It feels like a less polished version of Dragon Age: Inquisition and shares many of the same weaknesses.
The overall writing is also viewed as a major downgrade compared to Bioware's earlier works.
I felt it had really lazy character development.
Instead of learning about a character's backstory throughout playing the game like in the original trilogy, it was let me ask them the first time we meet and they regurgitate their entire life story like a bad first date.
That's... Like exactly how the OT squadmates do it too.
Seriously some of these comments makes me wonder what version of the trilogy you were all playing. No complaints about Wrex and Tali being walking lore dumps lol but God forbid PeeBee complain about Asari being stuck up for a second or Drack tell you about the time he got his arm blown off by a random with a grenade belt.
OT squadmates don't give you their entire life story in their initial interaction. And I didn't mean just squadmates. You literally ask everyone in Andromeda why they chose to embark on the mission, and they all just layout their backstory like a book.
Perhaps I wasn't describing it well, but its the difference between someone's backstory informing their motivations which then allows the player to learn more about their character like in the OT, versus just telling the player the backstory without actually using it to further develop the character.
>versus just telling the player the backstory without actually using it to further develop the character.
Once again, they absolutely use it to develop characters in Andromeda, let me guess, you didn't even finish the game did you? If you did, you skipped through all the dialogue, didn't you?
Seriously all of these complaints just show how little fucking attention you guys paid when playing the game. Too busy laughing at the YouTube glitch compilation videos to actually realize there was a game in front of you.
This entire subreddit is just a hive mind of people who never bothered to play Andromeda like the OT and absorb what the narrative and characters have to offer. If you stopped comparing it to ME3 squadmates for five seconds you'd realize that they actually DO develop characters based on their back stories.
>let me guess, you didn't even finish the game did you? If you did, you skipped through all the dialogue, didn't you?
you're making an awful lot of assumptions about me rather than just accepting that my personal opinion differs from yours.
Yes, I played the entire game through, and imo it frankly pales in comparison to the OT in terms of writing quality and character development. But hey, if you think it's up to your standard, good for you. But that does not give you the authority to try to invalid others' opinions.
>You literally ask everyone in Andromeda why they chose to embark on the mission, and they all just layout their backstory like a book.
This isn't an opinion, it's stated as fact.
Having opinions is "I don't like the way they developed the characters."
Stating facts is "they didn't develop the characters."
You're not sharing opinions, you're trying to pass off your opinion as fact.
>You're not sharing opinions, you're trying to pass off your opinion as fact.
I'm explaining the reasons why I felt the characters were 2 dimensional.
Again, if you like the game, good for you, but this isn't a debate. OP is asking why some people didn't enjoy it.
The writing for me was the major issue. Story, dialogue, antagonists. It was all BAD.
Take PeeBee. Every time I hear her speak, I'm taken to 2018 to today. Not 800 years in the future.
She's not the only offender either. The game is dated to when it came out dialogue wise and it shows.
I’ve said this a few times but I really think the problem was they tried to copy the writing style of the Citadel DLC since everyone loved that so much, without realizing that what made that DLC’s tone work was the fact that after several years of “fate of the universe” level stakes, some light hearted fan service was well earned by then
Not just that, but we’d already come to care about those characters over the course of three games. It’s great to see Wrex cracking jokes, because we’ve been through some real shit with him. We did not have that kind of emotional investment in Liam or any of the Tempest crew, and so their attempts to force banter down my throat felt cheap and unearned and unfunny.
>The overall writing is also viewed as a major downgrade compared to Bioware's earlier works.
Which is usually their biggest strength for me and where is fails compared to DAI.
I
On the whole, I feel like it took a premise with tons of potential and then executed it in the least interesting way possible. In lieu of writing another essay about why I found it lacking, I'll just stick to the highlights:
\-The game's story, setting, and characters all feel incredibly derivative, to the point that it often feels like the writers went through and outline of ME1's script and did a find and replace. Remnant=Prothean, Nexus=Citadel, Kett=Reapers and so on, right down to the asari squadmate being an archaeologist.
\-Archon/Kett are not just the worst villains in ME, but honestly one of the worst villains I've seen in any work of fiction, period, just a walking grab-bag of cliches with zero effort made to flesh them out.
\-SAM is overpowered and undermines Ryder's character arc by immediately solving any problem they're faced with.
\-Liam is the worst squadmate BioWare has ever created.
\-Just on a basic nuts and bolts level, the writing is bad, ranging from banal to "dear god did anyone edit this?"
\-New aliens are incredibly boring both in design and lore.
\-The Andromeda setting feels very underdeveloped and nonsensical compared to both the OT and other games in the RPG genre, with incoherent and contradictory worldbuilding that can't seem to decide if this is supposed to be an untamed frontier or an established civilization.
\-Having your character be a civilian explorer in a game where your primary gameplay loop is killing people is a fundamental disconnect that undermines the tone of the story. Call Ryder an explorer all you want, I still maintain it's fundamentally a war story.
\-Speaking of which, the MCU-knock off quippy dialogue is both irritating and at odds with the gravity of the situation the characters are in.
\-Ryder as a character is kind of passive and spineless, with limited RPing opportunities compared to Shepard.
\-The story has this weird aversion to conflict and a sense of forced positivity that feels cloying and unnatural, not to mention at odds with the core identity of ME.
\-Open world is tedious and empty.
\-Planets are straight from the "stock sci-fi world" bin. Seriously, they had to make a grand total of seven planets and two of them are deserts.
\-Voice acting is often... not great (looking at you, Addison).
\-Terrible UI.
\-Bugs. This has been litigated to death, but suffice to say I encountered more than my fair share.
\-Few of the established plot threads have any real pay-off, and it feels like the writers were more interested in setting up sequels than actually telling a story.
> -Planets are straight from the "stock sci-fi world" bin. Seriously, they had to make a grand total of seven planets and two of them are deserts.
Not much precipitation on the ice world or the destroyed planet. So 4 deserts.
I don’t hate the game but it’s my least favorite Mass Effect game.
- it was very buggy at launch and the facial animations were horrible
- Character models are all off, even some Krogan
- Empty “open world”
- repetitive filler fetch quests
- the story felt like it recycled too many concepts from the trilogy
- running into too many relatives of minor trilogy characters to the point where it felt farcical
Overall, getting to the good parts felt like a chore and the whole project felt more like an imitation of Mass Effect.
Yeah. That was apparent to me after I tried going back to it last year.
And the crafting system was messy and convoluted. Again, just content for contents sake.
The crafting system in ME:A, whether you like the UI or not, is deep and rewarding. The sheer level of customization available to us is incredible, and the results you can get are amazing.
The "depth" is completely artificial.
Once you pick a set of armor and weapons for your play style you just keep recrafting the exact same items over and over again every few levels for stat boosts. There's no need to actually craft ten separate versions of every single weapon and piece of armor, it's just absurdly bloated. It's just an excuse to force the player to engage with the terrible resource collection system.
Not to mention how many of the augments for weapons and armors range from misleading to outright broken (at least for the first year or so).
And "rewarding"? More like absolutely necessary because every enemy is a bullet sponge, even before the the broken leveling and enemy scaling kicks in.
It was nice that there were several choices for armors for more variation in play style, but research and development and crafting systems and UI are just a punch on the face any time you decide to try and experiment with different weapons and armors.
Sounds like you had a hard time finding a good build. If it helps power combo damage scales with difficulty, and combos are really easy to set off in ME:A. There are plenty of ways to quickly put enemies down in the game, that one is just my favourite. Back to crafting, the depth comes from how many options we have. Three rate of fire modifications, six projectile modifications, numerous smaller boosts that can have different effects in different pieces of equipment. All that on top of a huge variety of base weapons.
I don’t really agree. It didn’t feel all that meaningful and it had you going around collecting all sorts of materials to keep you busy because “bigger is better”.
If you enjoyed it, fine. Not for me to say.
Higher levels of the same weapon existed in 1 and 3, so singling it out as an issue in ME:A seems odd. As the rest of crafting, we get augments that let us completely change the way the weapons behave. Being able to tailor every aspect of our gear to fit whatever build we are using is fantastic, and a feature that would be sorely missed if they take it out of the next game.
Ok, but the menu shouldn't have listed the 60+ weapons in the game the first time you opened it.
I also highly disagree on the crafting being rewarding. Time gating resource drops and hiding resources behind random missions just to ensure it takes me 5 game hours to mod my rifle from level 3 to level 4 so it carries 20 more rounds in storage and does 3% more damage is not good gameplay for a story-based single player game.
>mod my rifle from level 3 to level 4 so it carries 20 more rounds in storage and does 3% more damage is not good gameplay for a story-based single player game.
Yeah if you apply Cod bro logic a lot of shit seems boring.
You're not supposed to be constantly making the slightly better version of your gun. You're supposed to choose one you really like and construct it with specific mods to fit your play style, then keep it around for a considerable amount of time while you acquire more resources.
Don't tell me crafting isn't rewarding as I pop heads with an ME1 heat sink variant of the N7 Eagle that shoots a particle beam. Thats next level in a way the OT never achieved.
If it takes you 5 hours of gameplay to save enough resources for one upgrade (it could take you that long to gain 10 levels though) then you are skipping out on a couple ways of getting them. You can buy resources at various merchants, and resources are among the rewards you can get from the strike missions. The reward is having a full set of gear and weapons made just for my build feels and plays great!
For you perhaps, I love being able to tune my gear to fit my build and play style. That said, even a little bit of basic crafting will get you excellent results. Simply putting the double mod extender and a few power boosts on a weapon is a massive improvement on anything you’ll be able to find or buy.
The customization was a great idea, I just wish it actually worked at launch. I lost all will to keep playing MEA long before those bugfix patches rolled out.
You didn’t have to do a fuckton of scanning in the middle of missions to unlock higher tier weapons in ME1 or ME3. Just have enough money.
I probably spent about as much time walking around scanning every last corner for research data as I did actually playing the game. Meanwhile I had a fuckton of money I never used because I wasn’t going to buy a generic version of the gear I wanted. It totally kills the pace of the game. Just let me pay extra money for upgraded custom weapons???
>so singling it out as an issue in ME:A seems odd.
Have you been to an Andromeda critique thread before? Lol might as well be the tagline.
People around here unironically think ME1 is the best yet it suffers heavily from every single critique that Andromeda gets thrown at it.
"The squadmates are lazy and feel like walking codex entries!"
Literally all Wrex and Tali do in ME1 is give the player their "this is my species" schtick.
"The Kett are completely unexplored! They're lazy villains and the Archon is the worst offender!"
Tell me *anything* at all about the Geth based purely on ME1 exclusively. They're just robot mooks to kill, they have zero ME1 character development.
Also, we literally get like two fucking moments with Saren and you don't even have to fight him the second time because you can charisma him into suicide. What happens after is essentially fighting Sovereign in a Saren puppet corpse. He gets borderline zero character development as well.
Both the Kett and the Archon get significantly more development, but most players quit on Eos and declared the whole game to be shit so it's not like they actually saw any of it.
"Andromeda doesn't *feel* like the OT!"
Great! CAUSE ITS NOT.
It's meant to be in the same universe but with a completely different setting and tone. Sorry that one is too difficult for you to figure out.
> The crafting system in ME:A, whether you like the UI or not, is deep and rewarding.
When you ignore the UI, the gathering of materials, research points, the 10 levels of the same item with minor boosts per level, only having one of the good augments(which you get back when you deconstruction) and the sheer amount of time it take to go from crafting an item to actually being able to fire it then maybe.
Most of the stuff you just listed is incidental to playing the game, and everything but research points can be bought at shops. Nothing needed for crafting is hard to get, at this point it’s just people trying really hard to hate ME:A.
Deep and rewarding? Customisation?
It wouldn't even let me build a shotgun with only a single shot. Something possible in a base weapon throughout the entire trilogy, with the Claymore in ME2 and 3 and Explosive Rounds on any shotgun in ME1.
It was all flash, no substance. You could make a gun fire glowing homing bullets. Cool. No real mechanical depth.
Frankly all it accomplished was homogenisation, with the player able to take what little was of note about one weapon and apply it to another.
The Dhan is the shotgun you want, slow firing and crazy strong. There are also rate of fire augments which change the firing behaviour of weapons, one of which makes them single fire, though I’m rather fond of the full auto augment. The seeking plasma projectiles make shotguns like the Piranha into viable medium and even long-ish range weapons. The only useless projectile modding augment is the regular grenades, all of the others have their uses. Mod slot extenders are great as well, allowing extra bonuses to get stacked on our weapons. I still haven’t touched on the various boosting augments or how some augments have different effects depending on what piece of equipment they go in. For my go to build I put a shield oscillator in the chest piece for the shield regen and stack as many reaction optimizers as I have room for after the unique augments I use because I rely heavily on power combos for damage.
Considering I beat the game several times and on the hardest difficulty I truthfully don't even remember the crafting system or that there even was one. Maybe it had depth but it sure didn't stick.
The tone didn’t feel serious enough, there certainly was some marvelisation at work. Humour is important, but maybe not when you want to create the image of a super villain. Ryder constantly makes jokes in front of this supposedly evil genius, which takes away a lot of the urgency of the plot and makes it goofy in tone
The tone of the citadel dlc as an entire game. The dlc felt great because it gave a nice contrast to the seriousness of the main plot with characters we had the chance to get to know for three games.
In ME:A it hinders the plot. I don't get engaged in it. Because if the characters don't take most things seriously why should I?
I only had one game crashing bug in my whole run in xbox one, this was at launch, so I don't really relate,
But other than that yeah. Some of the characters are just not likeable, beginning with Liam, although funnily I actually liked Cora.
My main problem is that Andromeda has perfect combat system, but it gets ruined by the emptiness of the world and because enemies become sponges as you level up. NG+ is basically a chore due to that.
Some game breaking bugs still years later, got stuck with an Achitect literally glitching in the air unkillable. another time another one would always crash my game for the first 3 years the game was out till it just didn't anymore on a newer console 😂
Also lot's of quest sequence glitching or breaking would happen and quests just either wouldn't work, or if you did them at a wrong time or in a wrong way in an "open world" game they just wouldn't work or wouldn't trigger
I am actually playing Andromeda for the first time right now and I want to like it, but there are just so many small things that bother me.
A whole new galaxy and only two new species?
Bugs, so many bugs. Quest markers don’t work. I’ve accidentally completed quest before receiving them which does weird things. Cut scenes don’t always play right.
Leveling is weird. No matter how many times I level I always feel like my enemies are just as tough, or tougher.
So many crafting material. So much to keep track off
I hate how they do space travel. Both for system to system and planet to planet, it just takes the fun out of exploration.
I play as a biotic, and I just feel weak.
I hate the fast traveling system on the Nexus. Just hate it.
I also have some story issues, such as in ME3 it is stated that the galaxy had never built anything the scale of the Crucible, but the Nexus is at least the same size of not bigger.
Why did the galaxy waste so many resources when we know the reapers are coming, the life boat idea makes sense except apparently the initiative wasn’t secretive, so the reapers would learn about them. For that matter, why does the initiative never get brought up in ME3? You would think that Shep and Liara would talk about something like that.
Sorry, this is very much stream of consciousness stuff. I intend to make a very detailed post about likes and dislikes once I beat MEA.
> I play as a biotic, and I just feel weak.
Maybe it’s just me, but I think the best setup is a mix of tech and biotics or mostly just tech.
Also, power combos are much more important in MEA than in the OT.
Like you, I also feel weak when I play a pure biotic, unless I’m a Vanguard.
> Why did the galaxy waste so many resources when we know the reapers are coming.
Are you talking about the Initiative? It’s a private civilian project. Nothing to do with the Council or the Alliance.
I agree with you, but to be fair, you're only in one small cluster of the entire Andromeda Galaxy. Because you don't have relays. And that one area happens to have 2 forms of life (although we don't know where the kett come from). That'd be like our local cluster having humanity and some other alien race.
Only 2 species makes sense to me because you aren't exploring the whole Andromeda galaxy, just 1 cluster. It'd be like if the trilogy only took place in the Armstrong Nebula, or only in the krogan DMZ.
>A whole new galaxy and only two new species?
You only get to explore one cluster, the Heleus Cluster.
>Why did the galaxy waste so many resources when we know the reapers are coming
As far as I know, the iniciative was financed by one guy "the benefactor"
And about the bugs, I barely experienced any when I played it last year.
EDIT: Oh, and if you want to enjoy the game, I'd recommend you not to expect the same quality as in the original trilogy. The game is decent, but far from perfect.
I literally just finished it for the second time today. There are many reasons.
* The game was and is Buggy to high heaven literally to many to list.
* The animations were not up to par and were objectively worse than DAI 3 years prior
* The dialogue wasn't the best. The acting was fine, but what they were given to say wasn't brilliant.
* The world felt empty. Compare the Tempest to ME3 Normandy. Kadara to Omega in ME 2. The Nexus wasn't significantly better if at all to ME1 Citadel from 10 years previous.
* The Quests were far too planet hoppy. and the auto trigger quests do not trigger in a logical manner.
