MEA was bad but less egregious because its whole premise wasn’t live services.
No, you can’t have less than no support.
I think ME:A gets a bad rap. Or maybe more specifically, an unfairly harsh rap.
I finished it. It was fine. I’d even say I enjoyed myself for long stretches of it. All of the frontier stuff - helping found settlements, finding the other arks, founding the new seat of government, etc. was fairly interesting. It was the main storyline with the antagonist that was utterly bland. I honestly can’t even remember his name.
I think it has the best feeling combat of the entire series, though the actual action has never been the focal point of ME.
At the end of the day, I think Andromeda is the worst Mass Effect game, but I also think that’s a fairly high bar to begin with. The game is fine - not great - but fine. Particularly once they cleaned up the stuff with the overly glassy, dead eyes, and the wonky inverse kinematics that would make you crab walk every now and again.
Andromeda was just another casualty of the Internet “pile on” effect of trashing games.
You’ll have some fun zipping around in the campaign (I did), but be warned that the story is utter tat.
For $12-13, i’d say it’s worth it for however many hours you get out of it. Having bought it at launch for full price, I regret it.
When I said “MEA was bad” I was answering the “discontinuing support” question of prior poster. MEA was a solid 6.5/10 finished game that suffered for not having stronger connections to other ME games (no aliens etc.) simply by being out in its own galaxy and the “bad” part was that it was never given a chance to develop it to the extent of ME Trilogy.
Anthem is an unfinished scam of the misbegotten live services premise.
That’s fair enough. I’m actually sad we will probably never see a sequel to Andromeda set decades in the future, where you get to see how all of the settlements you helped found, ultimately grew and developed.
But yeah, I don’t want to go too easy on it. The Ryder twins were bland compared to Shepard, the antagonist was bland, some of the companions were bland, and the main story was forgettable. Yet much like Skyrim, there’s a lot of fun to be had in spite of the main narrative being uncompelling.
Antagonist was super bad yeah, and this is something that Bioware has struggled with for the last ~10 years.
Unlike you I didn’t like the frontier stuff and exploration but I did legit enjoy the ‘classic’ ME style missions with the crew. The ending was the real highlight of the game, much better executed than in the previous games.
Even the new antagonist in Cataclysm event has a stupidly generic name. The Antagonist or Adjudicator or some shit that isn’t memorable from the 3 breadcrumb story missions I tolerated.
Another Sr Producer just put in his notice.
ENHANCE!
I love that picture, and I don’t even play Sonic.
Move along, nothing to see here.
This departure is more for Dragon Age though and doesn’t affect Anthem’s already sad state of affairs.
True, but that doesn’t change the fact that its a bad sign for Bioware.
From what I gather he was lead designer on Dragon Age 2, which basically crapped all over the original game and killed my interest in the franchise… Not that I think him abandoning DA4 means it might find its way back to the promise of the original.
I enjoyed Dragon Age Inquisition a lot. Dragon Age 2 was terrible.
They reportedly had to build and release DA2 in only 12 months, so in a talking dog sort of way it’s fantastic. It’s a dog that talks, who cares what it says?
DA2 was shit, but given the timetable I wouldn’t assign blame to the team working on the game. It’s the exact opposite of Anthem in that way.
Loved DA2 characters and some of the story and setting. Limited scope and asset reuse hampered enjoyment. Dumbing down of combat sucked and simple quests predicted same for DAI.
Well, my main issue with DA2 is the change from a strategic high level view of the battlefield with freeform mouse controls, over to moving characters by “driving” an overshoulder camera as a 3rd person action game. Even if you zoom out, you can’t just click somewhere, you need to awkwardly “drive” your cursor in order to issue commands.
This fundamental change in the game design, one that can basically be mapped to strategy PC game (DAO) to action console game (DA2), is my main beef. The limited scope, story and recycled assets are all secondary issues for me.