On his Twitter account yesterday, Mass Effect Andromeda Lead Designer Ian Frazier responded to a question about the facial animations in the game and whether or not they would be addressed in a future patch.
“We’re looking at patching lots of issues and want to strongly support the game moving forward,” he said. “I can’t say more just yet.”
As for additional character creation options, BioWare is “still looking [at] several possibilities for improving the [character creator],” and Frazier has stubble for the male Ryder “on the list of things we’re looking at potentially fixing/adding for character creation.” Asked about light skin tones, he said, “Can’t promise anything yet, but we’re currently evaluating various options for making it better.”
One of the other complaints about Andromeda is the fact that saving is disabled during priority missions. After confirming that it’s something BioWare is looking into, Frazier responded to someone who asked when players would be able to save during those missions. “Not sure yet, still checking out the ramifications of such a change,” he replied. “Will tweet if/when I can!”
When a player asked if anything could be said about the lack of male/male romances, Frazier said, “There’s nothing I can share on this at this time, sorry.” That same player then asked if we’ll hear something about this in the future, and Frazier added, “Absolutely. This is definitely not going in the trash – we take the concerns very, very seriously.”
In fact, Frazier was in a meeting yesterday about this very topic, but there isn’t a timeframe for when we might hear more about it from BioWare. “We’re investigating a large number of things right now, don’t want to promise anything I can’t deliver,” he added.
BioWare also posted official patch notes for Mass Effect Andromeda update 1.04 and updates 1.01 – 1.03:
Patch 1.04
Single-Player
- Fixed an issue whereby players were unable to land on Ark Natanus
- Fixed an issue whereby the game loaded to a black screen or ran as a background process when Corsair Utility Engine or similar programs were running
Multiplayer
- Fixed an issue causing players to stop hearing their character’s audio and start hearing another player’s instead
- Fixed an issue causing the game to crash when using the Human Male Soldier and F key
Early Access Patch (1.01 – 1.03)
General
- Overall performance improvements
- Fixed an issue with the title only accepting input from the last controller synced when two controllers are assigned to the same profile
- Fixed various collision issues
- Fixed a few rare audio issues
Single-Player
- Improvements to many cinematics, conversations, and other character interactions
- Improved quest rewards
- Fixed an issue whereby a door could become jammed in mission 5
- Fixed issues with objective markers not appearing correctly
- Minor performance improvements after some Tempest transitions
- Fixed an issue whereby the combat music was not functioning as designed
- Fixed some minor quest-related issues
- Fixed a small cinematic issue during the Drack loyalty quest
- Minor balancing change to the “Remove the Heart” quest
- Improvements to quest tracking and waypoints
Multiplayer
- Improvements to Strike Teams UI screens
- Additional multiplayer tutorials implemented
- Balance changes to guns, reward packs, and objectives scoring
- Improved appearance of character portraits
- Added new artwork for MP characters, armor, and challenges in menus and codex entries
If you’ve experienced an issue in Mass Effect Andromeda, Frazier says, “Every issue reported through [this website] makes it to the dev team for investigation/patching.”
Mass Effect Andromeda releases tomorrow, March 23, in Europe for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. It’s already available in North America.
[Source: BioWare, Ian Frazier (Twitter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11) via Eurogamer]
