Andromeda: Why people really hate it

[Stargazer2600]

2 hours ago, ShakeNBake663 said:

I feel like Bioware is in a little bit of a hole when it comes to Mass Effect. A lot of people seem to forget that the first game was basically only world building, getting to know these new species and how they work and such. Andromeda only has one new species in it so there's not really the same sense of wonder, even if we're in a new system with new planets (so really there SHOULD BE more new species tbh). So what do people think about next? The story. ME1 didn't have that strong of a story in my opinion, but it was only the first in a trilogy like Andromeda seems to be. Even the characters in ME1 didnt really get interesting until later games, so I'm willing to give the Andromeda cast a chance, but other fans are not.

 

Honestly I feel like people would be more forgiving if they thought of Andromeda as the first chapter of a new saga, but it's basically impossible with the last game having that ending. (I'm not gonna defend the ending, it really was garbage imo.) People were legit hurt about that ending, so even if Andromeda had been technically perfect and every facial animation was on point this game would still be criticized all to hell.

2 species, kett and angara but i know what you mean

[MissShake]

5 minutes ago, Stargazer2600 said:

2 species, kett and angara but i know what you mean

 

Ah, yes my mistake. Forgot about the kett for a second there.

[Stargazer2600]

2 minutes ago, ShakeNBake663 said:

 

Ah, yes my mistake. Forgot about the kett for a second there.

wasnt sure if you wanted to count remanant since they are just AI like geth but, to someone picky, they could be added. i dont count the though

[FielVeredus]

Just plat'ed the game last night.

 

This game deserved more than hate it got. Clearly most people jump on hatebandwagon. This game get better when playing , sure it start slow but after complete the game i have left my smile after finished it, it well worth my time. Combat is not repetitive + fun and most game failed to achieved this.

 

While it's not mean to be perfect or GOTY but it has special spot in my heart now. I would give this game 8-8.5/10 , there are room for improvement and some weird design decision + glitch. I pretty not sure why this game get Low 70s score , it should be Low 80s at least.

 

People need to stop looking for reviewer and make their own judgment rather than have someone told you what to think.

[DividedByMankind]

23 hours ago, FielVeredus said:

Just plat'ed the game last night.

 

This game deserved more than hate it got. Clearly most people jump on hatebandwagon. This game get better when playing , sure it start slow but after complete the game i have left my smile after finished it, it well worth my time. Combat is not repetitive + fun and most game failed to achieved this.

 

While it's not mean to be perfect or GOTY but it has special spot in my heart now. I would give this game 8-8.5/10 , there are room for improvement and some weird design decision + glitch. I pretty not sure why this game get Low 70s score , it should be Low 80s at least.

 

People need to stop looking for reviewer and make their own judgment rather than have someone told you what to think.

 

Hatebandwagon????? im not fucking paying for a fucking mass effect game where animations look from fucking 2007... NOT paying 60$ for it until they either fix it...or release a patch or whatever... is that fucking hate???? No it is not.... it is coming from a fan.. that was expecting and looking really toward this game...for years..... and got really dissapointed when this fan saw those animations.. glad i checked youtube first... and 40% of mass effects are dialogs, that means alot of animations, and i am not looking at this crap for hours when i am playing.

[Stargazer2600]

48 minutes ago, DividedByMankind said:

 

Hatebandwagon????? im not fucking paying for a fucking mass effect game where animations look from fucking 2007... NOT paying 60$ for it until they either fix it...or release a patch or whatever... is that fucking hate???? No it is not.... it is coming from a fan.. that was expecting and looking really toward this game...for years..... and got really dissapointed when this fan saw those animations.. glad i checked youtube first... and 40% of mass effects are dialogs, that means alot of animations, and i am not looking at this crap for hours when i am playing.

they have released a patch that fixed quite a bit. Second, perhaps you dislike the game cause your expectations were to high. i actually did another post about that here. Perhaps you should give it a read.

[MissShake]

13 hours ago, DividedByMankind said:

Hatebandwagon????? im not fucking paying for a fucking mass effect game where animations look from fucking 2007... NOT paying 60$ for it until they either fix it...or release a patch or whatever... is that fucking hate???? No it is not.... it is coming from a fan.. that was expecting and looking really toward this game...for years..... and got really dissapointed when this fan saw those animations.. glad i checked youtube first... and 40% of mass effects are dialogs, that means alot of animations, and i am not looking at this crap for hours when i am playing.

