Mass Effect Andromeda Initiative Releases New Video That Explores the Versatile Tempest & Rugged Nomad
Jan. 12, 2017Mass Effect Andromeda Initiative Releases New Video That Explores the Versatile Tempest & Rugged Nomad
The newest Andromeda Initiative video forMass Effect Andromedais now live for recruits and delves into the vehicles you will be spending most of your time in: theTempestspaceship and yourNomadplanet exploration vehicle. TheAndromeda Initiativeis a program that lets players watch trainings and briefs and participate in activities that will result in some awards such as exclusive DLC and access to betas. Check out the video below and read on for a recap.
TheTempestis a speed specialist that can travel 13 light years per day. The ship is lightly armored but fast and can escape quickly from sketchy situations. Within the ship which serves as home forRyderand thecreware several functional rooms. Research and Development is where the team will gather intel and work on practical application toupgradeweapons,armorand theNomad. The Tech and Bio labs will support this by providing discoveries for these upgrades. The Meeting Room provides a place for the crew to gather or conference with theNexus. Below is Engineering, the Armory, Med-Bay and the Cargo Bay where the Nomad is kept. The ship features Crew Quarters and a Galley for some rest and relaxation as well as your Pathfinder Cabin. The Bridge is where the ship’s navigation takes place, where one of the manyplanetscan be selected for exploration.
Upon landing theNomaddeploys and serves as your exploration specialist. It’s a 6WD powerhouse that features a rear boost for an extra bit of planet scouting speed. Thrusters, shield, shield blast, life support, radar and paint jobs can all becustomizedhow you see fit, depending on the conditions of the planet you’re exploring. The Nomad also allows you to scan surfaces and mine them forminerals.
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Editor at Fextralife. I look for the substantial in gaming and I try to connect video games to the emotions and stories they elicit. I love all things culture and history and have an odd fondness for the planet Jupiter. I think my dogs are pretty awesome too.
You’re not saying anything you haven’t already said. You and I both know he didn’t make the ship design. He only approved. It’s a collaborative effort. They’re humans interacting to make art. A director is not a machine that has of list of things that are and aren’t specific to Mass Effect and then approves and disapproves submissions without meaningful interaction. There is good reason to assume a ship could have nice wide open spaces in it to accommodate the workers/personnel on the ship in more ways than one. The Citidel is a pretty similar example. People still have aesthetic sensibilities in the future. This isn’t future fantasy where everything adheres to an unrealistically narrow aesthetic design. It’s science fiction. Which you described all science fiction and story telling in the latter half of your post.
Also the Rachni only got controlled during the events of ME3. You fight some Rachni in ME1 and if you save the queen the Rachni queen will be the same one and will not betray you like the artificial one.
Also find it hard to believe the gameplay came first in ME3 when the game kept interrupting gameplay to force in story beats and didn’t allow any significant continuous stretches of gameplay. Hell the weapons and powers were poorly balanced and thought out. The idea gameplay came first comes off as extremely absurd to me.
Mac is in charge of art, of story, of story direction and writing details. His job isn’t to coordinate teams. His job is to coordinate and direct the creative efforts of different teams. He’s the guy who approves the art, who approves the story, who does the editing and makes suggestions for changes. If the creative director is all about drama and cinematics and shallow movie-trope cliched dialog, then the story of the game is going to be nothing but drama and cinematics and shallow movie-trope cliche dialog.
And that’s not the core of Mass Effect. Mass Effect is about details, about rational actions leading to inevitable consequences, about uncovering a mystery slowly. It’s about world-building and constraints. You can trace the roots of the Alliance/Turian First Contact War directly to the Reapers, in Mass Effect. (Reapers indoctrinate Rachni to be warlike, Salarian exploration team opens up Rachni relay, Rachni wars happen, laws are passed forbidding the opening of ‘closed’ mass relays, Humans try to open a closed mass relay, Turians start a war because of it.) Cause and effect. Action and consequence.
Whereas the stories of Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, both of which Mac Walters was in charge of on the story side, are basically just excuses to move from one gunfight to the next, poorly bridged by cliched, clumsy, lazy dialog. Mass Effect 3’s story was designed around the gameplay, where in Mass Effect 1, the gameplay was designed around the story.
