Mass Effect Andromeda - I'm not Commander Shepard and this is my favorite sequel

Thank you, I love reading things twice!

No problem, glad I could help!

I agree!

Up to this point, at least. Unless you don’t care for story in RPGs ;) I just think MEA had potential and an okay story overall (with some great moments) that really suffered from being drawn out.

Not calling you out in particular: To be honest, why I keep engaging what I see as disproportionate criticism of MEA is because I feel that giving any positive comments of the game is often met with claims of not caring about good design, writing or story. Which I think is frankly dismissive and unfair.

Also, the people who think Andromeda is a bad game are wrong, and need to be reminded of this frequently.

Maybe I’m not providing enough context, I actually played MEA twice, though sated and not likely to play it again. On the other hand I played ME trilogy about 6 times and do want to play it again! Its not a bad game, its just way less engaging than its predecessor.

Simple thing that bothered me about the kett, why did they attack the newly arrived human colonies? All the ME bad guys had complex and nuanced reasons for attacking and going into conflict with each other, even the Reapers. What compelled the Kett to attack the newly arrived humans? This is the sample of my frustration with that story, and why for me they felt like card board cut out bad guys.

You’re comparing Andromeda to the first trilogy, though. We thought the bad guys in the first ME were the geth, and didn’t learn much at all about their motivations. We didn’t find out that Saren’s ship was a reaper until damn near the end of the game and, badass as that was, his motivation was basically I’M BAD AND I’M COMING FOR YOU. One would like to think the kett would have been fleshed out over future games, but we may never know now.

It’s been so long that I don’t really remember whether or not the Geth-Quarian relationship was better fleshed out in ME1 than the Kett-Angaran relationship in MEA, but what Perky is saying is the point I am also trying to make. A lot of the good stuff in ME1 benefits from being further developed in ME2 and ME3. I remember not being that sold on ME1 the first time around but appreciating it more on the next playthroughs.

And ME1 was a 20-30 hour game if you did everything and didn’t rush through stuff, while MEA is stretched out to 60-80 hours. As I stated upthread, I think MEA would have been better received if it were concentrated.

I enjoyed Andromeda but I felt they missed a lot of possibilities to do something different. Here we were in a totally new galaxy with all that could entails and we end up with a mundane run of the mill invasion story where the Milky Way races become the Great White Saviours.

Where was the sense of wonder? There should have been abandoned derelict spaceships, mysterious outposts, space anomalies, space monsters, all there to explore?

What about running into traders and pirates, con men and slavers, all sorts of types you could run into? Why not an Andromeda Harry Mud or Han Solo or Malcom Reynolds or Blackbeard?

Where were the worlds with a variety of intelligent alien life - some tribal, some advanced, some trusting, some hostile, some that see you as gods, some that see you as food, some that see you as invaders, etc.

I am still waiting for this game.

We’re all waiting for that game. I hope it gets made someday.

Indeed, they really missed the opportunities there.

But I think the Kett-storyline could have been expanded in interesting directions with renewed contact to their home cluster. The Remnant and what they were up to also had potential for being an interesting contrast to the Reapers and the Milky Way. And I see the potential for how those plotlines could lead to some interesting commentary on the White Saviour-complex. However, that would have been even better if MEA had also dealt with it better.

Well ME1 even judging on its own, was full of world building, it had new everything and discovering the relationships between all the factions and how they worked (and they were involved), Saren was a traitor, but you find out even that wasn’t black and white, he saw an impossible future that he felt we couldn’t survive, and made the call to try to preserve us to some degree against the reapers. It also had a few absolutely chilling cinematic moments like Shepard walking out of the wreckage of the citadel somehow miraculously surviving, having to make difficult choices on who to sacrifice, and confronting Saren and trying to make him see the errors of his ways. it hinted at the deep stories behind the reapers and the geth, and made you wait to discover those answers in the sequel. All of this in maybe 30 hours of gaming. I considered this masterful storytelling!

As opposed to 80 hours of gaming with a shadow of that depth in MEA, and didn’t do as much world building as it should have, and none of the pure cinematic moments or intense choices of its predecessor. Don’t get me wrong MEA is a fine scifi action rpg, its just not on the same caliber of its source. I did hate the facial animations though, that drove me nuts and had nothing to do with gameplay or story, just a personal peeve.

Edit: Another moment from the original, sure the bureaucratic council makes you a specter, but they don’t really believe you, ignore you when you warn them about Saren, you have to disobey them and steal the Normandy and possibly cost your mentor, Anderson, his career. You come back and have to make a choice, do you destroy earth ships to protect the bureaucratic council, will you be petty? Will you value the lives of your own race over others, or will you protect the galaxy institutions as flawed as they are. I seriously morally paused when I was faced with that the first time!

Damn, I really am going to play this again now

Good points in this thread all around. One thing that hasn’t been mentioned much is just how cool it is to go down to planets and drive a vehicle around. Explore strange new worlds. Andromeda gave me that aspect better than any other Mass Effect, which is why it’s my favorite in one aspect.

For linear story-telling, the original Mass Effect is the best. For branching dialog choices, Mass Effect 3 is my favorite, except for the ending, of course. Mass Effect 2 kind of sits in the middle on everything, so it’s not my favorite in any aspect, which is why I always think of it as the weakest game in the series, I guess.

But I loved the open world/really wide corridor gaming in Andromeda. Get out of the vehicle and use my vehicle as cover to kill some guys, get back in the vehicle and come at the enemy base from the other side, and kill some enemy there. A game is more than the sum of its narrative threads. It’s this feeling of gameplay freedom and the feeling of exploring worlds that just elevates it in my mind above the other games in the series in a lot of ways.

But nobody’s really talked about this aspect:

That Jetpack was a game changer for combat. I loved darting around shooting dudes with that thing.

Sadly, the jetpack was instant death on the hardest difficulty that I played on. As soon as you use it, everyone shoots at you and you go down. It’s like a suicide button. I can hit the suicide button any time I want!

One of the reasons I really don’t love the waist high cover shooter model that ME2 and 3 adopted is how static and one note I feel like it makes the fights. 3 did at least provide some incentives to move around. But it’s the jetpack in Andromeda that really opened things up. (Well, that and the less rigidly linear combat environments.)

That reminds me, still need to beat Andromeda on Insanity. Beaten all the others, just this one left to do.

Never forget the Space Cows.

Happy N7 Day, everybody! I noticed last night that my Andromeda install on my Xbox One had an update, and poking around online it appears that Bioware released an Xbox One X enhancement update. And I’m betting I’m the only person on the board who would even care in the slightest.

In other news, looks like Amazon is offering a couple of the Andromeda tie-in novels for cheap today, you can get Nexus Uprising and Initiation for $.99 each today. And if you read the books while you’re holding a controller in your hand, you can pretend it’s DLC!

Hey, maybe it’s the excuse I need to finally go beyond the EA Access limit for the game I bought a long time ago and now don’t even have to put the disk in to play because it’s on EA Access now.

Wow, that’s sad when it’s all typed out like that.