T w e n t y S i d e d

I have no idea why the designers decided to make two of our five habitable worlds into orange deserts. Sure, the planets are a little different. Eos is a bit like the Mojave Desert and Elaaden is more an expanse of sand dunes like the Sahara. I wonder if their cobbled-together Frostbite offshoot wasn’t up to the job of depicting forests, meadows, and swampsYes, I realize the planets need to be uninhabitable. We could say these planets are low in oxygen. Fine for plants, not so good for animals.. Even if we decide to have two different deserts, did they really need to be the same shade of orange? It’s space! This science in this game runs on cartoon logic anyway, so why not go wild and give us a purple desert or whatever?

Disastronaut

I have a confession to make. I’m really into astronomy. Not real astronomy, mind you. I like shallow pop-astronomy. I like having complex questions boiled down to simple answers that you can understand without any complex mathematics. What would it be like to stand on the surface of X? How many livable exoplanets are there? How long would it take to get a message to someone in another star system? How long would it take to fly there? Is the space elevator really possible? What are the odds that there’s a planet out there with sexy blue-skinned women who want to learn about this thing we earthlings call kissingActually, this question is easy. The answer is zero.?

This means that occasionally I feel the need to take my shallow, badly-understood middle school pop-science and try to use it to ask interesting questions. I’m afraid today is one of those days. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Andromeda Part 15: Elaaden’s Orbit”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

The next stop on our adventure is Voeld. It’s a giant iceball. As before: we visit three monoliths, then go to the vault, and then the climate begins to recover.

This is how you “fix” these screwed up planets. You do the monoliths, do the vault, and then you run around knocking over Kett outposts and doing sidequests until the habitability score reaches 100%. It’s not hard. The Kett clusters are more common than Starbucks. It doesn’t take skill or ingenuity to fix these places. All you need is the fortitude to see it through. I don’t know who at BioWare thought we wanted more Ubisoft in our BioWare games, but they were wrong.

It’s disappointing that – despite all your efforts – you never see these places change. The sky clears once you activate the vault, but that’s it. Even if you get Eos to “100% habitability”, it’s still a lifeless orange desert. Even if you get Voeld to “100% habitability”, it remains a covered in ice and snow. I guess the Initiative has an extremely flexible definition of “habitability”.

Yes, it would strain credulity to re-shape the climate within the space of a few days. But we’re already doing that! We make the numeric habitability value of this planet go up using technology we don’t understand built by aliens we don’t understand. What we end up with is a story that’s not grounded enough to give us satisfying or intriguing explanations for its technology, but it’s too grounded to give us a visual depiction of all the terraforming we’ve accomplished. That’s a really strange spot to aim for on the drama vs. details spectrum. If you don’t want to make it deep and thought-provoking then you might as well make it awesome and fun.

Actually, I suspect this is another casualty of the lack of polish. There are a few lines of dialog that make me suspect they intended to make the planets change visually. Sometimes characters will talk about the huge changes you’ve made, and it really feels like it might be setting you up for a big reveal that didn’t make it into the game.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Andromeda Part 14: Welcome to the Voeld”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.