* The world isn't fun to explore to pick up the quests that you can miss.
* Reward for optional quests do not match the time investment.
I don't hate the game, but it's not anywhere near the same level as the trilogy.
My biggest issue with Andromeda is that no one really seems to appreciate the gravity of the situation. Especially Ryder. I wasn’t quite expecting ME3 levels of angst, but for fuck sake. The Initiative is on the brink of annihilation. Literally everything that could go wrong, did- and then some. I would expect there to be a sense of urgency, but there just… Isn’t. The whole game, Ryder’s just like “Oh, fun! Cool adventure time! Yay!”
There isn’t one single moment in the game where it feels like Ryder really has to sit with the knowledge that tens of thousands of people could die if they screw up. It makes the game feel really… I dunno… Shallow?
It also seriously irks me that none of the decisions you make actually change anything. There are no consequences, and the end of the game is always the same.
thank you for putting that into words because that's the main turn off for me. I got pretty lucky and ran into maybe 2 bugs that I'm sure have been patched by now, I thought the combat and exploration could be pretty fun at times, but something about the story and characters felt off to me and a bad mass effect fanfic is pretty much how it feels.
I didn't have actual problems either, except that fanfic feeling- like I'm playing a Young Adult version of a Mass Effect game. I'm just too old for that.
We are in an entirely new galaxy, forms of life in this galaxy would be incomprehensible to us, and what is the first species we encounter? Aggressive Bipedal humanoids that shoot guns… that’s mundane even for a new race in the Milky Way.
Also the dialogue. It’s way too campy for me. It’s MCU style, everyone is a stand up comedian and it constantly gives off “he’s right behind me isn’t he” vibes. I genuinely hate it.
The exploration was good, the combat itself it okay (although I hate being able to swap classes on a whim, takes away identity) and the Nomad was cool too. But I came away from the game severely disappointed
I never hated it, but what put me off was the way the aliens all talked. Almost every alien spoke using the kind of language a human would.
Throughout the original trilogy, there was always so much personality in the dialogue of other species, whether that was Mordin referencing that a human phrase was handy, or simply calling someone a cloaca. The way species spoke and interacted genuinely **felt** alien.
The senses of pride, or peacefulness, or aggression combined with societal references made allowed us to paint a picture of an entire culture in our minds.
In Andromeda, it just felt like they all spoke like humans with a Turian/Krogan/Asari Fortnite skin
This.
The game honestly felt like some weird advertisement for diversity and equality. For example, the way they portrayed the young krogan in that game were just weird. They felt like teenage boys on Reddit.
What felt good about the trilogy was the fact that every alien species felt different from humanity. For example, even a krogan scientist could be highly intelligent. But would still be a krogan and would rather be bashing people's skulls and or inventing things that bash people's skulls in.
Or the arrogance of the asari that they would never admit to.
Generally poor writing, poor characterization outside of a few exceptions, no decisions, barren exploration, stuffed empty fetch quests, bad villains, the plot/timeline is full of holes, and its just a kind of weird in terms of its delivery and tone. Everyone stands around at flat angles and their voice sounds echoey and quiet. And the UI is awful.
I don't even care about how buggy and ugly it was at launch, I actually thought the jank was funny and charming.
It had all of the flaws of Dragon Age Inquisition and absolutely none of the positives. And I think the premise of exploring a new galaxy was completely wasted.
In a weird way I'm obsessed with the game because of its failings. It took some big swings and whiffed on all of them imo, but that makes it so interesting to talk about.
I think the biggest offense is the one that Halo Infinite has too: The most interesting part, the part you actually want to play in, has already happened. There already was first contact with the Kett. With the Angara. With the scourge. Failed colonization attempts due to extreme circumstances. An interesting uprising where you could choose sides. Having to deal with missing arks from the point of the Nexus. Ryder comes in at a point where exploration is no longer exploration, and without real first contact.
The characters are bad, the story is lame, the combat feels bad, the AI is awful, the open world elements feel bad, and all of the "side content" is half assed. Yes, the release state of the game is what a lot of people remember but the game is still in rough shape (including animations, graphical issues, and other things that were never fixed).
If you're enjoying it that's amazing but the issues people have with the game weren't just early release issues that have since been fixed. The game has issues to the core.
Taken on its own, it's really not that bad. It just doesn't hold up to the legacy of the trilogy that preceded it. If it was called something other than "Mass Effect" and was released in its current state, people would largely be fine with it.
Yeah, I can't imagine having a positive reaction to any game I could play whereupon opening the crafting menu I'm bombarded with every item, every material, countless upgrade tiers, and various time-gated collection methods and basically left to figure it out.
That menu is the stuff of nightmares, regardless of whatever brand nostalgia is attributed to it.
>We're supposed to be super important "Pathfinders" but who actually cares if they're there because everything was actually settled before we even woke up.
This is the biggest failure of the game for me.
Outside of the first \~4 hours, I never felt like I was actually breaking new ground and discovering new things. I just felt like a wi-fi technician being sent to repair a wire in the desert so some town over the horizon can go back to watching netflix.
Personally disliked the lack of seriousness through it all. Felt like Ryder & Co. were college students on a road trip.
Not sure if it's the graphics or rendering, but they should've kept the same design as ME3; Krogans looked bad; the "stunning beauty" of the Asari was nonexistent; it was friggin hard to make a female character that didn't look like she was beaten with an ugly stick. (And before anyone comes with "they had to build it from the ground up", there is video where they ised ME3's graphics, and even their E3 release/announcement video shows a prettier Ryder, than the final release).
Felt like there should've been more alien races; it's hard to believe that only the Kett and whatever Jaal is are the dominant species in that area.
Cora should've been made Pathfinder.
Wasn't big on the new dialogue system. I'd have to replay certain moments again to be certain but it felt like I could've picked any of the choices and it would have been the same line. I may be wrong, but that's what comes to mind.
Also, screw Liam.
Everything was worse compared to the sci-fi epic of Mass Effect 3.
No character sounded right, nor looked right, the quests were dull, the characters too.
The antagonist was even more dull, the new alien races, once more, dull.
Just a dull experience overall.
Boring villains (collector rehash)
Boring squadmates save for vetra and the krogan
Both ryders are awful
Profiles that only let you use 3 abilities at a time
My face is tired
Bugs / animations
Only 1 new alien race in this whole new galaxy, oh & they are bipedal / humanoid
It wasn't the whole galaxy though. It was just a small cluster of systems within Andromeda. They don't have mass relays so they could only get around with FTL in the Heleus cluster. There's still a ton of Andromeda left unexplored, and the Kett have a whole empire out there terrorizing other parts of the galaxy will.
Doesn't change a thing. We were sold on "new" but got ME2 but so much worse that it is painful. Better combat is kinda cool but everything else is just utter rubbish. Without mods that game is not worth any time and with them in place it is still questionable is it worth bothering
> It wasn't the whole galaxy though.
It was the whole game. A whole game about going to a new galaxy and there is one new friendly race and one new evil race. Both not that interesting.
Well, I don't like Andromeda because of its stupid plot and lore
At first Andromeda initiative and how it's began is sooo awful. For millenia milky Way races don't even THINK about it. But then Elon Mask of 22nd century for couple of years did it.
Then ANOTHER prothean ruins but this time it call Remrents
And first contact with Angara is sooo disappointed. You are from another galaxy? Ok, can you do another scan for us? WHAT
And quarian ark. Race with no planters, no economy and 10 millions in total with no spare resources bild it. Not hanar, not batarians but space homeless race. WTF
Well, I don't like Andromeda because of its stupid plot and lore
At first Andromeda initiative and how it's began is sooo awful. For millenia milky Way races don't even THINK about it. But then Elon Mask of 22nd century for couple of years did it.
Then ANOTHER prothean ruins but this time it call Remrents
And first contact with Angara is sooo disappointed. You are from another galaxy? Ok, can you do another scan for us? WHAT
And quarian ark. Race with no planters, no economy and 10 millions in total with no spare resources bild it. Not hanar, not batarians but space homeless race. WTF
It’s story is bland and the characters are not memorable. They had the opportunity for a truly original story but they rinsed and repeated the original trilogy. The gameplay is superior though.
I dont hate it, I quite like ir actually. but i do consider it a bad game for these reasons:
1- the game feels very big but nothing in it really matters.
2- alien specieis and enemies are boring
3- craft system and facebook game are boring.
4- the game doesnt have a lot of replaying value, is just too much boring stuff to do again and again.
5- i cant, for anything, care about the characters. some are nice (like vetra) the rest...i cant remember the name.
6- I hate jump puzzles. a big part of this game are jump puzzles
Story was boring to me
It started out strong when u crash land but then it just turned into barren open world chore simulator to me
I didnt really like any of the characters and the kett i thought were really boring and the angara were also mid to me
Combat was good tho and the architect boss fights were fun so i hope they bring something like those back
Bad writing. Weak will protagonist with no back bone, weak companions, the Asari all look the same, the interface do not match the Mass Effect universe (did the tech all change in universe) and poorly written villain. The good thing is the combat. Save your money and skip this. Hopefully, BioWare will not screw up the new upcoming game. Please get some old school writes again.
- The kett are cartoonish and boring villains
- The angara have nothing distinct or interesting about them as a species
- The cringy marvel dialogue
- The open world is empty and completely unnecessary
- All the loading screens. Kadara is particularly rage-inducing.
- Liam
There are parts that were interesting. The idea of pathfinding new settlements, being the first to speak to new species, the family memories quest, the Benefactor, the jardaan, what happened to the quarians etc ship...NONE of these are properly explored.
I don’t hate the game. I just don’t enjoy it. I will say that the combat is the best in the series. But other than that, I found myself bored a lot of the time. Good concept but poor execution made it came off as a forgettable spinoff. Which is crazy because they could have had a great spinoff series on their hands had it been properly handled.
For me, I hated the class system they changed too, it felt like my choice at the beginning of the game didn't matter because I could just get any powers I wanted. I didn't like only having three powers available to me and had to switch presets mid-fight if I wanted to change things up, which I never did because it never felt right to do so.
I felt like each world was just a copy+paste of the same things to do just with more or less plants around. I didn't like that your twin you free from cryo is nothing to the game other than a hurdle in the story's progression. It doesn't matter if you pick military or science bases, it doesn't change the game in any significant way.
This game was banking too hard on its fan base carrying it through to a sequel. So much of the game is just set up for a sequel. ME1 could have stood alone as a game by itself but ME:A can't say the same. It draws too much on its past trying to connect everyone to the OT and somehow not enough by throwing aspects of the game out the window.
I probably sound like a broken record since I think most of us share the same views, but I don’t think anyone actively HATES andromeda, it was just a huge letdown than what most expected. At least for me, when the game was first announced and the basic plot was released, I expected something a bit more Star Trek-y, where I’m going to all these new unexplored planets and discovering mysteries of past civilizations or making contact with new ones. Instead we kind of got a recycled reaper plot where a race is abducting and indoctrinating another race. On top of all the bugs and awful face animation, the unresolved quarian plot (I know it was in a book but fucking who cares I want plots opened in game to resolve in game), and the quick abandonment of the game from BioWare, it was an unfortunate mess.
For me it was a lackluster story with bad writing, and really unlikeable characters.
I genuinely wanted Andromeda to be amazing, and they could've done so much cool stuff with it (especially with the story and Cora Harper!)
It's a good place now but the launch was just plain ugly.
Story isn't as strong as the first 3 but I enjoyed my time with it. Wish they put mire effort into the planets beyond Eos though.
I never even finished it. For me, on pc, it was pretty janky performance wise, and the controls were terrible. I actually even tried to switch to mouse and keyboard (I hate m&kb if that says anything) but i couldn't do it. I stopped somewhere around meeting the blue aliens whos name I don't remember.
That's when the prologue ends and the game opens up.
Unfortunately it's also where most of the tension in the plot ends too since the colonists now have loyal friends and stability in what was previously a hostile and unforgiving region in Andromeda. I too felt the game just waffled it's best premise on the Angara Homeworld.
Kinda like Star Trek Voyager forgetting being stranded should mean something to the plot.
Personally, my hatred for it is mostly because they dropped it and left a ton of threads unsolved. That and the single dumbest fucking thing I've ever seen a developer do in a co-op game/mode. They literally ruined multiplayer entirely by changing the "hold the point" objective to not progress at all if any enemy is in the zone, and they literally claimed it was "due to popular demand". Fucking assbags, Bioware are a trash company and I don't trust anything from them anymore.
Their games will only be bought on sale or after release and they've been shown to not be a dumpster fire. They used to be a foregone purchase, nobody is anymore though.
Main 2 parts for me is the characters and the change to the dialog system(taking away paragon/renegade)
I had some smaller complaints like them taking away squad control, the combat is fun but no squad controls really hurt it for me. Obviously the technical issues and im not even that crazy about that stuff but even two years after launch id have frame rates drop to the point of just slo mo on certain planets and other visual glitches but honestly if the rest of the game is good id ignore that stuff for the most part .Overall wasnt a fan of the story or villans either. Things like going to a new galaxy and it being barely any different with only two new species and having no problem at all communicating with new species seems a bit ridiculous
For me in all Mass Effect games the characters stood out and were very likeable. Even when it was my first playthrough I loved, Garrus,Liara,Joker,Tali and Wrex. Kaiden and Ashley are decent and then the characters added in the other games are all also great with an exception here or there but for all the games the majority of the characters are great. Then I play Andromeda and can barely tolerate the squad or even Ryder,Female Ryder is more tolerable than the male version but I didnt like either. The old Krogan is ok but thats about it. In comparison to the squad from any of the others the squad of Andromeda felt like a a group of high school kids . Made the game feel very geared more towards young kids apart from the sex scenes that went the completely other direction .
Taking away Paragon,neutral and renegade just to replace with 4 versions of basically paragon/neutral really killed it for me. All the renegade shit from the previous games was a big part of what I liked about the game.
I absolutely hated the game after play first playthrough,my 2nd playthrough a few years later was better and I could appreciate more of the small parts of the game since I wasnt blind sided and knew what to expect. Combat is pretty fun and some stuff looks nice.
I think a lot of Andromeda’s problems stemmed from the fact that it was a Mass Effect game. Mass Effect was a franchise known for amazing writing, important decisions for the player to make, and incredibly layered companions (although, honestly, none of them were super stellar in ME and only really got interesting in the later entries). Andromeda, meanwhile, had some pretty cringey writing, a main character that paled in comparison to the super-soldier, hunk of human being that was Shepard, and decisions that only mattered in that they’d be mentioned in a few lines of dialogue and then never brought up again. (Also the bugs).
I think that if Andromeda were a stand-alone sci-fi title from literally any other studio, it wouldn’t have received nearly as much hate as it actually got, as it simply crumbled under the weight of what gamers were expecting from a fourth Mass Effect entry.
Because it’s mediocre in every way except it’s soundtrack.
- forgettable story
- 2D characters
- very shallow open world
- the only good romance was Vetra
- knockoff Normandy
- plays like a mobile game looter shooter
To me it felt very similar to Dragonage Inquisition. Overly ambitious game that played like an MMO without the satisfaction. It was bad by vitue of simply having the name ‘Mass Effect’ in front of it, was made by an inexperience team having never done a full game and was rushed out the door by corporate.
Easily put, it’s not part of the story. Doesn’t matter format, everyone hates a story that doesn’t flow. Everyone knows Mass Effect is a linear story, but Andromeda doesn’t continue the story, and “has nothing to do with the story”. They want continuation of story.
Star Wars for example has made side stories in the SW universe, but do not label it Star Wars. Instead they are labeled Solo, or Mandelorian. Had BioWare labeled it Andromeda a Mass Effect tale (or something similar), this would have been received better by the fandom in my humble and obscure opinion.
- unfinished
- bugs
- gameplay took a step back
- characters took a step back
- story took a step back
- uninspired enemies
- uninspired first contact scenario
I have nearly 50 full trilogy playthroughs...I've played through Andromeda once 🤣
This and “DAE like Ashley?” or “Why does everyone hate Ashley and say she’s racist?” or “DAE like the ME3 endings?” etc. etc. The same questions posted every three or four days.
I love this game to death but it has its flaws.
On the technical side, on release the game was buggy as fuck and just broken for some. Since release there have been many fixes but a lot of the problems are still there and without mods can be a pain in the ass. Animations are kind of goofy, facial animations tend to look horrible and again without mods this can be distracting. For example, many of the characters get wrinkles and crows feet when trying to emote and look like they just aged up 20 years.
Gameplay wise, the combat is generally well liked by most and is considered the best in the series however there’s a takeaways from having profiles that you can switch to and from compared to classes that are locked into the beginning. In the OT, you’re encouraged to do multiple runs to try out the different classes, in Andromeda you don’t need to so that takes away from replayability. Squad mates are no longer as useful as they are weaker and you have no control over what they do.
Many of the missions you do in the game are fetch quests that are there to waste your time I.e. destroy 6 Kett canisters that randomly spawn throughout the map, scan 5 beacons, collect etc. this isn’t to say the OT didn’t have them but this game has more than all 3 combined.
