Sara Ryder, but I didn't get many of them either. It wasn't exactly a big issue.

 

[Kozmos]

So you are just jumping on the YouTube hate train then? Got it. I was on the hate train too until I actually bought the game and played it. It's not anywhere near as good as the other Mass Effects but the footage you see on YouTube is not an accurate representation. What a lot of YouTubers are doing is showing footage from the beta and passing it off as current footage so they can get views by saying "OMGZ, look how turrible deez faces iZ!" I bought it a day after its release and didn't experience any of these supposed glitches or bad animations. Now that Bioware did a patch to fix these supposed glitched, the game looks and plays even better now.

The AI also isn't terrible. Those YouTubers play the game on easy and say they are playing it on a harder difficulty in order to make it seem like the AI is terrible. I play on normal and the enemy regularly uses pretty solid tactics to pin me down and outflank me. My point? You can't trust LPs on YouTube. There are simply too many ways to manipulate your footage (even on live streams) to make a game seem good or bad. That's why the best way to see what a game is really like is to buy it for yourself and play it.

I watched multiple LPers who play on harder difficulties and on PC (the only platform that matters for me). How do I know? A) I don't watch spliced gameplay LPs. B) If you spend a milisecond out of cover you were honed down within seconds, the usual ME Hardcore/Insanity fare. I saw dozens of obvious glitches and easily reproducible bugs which are unacceptable to me. The AI gets stuck in a failure mode fairly easily. Am I supposed to be impressed they achieved flanking in a 3D open environment? That's the barest prerequisite, even if it comes down to simply running out in the open as they do or jumping up on buildings to follow you. People also call Dark Souls games AI good. Shows what they know.

Ostensibly Mass Effect is/was an RPG, a role playing game. They threw that away with this extremely fluid, multi-class setup where you can be whatever you want, whenever you want which admittedly gave a more interesting combat system due to skill mixing, but they screwed that too with nerfing your companion modifications. Then they dropped the ball in animation department, a mortal sin for a game that spends lengthy chunks of it talking to people with the camera zoomed right into their faces. It's like shoving PS2 era textures into the players face when he enters a room, instead of trying to minimize their exposure and hide them away as much as possible. It's lazy and unacceptable. Finally to add insult to injury, they make your character play who they want you to play for the vast majority of the time, not even the illusion of choice is presented. Four dialogue choices? Wow. They lead to the same result. A flippant response with a different spin on it. The writing and voice acting? Hoooorrrendous even with videogame standards applied.

You might enjoy these kind of things or think it's fine and the rest of the game is good enough. I don't, I've played enough games and know the process enough to recognize laziness and incompetence. Obvious seams, Z-fighting, lighting issues, crappy particle effects, aggressive culling, blending issues. These people are working with ready made tools mind you, a couple of clicks is all it would take, a couple of clicks! If the developers don't give a damn about their product, why should I? It just makes my blood boil even thinking about it.

We have different standards. I hate what has become of my favorite franchises for many reasons, not just because it's trendy. There is a reason why crowd-funded games are getting money thrown at them nowadays. At least when they screw up, I know they aren't backed by millions of dollars and hundreds of people working on it.

 

[Arakhor]

Why are you assuming that Bioware are wilfully lazy or incompetent? We have no idea about their staffing levels, timing requirements or what compromises EA may have forced them to make.

There were certainly some cheesy bits of dialogue, but to say that the voice acting was horrendous is just doing a disservice to the professional cast, presumably simply to be 'hip'.

 

[Kozmos]

Why are you assuming that Bioware are wilfully lazy or incompetent? We have no idea about their staffing levels, timing requirements or what compromises EA may have forced them to make.

There were certainly some cheesy bits of dialogue, but to say that the voice acting was horrendous is just doing a disservice to the professional cast, presumably simply to be 'hip'.

Modding communities and a few game developers. I have friends in the industry, I have been gaming for a decade and more and looking into how games are made. Call it a hobby or personal interest. Plenty of information out there if you care to find it. Giant companies don't operate the same way as small or mid sized studios do. Game development like software development is not something that necessarily gets better the more people you throw at it, money sometimes helps but it depends on the organization on the ground.

Professional cast? You're thinking of the old games. Without a good director, even decent voice actors are pointless. But like I said, different standards. Your choice is not invalidated because I think the game is subpar. It's entirely a personal preference. I gave my reasons why it fails for me as a ME game and a game in general, technical and gameplay reasons included. Simply watch ME 2 Illusive Man scenes and then anything in ME:A and say it was made by the same people or people with similar levels of skills.

 

[Commodore]

There were certainly some cheesy bits of dialogue,

Yeah, the dialog is mostly okay, but there are a few instances where they seem to have tried to shoehorn in some "internet meme" language in some weird attempt to appeal to younger gamers I guess. That "my face is tired" line stands out as the most glaring example of what I'm talking about.