 

You have every right to be annoyed, but to expect good facial animations from Bioware is fascinating since that's always been a weak points of theirs.

[DividedByMankind]

5 hours ago, ShakeNBake663 said:

 

You have every right to be annoyed, but to expect good facial animations from Bioware is fascinating since that's always been a weak points of theirs.

Yeah mate but in my opinion its 2017 and ps4 era and they should of like leaned something after all these years

[phoenix_shade]

IMO the story compared to mass effect 1 is super weak, and I don't care about nearly all my sidekicks.

[Stargazer2600]

On 4/13/2017 at 3:23 AM, phoenix_shade said:

IMO the story compared to mass effect 1 is super weak, and I don't care about nearly all my sidekicks.

its not hand fed to you like in the original trilogy. you have to really talk to them all and exhaust all dialouge options but, at the end, i liked them and didnt regret romancing cora

[phoenix_shade]

Holding out for a mysterious device that transports them back in time to the Milky Way to screw up the Reaper time line. *cmon bioware.......* 

 

MORE SHAPARD

Edited April 15, 2017 by phoenix_shade

[MissShake]

1 hour ago, phoenix_shade said:

Holding out for a mysterious device that transports them back in time to the Milky Way to screw up the Reaper time line. *cmon bioware.......* 

 

MORE SHAPARD

 

No thanks. I'm tired of the Reapers, Shepard's story is over, and shoehorning them back in sounds like trouble. Do you really trust the team who wrote this game to do a good job with Shepard?

[ShadowReplicant]

Finally got the platinum, so here are my final thoughts on the game (mostly regarding story and writing, because visual presentation is of secondary importance to me):

 

If I had to rate it, I'd give it a 6/10. As a AAA sci-fi game Andromeda is fairly average, but as a Mass Effect game it simply fails on too many levels and deserves all the criticism. First of all, the premise had potential but the story suffers from inept writing and a general lack of imagination and compelling material. The "Pathfinder" idea was the perfect opportunity to go back to the fantastic origin system of Dragon Age: Origins and offer the player the choice of starting out as a member of a different race, but no – once again you find yourself in the shoes of the human Standard McDefault, AKA Scott/Sara Ryder (I guess Stryker or Hunter weren't available), an uncharismatic, stereotypically heroic, horny dweeb with the mental capacity of a 15 year old, who shouldn't even be part of the Initiative, let alone be leading it (seriously, leave the retarded twins in the freezer and let me play as Alec Ryder). You quickly assemble a group of second-rate Milky Way rejects including Not-Liara, Not-Wrex and a female Not-Garrus and begin your quest to scan (and hopefully fuck) every last object in the Andromeda galaxy.

 

Let's be completely honest here – the protagonists are lifeless cardboard cutouts. But at least the bad guys are interesting, right? Enter the Kett... an aggressive race of uncommunicative insectoid space nazis whose backstory is in a future sequel. But boy, are they evil. They're basically discount Star Trek villains. And then there's the Proth... I mean the Remnant. What amazes me about the Remnant is that the writers somehow succeeded in making them incredibly boring. The Protheans were one of the most interesting aspects of the original story. Every time you learned something new about them, you got a little excited. There was a sense of mystery behind their disappearance and the things they left behind. There's nothing like that in Andromeda. There's no sense of awe or discovery, everything is presented to you on a silver platter by your magical AI SAM. Let's talk about that fucker. I hate him. He can do ANYTHING – need to decipher an unknown language in a millisecond? No problem. Want to be immune to diseases? You got it. Don't want to be dead anymore? Boom. Thank fuck for space magic. Also, he never shuts up. The Pathfinder and his allies are completely useless when you think about it – their only purpose is to carry SAM around and let him deal with everything. Besides, I still don't understand how an N7 grunt single-handedly created the most advanced AI in the history of two galaxies, but maybe I've missed something. SAM's inclusion in the story also inherently negates any potentially interesting conflict. How about NOT understanding the Angara immediately upon first contact? What if you actually had to put together a team of linguists and other scientists to study their language and culture before you could properly communicate with them? (That's how omni-tool translators worked in the original trilogy btw.) And why are the Angara so generic anyway? This is a new galaxy, this is science fiction, why not have something completely different, like a silicon-based species or something? Even the Hanar had more thought put into them and they weren't even one of the major races. Oh... right, the Angara are the only new friendly race, so they have to be potentially fuckable...

