You might think I'm going to rip on Mass Effect Andromeda, because that's the cool thing to do, but there are some lessons on open world RPG design that I have been able to draw from my time in Andromeda that I can apply to make Miranda a better game. Truth be told, after 60 hours and playing through about 40% of the game, I can see the Mass Effect game they were trying to make and there are things I quite like about it. I play some games just to try to figure out how they are designed, but I wouldn't still be playing Andromeda if there wasn't some of the old Mass Effect magic in there.
The next 8 hours I played I really had no idea what I was doing. I followed the little map widget around, going from place to place and ignoring everything but how to get to the next map point. I went to three planets, wandered around huge maps, I talked to people, I killed monsters, I struggled with the controls for the Nomad and the resulting motion sickness. I saw crafting, and research, and strike teams, and vendors, and resources and scanning. So much stuff. I had played all three previous Mass Effect games so I knew what there should be, but the menus are so buggy I just couldn't figure anything out. This fueled my frustration, confusion and growing desire to just ignore all of that and go shoot pretty things. This was not a fun experience, and it stalled me for months. Probably the saddest example of this was 25 hours in when I was trying to figure out how to get backup life support to work and the article I was reading said you assign them to the "weapon wheel." I was like "I have a weapon wheel?" (Press Tab to show the Weapon Wheel - I had to go to a second article to find what key to press.) Games need to tell players what to do and why, and if they haven't played for a while, they should tell them again.
I also collected a lot of loot during that time, but I never looked at any of it. I realized later that in Andromeda, loot is undifferentiated. It shows up in a big white list of 15 random things that are good for who knows what, you see the "take all" button and the game conditions you to hit space as quickly as possible to move forward. So you never know when you get something cool. When I play Guild Wars 2, if I get a good piece of loot, there's an "oh wow" audio cue that tells me to look closer. Yes, you can look through Andromeda's inventory and it tells you if you have something exotic, but the game's technical problems gave me every reason not to look closely at the inventory. Games with loot need the "oh wow" cue.
In those first 9 hours I only used the default gun. I had better guns presumably, but I just didn't realize it until I hit a mission where after 20 tries I couldn't even make a dent in a big monster. When I finally did crack that mission, the game crashed and lost my progress and I had to do it another 20 times. Oops, I guess that's a bit of a rip.
When I figured out how to change guns I got a sniper rifle and it broke the game. Andromeda's AI surprisingly doesn't handle snipers. Enemies just hide when you shoot at them - they don't shoot back or try to close the gap unless you get a bit closer. I could sit 100m out, picking them off one by one, then go in and clean up any indoor stragglers. That is a problem, but the bigger problem is with Andromeda's random encounter design: You might spend five minutes clearing out a group of Kett, but when you do, there's rarely any reward. Kett bases usually have nothing to scan, no loot, no reward of any type. You probably get XP, hard to say. Now I ignore Andromeda's random encounters, driving right past, or more often, driving the Nomad right over the attackers at full speed which is at least a bit of fun - but probably not what the designers intended. Scripted encounters need to give players an incentive to kill the same monsters over and over. The bonus lesson here: physics is funny.
For almost the entire time I played Andromeda, I played with the same squadmates - the pink guy and the angry lady. In earlier Mass Effect games the game would ask you who to take on each mission and you could try out different characters. Andromeda never asks. It turns out the choice is buried under a tab on the loadout screen before you go to a planet (just found that out now, I discovered how to change squadmates about 25 hours in on the forward station consoles on a planet.) If your game has a variety of content for players to experience, make them choose, don't bury important choices.
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Homepage: email:kurt at pacomms dot co dot uk