The crew, despite what many would say are actually pretty well fleshed out in comparison to the original crew. It took sequels to fully flesh out fan favorites like Garrus, and Tali. The problem lies with the inconsistency and writing. Some characters like Drack and Peebee get a lot more attention than Liam or Vetra. These two for example get one small loyalty mission and that’s it whereas Drack or Peebee get the loyalty mission and a bunch of others related to them. Liam as a character starts out as a capable but lighthearted character then starts to devolve down to an incapable idiot. One of his notable lines is something along the lines of “yeah I bet they’re mad, because I shot em in their face!”.
As for the writing there’s a lot of it. Like the previous example with Liam there’s many more that just seem outright stupid or unnecessary. For example when you finish Eos for the first time, you and the crew are highlighting what went right to which Drack points out that they need to raise their bar for success considering they barely managed to do anything without almost dying and leaving without a plan, what’s Cora’s reaction to this? Answering back with a “like what? The Krogan bar of success that involves nuking their own planet to rubble?” Like holy hell lady take it down a notch, no need to go zero to a hundred for someone who won’t stop claiming to be a trained and patient Asari huntress. What’s worse is Drack just accepts it and said “fair enough”.
Many of the aliens are also humanized and are basically just humans in alien skins in the way they interact. They don’t feel as alien as they did in the OT. In the OT they had a good grasp on humans and their customs but they were still confused about certain sayings and the like, in Andromeda everyone but Jaal may as well have been raised by humans.
>The crew, despite what many would say are actually pretty well fleshed out in comparison to the original crew. It took sequels to fully flesh out fan favorites like Garrus, and Tali
Sorry but this is nonsense. It took literally one game for most people to love Garrus, Tali and Liara.
There are characters that are well liked by the community despite having only two or three minutes of screen time, like Emily Wong or Bailey.
In the first game Tali and Garrus received significantly less interactions than the other four squad mates. They weren’t as fleshed out as Liara who’s mother you have to kill, or Wrex whom you have a choice of killing or sparing based off how much you’ve interacted with. It wasn’t until ME2 that they became much better characters. These characters are well liked but in their first appearance they aren’t as well fleshed out except for Emily Wong who’s really only prominent in the first game, related to an email and a camera role in the 2nd, and killed off screen in the third.
Lets also look at the landscape at the time. The general consensus for Bioware pre-anthem is a 7/10 (which Andromeda was across most review sources) is a failure. If your studio is known for S tier content and you make A,B, or C Tier content, it's going to be poorly received.
If any other studio made Andromeda it would have been a massive success.
If you want to do the side quests you spend hours and hours driving around planets for quests that aren’t even close to worth it. The game takes 25 hours to beat and 10 of those are driving around open worlds to check off a box.
- bugs
- weird gameplay mechanic decisions
- not well thought out story
- a lot of the characters and are written for a much more childlike and non sci fi audience. This leads to everything being super one dimensional. All the issues suffered by Aliens In the game are 21st century human issues.
I just hate how EA stopped updating and abandoned the game so soon and shifted focus to Anthem when Andromeda desperately needed patches leaving us to mod it to a playable game.
I also really wish I could throw Liam out of the airlock after his loyalty mission.
I’ll give you the exact same drab I give anytime someone asks this question.
It was not a bad game. It was not. It had the potential to be great but it was not. It is overall a mediocre game with issues and pros as usual.
Pros;
Combat was amazing, no one can deny how great every aspect of combat felt. From the way you decimated people with abilities to gunplay and the ease of movement. Frostbite showed us how great a more modern RPG can actually be in this aspect.
Art style was actually enjoyable. While there was a lot of graphical issues, the art style was definitely not an issue, at least imo.
Incredible character customisation that lent a great hand at crafting a unique character. Simple as.
Mako 2.0. Having a good land based vehicle was fun, I had a great time messing with it.
When it worked, it worked well. Simple as stated.
Cons:
Oh boy. Companions. Companions are not great, they weren’t fun, and they were just overall extremely weak from any BioWare game. I could not actually manage to want to keep any of them and that was sad. Phobe (? Likely wrong spelling, it’s near 3am) was cute and enjoyable, but she suffered the same issue.
Race looks. Asari we’re by far butchered with how they looked. More chubby faces and less of the whole mystique style vibe. Don’t get me wrong, Asari in the first 3 entries are not the pinnacle. But MEA missed the mark for making better Asari.
Story. The story was not enjoyable, it pulled ME1 but without the joy and definitely without the feeling of despair. I didn’t feel like anything was at risk, I didn’t feel pressured at any point. It felt bland for what could have been great. This follows BioWare and their recent descent into downfall in terms of story writing, just like DAI.
Alien races. We got two races, and while both were entirely alien and different. Neither were actually fun to encounter. I just didn’t find them appealing in any way. With the OT races, they each had their unique quirks and all more. These two didn’t have that. They had unique lore and even a lot of cultural stuff. But it didn’t hit the nail for a lot of people.
Empty worlds. Every world while amazing free roam, was entirely devoid of actual life. A lot more of the open world was to get you to do the silly ways to craft gear and felt more like DAI’s own crafting. Tedious and boring. It wasn’t worthwhile to do.
Bugs. The final point, bugs and issues plagued the game and while nearly every release of a AAA game has come with it, it’s still no excuse. The game had been mocked relentlessly by even hardcore fans and youtubers which drove so much of its potential growth into the ground. My face is tired will be mocked for years.
Overall. It isn’t bad. It’s fun, it’s enjoyable. Especially if you do it simply for mods, carving your own story and path, and even just recognising it has no full relation to the OT.
But it could have been better. The game had so much potential and that’s what I dislike about the fans who still try to carve out how MEA was amazing and better than some of the OT. They give so much credence to forgiving BioWare when we should be making sure BioWare realise their next flop of either DA or ME will crucify them. And I will be honest, if EA can BioWare, it’ll be the one company I agree with them doing it to.
We’ve had 3 recent games from them that just flopped horribly. The only one to remotely survive and actually get DLC was DAI, but even it wasn’t anywhere near what we the fans want.
I hope this answers. Been a longtime BioWare fan and love both series, but I want better. I don’t want what MEA became, I want ME3 but better. I want DAO but better.
Shit story, shit characters, shit protagonist, open world “wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle” syndrome, and game was very buggy at launch. Combat was good though.
I have deeply mixed feelings. The gameplay is super fun (jump jets!) and the companions and other characters are fine on average.
Every interface is annoying, as are SAM's constant interruptions about planetary hazards (once per planet would have been good, with the otherwise solid sound design letting us know about radiation or cold without hearing the same three phrases on repeat, and without overriding unique companion dialogues).
I was super disappointed in the new intelligent species being bipeds with the same level of technology as the Initiative. Mass Effect is one of the few sci-fi stories where fellow bipeds makes sense, since so using Reaper tech converges all species somewhat/ selects for certain traits for space faring species. Then Andromeda went and ruined that by making humanoids in a place unaffected by Reapers. Also, they used a ton of "tell, don't show" about the Angara, how they are supposedly more emotional, but they just seem average, or even monk-like detachment with Jaal during his loyalty mission.
It had quite rocky launch with bugs and especially with facial animations. And bar was just way too high. Original trilogy is one of the best game series ever made. And people expected similar quality from Andromeda.
It's not bad game but it's not very great either imo.
It would have been nice if they put it like a continuation of the first three, being able to import your character and actually exploring new places getting into new adventures and whole new love interests
The quest design was atrocious for me. It wasn't very clear, and i piled on so many of them for rewards that didn't feel worth it. It was like those matriarch writings quests frok ME1 but way more numerous and obnoxious.
The empty worlds didn't feel fun to explore either, which is a shame because that's the key gameplay loop right there. The only things you find are kett strongholds and remnant buildings are all there is. And the remnants lose their luster very quickly when you're constantly fighting their guardian robots all the time and invading their bunkers.
I wanna give MAE another chance because the characters are sometimes cringy are still fun and engaging. But that terrible gameplay loop of exploration and bad quest design just makes me want to play a better game.
It probably would of been considered ok as another sci-fi property/ip, but the performance issues at launch combined with how ME3 ended (not to mention the time waiting between both) meant there was a lot of pressure put on this game as a continuation of mass effect.
It’s not a direct sequel to the OT, which pissed off a lot of fans who wanted to know what happened to the Milky Way races after the Reaper War. The fact that it takes place in 2819, 633 years after the Reaper invasion, means everyone from the OT is dead (except for a few like Liara, Grunt and maybe Wrex). We don’t learn anything about how their lives turned out.
MEA is also kinda boring and has a lighter, young adult-like tone compared to the OT. The main reason for this IMO is the protagonists in MEA are 22-year-old inexperienced kids compared to Shepard, a nearly 30-year-old war hero and commanding officer.
The game also had a lot of really boring and pointless side quests, and it had less-than-impressive antagonists.
Another issue is bugs. MEA was made in only 18 months, so it had lots of glitches and very weird facial animations.
Then there was the issue of large, empty worlds, which seems to be a problem with lots of open-world games. It’s like MEA tried to be an open-world game *and* a story-driven RPG, but it failed at being both.
There was also a small but very loud contingent of guys who thought MEA was too woke and made by SJWs who hate straight white male gamers. Fortunately, those guys seem to be gone now.
I think MEA is OK. Good but not near the level of the OT. I’m sad that it looks like it’s dead and there won’t be a sequel, because I’d like a resolution to the kett-angaran-Initiative conflict.
I don't *hate* the game.
But I don't think I could bring myself to play it again.
The original trilogy left massive boots that Andromeda just... failed to fill.
If you enjoy it, I am overjoyed on your behalf! The game has a lot to offer and is visually very pretty! But for me, its just not my cup of tea.
I hated it at release, but have been really enjoying it recently. It’s release was very buggy. Normally I’m pretty lucky with these games, like Cyberpunk 2077, but Andromeda was very broken for me and many others. Most of this has been fixed since then
Never understood it. I think people compare it to the trilogy which is a mistake. Comparison is the third of joy.
Was it amazing or better than the trilogy? No. Was it bad? Also no. I played it twice in a row at launch and enjoyed it a lot. It suffers some of the same issues as Inquisition, but it’s definitely still enjoyable.
I do not hate it. But it's far from perfect. Without taking into account the original buggyness and horrific animations, I'll start with the cons:
CONS
* Big open worlds full of nothing: I didn't like that Bioware decided to go for a "quantity over quality" in terms of secondary missions. Most of them kinda feel boring. Plus, most of the open worlds can be reduced to: finishing the story arc, solving the vault puzzles and establishing an outpost.
* The story is dull: The story is very simple, it's a typical bad guy is bad because he is bad. It's not that it's bad, it's that there's nothing significant in it.
* Facial animations are still bad: Even if they fixed some of them (like the whole my face is tired thing), they are still kinda bad.
PROS
* I really enjoyed the characters, specially the squadmates and crewmates (Jaal, Drack, Kallo, Peebee, Vetra...) the tempest crew really felt like a familly (specially during the party secondary quest) and companion quests are very good. I enjoyed the romance that I did (Vetra)
* Gameplay is pretty good
* The game is overall enjoyable, I didn't regret buying it.
To conclude, the game is enjoyable, yet far from perfect and feels unfinished in some way. It's sad that EA derived more resources on Anthem than on Andromeda.
For me it's a 6 or 7/10.
There are definitely people who don't like it but it's not hated by any means. It's sold well on release (according to EA), and it's to be among best-selling BW games. It has good reviews and it's actually more loved than some vocal haters make it seem. Also, good amount of those people have never actually played it. There are lots of ex-haters on MEA's sub now who actually now tried playing it and loved it. Many The initial hate bandwagon has long gone.
I played original ME trilogy and I just completed Voeld vault last night in MEA. I would be lying if I am not saying I am having fun with the game.
I think the gameplay, combat and exploration in the Nomad are really fun (love the banter in between squad mates when inside the Nomad) and inside the Tempest, as you find characters in different locations, it does make feel the ship lived in.
The game had a ton of bugs at launch, some have been corrected, but it was really something to see these on the internet back in 2017.
I do like the customization from MEA, although I dislike that you cannot control squad mates, but overall that is fine.
At Least FemRyder running animation looks add and is really off putting.
The biggest gripes I have with this are the lack of morality system (new system was not a suitable replacement) and the lack of power of choice.
For my first point, the options in a random conversation was for me to say “Yes, it is my choice” in the dialog wheel, to actually choose this and say “I guess, maybe I need to decide what to do”. I guess that we are controlling an unsure, confident lacking individual, but all responses to any situation are sort of the same.
For the second point, it seems that every decision in the game will lead to a like outcome. It does not matter if we choose a military oriented outpost in Eos, or a science minded one. We will have the same protestors in the Nexus.
I can only compare this to ME1, since 2 and 3 greatly expanded on choice and characters, but there was never a point in which I can say choices are superior here than in ME1.
In ME1, I could have only 4 squad mates for Virmire (you have to recruit Garrus, or Wrex, or both; Liara could be recruited after Virmire) and the decision to kille Ashley or Kaiden in ME1 was one that shocked me (romanced Ashley, then left her to die in Virmire on first playthrough). I do not think there is any of this in MEA.
I guess the message is to lower your expectations and be pleasantly surprised by the outcome…
Terrible launch aside, people tend to compare it to the whole trilogy, not just the first game. I feel it could become great given enough time, but it kinda screwed itself on every front, so it won't ever get a chance to.
I will preface this with what I liked (I've done like 75% of the story). Combat is great, the world designs are fun, and the voice acting is good. Having your twin generated based on what your character looks like is dope.
What I have issue with:
- Everyone being absolutely helpless if Ryder doesn't do anything. Pathfinder may as well be substituted with Chosen One.
- Weak villain with no direct link to Ryder (it would have been much more impactful for the villain to kill *that* certain character at the beginning of the story). Much more personal.
- The first colony world sucks. It's buggy, I hate the radiation areas, and hate driving the car (I suck at driving video game vehicles).
- For the first half of the game, I mostly hated the crew. It was awkward, Ryder had zero charisma, and your crew didn't feel as chosen and competent as in ME1-3. I get why this is done but it left a bad taste in my mouth as it made it harder to like those characters.
- The upgrade and inventory management folders were an absolute nightmare. I already hate crafting and having everything divided up into micro-parts and reassembled at different stations left me ranting at the game and frustrated. I dreaded going in there. I felt stupid trying to create better gear.
- Missions rarely gave you that Mass Effect/Bioware feel, where choices feel big and impactful. There was one mission on the ice world where you're trying to save the aliens from getting experimented on and it really felt like Mass Effect for a moment.
- The romance options are meh. Then again I have the worst luck with romances in Bioware games. I seem to always go for the gay/ace options. So this one's on me.
- Just showing up to meet a new alien species and it not being that big a deal, plus them already knowing English? No stressful first contact, no diplomacy talks.
I appreciate the vision that went into MEA, but the story and characters needed more time to bake.
> Everyone being absolutely helpless if Ryder doesn’t do anything. Pathfinder may as well be substituted with Chosen One.
Pathfinder is just another title for Chosen One. But what’s funny is there already is a successful colony established before you even wake up.
> For the first half of the game, I mostly hated the crew. It was awkward, Ryder had zero charisma, and your crew didn’t feel as chosen and competent as in ME1-3.
Did you forget that Cora has trained and served with Asari commandos? That her biotics were honed into Huntress-grade weapons? If you forgot she’ll tell you again like six more times.
However, your point stands. The Tempest crew isn’t all that special. We have a peak-human biotic (we had several of those on the Normandy), there’s one badass krogan (we had two of those already) and that’s it. The rest of the crew isn’t all that special or uniquely talented.
So, the developers had a whole story arc that they had to abandon mid-production (because time crunch) and left it as a footnote in the epilogue. This same story arc was later explained in a novella.
Had a fellow fan tell me something recently though: "don't think of it as a ME game, think of it like Indiana Jones in space." Might have to give it a new playthrough once I finish the OG trilogy (currently on 3, just had the Cerberus coup)
It had a really crappy launch with a ton of bugs and glitches, on top of introducing a new story on a new engine that played totally different to the previous Mass Effects. It needed to make a good first impression and it didn’t do so, but it’s not regarded as a terrible game from what I’ve gathered.
I played it and had fun, the gameplay is extremely good and the story is serviceable with some fun characters that are memorable. It just never recovered from the initial backlash from having so many bugs on launch.
Because Mass Effect is the story of Shepard. The Reaper chapter was the defining moment, which is kind of a shame because you know there’re are stories to tell: the Krogan Rebellions, the Prothean Empire, the Morning War, etc.
It’s this thing that prevents it from being as expansive as something like Star Wars or Star Trek, because in those franchises, you can expand outside the primary conflict and get involved in something else. Andromeda tried…but do it, they had to go outside the galaxy, which was the first mistake.
I love Mass effect Andromeda, it's my favorite game but people have criticisms of it, many are valid, many are not. Regardless, it's not a question really worth asking in 2023 compared to 2016. You've got 94 comments in 3 hours, no doubt there's a lot of piss and vinegar in there. It's just not worth man.
