Announced on Twitter. Patch and notes supposed to drop on 5/11 @9AM Pacific

There are murmurings of the notes and patch dropping early.

EDIT: Transcribed notes from linked Reddit image of a PS4

• Improved performance and stability.
• Improved legibility of subtitles and fixes.
• Various improvements to cinematic scenes.
• Fixed issues with player animations getting stuck when jumping or changing direction repeatedly.
• Increased the number of autosaves allowed.
• Max Nexus level increased to 29.
• Fix issue where SAM would tell Ryder they have new email, even when there are no new emails.
• Conversation options will no longer appear greyed out if new content is available.
• Single player fixes and improvements to Enemies, Armor, Weapons, Vendors, Mods, Controls, and additional Graphical Options.
• Single player balance improvements at higher difficulties.
• Single player Missions and Exploration bugs fixed.
• Multiplayer balance changes: Power, Upgrades, Character Stats, Weapons, Enemies, Missions.

EDIT 2: Bioware posted more detailed official notes on their blog.

I turn this game on from time to time, scroll around the multiplayer menus then realize i don't want to play it and turn it off. :-(

I guess if the patch does something drastic i may find the will to jump back in and at least try more of the single player.

Obligatory "are they patching in the fun yet?" comment.

Seriously though, this is too little, too late, no matter what's in the patch. There's just too much fundamentally wrong with both the systems and story of that game for it to ever become "good." The best it can do is reach varying shades of mediocre.

In other news, BioWare pushed back the release of their new IP. For reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the reception to Andromeda.

Great, I've just finished this game and they decide to fix the bugs only now, I'll remember that EA next time I want to buy one of your games.

Might be too little, too late. At this point I've almost completely bounced off of this game's multiplayer. That's after dumping some 500+ hours into Mass Effect 3's mode.

@lawgamer: Yeah, I concur.

I just beat the game a few days ago with 95% overall completion and that thing is a mess. I waited until patch 1.05 to really get deep into it, so I missed out on many of the serious bugs (see Brad's video) and garish Addison make-up. However, none of the patches will ever fix what a fundamentally flawed, busted experience this is. The threadbare, awful story. The miserable writing. The utter lack of respect for the lore (Krogan larping groups and prom nights, biotics being X-men who magically manifest their powers at puberty, etc. ugh). The seemingly endless litany of poorly designed fetch quests with pathetic endings and/or multiple sections requiring hopping to four or five planets and enduring loading screen after loading screen. The lack of ambient music and sound that makes so many places feel dead, barren, and/or peopled by oddly posed mannequins. The pathetic animations. The over-reliance on email to convey characterization and subplot elements. Having to fly into space to check such said emails. The horribly long list of minor glitches and quirks that extend into every facet and moment of the game (character twitches, NPCs flickering in and out of existence, NPCs rubber-banding back into place, NPCs hovering in mid-air, enemies dropping in from the heavens, the time all the bandits on Kadara became invisible save their guns until I reloaded, my team mates plummeting from the sky when I fast travel to New Tuchanka and exit the Nomad, SAM telling me I have email every single time I cross an invisible line on the Normandy's upper deck, SAM telling me about temperature fluctuations EVERY SINGLE TIME I ENTER AND EXIT A SAFE ZONE in the same disinterested tone, etc.).

I enjoyed the combat, though the camera stayed way too close to my character when my gun was drawn. I still like the Mass Effect races, though seeing them in something this straight-to-dvd and rubbish was depressing. The fighting, Drack, and a steady stream of scotch saw me through.

But you can't patch everything else. The cost to benefit ratio just doesn't justify remaking the whole game, and adding ambient music and putting a muzzle on SAM will only do so much. Rewriting all the dialogue, re-recording all the VA, and redoing the plot & game design isn't feasible. This thing is, effectively, done. They're just polishing a dumpster fire and marking it down to $40.00 at retailers to tempt more buyers.

After giving this game every chance I could, I thoroughly agree with Brad's review and score. What a disappointment.

Shame that I just finished it. That new email bug annoyed me for most of the game.

