Prepare to frequently question life itself while playing Mass Effect: Andromeda, as the development team has stuffed the game with meaningful sidequests.
In an interview with PC Gamer Magazine, Bioware’s Fabrice Condominas said that they’re taking a different approach to sidequests in Andromeda, following The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
“We are approaching the completionist aspect very differently, because we’ve done and learned a lot from [Dragon Age:] Inquisition,” said Condominas. “But we’ve also observed what other games have been doing, like The Witcher.”
The Mass Effect series has been known for it’s rich world with varied and likable characters, but aspects of the game can feel like busywork. Its sidequests, especially when compared to The Witcher series by CD Projekt Red, did not compare. In The Witcher, every sidequest had a layer of moral ambiguity, and would make you sit and question your decisions. More often than not, the decision that you made based on either prejudices, or what you believed from other characters in-game, turned out to be wrong. What’s worse is that there are consequences to who you let live, and who you let die.
The sidequests in The Witcher were so gripping that they usurped the entire stories of other games. It’s also why many gamers would spend over a hundred hours hunting down every single quest to squeeze out every ounce of narrative.
Condominas also pointed out that sidequests themselves do not need to have a major tie-in to the overall narrative to be meaningful or impactful. It’s something that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt pulled off particularly well.
Mass Effect: Andromeda is set to launch March 21, 2017 for the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC. The full interview with Condominas can be found in the March issue of PC Gamer Magazine.
Imagine tapping a Zelda icon on your iPhone and jumping straight into Hyrule. A new open-source project called nxnative makes that possible by repackaging Switch games you’ve bought into apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with no emulator in the middle.
Why does this run so well on Apple devices?
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”