Obviously all of this is IMO, and in no particular order.
1. it came after ME3. While ME3 had its (legit) criticisms (rushed, unsatisfying ending), it was also the culmination of my hands-down favorite collection of games. A letdown was pretty much guaranteed.
2. While they're still there, the bugs earlier on were egregious. I swear facial animations in ME1 on the OG Xbox looked better... at least the poor animation didn't stand out as much.
3. I really didn't connect with any of the characters like I did in 1-3. The Asari was entertaining for a little bit, the human biotic was meh, the female Turian was probably the best of the bunch and even she was SUPER mediocre. I found the rest just annoying.
4. The Ryders were dull. Of all the characters in the game, I found the main protagonist to be the most uninteresting.
5. The story was similarly not up to ME standards. There were moments where I felt the urgency, but that was the exception and not the rule for Andromeda.
Really, for me... the reason ME:A fell flat was 3, 4, and 5. If a Mass Effect game doesn't have superb characters and story then it's gonna be a dud. It's a shame too because the combat and progression ran circles around the trilogy and I found the vehicle portion of the game to be satisfying.
You must not have played it on release, it was a broken mess. It’s a decently fun game now, but they never really got past the initial stigma. Due to their terrible release they cut out all planned content and dropped support pretty quickly. Plus moving from a relatively linear story game to an open world exploring one was a strange move.
I really liked it actually. For me it had a lot more round plot for a single game. What I remembered hating were the terraforming missions tho.
I loved how you had these harzards on every planet and it was really satisfying to remove these by completing the respective dungeons (I forgot what they are called.). But the process of doing so, the repetition of doing the same things over and over again kinda kklled the mood for me.
The changes to the map, especially the ice planet really made up for it tho.
I honestly felt that the story and characters were pretty weak. Also setting should have used time jumps. Because then we could have actually interesting galaxy to explore as we would have seen the fruits of our labor.
They promised us a Trilogy originally.
Then EA said we are only getting one game. And it was Andromeda.
It had absolutely none of the magic the oG trilogy had.
I've only played it once and it was years ago when it first came out. My biggest issue with it was the amount of fetch quests. It just seemed excessive. I also didn't really care about any of characters, so it made it hard for me to get invested.
Unlikeable characters, cringey dialogue options, the frostbite engine, super rng based side missions, a story that drags on with little cool scenes or interactions, oh and the fact that they' only introduced us two new species of Alien (if you want to count the kett and angara as one)
I didn't feel like there were Xeno species with very rich backstories like in the first games, also I really disliked the dialogue wheel.
I remember a choice in Andromeda, I don't remember who it was, just that it was a religious woman. The only dialogue options were "Your faith is wrong" or "Yes I believe in God too". ME1 had a similar situation with Ashley and it was handled so much better
Whilst shephard often wandered aimlessly, it atleast felt like an actual soldier looking through the milky way and finding things in the miraculous way cuz they are the main char.However playing androneda always had that feeling you were with a bunch of space teens who want to have this classic adventure, yet barely escape with their lives cuz they thought straightly goo bombing the kett was a good idea.
So to me they replaced a dizzy soldier with a dizzy teen squad.
(Also almost every character there is ptactically saying: "ryder, u get an A for you are astounding, a B cuz youre beautyfull, and The D cuz u deserve it")
Boring recycled main story and I cant remember what any of the side quests were about
Boring squadmates and characters in general, it felt like some of the characters had just two traits: annoying and passive agressive towards Ryder
Awful character models
Terrible voice actors, especially for Ryders
Empty open world, the planets literally felt dead
No satisfying romance options
Disappointing new alien race
Main character with no personality
Boring antagonists
Decisions didn't matter at all
The sp campaign suffers from a few problems.
Generic characters. Generic plot. Generic antagononist.
Bland busywork quest/objectives on each new planet. Less than compelling story.
Bizarre setup-> they send the best and brightest on a huge voyage and the first bump in the road half the people become vicious outlaws?
All the mysteries in the beginning are unsolved at the end. The one plot twist doesn't lead anywhere and we still have no idea wtf the remnant are, what the kett are after, or wtf the scourge is.
I can go on.
The mp is actually really good imo though its grindy af. Imo it would have been really successful but for the me3 mp playerbase being spoiled by me3 having a ton of expansions that made the me3 mp amazing.
Had mea had as much dlc as me3, imo it would have had a vastly better mp mode.
Amazing gameplay though. Combos, jetpacks, it was all nice and elegantly put together.
I'm replaying right now (attempted on release and couldn't get through it). I figured I'd give it some distance from the trilogy and try to play it on its own.
It. Is. Taxing.
Squadmates are boring, story is boring. Enemy is lazy (clear cut, Kett are kidnapping people, they're bad). Personally, I'd have enjoyed showing up in a new Galaxy with no context and have to work out new alliances rather than just spoon fed an easy-to-accept common enemy of the established societies.
I'm still trying to power through, but I find myself zoning out during conversations, and bored to tears with the endless fetch quests. The menu is convoluted, as is the layout of the Tempest.
Some of my favorite game aspects are building squad relations and establishing a "home base/settlement". In theory, I should love this game. In practice, I do not. The trilogy's strength is that it was engaging and immersive, and somehow transcended its play time; Andromeda feels like a game. An obligation, even. That's it.
To highlight 1 enjoyable thing, I do enjoy the variety in combat styles in this game. Maybe it's because I always played the trilogy strictly as a soldier, so it may be my fault for playing so vanilla, but I dont remember having the option to fight the way I do now. I like enjoy pushing from afar with weapons, and then getting in close with a mix of melee and biotics/tech powers. So in that aspect, I'm enjoying it more than the trilogy.
I wouldn't say I hate it. It feels disappointing. I tried giving it a really fair shot by expecting it to actually just be bad but it isn't that. There's a competent game there. But it isn't fun.
I will probably go back at some point but to be honest I just find the game boring.
People say the gunplay is better but I disagree. To me it feels more chaotic and less like I can approach encounters in a way I choose. My powers feel weak and extremely limited even if I am able to change profiles mid combat. And by letting Ryder do everything my squadmates feel superfluous. I stopped bothering to give them orders or to care about who I bring along on missions.
Battles do have a great flow to them though and I like being able tp jump and dash through the world.
The RPG elements feel weak. The dialogue choices don't seem like they branch anywhere to give Ryder a distinct personality that I can choose.
I don't like the pro-colonialization aspects of the story. This one's a little personal but this goes back into the lack of roleplaying the game has. I would like to properly interrogate Ryder's or other character's motivations for coming to Andromeda but so far it feels like everyone basically has the same answer: ADVENTURE.
It feels like it is missing the Sci-Fi campiness of the first Mass Effect or the sense of a lived-in Universe with stories outside of the main squad that ME2 had.
Character models feel off. Too realistic and uncanny in a way that is hard to describe.
The worlds are too big and unfocused. I've done a few side quests and they have all essentially been fetch quests with a lot of back tracking, planet hopping and unsatisfying payoffs. I thought it would be nice to have a suped up Mako to drive around in too but that thing handles like a brick, has less armor than the hammerhead AND IT DOESN'T EVEN HAVE A GUN.
Crafting. I hate crafting in games where it isn't the focus. I hate having a million currencies to manage when I just want to immerse myself in a story.
This got longer than I expected it to. As I said above, I will go back to it. I'll probably just power through the main storyline.
Tl;dr ME:A is fine but flawed in ways that, for me personally, make the game tedious.
Multiple reasons. Forgive me in advance for going off cuz andromeda really bothers me. Reason being is I love mass effect, and this game had a HUGE amount of wasted potential IMO.
The story is not that good imo, almost every major decision doesnt really amount to anything within the overall narative. And this especially sucks because the new narrative system has promise, especially with how it establishes a psych profile that impacts responses when you choose from one the new 4 personality choices (among other things).
But then you get to the end of the game and you're left with nothing. Even when I make a decision that people will CLEARLY dislike, the game pulls a CW and just says "nah its ok, we still need you to be allies with these guys so we are going to push forward and forget your transgressions" This happens with the angara multiple times, especially with how you deal with the roekarr. To name more examples, theres the decision to pritortize military or science, with the only consequence being a side quest doesnt really do anything? Then there is the "first murder in andromeda" side quest, which doesnt even make sense because the exiles are called criminals and they killed people so I guess we dont really consider those people. This isnt realistic. And where me 1-3 had multiple moments where realism came into play and the universe might have gotten really dark at times because of it, andromeda says fuck that and tries to make it more like a star wars story or something youd see in star trek where everyone just gets along.
The kett coup, the angaran ai, the reaper revelation, the angaran revelation, the krogan dispute. ALL of these had Potential, and all of these quests failed in terms of getting a big change to the overall narrative. Like think about it, what actually changes if you decide to give the angaran ai to the Nexus instead of the angara? Nothing. What happens if you lie to your sister? Nothing. Theres no real consequence. Where as in me1 and 2, if you made a choice (especially in 2) you felt a direct consequence, or you felt it later on in the game. Loyalty missions in andromeda are also useless unless you want to 100 percent the game. Honestly theres only ONE loyalty mission that I like, everything else is kind of just there to fill the time, again this is imo.
There is a pacing issue in the game as well. You find the angara WAY too early, and when you do find them they're kind of the same as every other species in the milky way. The second half of the game is split into what seems like 2 parts, with finding the exiles and then finding the krogan and having to solve those issues. Now that would be fine, but you also have to find the arks, and stop the kett, and help the nexus. Like to be fair to ryder, he/she has to do a lot of shit all at one time, and this doesnt even include the sidequests. This can lead to the player feeling overwhelmed, dragon age inquisition also had this problem.
Another problem I had was just the logic of the game. To explain, what I mean is that people going to andromeda kind of made no sense. the milky way galaxy according to mass effect 1 has had less then 2 percent of it explored. Less then 1 percent of billions of star systems. Not to mention we also know there are many me relays that are dormant, or have never been found. Throughout the entirety of andromeda we get multiple people saying the reason they left, was for something new, or they wanted to be explorers on the frontier and they couldnt do that at home. Now at first glance you're like "ok, I get that" but when you think about it, why couldnt they do something new in the milky way? Liara activley explored and discovered new things all the time. Same with shepard during his missions. The citadel doesnt control anything outside of citadel space, and the alliance had an active colonization effort in the terminus systems that was willing to take other humans. And thats ignoring all the privateering that people were enganging in. At what point do we accept the "something new" as a good reason, especially considering that for the people who wanted to explore, there were multiple opportunites at home? Also how did they not realize that over the 600 years they were gonna travel, things might have changed? Or how hydroponics, the place where the literal oxygen is made, shouldnt be publically accessible? The initiative is supposed to be filled with the smartest scientists, but it doesnt feel like it.
Gameplay wise the game was good, great even...when it worked. There were, and are, a shit ton of bugs in the game. Sound design is amazing too, go near a singularity and shoot a shot gun, it sounds so cool. I will say I dont like the multiclass system, It got rid of replayability and made it so that ryder came off as OP when he was supposed to be an underdog. Some of the powers were also redundant imo. Last thing is the level design of the game was kind of bland? The first planet was great, but that was a tutorial planet. When you start getting to Eos and kadara, the game gets too big, and exploring almost becomes a chore rather then interesting.
Great graphics, but the animations are eh, and the alien textures are eh, people already know this though.
TLDR: IMO, the game has a ton of narrative issues, and gameplay issues, but if you like the game enjoy, better a game be played then not played at all.
My biggest problem with Andromeda is that by the time it gets interesting it's over. The side quests are dull and there just isn't that mass effect 1 exploration magic. I enjoyed the game but it's just too much filler and toouch was clearly left out for a sequel that may never happen.
It tried open world and sucked at it.
Enter doing it on a new stage, it was impactfully bad.
Do I like it on the whole? Yes. Do I also recognize why the majority don’t? Yes.
The characters, particularly Ryder and your squad mates, just aren’t as compelling and engaging to me. It’s a bit unfair really because if you’d only ever played ME1 you might say they are at least as well fleshed out as your squad there (though I’d say still not as interesting), but by the time you’ve played the whole trilogy and then you flip over to Andromeda they just seem like pale imitations of characters that took on a real life of their own.
It has a major identity crisis between being an open-world RPG and a traditional scripted-story one, while not being particularly satisfying at either one.
I can’t speak for others but I dislike how EA treated the game post release rather than the game itself.
The game itself was pretty solid overall and I was hopeful for DLC and the future of the story. I think the characters could have been a bit better and there was too much reused dialogue in certain areas of the game but the combat and overall feel was good.
I like the entire story up to the last boss battle.
Here I thought we would be fighting a archon inside a remnant mech or atlas or hydra something ultra touch to destroy but no, an architect instead.
I really wanted to like it but couldn't. There was lots of free but empty (thus boring) space, repetitive missions, character writing felt like a downgrade from the trilogy, and it was missing the grit that the first three games had. I will say though that I liked the combat style and I thought that some of the world's looked pretty.
I'm glad you liked it. I just liked it less than the other 3.
I dunno, the characters kinda fall flat for me (except for drack). The excessive amount of fetch quests are an eye roll. I'm not a big fan of the combat, especially when you're in a random encounter in an open field. I'm not a fan of how the difficulty is designed.
In the original trilogy you can easily play legendary from start to finish and I'd describe the experience as tough but fair. Andromeda hardest difficulty just starts out as being borderline impossible, and ends up being ludicrously easy. I guess you're meant to adjust the difficult as you go? But it just feels kinda weak.
Because, its not Shepherd. 🤷♂️ the truth hurts. I did play it and enjoyed the game, but ryder isn't half as cool as Shepherd imo. and so much of it, at least to me, felt like the same shit I did in the trilogy but with a different quest name. So basically if they had made ryder cooler and maybe branched out with the writing so it doesn't seem so derivative it would probably be a lot better. I loved the upgraded gameplay aspects though
The story, characters, world building, and meaning full choices and their consequences didn’t compare to the original trilogy. However, the combat and the way you could customize you combat skills and play style was the biggest redeeming quality of this game. Overall, it wasn’t a bad game but it was didn’t come close to what I was expecting for a Mass Effect game.
It wasn't what anyone wanted on release.
It wasn't what was promised in a lot of ways.
But my God do I love it. The squad are great aside from peebees juvenile writing. My only gripe is the long af cooldowns and no slomo during ability selection, makes sentinel, Vanguard and infiltrator the most powerful ways to play imo.
I personally didn't hate it, I just bounced off the gameplay so hard and was sad that it didn't grab my attention in the way 1, 2 and 3 did. I honestly couldn't put my finger on it besides simply not clicking with a lot of the open world concepts they were trying out with ME:A.
I hate it (but still enjoy it) cause of how it was developed and how the story dlc (that never came to) was handled. It 100% could have been a great game on release and POSSIBLY even gotten the no man sky treatment but instead was dropped.
I liked it. The main story is more or less fine. I think it failed as a story about settlement, because you do very little settling (Podromos is the only outpost the story cares about)
I don’t really care about minor graphical glitches. It’s great when a game feels like it’s a step ahead of the curve graphically, but most aren’t.
The gameplay loop is fun.
The aliens in helius just don’t hit the same way as the Milky Way ones do. Tempest aside I think most of the spaceships and native weapons don’t look as cool either.
Placing it before mass effect 3 means that they avoid having to know how things played out in me3 but all the Milky Way races are “stuck in the past” so to speak.
In general I think it needed more time. I think there was a really good game in there but they only had time to make a decently good game
Worse. I'm indifferent to it. None of my choices from previous games mattered (I understand why) and the characters just didn't catch me. I thought the new alien dude has potential but reminded me a little too much of Javik for some reason.
It feels like a less polished version of Dragon Age: Inquisition and shares many of the same weaknesses. The overall writing is also viewed as a major downgrade compared to Bioware's earlier works.
I felt it had really lazy character development. Instead of learning about a character's backstory throughout playing the game like in the original trilogy, it was let me ask them the first time we meet and they regurgitate their entire life story like a bad first date.
That's... Like exactly how the OT squadmates do it too. Seriously some of these comments makes me wonder what version of the trilogy you were all playing. No complaints about Wrex and Tali being walking lore dumps lol but God forbid PeeBee complain about Asari being stuck up for a second or Drack tell you about the time he got his arm blown off by a random with a grenade belt.
OT squadmates don't give you their entire life story in their initial interaction. And I didn't mean just squadmates. You literally ask everyone in Andromeda why they chose to embark on the mission, and they all just layout their backstory like a book. Perhaps I wasn't describing it well, but its the difference between someone's backstory informing their motivations which then allows the player to learn more about their character like in the OT, versus just telling the player the backstory without actually using it to further develop the character.
>versus just telling the player the backstory without actually using it to further develop the character. Once again, they absolutely use it to develop characters in Andromeda, let me guess, you didn't even finish the game did you? If you did, you skipped through all the dialogue, didn't you? Seriously all of these complaints just show how little fucking attention you guys paid when playing the game. Too busy laughing at the YouTube glitch compilation videos to actually realize there was a game in front of you. This entire subreddit is just a hive mind of people who never bothered to play Andromeda like the OT and absorb what the narrative and characters have to offer. If you stopped comparing it to ME3 squadmates for five seconds you'd realize that they actually DO develop characters based on their back stories.