 

The laziness of the writers and narrative designers downright breaks the immersion at times – like when all Angaran merchants immediately accept your worthless "credits." Remember the Volus? The little guys that were practically running the Milky Way economy? Don't need them anymore, all aliens in Andromeda miraculously have the exact same monetary system, of course. Oh, and they use Arabic numerals, apparently. What a relief. And how exactly does this economy work anyway, I didn't see any financial institutions on the Nexus. And while we're at it, why would you bring the Krogan to a new galaxy? They're violent and infertile, wouldn't they be the last choice for a colonization effort? Why is there no prison on the Nexus, you thought there wouldn't be any crime in a community of 100.000 people? No legal system? No politics? Did we leave democracy in the Milky Way? Why did so many of "Milky Way's finest" turn into violent sociopaths the minute something unexpected happened? There was a screening process, right? RIGHT?! Why is there no additional personnel on the Tempest? Remember the Normandy quartermaster who would sell you newly procured equipment whenever the ship landed on a planet? Don't need him anymore, now there's a magical terminal, kids. Oh, fuck off. There's a reason why I read every single codex entry every time I play one of the old Mass Effect games, it's called believable world-building. I have yet to open the codex menu in Andromeda. I'm not saying the previous Mass Effect games were flawless masterpieces, but Andromeda is on a completely new level of "dumbed down." This is sci-fi for pre-teens, folks.

 

There's an impressive amount of dialogue in the game, unfortunately none of it made me care about any of the characters. Some of it was so unbearably cringe-worthy and nonsensical that it actually made me hate some of them (and the people who wrote this trash). I think Jaal came closest to being somewhat interesting/likable with Liam landing on the opposite side of the spectrum (he's basically the Jar Jar Binks of the Mass Effect universe). They never really come together as a team either because there's simply no need for that (there's no conflict between the characters and you never need them because SAM magically takes care of everything) and they just seem like a bunch of random talentless tag-alongs most of the time. They are so painfully uninteresting that I actually had to force myself to talk to them on the ship. Their loyalty missions are equally as dull and usually consist of shooting galleries without any character development.

 

The story itself is devoid of any emotional, exciting or compelling beats – even the "big finale" is just a phoned-in, lazy remix of the attack on the Citadel and the suicide mission, with an absolutely shameless deus ex machina thrown in for good measure. The ending is big, loud and dumb. The only thing that elicited some kind of emotion from me were the last recorded messages from the Milky Way on Alec Ryder's computer. Yeah... can we just go back to that place? You know... the galaxy that we could actually relate to? Please?

 

The quests are generic and uninteresting for the most part, the bosses are incredibly tedious and poorly designed (especially the Architect fights are so mind-numbingly boring on higher difficulties that I couldn't bring myself to finish all of them), the enemy AI is pretty much nonexistent, the sudoku puzzles are a chore, the planets are beautiful but rarely worth exploring, the choices you make don't matter (including dialogue choices – you literally can't be rude or mean to people anymore), the dialogue system is just as worthless and confusing as Fallout 4's and a lot of the major plotlines remain unresolved (Mass Effect had exactly one unresolved plotline, as far as I can remember).

 

And the positives? Well, the combat is fun, albeit dumbed-down – excuse me – "streamlined" (they might as well get rid of the squad mechanic at this point, it's completely useless). I liked the crafting, the customization options, the leveling system (yes, the menus are a horrible mess). The graphics are god damn gorgeous, I don't care what people say – the lighting and reflections, the environments, it all looks stunning (yes, the character animations suck). The sound design is great. Some of the music is good (when it's actually there)... and that's about it.

 

The best thing I can say about Mass Effect: Andromeda is that I didn't completely hate it and I wasn't bored while I was playing it. Will I remember it in a month's time? Nope. Will I play it multiple times like the previous installments? Take a guess. And what would I say to BioWare? Play The Witcher 3, hire some good writers and get your shit together.

[MissShake]

Ya know, the more I think about Andromeda the more I realize that part of why I'm personally disappointed in it is because of Bioware's last game. Not ME3, but Inquisition. I think that game is so fantastic and Andromeda just doesn't make me feel quite as satisfied as Inquisition did. Maybe that could also be a factor: Bioware has such a high standard for me that just an okay game doesn't feel good enough. 

