Today’s Mass Effect: Andromeda patch focuses on multiplayer tweaks, cinematics

The latest patch for Mass Effect: Andromeda is out now, and BioWare says it will address many of the game’s shortcoming, including tweaks to multiplayer and the game’s opening cinematics.

Today’s patch, referred to as 1.06, weighs in just more than one gigabyte. You can find the full patch notes on the BioWare blog in a post dated yesterday but only made visible this morning. Another post dated today details a laundry list of changes to multiplayer balance, including tweaks to enemy health and player weapon damage.

“We’ve received a lot of community feedback about balance issues in multiplayer,” BioWare said in the post. “Powers and weapons were underperforming at higher difficulties — particularly power combos and assault rifles. As a result, players relied heavily on the Vanquisher sniper rifle and melee-focused classes.

“We found current damage levels significantly slowed the pace of games on Gold and Silver difficulties. To fix this, we started to overhaul the balance in multiplayer. Today’s changes are the first step in that process.”

Weapon damage has been boosted significantly, making assault rifles, pistols and shotguns more deadly. In addition, the kett faction has been nerfed through reductions to their health and base defenses. The Wraith, for instance, has had its health reduced by 20 percent, while the shields on Destined have been dropped by 67 percent.

On the single-player side, BioWare says that they spent extra time improving cinematics scenes in the early part of the game. They also squashed a bug that had SAM telling the main character that they had new emails repeatedly, and another that prematurely grayed out dialogue options even though characters had more to say.

Finally, players who purchased the Deluxe and Super Deluxe editions of the game will receive their promised Nomad skins, a new Pathfinder outfit as well as a pack of multiplayer goods “with a high chance of receiving an ultra-rare item.”