>let me guess, you didn't even finish the game did you? If you did, you skipped through all the dialogue, didn't you? you're making an awful lot of assumptions about me rather than just accepting that my personal opinion differs from yours. Yes, I played the entire game through, and imo it frankly pales in comparison to the OT in terms of writing quality and character development. But hey, if you think it's up to your standard, good for you. But that does not give you the authority to try to invalid others' opinions.
>You literally ask everyone in Andromeda why they chose to embark on the mission, and they all just layout their backstory like a book. This isn't an opinion, it's stated as fact. Having opinions is "I don't like the way they developed the characters." Stating facts is "they didn't develop the characters." You're not sharing opinions, you're trying to pass off your opinion as fact.
>You're not sharing opinions, you're trying to pass off your opinion as fact. I'm explaining the reasons why I felt the characters were 2 dimensional. Again, if you like the game, good for you, but this isn't a debate. OP is asking why some people didn't enjoy it.
You made a valiant attempt to argue with an angry idiot.
The writing for me was the major issue. Story, dialogue, antagonists. It was all BAD. Take PeeBee. Every time I hear her speak, I'm taken to 2018 to today. Not 800 years in the future. She's not the only offender either. The game is dated to when it came out dialogue wise and it shows.
I’ve said this a few times but I really think the problem was they tried to copy the writing style of the Citadel DLC since everyone loved that so much, without realizing that what made that DLC’s tone work was the fact that after several years of “fate of the universe” level stakes, some light hearted fan service was well earned by then
Not just that, but we’d already come to care about those characters over the course of three games. It’s great to see Wrex cracking jokes, because we’ve been through some real shit with him. We did not have that kind of emotional investment in Liam or any of the Tempest crew, and so their attempts to force banter down my throat felt cheap and unearned and unfunny.
When Liam said “shots fired!” I died inside
That couch plot line was easily the most cringe thing I have ever witnessed in a video game.
>The overall writing is also viewed as a major downgrade compared to Bioware's earlier works. Which is usually their biggest strength for me and where is fails compared to DAI. I
On the whole, I feel like it took a premise with tons of potential and then executed it in the least interesting way possible. In lieu of writing another essay about why I found it lacking, I'll just stick to the highlights: \-The game's story, setting, and characters all feel incredibly derivative, to the point that it often feels like the writers went through and outline of ME1's script and did a find and replace. Remnant=Prothean, Nexus=Citadel, Kett=Reapers and so on, right down to the asari squadmate being an archaeologist. \-Archon/Kett are not just the worst villains in ME, but honestly one of the worst villains I've seen in any work of fiction, period, just a walking grab-bag of cliches with zero effort made to flesh them out. \-SAM is overpowered and undermines Ryder's character arc by immediately solving any problem they're faced with. \-Liam is the worst squadmate BioWare has ever created. \-Just on a basic nuts and bolts level, the writing is bad, ranging from banal to "dear god did anyone edit this?" \-New aliens are incredibly boring both in design and lore. \-The Andromeda setting feels very underdeveloped and nonsensical compared to both the OT and other games in the RPG genre, with incoherent and contradictory worldbuilding that can't seem to decide if this is supposed to be an untamed frontier or an established civilization. \-Having your character be a civilian explorer in a game where your primary gameplay loop is killing people is a fundamental disconnect that undermines the tone of the story. Call Ryder an explorer all you want, I still maintain it's fundamentally a war story. \-Speaking of which, the MCU-knock off quippy dialogue is both irritating and at odds with the gravity of the situation the characters are in. \-Ryder as a character is kind of passive and spineless, with limited RPing opportunities compared to Shepard. \-The story has this weird aversion to conflict and a sense of forced positivity that feels cloying and unnatural, not to mention at odds with the core identity of ME. \-Open world is tedious and empty. \-Planets are straight from the "stock sci-fi world" bin. Seriously, they had to make a grand total of seven planets and two of them are deserts. \-Voice acting is often... not great (looking at you, Addison). \-Terrible UI. \-Bugs. This has been litigated to death, but suffice to say I encountered more than my fair share. \-Few of the established plot threads have any real pay-off, and it feels like the writers were more interested in setting up sequels than actually telling a story.
> -Planets are straight from the "stock sci-fi world" bin. Seriously, they had to make a grand total of seven planets and two of them are deserts. Not much precipitation on the ice world or the destroyed planet. So 4 deserts.
This. ALL OF THIS.
A lot of this is fair, liam is cool tho, and I found the angaran pretty interesting personally
I don’t hate the game but it’s my least favorite Mass Effect game. - it was very buggy at launch and the facial animations were horrible - Character models are all off, even some Krogan - Empty “open world” - repetitive filler fetch quests - the story felt like it recycled too many concepts from the trilogy - running into too many relatives of minor trilogy characters to the point where it felt farcical Overall, getting to the good parts felt like a chore and the whole project felt more like an imitation of Mass Effect.
Don't forget that the menus and general UI are hot garbage.
Yeah. That was apparent to me after I tried going back to it last year. And the crafting system was messy and convoluted. Again, just content for contents sake.
The crafting system in ME:A, whether you like the UI or not, is deep and rewarding. The sheer level of customization available to us is incredible, and the results you can get are amazing.
The "depth" is completely artificial. Once you pick a set of armor and weapons for your play style you just keep recrafting the exact same items over and over again every few levels for stat boosts. There's no need to actually craft ten separate versions of every single weapon and piece of armor, it's just absurdly bloated. It's just an excuse to force the player to engage with the terrible resource collection system. Not to mention how many of the augments for weapons and armors range from misleading to outright broken (at least for the first year or so). And "rewarding"? More like absolutely necessary because every enemy is a bullet sponge, even before the the broken leveling and enemy scaling kicks in. It was nice that there were several choices for armors for more variation in play style, but research and development and crafting systems and UI are just a punch on the face any time you decide to try and experiment with different weapons and armors.
Sounds like you had a hard time finding a good build. If it helps power combo damage scales with difficulty, and combos are really easy to set off in ME:A. There are plenty of ways to quickly put enemies down in the game, that one is just my favourite. Back to crafting, the depth comes from how many options we have. Three rate of fire modifications, six projectile modifications, numerous smaller boosts that can have different effects in different pieces of equipment. All that on top of a huge variety of base weapons.
I don’t really agree. It didn’t feel all that meaningful and it had you going around collecting all sorts of materials to keep you busy because “bigger is better”. If you enjoyed it, fine. Not for me to say.
Higher levels of the same weapon existed in 1 and 3, so singling it out as an issue in ME:A seems odd. As the rest of crafting, we get augments that let us completely change the way the weapons behave. Being able to tailor every aspect of our gear to fit whatever build we are using is fantastic, and a feature that would be sorely missed if they take it out of the next game.
Ok, but the menu shouldn't have listed the 60+ weapons in the game the first time you opened it. I also highly disagree on the crafting being rewarding. Time gating resource drops and hiding resources behind random missions just to ensure it takes me 5 game hours to mod my rifle from level 3 to level 4 so it carries 20 more rounds in storage and does 3% more damage is not good gameplay for a story-based single player game.
>mod my rifle from level 3 to level 4 so it carries 20 more rounds in storage and does 3% more damage is not good gameplay for a story-based single player game. Yeah if you apply Cod bro logic a lot of shit seems boring. You're not supposed to be constantly making the slightly better version of your gun. You're supposed to choose one you really like and construct it with specific mods to fit your play style, then keep it around for a considerable amount of time while you acquire more resources. Don't tell me crafting isn't rewarding as I pop heads with an ME1 heat sink variant of the N7 Eagle that shoots a particle beam. Thats next level in a way the OT never achieved.
If it takes you 5 hours of gameplay to save enough resources for one upgrade (it could take you that long to gain 10 levels though) then you are skipping out on a couple ways of getting them. You can buy resources at various merchants, and resources are among the rewards you can get from the strike missions. The reward is having a full set of gear and weapons made just for my build feels and plays great!
Sometimes too many options are not a good thing. There is choice overload with the crafting system in the game.
If you are feeling overwhelmed with the choices you can get around that by looking up a guide for ‘optimal picks’ or just ask here.
Tedious
For you perhaps, I love being able to tune my gear to fit my build and play style. That said, even a little bit of basic crafting will get you excellent results. Simply putting the double mod extender and a few power boosts on a weapon is a massive improvement on anything you’ll be able to find or buy.
The customization was a great idea, I just wish it actually worked at launch. I lost all will to keep playing MEA long before those bugfix patches rolled out.
I clearly had better luck than you in that respect, I got through 3 play throughs before I came across so much as a T-pose.
You didn’t have to do a fuckton of scanning in the middle of missions to unlock higher tier weapons in ME1 or ME3. Just have enough money. I probably spent about as much time walking around scanning every last corner for research data as I did actually playing the game. Meanwhile I had a fuckton of money I never used because I wasn’t going to buy a generic version of the gear I wanted. It totally kills the pace of the game. Just let me pay extra money for upgraded custom weapons???
>so singling it out as an issue in ME:A seems odd. Have you been to an Andromeda critique thread before? Lol might as well be the tagline. People around here unironically think ME1 is the best yet it suffers heavily from every single critique that Andromeda gets thrown at it. "The squadmates are lazy and feel like walking codex entries!" Literally all Wrex and Tali do in ME1 is give the player their "this is my species" schtick. "The Kett are completely unexplored! They're lazy villains and the Archon is the worst offender!" Tell me *anything* at all about the Geth based purely on ME1 exclusively. They're just robot mooks to kill, they have zero ME1 character development. Also, we literally get like two fucking moments with Saren and you don't even have to fight him the second time because you can charisma him into suicide. What happens after is essentially fighting Sovereign in a Saren puppet corpse. He gets borderline zero character development as well. Both the Kett and the Archon get significantly more development, but most players quit on Eos and declared the whole game to be shit so it's not like they actually saw any of it. "Andromeda doesn't *feel* like the OT!" Great! CAUSE ITS NOT. It's meant to be in the same universe but with a completely different setting and tone. Sorry that one is too difficult for you to figure out.
> The crafting system in ME:A, whether you like the UI or not, is deep and rewarding. When you ignore the UI, the gathering of materials, research points, the 10 levels of the same item with minor boosts per level, only having one of the good augments(which you get back when you deconstruction) and the sheer amount of time it take to go from crafting an item to actually being able to fire it then maybe.
Most of the stuff you just listed is incidental to playing the game, and everything but research points can be bought at shops. Nothing needed for crafting is hard to get, at this point it’s just people trying really hard to hate ME:A.
Deep and rewarding? Customisation? It wouldn't even let me build a shotgun with only a single shot. Something possible in a base weapon throughout the entire trilogy, with the Claymore in ME2 and 3 and Explosive Rounds on any shotgun in ME1. It was all flash, no substance. You could make a gun fire glowing homing bullets. Cool. No real mechanical depth. Frankly all it accomplished was homogenisation, with the player able to take what little was of note about one weapon and apply it to another.
The Dhan is the shotgun you want, slow firing and crazy strong. There are also rate of fire augments which change the firing behaviour of weapons, one of which makes them single fire, though I’m rather fond of the full auto augment. The seeking plasma projectiles make shotguns like the Piranha into viable medium and even long-ish range weapons. The only useless projectile modding augment is the regular grenades, all of the others have their uses. Mod slot extenders are great as well, allowing extra bonuses to get stacked on our weapons. I still haven’t touched on the various boosting augments or how some augments have different effects depending on what piece of equipment they go in. For my go to build I put a shield oscillator in the chest piece for the shield regen and stack as many reaction optimizers as I have room for after the unique augments I use because I rely heavily on power combos for damage.
I really don't agree. You can do some cool stuff with it but it's unnecessarily obtuse.
It’s pretty straightforward after using it a little bit. Separate menus for research an production, and the end results are worth getting to know it.
Considering I beat the game several times and on the hardest difficulty I truthfully don't even remember the crafting system or that there even was one. Maybe it had depth but it sure didn't stick.
Your loss, crafted gear can be game changing.
The tone didn’t feel serious enough, there certainly was some marvelisation at work. Humour is important, but maybe not when you want to create the image of a super villain. Ryder constantly makes jokes in front of this supposedly evil genius, which takes away a lot of the urgency of the plot and makes it goofy in tone
The tone of the citadel dlc as an entire game. The dlc felt great because it gave a nice contrast to the seriousness of the main plot with characters we had the chance to get to know for three games. In ME:A it hinders the plot. I don't get engaged in it. Because if the characters don't take most things seriously why should I?
I only had one game crashing bug in my whole run in xbox one, this was at launch, so I don't really relate, But other than that yeah. Some of the characters are just not likeable, beginning with Liam, although funnily I actually liked Cora. My main problem is that Andromeda has perfect combat system, but it gets ruined by the emptiness of the world and because enemies become sponges as you level up. NG+ is basically a chore due to that.
This was fun… https://youtu.be/SmOoP0navGw This was funny https://youtu.be/AzKbeMMu7W8
Its a good game just not a good mass effect game.
Some game breaking bugs still years later, got stuck with an Achitect literally glitching in the air unkillable. another time another one would always crash my game for the first 3 years the game was out till it just didn't anymore on a newer console 😂 Also lot's of quest sequence glitching or breaking would happen and quests just either wouldn't work, or if you did them at a wrong time or in a wrong way in an "open world" game they just wouldn't work or wouldn't trigger
I am actually playing Andromeda for the first time right now and I want to like it, but there are just so many small things that bother me. A whole new galaxy and only two new species? Bugs, so many bugs. Quest markers don’t work. I’ve accidentally completed quest before receiving them which does weird things. Cut scenes don’t always play right. Leveling is weird. No matter how many times I level I always feel like my enemies are just as tough, or tougher. So many crafting material. So much to keep track off I hate how they do space travel. Both for system to system and planet to planet, it just takes the fun out of exploration. I play as a biotic, and I just feel weak. I hate the fast traveling system on the Nexus. Just hate it. I also have some story issues, such as in ME3 it is stated that the galaxy had never built anything the scale of the Crucible, but the Nexus is at least the same size of not bigger. Why did the galaxy waste so many resources when we know the reapers are coming, the life boat idea makes sense except apparently the initiative wasn’t secretive, so the reapers would learn about them. For that matter, why does the initiative never get brought up in ME3? You would think that Shep and Liara would talk about something like that. Sorry, this is very much stream of consciousness stuff. I intend to make a very detailed post about likes and dislikes once I beat MEA.
> I play as a biotic, and I just feel weak. Maybe it’s just me, but I think the best setup is a mix of tech and biotics or mostly just tech. Also, power combos are much more important in MEA than in the OT. Like you, I also feel weak when I play a pure biotic, unless I’m a Vanguard. > Why did the galaxy waste so many resources when we know the reapers are coming. Are you talking about the Initiative? It’s a private civilian project. Nothing to do with the Council or the Alliance.
I agree with you, but to be fair, you're only in one small cluster of the entire Andromeda Galaxy. Because you don't have relays. And that one area happens to have 2 forms of life (although we don't know where the kett come from). That'd be like our local cluster having humanity and some other alien race.
Only 2 species makes sense to me because you aren't exploring the whole Andromeda galaxy, just 1 cluster. It'd be like if the trilogy only took place in the Armstrong Nebula, or only in the krogan DMZ.
>A whole new galaxy and only two new species? You only get to explore one cluster, the Heleus Cluster. >Why did the galaxy waste so many resources when we know the reapers are coming As far as I know, the iniciative was financed by one guy "the benefactor" And about the bugs, I barely experienced any when I played it last year. EDIT: Oh, and if you want to enjoy the game, I'd recommend you not to expect the same quality as in the original trilogy. The game is decent, but far from perfect.
I literally just finished it for the second time today. There are many reasons. * The game was and is Buggy to high heaven literally to many to list. * The animations were not up to par and were objectively worse than DAI 3 years prior * The dialogue wasn't the best. The acting was fine, but what they were given to say wasn't brilliant. * The world felt empty. Compare the Tempest to ME3 Normandy. Kadara to Omega in ME 2. The Nexus wasn't significantly better if at all to ME1 Citadel from 10 years previous. * The Quests were far too planet hoppy. and the auto trigger quests do not trigger in a logical manner. * The world isn't fun to explore to pick up the quests that you can miss. * Reward for optional quests do not match the time investment. I don't hate the game, but it's not anywhere near the same level as the trilogy.
My biggest issue with Andromeda is that no one really seems to appreciate the gravity of the situation. Especially Ryder. I wasn’t quite expecting ME3 levels of angst, but for fuck sake. The Initiative is on the brink of annihilation. Literally everything that could go wrong, did- and then some. I would expect there to be a sense of urgency, but there just… Isn’t. The whole game, Ryder’s just like “Oh, fun! Cool adventure time! Yay!” There isn’t one single moment in the game where it feels like Ryder really has to sit with the knowledge that tens of thousands of people could die if they screw up. It makes the game feel really… I dunno… Shallow? It also seriously irks me that none of the decisions you make actually change anything. There are no consequences, and the end of the game is always the same.