@lawgamer: Yeah, I was debating about posting on that myself. Pretty BS timing if you ask me. Some of the CEO's quotes to the shareholders had the subreddit pretty riled up. Stuff like Mass Effect being known for its combat and "fast paced multiplayer" or how the aggregate review scores were lower than they'd like, but they still had over 100 critics give an 80+. So, you know, eff those other critics. A hundred people can't be wrong. Sounds like corporate PR damage control to me.

As a spoiler addendum, that ending sequence of quests... gods.

First a hollow, embarrassing, soft reboot parody of the "Shepard telling the Council about Reapers" scene, with the Initiatives leaders scoffing at Ryder's Meridian plan after a whole game of him saving their butts at every single turn as Space Jesus: Cosmic Errand Boy. Then that mustache-twirling Archon monologue where he vows to render the whole cluster a wasteland, the Deus Ex Machina misery of using an ancient Remnant fleet to make up for the writers backing themselves into a narrative corner (the Kett have a huge navy... we didn't give our faction a navy because we were afraid they'd look like imperialists if they had any capacity for self defense outside of assault rifles... EUREKA! The Crucible, I mean, the lost Remnant Fleet of Lord Plot-Contrivincia), and the absurdity of using civilian shuttles to fly our superhero pathfinder pals around as they shoot miscellaneous energy beams out of their hands. Oh, and you better win because Dick Dastardly kidnapped the entire human ark while you weren't looking and now has your whole species hostage. Can you handle that, Ruff Ryder?!? *sigh* Can they patch all of this rubbish out of existence and redo the ending? I'd be much obliged.

I've been playing this although I got to it a few weeks after it came out, and honestly I mostly enjoy it and I'm really not sure why everyone seems to hate everything about this game. As long as the patch doesn't break my save then I'll probably keep enjoying it.

Glad I've waited so far. Hopefully it will be worth the purchase soon.

Same.

They also added the new casual outfit for Deluxe Edition owners. Perfect for date night, they said.

Gallery

For the multiplayer, they VERY MASSIVELY buffed basically everything. MASSIVELY buffed power and combo damage. Also many guns were buffed. Worth a go back. This is the patch I've been waiting for.

@freedom4556: Just when I thought the Ryders couldn't sink any lower... well, they are only human after all. *drum roll*

In news that EA will doubtlessly say is "unrelated," Bioware Montreal has been sent back to the minors.

@lawgamer said:

As sophomoric those type of comments are, not that I'm giving you or anyone shit for it by any means since it's all justified and reasonable, I'm honestly waiting until the game has the sufficient amount of polish that it should have shipped with. There are plenty of other games out there and the hard drive that I dedicate to games is full, so, I can wait for Andromeda to get its shit together.

• Conversation options will no longer appear greyed out if new content is available.

The fact that this had to be patched in is so silly. I should really get back to this at some point and just main line through the rest of the story missions.

Yeah, I need to go back to this and see if the enemies still feel like massive bullet sponges or not. If sales for the game itself were lacking, they really should consider making the multiplayer free-to-play. If not now, then perhaps several months later. I'd hate to think of them fixing the game, making multiplayer fun, and then there being no one online still playing it.

Here's a link to the Multiplayer patch notes. Link

One of the many quotes "Increased base combo damage by approximately 60% in Bronze, 140% in Silver, and 200% in Gold."

A lot of powers/guns are straight doubled in damage. Love the Sonad on my Turian Havoc Trooper.

The damage buffs haven't been overstated. Powers do insane amounts of damage now, and I'm not even specced into the power increasing passives since they used to do so little.

Patch notes have actually got me interested although they slightly nerfed the only 2 classes i liked, but the increases to damage seem to be what I thought they should be.

Already Platinumed this a month back, no reason to go back now.

Anybody figured out yet how much, if any, of those combat balance changes apply to the single player? It seems like some of them might, but definitely not all of them. I'm seeing conflicting reports on various places.

Sounds like they are really boosting the parts of multiplayer that seem weak. Power damage getting a boost, assault and shotguns getting a boost, kett weaker, and more.

