Only being one day on the market, Mass Effect: Andromeda, like most new releases, has some issues coming out of the gate. In light of this, a blog post was created by BioWare to address some of the community’s concerns with the game so far, and reveal the fixes being implemented in the first patch. While the blog post addressed some issues, it failed to bring up what they have planned for character facial animations, however, in a Twitter post by the games lead designer, a comment on the subject was made.
While not outright coming out and saying it, the blog post referenced making “Improvements to many cinematics, conversations, and other character interactions”. While this isn’t confirming it to be the facial animation of characters, the games lead designer Ian Frazier made a announcement on twitter to hopefully ease some player frustrations.
“Patch 1.04 and the Early Access Patch introduce a number of general performance improvements and bug fixes. Patch 1.04 corrects an issue causing players to experience a black screen on launch, as well as a problem with hearing character audio in multiplayer.”
In another tweet from Ian he mentioned that they “Can’t promise anything yet, but we’re currently evaluating various options for making it better.” In the tweet he is referring to the lack of options currently available when creating a player.
As for the patch itself, players can expect to get many fixes for general performance issues, most notably the fact that in some cases, players are unable to land on Ark Natanus. The patch will also fix the issue that occurred when the game was initiated. In some cases players would be taken to a blank screen instead of the home menu. For multiplayer, some players would have issues with players hearing audio from different characters instead of their own, this should now be fixed.
Take a look below at the full list of fixes and improvements made by BioWare from the blog post.
Singleplayer
- 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
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
Singleplayer
- 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