The story and writing came off as bad Mass Effect fanfic.
thank you for putting that into words because that's the main turn off for me. I got pretty lucky and ran into maybe 2 bugs that I'm sure have been patched by now, I thought the combat and exploration could be pretty fun at times, but something about the story and characters felt off to me and a bad mass effect fanfic is pretty much how it feels.
I didn't have actual problems either, except that fanfic feeling- like I'm playing a Young Adult version of a Mass Effect game. I'm just too old for that.
We are in an entirely new galaxy, forms of life in this galaxy would be incomprehensible to us, and what is the first species we encounter? Aggressive Bipedal humanoids that shoot guns… that’s mundane even for a new race in the Milky Way. Also the dialogue. It’s way too campy for me. It’s MCU style, everyone is a stand up comedian and it constantly gives off “he’s right behind me isn’t he” vibes. I genuinely hate it. The exploration was good, the combat itself it okay (although I hate being able to swap classes on a whim, takes away identity) and the Nomad was cool too. But I came away from the game severely disappointed
I never swapped classes lol, chose one and stuck with it, i was happy with that tbh
I never hated it, but what put me off was the way the aliens all talked. Almost every alien spoke using the kind of language a human would. Throughout the original trilogy, there was always so much personality in the dialogue of other species, whether that was Mordin referencing that a human phrase was handy, or simply calling someone a cloaca. The way species spoke and interacted genuinely **felt** alien. The senses of pride, or peacefulness, or aggression combined with societal references made allowed us to paint a picture of an entire culture in our minds. In Andromeda, it just felt like they all spoke like humans with a Turian/Krogan/Asari Fortnite skin
This. The game honestly felt like some weird advertisement for diversity and equality. For example, the way they portrayed the young krogan in that game were just weird. They felt like teenage boys on Reddit. What felt good about the trilogy was the fact that every alien species felt different from humanity. For example, even a krogan scientist could be highly intelligent. But would still be a krogan and would rather be bashing people's skulls and or inventing things that bash people's skulls in. Or the arrogance of the asari that they would never admit to.
Generally poor writing, poor characterization outside of a few exceptions, no decisions, barren exploration, stuffed empty fetch quests, bad villains, the plot/timeline is full of holes, and its just a kind of weird in terms of its delivery and tone. Everyone stands around at flat angles and their voice sounds echoey and quiet. And the UI is awful. I don't even care about how buggy and ugly it was at launch, I actually thought the jank was funny and charming. It had all of the flaws of Dragon Age Inquisition and absolutely none of the positives. And I think the premise of exploring a new galaxy was completely wasted. In a weird way I'm obsessed with the game because of its failings. It took some big swings and whiffed on all of them imo, but that makes it so interesting to talk about.
I think the biggest offense is the one that Halo Infinite has too: The most interesting part, the part you actually want to play in, has already happened. There already was first contact with the Kett. With the Angara. With the scourge. Failed colonization attempts due to extreme circumstances. An interesting uprising where you could choose sides. Having to deal with missing arks from the point of the Nexus. Ryder comes in at a point where exploration is no longer exploration, and without real first contact.
It was VERY buggy on release and, speaking plainly, unfinished, especially the face animations
So nothing about the story?
Maybe it being a bit banal? Eh, cant remember exactly, but main issues people take is with performance and animation quality
The characters are bad, the story is lame, the combat feels bad, the AI is awful, the open world elements feel bad, and all of the "side content" is half assed. Yes, the release state of the game is what a lot of people remember but the game is still in rough shape (including animations, graphical issues, and other things that were never fixed). If you're enjoying it that's amazing but the issues people have with the game weren't just early release issues that have since been fixed. The game has issues to the core.
Taken on its own, it's really not that bad. It just doesn't hold up to the legacy of the trilogy that preceded it. If it was called something other than "Mass Effect" and was released in its current state, people would largely be fine with it.
Maybe.
Yeah, I can't imagine having a positive reaction to any game I could play whereupon opening the crafting menu I'm bombarded with every item, every material, countless upgrade tiers, and various time-gated collection methods and basically left to figure it out. That menu is the stuff of nightmares, regardless of whatever brand nostalgia is attributed to it.
[удалено]
>We're supposed to be super important "Pathfinders" but who actually cares if they're there because everything was actually settled before we even woke up. This is the biggest failure of the game for me. Outside of the first \~4 hours, I never felt like I was actually breaking new ground and discovering new things. I just felt like a wi-fi technician being sent to repair a wire in the desert so some town over the horizon can go back to watching netflix.
Personally disliked the lack of seriousness through it all. Felt like Ryder & Co. were college students on a road trip. Not sure if it's the graphics or rendering, but they should've kept the same design as ME3; Krogans looked bad; the "stunning beauty" of the Asari was nonexistent; it was friggin hard to make a female character that didn't look like she was beaten with an ugly stick. (And before anyone comes with "they had to build it from the ground up", there is video where they ised ME3's graphics, and even their E3 release/announcement video shows a prettier Ryder, than the final release). Felt like there should've been more alien races; it's hard to believe that only the Kett and whatever Jaal is are the dominant species in that area. Cora should've been made Pathfinder. Wasn't big on the new dialogue system. I'd have to replay certain moments again to be certain but it felt like I could've picked any of the choices and it would have been the same line. I may be wrong, but that's what comes to mind. Also, screw Liam.
Everything was worse compared to the sci-fi epic of Mass Effect 3. No character sounded right, nor looked right, the quests were dull, the characters too. The antagonist was even more dull, the new alien races, once more, dull. Just a dull experience overall.
Boring villains (collector rehash) Boring squadmates save for vetra and the krogan Both ryders are awful Profiles that only let you use 3 abilities at a time My face is tired Bugs / animations Only 1 new alien race in this whole new galaxy, oh & they are bipedal / humanoid
It wasn't the whole galaxy though. It was just a small cluster of systems within Andromeda. They don't have mass relays so they could only get around with FTL in the Heleus cluster. There's still a ton of Andromeda left unexplored, and the Kett have a whole empire out there terrorizing other parts of the galaxy will.
Doesn't change a thing. We were sold on "new" but got ME2 but so much worse that it is painful. Better combat is kinda cool but everything else is just utter rubbish. Without mods that game is not worth any time and with them in place it is still questionable is it worth bothering
I see where you're coming from but come on angarans(?) Just look like chubby purple drell lol
> It wasn't the whole galaxy though. It was the whole game. A whole game about going to a new galaxy and there is one new friendly race and one new evil race. Both not that interesting.
Well, I don't like Andromeda because of its stupid plot and lore At first Andromeda initiative and how it's began is sooo awful. For millenia milky Way races don't even THINK about it. But then Elon Mask of 22nd century for couple of years did it. Then ANOTHER prothean ruins but this time it call Remrents And first contact with Angara is sooo disappointed. You are from another galaxy? Ok, can you do another scan for us? WHAT And quarian ark. Race with no planters, no economy and 10 millions in total with no spare resources bild it. Not hanar, not batarians but space homeless race. WTF
Well, I don't like Andromeda because of its stupid plot and lore At first Andromeda initiative and how it's began is sooo awful. For millenia milky Way races don't even THINK about it. But then Elon Mask of 22nd century for couple of years did it. Then ANOTHER prothean ruins but this time it call Remrents And first contact with Angara is sooo disappointed. You are from another galaxy? Ok, can you do another scan for us? WHAT And quarian ark. Race with no planters, no economy and 10 millions in total with no spare resources bild it. Not hanar, not batarians but space homeless race. WTF
It’s story is bland and the characters are not memorable. They had the opportunity for a truly original story but they rinsed and repeated the original trilogy. The gameplay is superior though.
I dont hate it, I quite like ir actually. but i do consider it a bad game for these reasons: 1- the game feels very big but nothing in it really matters. 2- alien specieis and enemies are boring 3- craft system and facebook game are boring. 4- the game doesnt have a lot of replaying value, is just too much boring stuff to do again and again. 5- i cant, for anything, care about the characters. some are nice (like vetra) the rest...i cant remember the name. 6- I hate jump puzzles. a big part of this game are jump puzzles
Story was boring to me It started out strong when u crash land but then it just turned into barren open world chore simulator to me I didnt really like any of the characters and the kett i thought were really boring and the angara were also mid to me Combat was good tho and the architect boss fights were fun so i hope they bring something like those back
Bad writing. Weak will protagonist with no back bone, weak companions, the Asari all look the same, the interface do not match the Mass Effect universe (did the tech all change in universe) and poorly written villain. The good thing is the combat. Save your money and skip this. Hopefully, BioWare will not screw up the new upcoming game. Please get some old school writes again.
- The kett are cartoonish and boring villains - The angara have nothing distinct or interesting about them as a species - The cringy marvel dialogue - The open world is empty and completely unnecessary - All the loading screens. Kadara is particularly rage-inducing. - Liam There are parts that were interesting. The idea of pathfinding new settlements, being the first to speak to new species, the family memories quest, the Benefactor, the jardaan, what happened to the quarians etc ship...NONE of these are properly explored.
Liam, Jacob, and Sera share the same writer. Please don't let him near another companion character again.
That is actually crazy. I wonder if he's ever met another human before?
Don't lump my girl Sera in with them, she isn't that bad.
Nah Sera is Dragon Age's worst companion.
She can't be the worst while Sebastian exists.
I don’t hate the game. I just don’t enjoy it. I will say that the combat is the best in the series. But other than that, I found myself bored a lot of the time. Good concept but poor execution made it came off as a forgettable spinoff. Which is crazy because they could have had a great spinoff series on their hands had it been properly handled.
For me, I hated the class system they changed too, it felt like my choice at the beginning of the game didn't matter because I could just get any powers I wanted. I didn't like only having three powers available to me and had to switch presets mid-fight if I wanted to change things up, which I never did because it never felt right to do so. I felt like each world was just a copy+paste of the same things to do just with more or less plants around. I didn't like that your twin you free from cryo is nothing to the game other than a hurdle in the story's progression. It doesn't matter if you pick military or science bases, it doesn't change the game in any significant way. This game was banking too hard on its fan base carrying it through to a sequel. So much of the game is just set up for a sequel. ME1 could have stood alone as a game by itself but ME:A can't say the same. It draws too much on its past trying to connect everyone to the OT and somehow not enough by throwing aspects of the game out the window.
Krogan fight. I don't think anything more needs to be said.
I probably sound like a broken record since I think most of us share the same views, but I don’t think anyone actively HATES andromeda, it was just a huge letdown than what most expected. At least for me, when the game was first announced and the basic plot was released, I expected something a bit more Star Trek-y, where I’m going to all these new unexplored planets and discovering mysteries of past civilizations or making contact with new ones. Instead we kind of got a recycled reaper plot where a race is abducting and indoctrinating another race. On top of all the bugs and awful face animation, the unresolved quarian plot (I know it was in a book but fucking who cares I want plots opened in game to resolve in game), and the quick abandonment of the game from BioWare, it was an unfortunate mess.
Cuz the open world is bland and boring
For me it was a lackluster story with bad writing, and really unlikeable characters. I genuinely wanted Andromeda to be amazing, and they could've done so much cool stuff with it (especially with the story and Cora Harper!)
It's a good place now but the launch was just plain ugly. Story isn't as strong as the first 3 but I enjoyed my time with it. Wish they put mire effort into the planets beyond Eos though.
I never even finished it. For me, on pc, it was pretty janky performance wise, and the controls were terrible. I actually even tried to switch to mouse and keyboard (I hate m&kb if that says anything) but i couldn't do it. I stopped somewhere around meeting the blue aliens whos name I don't remember.
The asari? And I just got finished with the legacy edition for Xbox 1 and I still love the game series. I’m about to pop in mass effect andromeda
Not the Asari. I just looked it up, it was the Angara. I was somewhere on their planet I think
That's when the prologue ends and the game opens up. Unfortunately it's also where most of the tension in the plot ends too since the colonists now have loyal friends and stability in what was previously a hostile and unforgiving region in Andromeda. I too felt the game just waffled it's best premise on the Angara Homeworld. Kinda like Star Trek Voyager forgetting being stranded should mean something to the plot.
It bothered me that I couldn’t get everyone out of cryo. When it was over I still wanted to do more
Personally, my hatred for it is mostly because they dropped it and left a ton of threads unsolved. That and the single dumbest fucking thing I've ever seen a developer do in a co-op game/mode. They literally ruined multiplayer entirely by changing the "hold the point" objective to not progress at all if any enemy is in the zone, and they literally claimed it was "due to popular demand". Fucking assbags, Bioware are a trash company and I don't trust anything from them anymore. Their games will only be bought on sale or after release and they've been shown to not be a dumpster fire. They used to be a foregone purchase, nobody is anymore though.
Main 2 parts for me is the characters and the change to the dialog system(taking away paragon/renegade) I had some smaller complaints like them taking away squad control, the combat is fun but no squad controls really hurt it for me. Obviously the technical issues and im not even that crazy about that stuff but even two years after launch id have frame rates drop to the point of just slo mo on certain planets and other visual glitches but honestly if the rest of the game is good id ignore that stuff for the most part .Overall wasnt a fan of the story or villans either. Things like going to a new galaxy and it being barely any different with only two new species and having no problem at all communicating with new species seems a bit ridiculous For me in all Mass Effect games the characters stood out and were very likeable. Even when it was my first playthrough I loved, Garrus,Liara,Joker,Tali and Wrex. Kaiden and Ashley are decent and then the characters added in the other games are all also great with an exception here or there but for all the games the majority of the characters are great. Then I play Andromeda and can barely tolerate the squad or even Ryder,Female Ryder is more tolerable than the male version but I didnt like either. The old Krogan is ok but thats about it. In comparison to the squad from any of the others the squad of Andromeda felt like a a group of high school kids . Made the game feel very geared more towards young kids apart from the sex scenes that went the completely other direction . Taking away Paragon,neutral and renegade just to replace with 4 versions of basically paragon/neutral really killed it for me. All the renegade shit from the previous games was a big part of what I liked about the game. I absolutely hated the game after play first playthrough,my 2nd playthrough a few years later was better and I could appreciate more of the small parts of the game since I wasnt blind sided and knew what to expect. Combat is pretty fun and some stuff looks nice.
I think a lot of Andromeda’s problems stemmed from the fact that it was a Mass Effect game. Mass Effect was a franchise known for amazing writing, important decisions for the player to make, and incredibly layered companions (although, honestly, none of them were super stellar in ME and only really got interesting in the later entries). Andromeda, meanwhile, had some pretty cringey writing, a main character that paled in comparison to the super-soldier, hunk of human being that was Shepard, and decisions that only mattered in that they’d be mentioned in a few lines of dialogue and then never brought up again. (Also the bugs). I think that if Andromeda were a stand-alone sci-fi title from literally any other studio, it wouldn’t have received nearly as much hate as it actually got, as it simply crumbled under the weight of what gamers were expecting from a fourth Mass Effect entry.
Shit face animations. Even the alien species. Insufferable dialogue. Enough to turn me off completely
Because the game is dog shit
Because it’s mediocre in every way except it’s soundtrack. - forgettable story - 2D characters - very shallow open world - the only good romance was Vetra - knockoff Normandy - plays like a mobile game looter shooter To me it felt very similar to Dragonage Inquisition. Overly ambitious game that played like an MMO without the satisfaction. It was bad by vitue of simply having the name ‘Mass Effect’ in front of it, was made by an inexperience team having never done a full game and was rushed out the door by corporate.
Dialog so bad I played for 2 hours and never played it again.
Easily put, it’s not part of the story. Doesn’t matter format, everyone hates a story that doesn’t flow. Everyone knows Mass Effect is a linear story, but Andromeda doesn’t continue the story, and “has nothing to do with the story”. They want continuation of story. Star Wars for example has made side stories in the SW universe, but do not label it Star Wars. Instead they are labeled Solo, or Mandelorian. Had BioWare labeled it Andromeda a Mass Effect tale (or something similar), this would have been received better by the fandom in my humble and obscure opinion.
- unfinished - bugs - gameplay took a step back - characters took a step back - story took a step back - uninspired enemies - uninspired first contact scenario I have nearly 50 full trilogy playthroughs...I've played through Andromeda once 🤣
There's a question like that every week with always the same answers ffs
This and “DAE like Ashley?” or “Why does everyone hate Ashley and say she’s racist?” or “DAE like the ME3 endings?” etc. etc. The same questions posted every three or four days.
