{"id":1748,"date":"2017-03-12T20:35:46","date_gmt":"2017-03-12T20:35:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lfgdating.com\/gamer-dating-blog\/?p=1748"},"modified":"2017-03-12T20:35:46","modified_gmt":"2017-03-12T20:35:46","slug":"massive-affection-mass-effect-andromeda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lfgdating.com\/gamer-dating-blog\/massive-affection-mass-effect-andromeda","title":{"rendered":"Massive Affection for Mass Effect: Andromeda"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My love affair with the <em>Mass Effect<\/em> series goes back 7 years to when\u00a0<em>Mass Effect 2<\/em> released. I vividly remember sitting on my couch in my downtown studio apartment, feet on the coffee table, watching the loading screens come and go. I didn&#8217;t go in with any preconceived notions. I was hoping it would be good, but I&#8217;d settle for ok. The worst thing I can do is go in with high expectations. The last time I did that was when I paid $12 to see <em><a href=\"http:\/\/grantland.com\/hollywood-prospectus\/terminator-genisys-review-arnold-schwarzenegger\/\">Terminator: Genisys<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>in the theater. Last time I made that mistake.<\/p>\n<p>So I play through the beginning scenes. Ship getting blasted to high hell, Seth Green shouting at me, and Shepard staggering for balance. I take a sip of my overly-caffeinated Starbucks beverage and settle in for the night. &#8220;Not a bad start,&#8221; I think to myself. Next thing I know it&#8217;s about 4 in the morning, and I wonder where the night went. Looks like that coffee did the trick. But the truth is, how often are we so engaged in a game that we lose track of\u00a0<em>that much time<\/em>? I hadn&#8217;t had that black hole of time since my college days with the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=t_kHlLTKki4\">original\u00a0<em>Halo<\/em> multiplayer<\/a> where we&#8217;d scream shit talk down the fraternity house hallways. Sure, hazing is against state laws, but that doesn&#8217;t mean I can&#8217;t let the pledge down the hall know I no-scope head shotted him from across the map.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/giphy.com\/gifs\/nba-james-lebron-wIcOG8Mh3jkdi\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/media.giphy.com\/media\/wIcOG8Mh3jkdi\/giphy.gif\" alt=\"Nba GIF - Find &amp; Share on GIPHY\" width=\"1280\" height=\"720\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I was hooked. I played through twice over the course of the next month, one for paragon and one for renegade. I admit I liked the renegade more, especially when it came to getting Tali&#8217;Zorah out of trouble with her government. I hadn&#8217;t seen that level of ass chewing in years.<\/p>\n<div class=\"fve-video-wrapper fve-image-embed fve-thumbnail-image youtube\" style=\"padding-bottom:75%;\">\n    <iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/xlDAFCf-jFY?wmode=transparent&#038;modestbranding=1&#038;autohide=1&#038;showinfo=0&#038;rel=0\" width=\"100%\" height=\"100%\" frameborder=\"0\" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen><\/iframe>    <\/div>\n<p>My favorite part of the\u00a0<em>Mass Effect<\/em> series however is and always was that at any moment I could make Shepard go after someone to shut them up. Even in paragon I would go after people because, let&#8217;s be real, ain&#8217;t nobody going to talk to me that way. Even if I\u00a0<em>am<\/em> the good guy.<\/p>\n<p>It wasn&#8217;t the mechanics, which were awesome. It wasn&#8217;t the graphics, which I loved. It wasn&#8217;t the relationships I built with my shipmates, which were lovely. It was that I could shut up someone on a dime. Priceless.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/media.giphy.com\/media\/NRPYi4QOPhOQU\/giphy.gif\" width=\"586\" height=\"333\" \/><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>After both play throughs, I did what any dedicated fan would do: I purchased the original, and then played through that twice. Then I replayed ME: 2 twice. Then I waited (impatiently) for ME: 3 to release. Which when it did I played through three times quickly.<\/p>\n<p>And now we have\u00a0<em>Mass Effect: Andromeda<\/em>. No more Shepard, but that&#8217;s ok. S\/he had a good run. Numerous romances and lives saved later, we can move on without feeling like s\/he still has something in the tank.<\/p>\n<p>What do we expect from\u00a0<em>Andromeda<\/em>? Honestly, I don&#8217;t know. Like I wrote earlier, I temper my expectations. But this doesn&#8217;t mean that I don&#8217;t expect certain things; it just means that I am r<a href=\"http:\/\/www.wikihow.com\/Practice-Non-Attachment\">emoving my emotional attachment<\/a> to them. So for better or for worse, here are my expectations for\u00a0<em>Mass Effect: Andromeda<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>1. We&#8217;ll need more than 2 play throughs to get all the content. I loved how the first games in the series wove straight paths. I expect that this won&#8217;t be the exact same this time around. Now, I imagine we can get most of the content in a couple play throughs, but I think some will only be attainable using different permutations of decisions.<\/p>\n<p>2. The galaxy will be bigger than ever before. I don&#8217;t mean scannable planets, which if I may say, was a great home-from-the-bars activity years ago. I mean I expect that it&#8217;ll be more open than ever before. As I type this I realize this is more of a want than an expectation.<\/p>\n<p>3. The romances will be spicier! I mean, when Shepard took a mate in the previous installments, it didn&#8217;t really affect other characters all that much. I think a lot of that was due to the fact that you couldn&#8217;t get to that part in the game until you were basically done with the game, but still. I expect fireworks, and then I expect\u00a0<em>fireworks<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>At least we don&#8217;t have long to wait! March 21 is right around the corner. We&#8217;ll only be 1 week into M<a href=\"https:\/\/bracketchallenge.ncaa.com\/\">arch Madness<\/a>, and that means we can get 2 days of high play time before games resume!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My love affair with the Mass Effect series goes back 7 years to when\u00a0Mass Effect 2 released. I vividly remember sitting on my couch in my downtown studio apartment, feet on the coffee table, watching the loading screens come and go. I didn&#8217;t go in with any preconceived notions. I was hoping it would be [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[319,480,212,299,9],"tags":[343,514,515],"amp_validity":null,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfgdating.com\/gamer-dating-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1748"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfgdating.com\/gamer-dating-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfgdating.com\/gamer-dating-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfgdating.com\/gamer-dating-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfgdating.com\/gamer-dating-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1748"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfgdating.com\/gamer-dating-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1750,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfgdating.com\/gamer-dating-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1748\/revisions\/1750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfgdating.com\/gamer-dating-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfgdating.com\/gamer-dating-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfgdating.com\/gamer-dating-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}