I hope I’m going to be pleasantly surprised by Mass Effect: Andromeda, but I do not expect to be. I expect that Andromeda will turn out to be yet another Humans Supreme, bombastic, cliche-ridden mass-market Hollywood-style space opera like every other Sci-Fi CRPG.
The exterior in my opinion follows the design established for ships like both Normandy-s where they look somewhat like modern shuttles. This one is distinct, and the engine core looks like some of the other technologies in the game. I would also say furniture design, shelving, and the general interior aesthetics match the previous games. The only difference is it looks less military and it looks less industrial. Which could be a clever touch seeing as this isn’t an effort of the alliance military, or a bad thing because this thing was clearly designed with combat encounters in mind. If it was government funded, I could see why the roominess could be bother some, but if this was an independent venture from a corporation or something similar, it would make sense to be that inviting and open. I could see it going both ways here to be honest. I think context matters here.
I didnt mean to offend you with my post. I apologize for any bad feeling I caused. Its not my way to offend people.
Tempests interior hit me as something amiss. Its like DA2 when you first see Flemeth with horns, then Elves looking like Navi from "Avatar" and walking barefoot, and finally Qunari with horns. While all these were quite different in DA:O.Compared to the very cramped ships from ME games and books, Tempest is a radical departure in design which creates consistency problems. It would be all right if its a ship design 600 years in the future; problem is, its a ship built and launched during ME2 events. And this doesnt make any sense. Lets say its a radical experimental design. But in such case, it would have been tested before launch, and definitely used in ME3. When the fate of all life in the Galaxy is under threat, you use anything you have.
Such BW decisions of “cool” over consistency or common sense are diminishing the immersion in my case. I was able to accept somehow the radical changes in DA2 by considering them to be figments of Varrics imagination (and he really didnt liked elves). It worked for DA2 since its ultimately Varrics tale, told by him to Cassandra. But in fact it`s all about BW favoring flashy designs recently.
Uhhh….
Sorry, what exactly are you trying to say? Because I see, “creative producer.” And yes as the director he directs the team. Funny that a job title is the function of the job. He didn’t make the ship. He may have approved it, but he did not design it. Get over it.
Do not take what I said and make it into some kind of stance you think I took. I did not make a statement on how things should be in any way, shape or form and I did not make a value Judgement. You’re putting words in my mouth and I don’t appreciate it.
It is plausible that the design of the ship was both to encourage mental health of people who would be isolated from society, and incorporated empty room for further growth years into their trip. Reality is we can come up with explanations about why the ship is this way and instead there is a focus on how, according to us, it shouldn’t be. Seems a rather strange thing to focus on, I like how the ship looks and can think of why it is like it is without breaking immersion
You cannot make a phobia-free game. Claustrophobia? This means that every dungeon crawler should be banned. Also elevators, closets, and basically everything with a roof. Say goodbye to the Deep Roads… Spiders? No way, man, think about arachnophobia. The same for snakes, dogs, bees, wasps, cats, crowds and so on. Not to mention the afraid of heights phobia, which disqualifies ME:As Tempest just as well. Its much easier to ban video games entirely, and no more phobias, right?
Defending a flawed design with mental health and claustrophobia explanations doesnt work. If you look closer to the images, you see a huge amount of unused, hollow spaces throughout the ship, as big as a roofed football stadium and traversed by some light bridges. Thats insane and of no use for any space ship, not just a small one designed for exploration. Regardless of any health issues. You dont need this. Instead you need vital things to create an ecosystem (food, oxygen / carbon recycling which means plants and/or algae), terraforming equipment in order to establish a base. Were talking about another galaxy here, not a trip to the neighbor`s house.
The executive producer’s job is to get different teams working together.
The creative producers job is to direct and approve art, story, level design and provide guidance to the different teams in shaping the story and the art. If the creative director doesn’t give a damn about details and world building, NO ONE on the team will care about details and world building.
And it’s the details and world building that can make or break a science-fiction or fantasy CRPG.