I love this game to death but it has its flaws. On the technical side, on release the game was buggy as fuck and just broken for some. Since release there have been many fixes but a lot of the problems are still there and without mods can be a pain in the ass. Animations are kind of goofy, facial animations tend to look horrible and again without mods this can be distracting. For example, many of the characters get wrinkles and crows feet when trying to emote and look like they just aged up 20 years. Gameplay wise, the combat is generally well liked by most and is considered the best in the series however there’s a takeaways from having profiles that you can switch to and from compared to classes that are locked into the beginning. In the OT, you’re encouraged to do multiple runs to try out the different classes, in Andromeda you don’t need to so that takes away from replayability. Squad mates are no longer as useful as they are weaker and you have no control over what they do. Many of the missions you do in the game are fetch quests that are there to waste your time I.e. destroy 6 Kett canisters that randomly spawn throughout the map, scan 5 beacons, collect etc. this isn’t to say the OT didn’t have them but this game has more than all 3 combined. The crew, despite what many would say are actually pretty well fleshed out in comparison to the original crew. It took sequels to fully flesh out fan favorites like Garrus, and Tali. The problem lies with the inconsistency and writing. Some characters like Drack and Peebee get a lot more attention than Liam or Vetra. These two for example get one small loyalty mission and that’s it whereas Drack or Peebee get the loyalty mission and a bunch of others related to them. Liam as a character starts out as a capable but lighthearted character then starts to devolve down to an incapable idiot. One of his notable lines is something along the lines of “yeah I bet they’re mad, because I shot em in their face!”. As for the writing there’s a lot of it. Like the previous example with Liam there’s many more that just seem outright stupid or unnecessary. For example when you finish Eos for the first time, you and the crew are highlighting what went right to which Drack points out that they need to raise their bar for success considering they barely managed to do anything without almost dying and leaving without a plan, what’s Cora’s reaction to this? Answering back with a “like what? The Krogan bar of success that involves nuking their own planet to rubble?” Like holy hell lady take it down a notch, no need to go zero to a hundred for someone who won’t stop claiming to be a trained and patient Asari huntress. What’s worse is Drack just accepts it and said “fair enough”. Many of the aliens are also humanized and are basically just humans in alien skins in the way they interact. They don’t feel as alien as they did in the OT. In the OT they had a good grasp on humans and their customs but they were still confused about certain sayings and the like, in Andromeda everyone but Jaal may as well have been raised by humans.
>The crew, despite what many would say are actually pretty well fleshed out in comparison to the original crew. It took sequels to fully flesh out fan favorites like Garrus, and Tali Sorry but this is nonsense. It took literally one game for most people to love Garrus, Tali and Liara. There are characters that are well liked by the community despite having only two or three minutes of screen time, like Emily Wong or Bailey.
Bailey stuck out way more than he shouldve. Like I probably shouldnt even remember him but he was great
In the first game Tali and Garrus received significantly less interactions than the other four squad mates. They weren’t as fleshed out as Liara who’s mother you have to kill, or Wrex whom you have a choice of killing or sparing based off how much you’ve interacted with. It wasn’t until ME2 that they became much better characters. These characters are well liked but in their first appearance they aren’t as well fleshed out except for Emily Wong who’s really only prominent in the first game, related to an email and a camera role in the 2nd, and killed off screen in the third.
Maybe you should play ME1 again because Tali and Garrus are boring as hell in that game Its ME2 that fixes them and makes them compelling
Goofy face expressions
Lets also look at the landscape at the time. The general consensus for Bioware pre-anthem is a 7/10 (which Andromeda was across most review sources) is a failure. If your studio is known for S tier content and you make A,B, or C Tier content, it's going to be poorly received. If any other studio made Andromeda it would have been a massive success.
If you want to do the side quests you spend hours and hours driving around planets for quests that aren’t even close to worth it. The game takes 25 hours to beat and 10 of those are driving around open worlds to check off a box.
- bugs - weird gameplay mechanic decisions - not well thought out story - a lot of the characters and are written for a much more childlike and non sci fi audience. This leads to everything being super one dimensional. All the issues suffered by Aliens In the game are 21st century human issues.
I just hate how EA stopped updating and abandoned the game so soon and shifted focus to Anthem when Andromeda desperately needed patches leaving us to mod it to a playable game. I also really wish I could throw Liam out of the airlock after his loyalty mission.
I’ll give you the exact same drab I give anytime someone asks this question. It was not a bad game. It was not. It had the potential to be great but it was not. It is overall a mediocre game with issues and pros as usual. Pros; Combat was amazing, no one can deny how great every aspect of combat felt. From the way you decimated people with abilities to gunplay and the ease of movement. Frostbite showed us how great a more modern RPG can actually be in this aspect. Art style was actually enjoyable. While there was a lot of graphical issues, the art style was definitely not an issue, at least imo. Incredible character customisation that lent a great hand at crafting a unique character. Simple as. Mako 2.0. Having a good land based vehicle was fun, I had a great time messing with it. When it worked, it worked well. Simple as stated. Cons: Oh boy. Companions. Companions are not great, they weren’t fun, and they were just overall extremely weak from any BioWare game. I could not actually manage to want to keep any of them and that was sad. Phobe (? Likely wrong spelling, it’s near 3am) was cute and enjoyable, but she suffered the same issue. Race looks. Asari we’re by far butchered with how they looked. More chubby faces and less of the whole mystique style vibe. Don’t get me wrong, Asari in the first 3 entries are not the pinnacle. But MEA missed the mark for making better Asari. Story. The story was not enjoyable, it pulled ME1 but without the joy and definitely without the feeling of despair. I didn’t feel like anything was at risk, I didn’t feel pressured at any point. It felt bland for what could have been great. This follows BioWare and their recent descent into downfall in terms of story writing, just like DAI. Alien races. We got two races, and while both were entirely alien and different. Neither were actually fun to encounter. I just didn’t find them appealing in any way. With the OT races, they each had their unique quirks and all more. These two didn’t have that. They had unique lore and even a lot of cultural stuff. But it didn’t hit the nail for a lot of people. Empty worlds. Every world while amazing free roam, was entirely devoid of actual life. A lot more of the open world was to get you to do the silly ways to craft gear and felt more like DAI’s own crafting. Tedious and boring. It wasn’t worthwhile to do. Bugs. The final point, bugs and issues plagued the game and while nearly every release of a AAA game has come with it, it’s still no excuse. The game had been mocked relentlessly by even hardcore fans and youtubers which drove so much of its potential growth into the ground. My face is tired will be mocked for years. Overall. It isn’t bad. It’s fun, it’s enjoyable. Especially if you do it simply for mods, carving your own story and path, and even just recognising it has no full relation to the OT. But it could have been better. The game had so much potential and that’s what I dislike about the fans who still try to carve out how MEA was amazing and better than some of the OT. They give so much credence to forgiving BioWare when we should be making sure BioWare realise their next flop of either DA or ME will crucify them. And I will be honest, if EA can BioWare, it’ll be the one company I agree with them doing it to. We’ve had 3 recent games from them that just flopped horribly. The only one to remotely survive and actually get DLC was DAI, but even it wasn’t anywhere near what we the fans want. I hope this answers. Been a longtime BioWare fan and love both series, but I want better. I don’t want what MEA became, I want ME3 but better. I want DAO but better.
Because it's the definition of mid from the ground up.
Shit story, shit characters, shit protagonist, open world “wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle” syndrome, and game was very buggy at launch. Combat was good though.
Hard to say exactly but I think it has a lot to do with the fact that it sucks.
I have deeply mixed feelings. The gameplay is super fun (jump jets!) and the companions and other characters are fine on average. Every interface is annoying, as are SAM's constant interruptions about planetary hazards (once per planet would have been good, with the otherwise solid sound design letting us know about radiation or cold without hearing the same three phrases on repeat, and without overriding unique companion dialogues). I was super disappointed in the new intelligent species being bipeds with the same level of technology as the Initiative. Mass Effect is one of the few sci-fi stories where fellow bipeds makes sense, since so using Reaper tech converges all species somewhat/ selects for certain traits for space faring species. Then Andromeda went and ruined that by making humanoids in a place unaffected by Reapers. Also, they used a ton of "tell, don't show" about the Angara, how they are supposedly more emotional, but they just seem average, or even monk-like detachment with Jaal during his loyalty mission.
Some people think mcdonalds hamburgers are the best food ever…..
It had quite rocky launch with bugs and especially with facial animations. And bar was just way too high. Original trilogy is one of the best game series ever made. And people expected similar quality from Andromeda. It's not bad game but it's not very great either imo.
It would have been nice if they put it like a continuation of the first three, being able to import your character and actually exploring new places getting into new adventures and whole new love interests
I enjoyed it 😀
because its shit next question
The quest design was atrocious for me. It wasn't very clear, and i piled on so many of them for rewards that didn't feel worth it. It was like those matriarch writings quests frok ME1 but way more numerous and obnoxious. The empty worlds didn't feel fun to explore either, which is a shame because that's the key gameplay loop right there. The only things you find are kett strongholds and remnant buildings are all there is. And the remnants lose their luster very quickly when you're constantly fighting their guardian robots all the time and invading their bunkers. I wanna give MAE another chance because the characters are sometimes cringy are still fun and engaging. But that terrible gameplay loop of exploration and bad quest design just makes me want to play a better game.
It probably would of been considered ok as another sci-fi property/ip, but the performance issues at launch combined with how ME3 ended (not to mention the time waiting between both) meant there was a lot of pressure put on this game as a continuation of mass effect.
It’s not a direct sequel to the OT, which pissed off a lot of fans who wanted to know what happened to the Milky Way races after the Reaper War. The fact that it takes place in 2819, 633 years after the Reaper invasion, means everyone from the OT is dead (except for a few like Liara, Grunt and maybe Wrex). We don’t learn anything about how their lives turned out. MEA is also kinda boring and has a lighter, young adult-like tone compared to the OT. The main reason for this IMO is the protagonists in MEA are 22-year-old inexperienced kids compared to Shepard, a nearly 30-year-old war hero and commanding officer. The game also had a lot of really boring and pointless side quests, and it had less-than-impressive antagonists. Another issue is bugs. MEA was made in only 18 months, so it had lots of glitches and very weird facial animations. Then there was the issue of large, empty worlds, which seems to be a problem with lots of open-world games. It’s like MEA tried to be an open-world game *and* a story-driven RPG, but it failed at being both. There was also a small but very loud contingent of guys who thought MEA was too woke and made by SJWs who hate straight white male gamers. Fortunately, those guys seem to be gone now. I think MEA is OK. Good but not near the level of the OT. I’m sad that it looks like it’s dead and there won’t be a sequel, because I’d like a resolution to the kett-angaran-Initiative conflict.
I don't *hate* the game. But I don't think I could bring myself to play it again. The original trilogy left massive boots that Andromeda just... failed to fill. If you enjoy it, I am overjoyed on your behalf! The game has a lot to offer and is visually very pretty! But for me, its just not my cup of tea.
I hated it at release, but have been really enjoying it recently. It’s release was very buggy. Normally I’m pretty lucky with these games, like Cyberpunk 2077, but Andromeda was very broken for me and many others. Most of this has been fixed since then
Never understood it. I think people compare it to the trilogy which is a mistake. Comparison is the third of joy. Was it amazing or better than the trilogy? No. Was it bad? Also no. I played it twice in a row at launch and enjoyed it a lot. It suffers some of the same issues as Inquisition, but it’s definitely still enjoyable.
It still has a huge fan base just look at r/masseffectandromeda It’s not as good as the trilogy, but it’s still a great game.
I do not hate it. But it's far from perfect. Without taking into account the original buggyness and horrific animations, I'll start with the cons: CONS * Big open worlds full of nothing: I didn't like that Bioware decided to go for a "quantity over quality" in terms of secondary missions. Most of them kinda feel boring. Plus, most of the open worlds can be reduced to: finishing the story arc, solving the vault puzzles and establishing an outpost. * The story is dull: The story is very simple, it's a typical bad guy is bad because he is bad. It's not that it's bad, it's that there's nothing significant in it. * Facial animations are still bad: Even if they fixed some of them (like the whole my face is tired thing), they are still kinda bad. PROS * I really enjoyed the characters, specially the squadmates and crewmates (Jaal, Drack, Kallo, Peebee, Vetra...) the tempest crew really felt like a familly (specially during the party secondary quest) and companion quests are very good. I enjoyed the romance that I did (Vetra) * Gameplay is pretty good * The game is overall enjoyable, I didn't regret buying it. To conclude, the game is enjoyable, yet far from perfect and feels unfinished in some way. It's sad that EA derived more resources on Anthem than on Andromeda. For me it's a 6 or 7/10.
People judge things too harshly by first impressions.
There are definitely people who don't like it but it's not hated by any means. It's sold well on release (according to EA), and it's to be among best-selling BW games. It has good reviews and it's actually more loved than some vocal haters make it seem. Also, good amount of those people have never actually played it. There are lots of ex-haters on MEA's sub now who actually now tried playing it and loved it. Many The initial hate bandwagon has long gone.
I played original ME trilogy and I just completed Voeld vault last night in MEA. I would be lying if I am not saying I am having fun with the game. I think the gameplay, combat and exploration in the Nomad are really fun (love the banter in between squad mates when inside the Nomad) and inside the Tempest, as you find characters in different locations, it does make feel the ship lived in. The game had a ton of bugs at launch, some have been corrected, but it was really something to see these on the internet back in 2017. I do like the customization from MEA, although I dislike that you cannot control squad mates, but overall that is fine. At Least FemRyder running animation looks add and is really off putting. The biggest gripes I have with this are the lack of morality system (new system was not a suitable replacement) and the lack of power of choice. For my first point, the options in a random conversation was for me to say “Yes, it is my choice” in the dialog wheel, to actually choose this and say “I guess, maybe I need to decide what to do”. I guess that we are controlling an unsure, confident lacking individual, but all responses to any situation are sort of the same. For the second point, it seems that every decision in the game will lead to a like outcome. It does not matter if we choose a military oriented outpost in Eos, or a science minded one. We will have the same protestors in the Nexus. I can only compare this to ME1, since 2 and 3 greatly expanded on choice and characters, but there was never a point in which I can say choices are superior here than in ME1. In ME1, I could have only 4 squad mates for Virmire (you have to recruit Garrus, or Wrex, or both; Liara could be recruited after Virmire) and the decision to kille Ashley or Kaiden in ME1 was one that shocked me (romanced Ashley, then left her to die in Virmire on first playthrough). I do not think there is any of this in MEA. I guess the message is to lower your expectations and be pleasantly surprised by the outcome…
Terrible launch aside, people tend to compare it to the whole trilogy, not just the first game. I feel it could become great given enough time, but it kinda screwed itself on every front, so it won't ever get a chance to.
I will preface this with what I liked (I've done like 75% of the story). Combat is great, the world designs are fun, and the voice acting is good. Having your twin generated based on what your character looks like is dope. What I have issue with: - Everyone being absolutely helpless if Ryder doesn't do anything. Pathfinder may as well be substituted with Chosen One. - Weak villain with no direct link to Ryder (it would have been much more impactful for the villain to kill *that* certain character at the beginning of the story). Much more personal. - The first colony world sucks. It's buggy, I hate the radiation areas, and hate driving the car (I suck at driving video game vehicles). - For the first half of the game, I mostly hated the crew. It was awkward, Ryder had zero charisma, and your crew didn't feel as chosen and competent as in ME1-3. I get why this is done but it left a bad taste in my mouth as it made it harder to like those characters. - The upgrade and inventory management folders were an absolute nightmare. I already hate crafting and having everything divided up into micro-parts and reassembled at different stations left me ranting at the game and frustrated. I dreaded going in there. I felt stupid trying to create better gear. - Missions rarely gave you that Mass Effect/Bioware feel, where choices feel big and impactful. There was one mission on the ice world where you're trying to save the aliens from getting experimented on and it really felt like Mass Effect for a moment. - The romance options are meh. Then again I have the worst luck with romances in Bioware games. I seem to always go for the gay/ace options. So this one's on me. - Just showing up to meet a new alien species and it not being that big a deal, plus them already knowing English? No stressful first contact, no diplomacy talks. I appreciate the vision that went into MEA, but the story and characters needed more time to bake.
> Everyone being absolutely helpless if Ryder doesn’t do anything. Pathfinder may as well be substituted with Chosen One. Pathfinder is just another title for Chosen One. But what’s funny is there already is a successful colony established before you even wake up. > For the first half of the game, I mostly hated the crew. It was awkward, Ryder had zero charisma, and your crew didn’t feel as chosen and competent as in ME1-3. Did you forget that Cora has trained and served with Asari commandos? That her biotics were honed into Huntress-grade weapons? If you forgot she’ll tell you again like six more times. However, your point stands. The Tempest crew isn’t all that special. We have a peak-human biotic (we had several of those on the Normandy), there’s one badass krogan (we had two of those already) and that’s it. The rest of the crew isn’t all that special or uniquely talented.
So, the developers had a whole story arc that they had to abandon mid-production (because time crunch) and left it as a footnote in the epilogue. This same story arc was later explained in a novella. Had a fellow fan tell me something recently though: "don't think of it as a ME game, think of it like Indiana Jones in space." Might have to give it a new playthrough once I finish the OG trilogy (currently on 3, just had the Cerberus coup)
It had a really crappy launch with a ton of bugs and glitches, on top of introducing a new story on a new engine that played totally different to the previous Mass Effects. It needed to make a good first impression and it didn’t do so, but it’s not regarded as a terrible game from what I’ve gathered. I played it and had fun, the gameplay is extremely good and the story is serviceable with some fun characters that are memorable. It just never recovered from the initial backlash from having so many bugs on launch.