[usrmd]

RISE, THREAD OF DESPICABLE COMMENTS~!
I've plat the first 3 and on my 2nd of Andromeda. ME:A is 100% Mass Effect.. Here's something I've noticed: people who complain about ME:A complain about a lot of other shit that I do not agree with. So I come to this conclusion: most complainers are just on a bandwagon, making stuff up and pulling dislikes out of thin air - worse, they convince themselves this is how they feel without a single original thought of their own. Terrible. "BioWare's Worst RPG to date"... that is just insane.

The entire game is great, even with the glitches and bad lines... oh wait, the script was perfect  who knew? in fact, those things make it even more Mass Effect, imho. Maybe not "Mass Effect 4" considering the entire change of cast, basically... derp. But damn close, and it's really no question whether or not this is Mass Effect... it is. From start to finish I was actually looking for something to tell me "oh this is what all the bad hype is for..." but nope, not once. Instead I was pleasantly invited back into the MA universe and reinvigorated with new appreciation for the series. No garbage surprises; the game is Mass Effect and very enjoyable.
Yes I played it through to Kadara with no patches,

Edited August 5, 2017 by usrmd

[rdhight]

On 4/2/2017 at 7:43 AM, KingGuy420 said:

The whole review system is broken and I for one really wish people would just learn to make their own decisions instead of listening to the opinion of someone with a paycheck on the line.

 

It does seem like there are some suspect things going on with reviews. Sometimes a big game comes out and it's like every single organization with more than one games journalist writes a review that basically lists only the positives. A week or two after the big sales spike is past, a dam breaks and those same places start talking about the negatives — things they were 100% capable of putting in those "9.0" launch-day writeups.

 

Then you have the places that assign someone proudly uninterested to write the main review for a big, important game, someone who says right in the piece that he doesn't even like or respect the genre it's in!

 

I still read/watch reviews because they're able to sound the alarm on a No Man's Sky or Andromeda, but they're frustratingly poor at separating mediocre from good or good from great.

Edited August 6, 2017 by rdhight

[DARKB1KE]

On 4/24/2017 at 6:31 AM, ShadowReplicant said:

Finally got the platinum, so here are my final thoughts on the game (mostly regarding story and writing, because visual presentation is of secondary importance to me):

 

If I had to rate it, I'd give it a 6/10. As a AAA sci-fi game Andromeda is fairly average, but as a Mass Effect game it simply fails on too many levels and deserves all the criticism. First of all, the premise had potential but the story suffers from inept writing and a general lack of imagination and compelling material. The "Pathfinder" idea was the perfect opportunity to go back to the fantastic origin system of Dragon Age: Origins and offer the player the choice of starting out as a member of a different race, but no – once again you find yourself in the shoes of the human Standard McDefault, AKA Scott/Sara Ryder (I guess Stryker or Hunter weren't available), an uncharismatic, stereotypically heroic, horny dweeb with the mental capacity of a 15 year old, who shouldn't even be part of the Initiative, let alone be leading it (seriously, leave the retarded twins in the freezer and let me play as Alec Ryder). You quickly assemble a group of second-rate Milky Way rejects including Not-Liara, Not-Wrex and a female Not-Garrus and begin your quest to scan (and hopefully fuck) every last object in the Andromeda galaxy.

 

Let's be completely honest here – the protagonists are lifeless cardboard cutouts. But at least the bad guys are interesting, right? Enter the Kett... an aggressive race of uncommunicative insectoid space nazis whose backstory is in a future sequel. But boy, are they evil. They're basically discount Star Trek villains. And then there's the Proth... I mean the Remnant. What amazes me about the Remnant is that the writers somehow succeeded in making them incredibly boring. The Protheans were one of the most interesting aspects of the original story. Every time you learned something new about them, you got a little excited. There was a sense of mystery behind their disappearance and the things they left behind. There's nothing like that in Andromeda. There's no sense of awe or discovery, everything is presented to you on a silver platter by your magical AI SAM. Let's talk about that fucker. I hate him. He can do ANYTHING – need to decipher an unknown language in a millisecond? No problem. Want to be immune to diseases? You got it. Don't want to be dead anymore? Boom. Thank fuck for space magic. Also, he never shuts up. The Pathfinder and his allies are completely useless when you think about it – their only purpose is to carry SAM around and let him deal with everything. Besides, I still don't understand how an N7 grunt single-handedly created the most advanced AI in the history of two galaxies, but maybe I've missed something. SAM's inclusion in the story also inherently negates any potentially interesting conflict. How about NOT understanding the Angara immediately upon first contact? What if you actually had to put together a team of linguists and other scientists to study their language and culture before you could properly communicate with them? (That's how omni-tool translators worked in the original trilogy btw.) And why are the Angara so generic anyway? This is a new galaxy, this is science fiction, why not have something completely different, like a silicon-based species or something? Even the Hanar had more thought put into them and they weren't even one of the major races. Oh... right, the Angara are the only new friendly race, so they have to be potentially fuckable...