So what? I find this absolutely annoying that people want to lump all the problems to the person directing people. It’s a collaborative art form. He only helps keep the cohesive vision for the game between departments who have different ways of looking at the world and games. His job is to make sure artists and programmers work together even though they think very differently, not to dictate how a ship looks. That’s like saying Ridley Scott is responsible for the Tears in the Rain line from Blade Runner. He wasn’t, Rutger Hauer came up with that himself.
And I get why you like the Normandy better, but you wanted to know why those design decisions were made. Why not think of why this ship does exist, perhaps in the future they take mental health seriously create living spaces that [i:35wzlw4o]don’t[/i:35wzlw4o] make people want to commit suicide? Cramped spaces that are ugly and colorless can have some serious repercussions on the mental state of the crew on the ship. It’s a depressing and anxiety inducing environment. Even for some players. The Normandy was always an uncomfortable space for me. You can’t pretend everything in ME was grounded in reality when the entire idea of Mass Effect technology cannot work, let alone biotics.
Mac Walters is more than ‘just a writer’. He’s the creative producer. He oversees everything from writing to art to level design.
Yes, sure, wide spaces are great for cameras, but unlike physical movie and TV sets, in video games you can put the camera anywhere you want and you don’t have to worry about whether it’ll fit in that space. Mass Effect did just fine with the Normandy and got across the essential idea that space travel in that universe does not involve Luxury Cruise Ships in Space.
Because having open spaces is a better for game play and people with claustrophobia. I know you want to find reasons to complain about one of the writers, but I highly doubt he had any say in the ship design considering that’s something the art team and the level design team have to make.
Except it’s tiny, smaller than the SR1. So why is there this massive waste of volume when an exploration vessel designed to have ‘everything possible’ available to the explorers needs every square inch of space to store something or perform some function?
We’re not talking about the Ark here. We’re talking about the scout vessel.
It is possible that because the ship was tasked with charting space that has never been seen before, it was made with everthing they could muster to have the most amazing colonisation vessel possible. It seems it was not quite expected to return, so it would not be odd for it to be a city unto itself
This is not how a relatively small exploration starship should look like. Especially when you are talking about a 600 years travel. Thats not even Star Trek level, but penthouse stuff. Space is a big expensive luxury even in case of ships, not to mention airplanes and starships. That much empty space available would have been filled with vital cargo. But hey, what do we know. Perhaps ME:A characters, like their starship are using dark matter, dark energy or light energy from space for propulsion and food. No need for heavy trivia stored on their ship… Funny though, I didnt saw any of this in ME3, and supposedly the Tempest left our Milky Way before the events from ME3.At least Star Trek presumed huge starships and anti-matter propulsion, which means bigger carrying capacity.
That’s likely a development progression. Next entries are always an improvement over the prior so even if it made some story sense it would be odd to go backwards in amenities. Could it be that differences in purposes are the reason for why the Tempest is swankier? It is after going to heading out far away from the Nexus and will be left to its own devices.
I’m actually VERY impressed because that interior is dammed impressive.
But I agree with your point, tho. The Tempest is bizarrely stylish for an exploration vessel, and as for the captain’s cabin… LOL.
The first thing that came into my head when I saw that enormous bed was ‘bow chicka wow wow’… You can tell it’s been built for the first ever ME nude scene.
I am not impressed.
Here you are, a relatively small expedition in the middle of nowhere, and you have something that looks like it’s straight out of Star Trek with its sweeping large rooms, empty spaces, and wide corridors, and cargo/vehicle rooms that look like they’re warehouses.
Whereas the Normandy, backed by the full economy and resources of the Alliance and a completely developed galactic economy behind it, was a small, cramped vessel where the only specialized spaces were the medbay and captain’s cabin.
It’s clear that the design of the Tempest took all its design cues from Star Trek and its anti-matter powered warp drives and infinite energy to magically create anything needed, rather than the ‘grounded in real world assumptions’ of the true Mass Effect universe.
Just another example of how Mac Walters prefers to skip over detailed world building, preferring cinematics and brainless Hollywood-style glitz and flash.