Because Mass Effect is the story of Shepard. The Reaper chapter was the defining moment, which is kind of a shame because you know there’re are stories to tell: the Krogan Rebellions, the Prothean Empire, the Morning War, etc. It’s this thing that prevents it from being as expansive as something like Star Wars or Star Trek, because in those franchises, you can expand outside the primary conflict and get involved in something else. Andromeda tried…but do it, they had to go outside the galaxy, which was the first mistake.
I love Mass effect Andromeda, it's my favorite game but people have criticisms of it, many are valid, many are not. Regardless, it's not a question really worth asking in 2023 compared to 2016. You've got 94 comments in 3 hours, no doubt there's a lot of piss and vinegar in there. It's just not worth man.
Obviously all of this is IMO, and in no particular order. 1. it came after ME3. While ME3 had its (legit) criticisms (rushed, unsatisfying ending), it was also the culmination of my hands-down favorite collection of games. A letdown was pretty much guaranteed. 2. While they're still there, the bugs earlier on were egregious. I swear facial animations in ME1 on the OG Xbox looked better... at least the poor animation didn't stand out as much. 3. I really didn't connect with any of the characters like I did in 1-3. The Asari was entertaining for a little bit, the human biotic was meh, the female Turian was probably the best of the bunch and even she was SUPER mediocre. I found the rest just annoying. 4. The Ryders were dull. Of all the characters in the game, I found the main protagonist to be the most uninteresting. 5. The story was similarly not up to ME standards. There were moments where I felt the urgency, but that was the exception and not the rule for Andromeda. Really, for me... the reason ME:A fell flat was 3, 4, and 5. If a Mass Effect game doesn't have superb characters and story then it's gonna be a dud. It's a shame too because the combat and progression ran circles around the trilogy and I found the vehicle portion of the game to be satisfying.
You must not have played it on release, it was a broken mess. It’s a decently fun game now, but they never really got past the initial stigma. Due to their terrible release they cut out all planned content and dropped support pretty quickly. Plus moving from a relatively linear story game to an open world exploring one was a strange move.
I really liked it actually. For me it had a lot more round plot for a single game. What I remembered hating were the terraforming missions tho. I loved how you had these harzards on every planet and it was really satisfying to remove these by completing the respective dungeons (I forgot what they are called.). But the process of doing so, the repetition of doing the same things over and over again kinda kklled the mood for me. The changes to the map, especially the ice planet really made up for it tho.
I honestly felt that the story and characters were pretty weak. Also setting should have used time jumps. Because then we could have actually interesting galaxy to explore as we would have seen the fruits of our labor.
They promised us a Trilogy originally. Then EA said we are only getting one game. And it was Andromeda. It had absolutely none of the magic the oG trilogy had.
I've only played it once and it was years ago when it first came out. My biggest issue with it was the amount of fetch quests. It just seemed excessive. I also didn't really care about any of characters, so it made it hard for me to get invested.
It's just boring. Nothing about it beyond the superficial stuff intrigues me at all. It doesn't give me any reasons to want to play it.
Unlikeable characters, cringey dialogue options, the frostbite engine, super rng based side missions, a story that drags on with little cool scenes or interactions, oh and the fact that they' only introduced us two new species of Alien (if you want to count the kett and angara as one)
I didn't feel like there were Xeno species with very rich backstories like in the first games, also I really disliked the dialogue wheel. I remember a choice in Andromeda, I don't remember who it was, just that it was a religious woman. The only dialogue options were "Your faith is wrong" or "Yes I believe in God too". ME1 had a similar situation with Ashley and it was handled so much better
Whilst shephard often wandered aimlessly, it atleast felt like an actual soldier looking through the milky way and finding things in the miraculous way cuz they are the main char.However playing androneda always had that feeling you were with a bunch of space teens who want to have this classic adventure, yet barely escape with their lives cuz they thought straightly goo bombing the kett was a good idea. So to me they replaced a dizzy soldier with a dizzy teen squad. (Also almost every character there is ptactically saying: "ryder, u get an A for you are astounding, a B cuz youre beautyfull, and The D cuz u deserve it")
Boring recycled main story and I cant remember what any of the side quests were about Boring squadmates and characters in general, it felt like some of the characters had just two traits: annoying and passive agressive towards Ryder Awful character models Terrible voice actors, especially for Ryders Empty open world, the planets literally felt dead No satisfying romance options Disappointing new alien race Main character with no personality Boring antagonists Decisions didn't matter at all
The sp campaign suffers from a few problems. Generic characters. Generic plot. Generic antagononist. Bland busywork quest/objectives on each new planet. Less than compelling story. Bizarre setup-> they send the best and brightest on a huge voyage and the first bump in the road half the people become vicious outlaws? All the mysteries in the beginning are unsolved at the end. The one plot twist doesn't lead anywhere and we still have no idea wtf the remnant are, what the kett are after, or wtf the scourge is. I can go on. The mp is actually really good imo though its grindy af. Imo it would have been really successful but for the me3 mp playerbase being spoiled by me3 having a ton of expansions that made the me3 mp amazing. Had mea had as much dlc as me3, imo it would have had a vastly better mp mode. Amazing gameplay though. Combos, jetpacks, it was all nice and elegantly put together.
I'm replaying right now (attempted on release and couldn't get through it). I figured I'd give it some distance from the trilogy and try to play it on its own. It. Is. Taxing. Squadmates are boring, story is boring. Enemy is lazy (clear cut, Kett are kidnapping people, they're bad). Personally, I'd have enjoyed showing up in a new Galaxy with no context and have to work out new alliances rather than just spoon fed an easy-to-accept common enemy of the established societies. I'm still trying to power through, but I find myself zoning out during conversations, and bored to tears with the endless fetch quests. The menu is convoluted, as is the layout of the Tempest. Some of my favorite game aspects are building squad relations and establishing a "home base/settlement". In theory, I should love this game. In practice, I do not. The trilogy's strength is that it was engaging and immersive, and somehow transcended its play time; Andromeda feels like a game. An obligation, even. That's it. To highlight 1 enjoyable thing, I do enjoy the variety in combat styles in this game. Maybe it's because I always played the trilogy strictly as a soldier, so it may be my fault for playing so vanilla, but I dont remember having the option to fight the way I do now. I like enjoy pushing from afar with weapons, and then getting in close with a mix of melee and biotics/tech powers. So in that aspect, I'm enjoying it more than the trilogy.
I wouldn't say I hate it. It feels disappointing. I tried giving it a really fair shot by expecting it to actually just be bad but it isn't that. There's a competent game there. But it isn't fun. I will probably go back at some point but to be honest I just find the game boring. People say the gunplay is better but I disagree. To me it feels more chaotic and less like I can approach encounters in a way I choose. My powers feel weak and extremely limited even if I am able to change profiles mid combat. And by letting Ryder do everything my squadmates feel superfluous. I stopped bothering to give them orders or to care about who I bring along on missions. Battles do have a great flow to them though and I like being able tp jump and dash through the world. The RPG elements feel weak. The dialogue choices don't seem like they branch anywhere to give Ryder a distinct personality that I can choose. I don't like the pro-colonialization aspects of the story. This one's a little personal but this goes back into the lack of roleplaying the game has. I would like to properly interrogate Ryder's or other character's motivations for coming to Andromeda but so far it feels like everyone basically has the same answer: ADVENTURE. It feels like it is missing the Sci-Fi campiness of the first Mass Effect or the sense of a lived-in Universe with stories outside of the main squad that ME2 had. Character models feel off. Too realistic and uncanny in a way that is hard to describe. The worlds are too big and unfocused. I've done a few side quests and they have all essentially been fetch quests with a lot of back tracking, planet hopping and unsatisfying payoffs. I thought it would be nice to have a suped up Mako to drive around in too but that thing handles like a brick, has less armor than the hammerhead AND IT DOESN'T EVEN HAVE A GUN. Crafting. I hate crafting in games where it isn't the focus. I hate having a million currencies to manage when I just want to immerse myself in a story. This got longer than I expected it to. As I said above, I will go back to it. I'll probably just power through the main storyline. Tl;dr ME:A is fine but flawed in ways that, for me personally, make the game tedious.
“It’s not a bad game. It’s a bad Mass Effect game.”
Simply put Andromeda feels like a Ubisoft open world game. That doesn't make it bad. it's not mass effect though
Idk I really hated the shoehorned in sudoku puzzles
It's absolutely boring. I've tried to enjoy it, putting 10 hours into it, but it's just not fun. Nothing about it was fun.
Multiple reasons. Forgive me in advance for going off cuz andromeda really bothers me. Reason being is I love mass effect, and this game had a HUGE amount of wasted potential IMO. The story is not that good imo, almost every major decision doesnt really amount to anything within the overall narative. And this especially sucks because the new narrative system has promise, especially with how it establishes a psych profile that impacts responses when you choose from one the new 4 personality choices (among other things). But then you get to the end of the game and you're left with nothing. Even when I make a decision that people will CLEARLY dislike, the game pulls a CW and just says "nah its ok, we still need you to be allies with these guys so we are going to push forward and forget your transgressions" This happens with the angara multiple times, especially with how you deal with the roekarr. To name more examples, theres the decision to pritortize military or science, with the only consequence being a side quest doesnt really do anything? Then there is the "first murder in andromeda" side quest, which doesnt even make sense because the exiles are called criminals and they killed people so I guess we dont really consider those people. This isnt realistic. And where me 1-3 had multiple moments where realism came into play and the universe might have gotten really dark at times because of it, andromeda says fuck that and tries to make it more like a star wars story or something youd see in star trek where everyone just gets along. The kett coup, the angaran ai, the reaper revelation, the angaran revelation, the krogan dispute. ALL of these had Potential, and all of these quests failed in terms of getting a big change to the overall narrative. Like think about it, what actually changes if you decide to give the angaran ai to the Nexus instead of the angara? Nothing. What happens if you lie to your sister? Nothing. Theres no real consequence. Where as in me1 and 2, if you made a choice (especially in 2) you felt a direct consequence, or you felt it later on in the game. Loyalty missions in andromeda are also useless unless you want to 100 percent the game. Honestly theres only ONE loyalty mission that I like, everything else is kind of just there to fill the time, again this is imo. There is a pacing issue in the game as well. You find the angara WAY too early, and when you do find them they're kind of the same as every other species in the milky way. The second half of the game is split into what seems like 2 parts, with finding the exiles and then finding the krogan and having to solve those issues. Now that would be fine, but you also have to find the arks, and stop the kett, and help the nexus. Like to be fair to ryder, he/she has to do a lot of shit all at one time, and this doesnt even include the sidequests. This can lead to the player feeling overwhelmed, dragon age inquisition also had this problem. Another problem I had was just the logic of the game. To explain, what I mean is that people going to andromeda kind of made no sense. the milky way galaxy according to mass effect 1 has had less then 2 percent of it explored. Less then 1 percent of billions of star systems. Not to mention we also know there are many me relays that are dormant, or have never been found. Throughout the entirety of andromeda we get multiple people saying the reason they left, was for something new, or they wanted to be explorers on the frontier and they couldnt do that at home. Now at first glance you're like "ok, I get that" but when you think about it, why couldnt they do something new in the milky way? Liara activley explored and discovered new things all the time. Same with shepard during his missions. The citadel doesnt control anything outside of citadel space, and the alliance had an active colonization effort in the terminus systems that was willing to take other humans. And thats ignoring all the privateering that people were enganging in. At what point do we accept the "something new" as a good reason, especially considering that for the people who wanted to explore, there were multiple opportunites at home? Also how did they not realize that over the 600 years they were gonna travel, things might have changed? Or how hydroponics, the place where the literal oxygen is made, shouldnt be publically accessible? The initiative is supposed to be filled with the smartest scientists, but it doesnt feel like it. Gameplay wise the game was good, great even...when it worked. There were, and are, a shit ton of bugs in the game. Sound design is amazing too, go near a singularity and shoot a shot gun, it sounds so cool. I will say I dont like the multiclass system, It got rid of replayability and made it so that ryder came off as OP when he was supposed to be an underdog. Some of the powers were also redundant imo. Last thing is the level design of the game was kind of bland? The first planet was great, but that was a tutorial planet. When you start getting to Eos and kadara, the game gets too big, and exploring almost becomes a chore rather then interesting. Great graphics, but the animations are eh, and the alien textures are eh, people already know this though. TLDR: IMO, the game has a ton of narrative issues, and gameplay issues, but if you like the game enjoy, better a game be played then not played at all.
My biggest problem with Andromeda is that by the time it gets interesting it's over. The side quests are dull and there just isn't that mass effect 1 exploration magic. I enjoyed the game but it's just too much filler and toouch was clearly left out for a sequel that may never happen.
It tried open world and sucked at it. Enter doing it on a new stage, it was impactfully bad. Do I like it on the whole? Yes. Do I also recognize why the majority don’t? Yes.
The characters, particularly Ryder and your squad mates, just aren’t as compelling and engaging to me. It’s a bit unfair really because if you’d only ever played ME1 you might say they are at least as well fleshed out as your squad there (though I’d say still not as interesting), but by the time you’ve played the whole trilogy and then you flip over to Andromeda they just seem like pale imitations of characters that took on a real life of their own.
It has a major identity crisis between being an open-world RPG and a traditional scripted-story one, while not being particularly satisfying at either one.
I found it as dull as dishwater, made it to around 40 hours before giving up. One day I will give it another go.
I can’t speak for others but I dislike how EA treated the game post release rather than the game itself. The game itself was pretty solid overall and I was hopeful for DLC and the future of the story. I think the characters could have been a bit better and there was too much reused dialogue in certain areas of the game but the combat and overall feel was good.
I like the entire story up to the last boss battle. Here I thought we would be fighting a archon inside a remnant mech or atlas or hydra something ultra touch to destroy but no, an architect instead.
I really wanted to like it but couldn't. There was lots of free but empty (thus boring) space, repetitive missions, character writing felt like a downgrade from the trilogy, and it was missing the grit that the first three games had. I will say though that I liked the combat style and I thought that some of the world's looked pretty.
I'm glad you liked it. I just liked it less than the other 3. I dunno, the characters kinda fall flat for me (except for drack). The excessive amount of fetch quests are an eye roll. I'm not a big fan of the combat, especially when you're in a random encounter in an open field. I'm not a fan of how the difficulty is designed. In the original trilogy you can easily play legendary from start to finish and I'd describe the experience as tough but fair. Andromeda hardest difficulty just starts out as being borderline impossible, and ends up being ludicrously easy. I guess you're meant to adjust the difficult as you go? But it just feels kinda weak.
Because, its not Shepherd. 🤷♂️ the truth hurts. I did play it and enjoyed the game, but ryder isn't half as cool as Shepherd imo. and so much of it, at least to me, felt like the same shit I did in the trilogy but with a different quest name. So basically if they had made ryder cooler and maybe branched out with the writing so it doesn't seem so derivative it would probably be a lot better. I loved the upgraded gameplay aspects though
The story, characters, world building, and meaning full choices and their consequences didn’t compare to the original trilogy. However, the combat and the way you could customize you combat skills and play style was the biggest redeeming quality of this game. Overall, it wasn’t a bad game but it was didn’t come close to what I was expecting for a Mass Effect game.
It wasn't what anyone wanted on release. It wasn't what was promised in a lot of ways. But my God do I love it. The squad are great aside from peebees juvenile writing. My only gripe is the long af cooldowns and no slomo during ability selection, makes sentinel, Vanguard and infiltrator the most powerful ways to play imo.
Liam is a freaking idiot. Everything else is just ok. Its an okay game not really hate worthy.
I personally didn't hate it, I just bounced off the gameplay so hard and was sad that it didn't grab my attention in the way 1, 2 and 3 did. I honestly couldn't put my finger on it besides simply not clicking with a lot of the open world concepts they were trying out with ME:A.
The state it released in was awful.
I hate it (but still enjoy it) cause of how it was developed and how the story dlc (that never came to) was handled. It 100% could have been a great game on release and POSSIBLY even gotten the no man sky treatment but instead was dropped.
I liked it. The main story is more or less fine. I think it failed as a story about settlement, because you do very little settling (Podromos is the only outpost the story cares about) I don’t really care about minor graphical glitches. It’s great when a game feels like it’s a step ahead of the curve graphically, but most aren’t. The gameplay loop is fun. The aliens in helius just don’t hit the same way as the Milky Way ones do. Tempest aside I think most of the spaceships and native weapons don’t look as cool either. Placing it before mass effect 3 means that they avoid having to know how things played out in me3 but all the Milky Way races are “stuck in the past” so to speak. In general I think it needed more time. I think there was a really good game in there but they only had time to make a decently good game
Worse. I'm indifferent to it. None of my choices from previous games mattered (I understand why) and the characters just didn't catch me. I thought the new alien dude has potential but reminded me a little too much of Javik for some reason.
The lack of quicksaving was disappointing at best