 

The laziness of the writers and narrative designers downright breaks the immersion at times – like when all Angaran merchants immediately accept your worthless "credits." Remember the Volus? The little guys that were practically running the Milky Way economy? Don't need them anymore, all aliens in Andromeda miraculously have the exact same monetary system, of course. Oh, and they use Arabic numerals, apparently. What a relief. And how exactly does this economy work anyway, I didn't see any financial institutions on the Nexus. And while we're at it, why would you bring the Krogan to a new galaxy? They're violent and infertile, wouldn't they be the last choice for a colonization effort? Why is there no prison on the Nexus, you thought there wouldn't be any crime in a community of 100.000 people? No legal system? No politics? Did we leave democracy in the Milky Way? Why did so many of "Milky Way's finest" turn into violent sociopaths the minute something unexpected happened? There was a screening process, right? RIGHT?! Why is there no additional personnel on the Tempest? Remember the Normandy quartermaster who would sell you newly procured equipment whenever the ship landed on a planet? Don't need him anymore, now there's a magical terminal, kids. Oh, fuck off. There's a reason why I read every single codex entry every time I play one of the old Mass Effect games, it's called believable world-building. I have yet to open the codex menu in Andromeda. I'm not saying the previous Mass Effect games were flawless masterpieces, but Andromeda is on a completely new level of "dumbed down." This is sci-fi for pre-teens, folks.

 

There's an impressive amount of dialogue in the game, unfortunately none of it made me care about any of the characters. Some of it was so unbearably cringe-worthy and nonsensical that it actually made me hate some of them (and the people who wrote this trash). I think Jaal came closest to being somewhat interesting/likable with Liam landing on the opposite side of the spectrum (he's basically the Jar Jar Binks of the Mass Effect universe). They never really come together as a team either because there's simply no need for that (there's no conflict between the characters and you never need them because SAM magically takes care of everything) and they just seem like a bunch of random talentless tag-alongs most of the time. They are so painfully uninteresting that I actually had to force myself to talk to them on the ship. Their loyalty missions are equally as dull and usually consist of shooting galleries without any character development.

 

The story itself is devoid of any emotional, exciting or compelling beats – even the "big finale" is just a phoned-in, lazy remix of the attack on the Citadel and the suicide mission, with an absolutely shameless deus ex machina thrown in for good measure. The ending is big, loud and dumb. The only thing that elicited some kind of emotion from me were the last recorded messages from the Milky Way on Alec Ryder's computer. Yeah... can we just go back to that place? You know... the galaxy that we could actually relate to? Please?

 

The quests are generic and uninteresting for the most part, the bosses are incredibly tedious and poorly designed (especially the Architect fights are so mind-numbingly boring on higher difficulties that I couldn't bring myself to finish all of them), the enemy AI is pretty much nonexistent, the sudoku puzzles are a chore, the planets are beautiful but rarely worth exploring, the choices you make don't matter (including dialogue choices – you literally can't be rude or mean to people anymore), the dialogue system is just as worthless and confusing as Fallout 4's and a lot of the major plotlines remain unresolved (Mass Effect had exactly one unresolved plotline, as far as I can remember).

 

And the positives? Well, the combat is fun, albeit dumbed-down – excuse me – "streamlined" (they might as well get rid of the squad mechanic at this point, it's completely useless). I liked the crafting, the customization options, the leveling system (yes, the menus are a horrible mess). The graphics are god damn gorgeous, I don't care what people say – the lighting and reflections, the environments, it all looks stunning (yes, the character animations suck). The sound design is great. Some of the music is good (when it's actually there)... and that's about it.

 

The best thing I can say about Mass Effect: Andromeda is that I didn't completely hate it and I wasn't bored while I was playing it. Will I remember it in a month's time? Nope. Will I play it multiple times like the previous installments? Take a guess. And what would I say to BioWare? Play The Witcher 3, hire some good writers and get your shit together.

You need to go outside or something man.  I've never known anybody to take games this seriously.  There's something you should look up, it's called "suspension of disbelief".  It might help you out and relieve that anxiety. 