I've still been enjoying it but with those tweaks it could really make it great.

@freedom4556: i would guess only the ones that state it, seems like most the patch is multiplayer.

Hm. Well, I finished the game some time back and took it off the system. I'll put it back on when there's something more interesting, like DLC that matters.

@oursin_360: It looks like they went through the combat patch notes today and tagged everything specific to one mode as [MP] or [SP] so that it is clear.

"Fix issue where SAM would tell Ryder they have new email, even when there are no new emails."

Fucking THANK YOU. I know there are other, far more important foxes, but holy shit this is annoying.

So the multiplayer is a lot different now. It seems like they are throwing more enemies at you, and you certainly mow them down now at a much faster rate. The enemies can feel spongy still on Gold but that's gone on Silver. Having weapons in general seem useful is a huge boost. The Carnifex does work again and all is right with the world.

To me it seems like you go down quicker too but I think overall it's certainly an improved experience. I had already put more than 60 hours into this, so I have been enjoying it, but this should keep me going a lot more.

I wonder if they still plan to make new maps with them downsizing the team and all? Haven't gotten myself to actually try out this new patch since one of my bigger gripes is the lack of any good maps, they all kinda suck.

@oursin_360: I reckon so. Bioware responded in that Kotaku article:

...Even as BioWare continues to focus on the Mass Effect Andromeda community and live service, we are constantly looking at how we’re prepared for the next experiences we will create...

That part, especially how they only call out community and live service as the focus, seems to me to say that the multiplayer will receive the exact same ongoing support it has been, because that microtransaction revenue stream already exists, but that they're not willing to take any more financial risks on Andromeda at this time. Particularly that last part about being prepared for what comes next.

So really it's only the number and scope of singleplayer DLCs that I'd worry about at this point. Remember they canceled that expansion to Dragon Age 2 when it didn't do well.

@freedom4556: I would say people shouldn't expect much from singleplayer but to me multiplayer seems like it shouldn't take too much to add to and it makes them money.

To little and to late. Bioware and EAs gamesupport is pathetic as always.

Has anyone run into an issue on PS4 where the game constantly says, "No new save files can be created," every time a save occurs?

I saw this a few times before, but since the patch it's started happening almost every time the game auto-saves. Its incredibly annoying. I get this message when I fast travel, when I enter a new area, when I make progress in a quest, when I enter a new star system. It's fucking annoying. This is the only game where I've encountered this. The weird thing is I am able to manually save and load. But this happens constantly.

@bladeofcreation: They mentioned in the 1.06 patchnotes that they increased the amount of available autosave slots. Perhaps you're full? If you can manually save, have you tried deleting all the autosaves? Perhaps there's a numbering conflict. I play PC, so I haven't seen that particular issue personally; just thinking out loud.

@freedom4556: I thought the autosaves automatically overwrite themselves. I went into the PS4 system storage and deleted a bunch of old saves (read this on a other forum) and I still ran into the issue. Thanks. I need to mess with it some more, see if I can cut down on the number of autosaves the game makes, but I didn't see an option when I looked.

I have this issue as well. I'm not sure if it's related to the 1.06 patch introducing some arbitrary save limit as I made a lot of manual saves over the course of 70 hours+ with the game. I went back and deleted some cloud saves, though I'm not sure this is necessarily a cloud issue since I have over 3 GB free on the cloud and my system is set to upload to the cloud when the system is on rest mode (so I don't think it's communicating with the cloud).

I tried deleting some saves directly off the hard drive and still get this error when a manual save occurs, though it seems the message doesn't pop up with automatic saves anymore. Still annoying as I want to create some manual saves for the end of the game, but can't now.

My guess is the game being overaggressive with creating autosaves since 1.06 is somehow causing issues with manual saves. I mean seriously, why does it need to keep the last 10 autosaves?

Edit: I wound up backing up all my saves on a flash drive and deleting 50 of them on the hard drive. Seems to be working ok for now and letting me make new manual saves. My guess is 1.06 retroactively added some save slot limit which it has an issue with if you made a lot of prior saves.