Edited October 7, 2017 by DARKB1KE

[DARKB1KE]

On 4/4/2017 at 6:52 PM, ShadowReplicant said:

https://youtu.be/3NomBfQQSS8 ... I mean, WTF is this?

 

OMG I loved that scene!  Hahahah truly awesome for the writers to put that in there.  If you understand the joke then you'd know that it's a mockery of super serious villains, it takes the trope and flips it.  That's pure comedy gold.  I even shut off the screen when he tried to voice-call me so it fit perfectly Sorry you hated it. 

Edited October 7, 2017 by DARKB1KE

[ShadowReplicant]

6 hours ago, DARKB1KE said:

You need to go outside or something man.  I've never known anybody to take games this seriously.  There's something you should look up, it's called "suspension of disbelief".  It might help you out and relieve that anxiety. 

 

Thanks for your insightful input and concern. You do realize that this is a forum where people passionate about games (in this case videogame writing) post their opinions on them? Btw. I don't want to suspend my disbelief in a Mass Effect game. Good stories are about internal consistency of a secondary, fictional reality. If your fiction is good, no suspension of disbelief is necessary. If your story fails to immerse the consumer of your work in a believable fictional universe, you fucked up and the consumer has to accept your bullshit (suspend his disbelief), because he no longer feels immersed, or simply give up.

 

The previous ME games had some of the best world-building in the medium, which is why the awful, sophomoric writing in Andromeda took a lot of fans by surprise. But you're either very young or simply don't care much about writing in primarily story-driven games so, if you enjoyed Andromeda, good for you, I guess.

[cloudleohart]

This being an RPG the primary objective is to tell a decent story. Andromeda fails to do that in every aspect. Setting aside my background in cosmology for a bit this story breaks suspension of disbelief. I was able to get beyond the original trilogy and it's law bending narrative. The villain, Archon, is so bland and unimportant that I can't tell you what he did in the game. There is another reason for that though. I was constantly getting sidetracked by side missions that were there just to pad the play time. All the characters in this game are boring,  especially your Ryder. How can that be possible when it's an RPG that is shaped by your decisions. I'm one of the few that hated all of ME3. An overly simplistic way of summarizing the plot of 3 is a guy with PTSD somehow solved a galaxy's worth of racism to fight off even larger bigots for reasons.

As one other person put it, if the Witcher 3 can get it with a lower budget then a company backed by the worst publisher in the U.S. can.

Edited November 8, 2017 by cloudleohart

[Stargazer2600]

1 hour ago, cloudleohart said:

This being an RPG the primary objective is to tell a decent story. Andromeda fails to do that in every aspect. Setting aside my background in cosmology for a bit this story breaks suspension of disbelief. I was able to get beyond the original trilogy and it's law bending narrative. The villain, Archon, is so bland and unimportant that I can't tell you what he did in the game. There is another reason for that though. I was constantly getting sidetracked by side missions that were there just to pad the play time. All the characters in this game are boring,  especially your Ryder. How can that be possible when it's an RPG that is shaped by your decisions. I'm one of the few that hated all of ME3. An overly simplistic way of summarizing the plot of 3 is a guy with PTSD somehow solved a galaxy's worth of racism to fight off even larger bigots for reasons.

As one other person put it, if the Witcher 3 can get it with a lower budget then a company backed by the worst publisher in the U.S. can.

Well doesn't matter now. They canned what could have been a great new trilogy cause of all the bitching so. Guess you must be thrilled. Personally I'm p***ed

[McVexy]

Honestly, the game was't THAT bad. Sure, it had it's crappy moments and the side quests were abysmal, but you very much got the feeling that they were setting up for another trilogy. I thought the Archon was a great bad guy to open up a new series of games with - nothing overly threatening, but enough to warrant your attention. We know the Kett were going to be involved still (similar to the Geth's role in the OT).

 

My main gripe with the game (bar the side "quests") was the characters - I didn't like any of them (no, not even the INSANELY overrated Jaal). The only somewhat likeable one was Draak who was just a Wrex clone. In fact, they should have all been switched with the Tempest crew - Lexi would have made a great companion - yelling in battle about being careful, throwing up shields, scolding you etc. Kallo, Suvi, Gil - I would have much preferred them in my squad. Heck, even Draak's granddaughter was a lot more compelling than the old man himself.

 

It's a shame that the game went down so badly. It really is. Part of me feels it was undeserved, an equal part of me feels it was deserved, but in the end we've all lost. No more Mass Effect games - or at least, a very large question mark as to it's future.

[DARKB1KE]

On 10/7/2017 at 4:35 AM, ShadowReplicant said:

 

Thanks for your insightful input and concern. You do realize that this is a forum where people passionate about games (in this case videogame writing) post their opinions on them? Btw. I don't want to suspend my disbelief in a Mass Effect game. Good stories are about internal consistency of a secondary, fictional reality. If your fiction is good, no suspension of disbelief is necessary. If your story fails to immerse the consumer of your work in a believable fictional universe, you fucked up and the consumer has to accept your bullshit (suspend his disbelief), because he no longer feels immersed, or simply give up.

 

The previous ME games had some of the best world-building in the medium, which is why the awful, sophomoric writing in Andromeda took a lot of fans by surprise. But you're either very young or simply don't care much about writing in primarily story-driven games so, if you enjoyed Andromeda, good for you, I guess.

I thought this game had a much better storyline than the previous 3 games. 

[Rally-Vincent---]

Having completed the game (only missing two trophies for the APEX missions), I can say: even with all its flaws, I liked the game enough to put ~90 hours into it. The flaws certainly can be  dealbreaker for some. I think the premise of the game - travelling to another galaxy to settle there was good enough to part Andromeda from the ME trilogy.

 

Let me preface my post saying that my favorite ME game from the trilogy as ME 1, simply because you get to explore the galaxy, and wherever you go, you discover something new. New planets, new races and everything that is attached to them (politics, culture, where and how they live, their conflicts with other races and within themselves, the Council etc etc). This is where ME:A failed to become a really interesting game. There is a whole new galaxy to explore, but there isn't much to discover. Only two new live alien races, and one is the enemy about you don't learn much, and one culture that apparently went under. At the new locations, you mostly encounter the same old races - Turians, Salarians, Krogan, Asari and Humans - you already know everything about.

 

So much potential lost. If ME:A would have done what ME 1 did - give you a whle new universe to discover, its shortcomings in the story would have been neglectable. I'd still say the game is solid - 6.5/10. I would have been interested in sequels.

 

On 24.4.2017 at 2:31 PM, ShadowReplicant said:

The "Pathfinder" idea was the perfect opportunity to go back to the fantastic origin system of Dragon Age: Origins and offer the player the choice of starting out as a member of a different race, but no – once again you find yourself in the shoes of the human Standard McDefault, AKA Scott/Sara Ryder (I guess Stryker or Hunter weren't available), an uncharismatic, stereotypically heroic, horny dweeb with the mental capacity of a 15 year old, who shouldn't even be part of the Initiative, let alone be leading it (seriously, leave the retarded twins in the freezer and let me play as Alec Ryder). You quickly assemble a group of second-rate Milky Way rejects including Not-Liara, Not-Wrex and a female Not-Garrus and begin your quest to scan (and hopefully fuck) every last object in the Andromeda galaxy.

 

I disagree here. Playing as Alec Ryder would just have been an attempt to be as close to a Shepard replacement as could have been. Having an inexperienced Twenty-something as Pathfinder would have given good opportunities for a story where the job shapes you into a 'real' Pathfinder, with the Initiative leadership as well as your crew, especially with Cora being passed over in the succession. The Initiative leadership was second rate - playing the designated Pathfinder Alec Ryder would have been quite boring, I think. I came to like Sara Ryder a bit into the story. You are right about the crew, not many of them really stick out. Drak, though, is a typical Krogan, which I liked. I can't really deal with Krogan who aren't Krogan. PeeBee also grew on me, I mostly took those two on missions. Surprisingly I liked Cora, she would have deserved a better storyline.

 

And: the banter between team members during free roam was quite interesting at times and helped building a relationship to them. Not every crew member can be as great as [insert your favorite crew member from the trilogy, in my case Mordin Solus].

 

On 24.4.2017 at 2:31 PM, ShadowReplicant said:

 But at least the bad guys are interesting, right? Enter the Kett... an aggressive race of uncommunicative insectoid space nazis whose backstory is in a future sequel. But boy, are they evil. They're basically discount Star Trek villains. And then there's the Proth... I mean the Remnant. What amazes me about the Remnant is that the writers somehow succeeded in making them incredibly boring. The Protheans were one of the most interesting aspects of the original story. Every time you learned something new about them, you got a little excited. There was a sense of mystery behind their disappearance and the things they left behind. There's nothing like that in Andromeda. There's no sense of awe or discovery,

 

I agree with one exception. If the new galaxy would have held enough other things to discover, making the Remnant stay a mystery for the first game would totally be acceptable. The Initiative is trying to find a place to settle, and with the new worlds so inhospitable, settling and

Spoiler

finding the missing Arks

 

would take priority over researching the Remnant. Resources are limited, only the minimum staff can be supported. It would have been very okay with me to delay remnant discoveries to the next title when the settlements are established. I think it is just because there is nothing else that one expects to find out something important about the Remnants. I reality, why wouldn't there be something that we just cannot find out about?

 

On 24.4.2017 at 2:31 PM, ShadowReplicant said:

 The Pathfinder and his allies are completely useless when you think about it – their only purpose is to carry SAM around and let him deal with everything. Besides, I still don't understand how an N7 grunt single-handedly created the most advanced AI in the history of two galaxies, but maybe I've missed something. SAM's inclusion in the story also inherently negates any potentially interesting conflict. How about NOT understanding the Angara immediately upon first contact? What if you actually had to put together a team of linguists and other scientists to study their language and culture before you could properly communicate with them? (That's how omni-tool translators worked in the original trilogy btw.) And why are the Angara so generic anyway? This is a new galaxy, this is science fiction, why not have something completely different, like a silicon-based species or something? Even the Hanar had more thought put into them and they weren't even one of the major races.

 

An excellent example of wasted potential. No need to add anything here.

 

As for the AI: If SAM had been developed during the 600 year voyage by a team of scientist who had been either not frozen or taken turns or whatever, I could have accepted most of its capabilities as 'given for the sake of gameplay'. 600 years would have been a reasobale timeframe to develop a powerful, sentient AI (based on what EDI was already capable of in 2185).

 

On 24.4.2017 at 2:31 PM, ShadowReplicant said:

The laziness of the writers and narrative designers downright breaks the immersion at times – like when all Angaran merchants immediately accept your worthless "credits." Remember the Volus? The little guys that were practically running the Milky Way economy? Don't need them anymore, all aliens in Andromeda miraculously have the exact same monetary system, of course. Oh, and they use Arabic numerals, apparently. What a relief. And how exactly does this economy work anyway, I didn't see any financial institutions on the Nexus. And while we're at it, why would you bring the Krogan to a new galaxy? They're violent and infertile, wouldn't they be the last choice for a colonization effort? Why is there no prison on the Nexus, you thought there wouldn't be any crime in a community of 100.000 people? No legal system? No politics? Did we leave democracy in the Milky Way? Why did so many of "Milky Way's finest" turn into violent sociopaths the minute something unexpected happened? There was a screening process, right? RIGHT?! Why is there no additional personnel on the Tempest? Remember the Normandy quartermaster who would sell you newly procured equipment whenever the ship landed on a planet? Don't need him anymore, now there's a magical terminal, kids. Oh, fuck off. There's a reason why I read every single codex entry every time I play one of the old Mass Effect games, it's called believable world-building. I have yet to open the codex menu in Andromeda. I'm not saying the previous Mass Effect games were flawless masterpieces, but Andromeda is on a completely new level of "dumbed down." This is sci-fi for pre-teens, folks.

 

To be fair: Some of the issues you bring up have been adressed in-game, albeit poorly. The Initiative surely would use credits trading with each other. You can ask one of the Angaraan arms merchants at the port (not the market) why he'd take your credits, and he tells you something like it will be an investment. Not sure a businessman would actually do it, but they can use the credits trading with the Initiative, can they? The sociopaths are somewhat adressed in a miniquest on Eladen where you scan Scavengers to see why they are so abnormal in their behavior. The explanation is again hardly believable, but they at least tried.

 

There is a prison on the Nexus (two holding cells in Operations :p). There must be a prison somewhere else, a certain character can be scentenced to jail or exile. The Initiative is a private enterprise, I can believe that there is a hierachy rather than a democracy before actually establishing outposts. Building a government comes after that, and in the meantime, Nexus security is all they have (this does not explain why an attempted murder is not punishable, though).

 

The Kett weren't bad as enemies. From what I saw during missions, I believe they might be inspired by the late Roman Republic (pure speculation, I know). I would have liked to see  how they'd have been fleshed out in further entries. Too bad the wonky-animation-outroar killed the series.

[Stargazer2600]

@Rally-Vincent--- you forgot the remnant, this brings it to 3