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

I’d buy another Dragon Age, assuming it didn’t sound like they totally screwed it up. 2 was a disappointment after Origins being so good, but I didn’t hate 2. I didn’t like the turn combat took in 2 or 3. I really enjoyed the characters and story in 3, and much of the world they built. The Hinterlands was too big, which took a little steam out of me - but I got back on track and enjoyed the rest of the game. I wish they would retool their combat to slow down the pace and make it more tactical. If they stole the system from Divinity Original Sin without all of the environmental stuff, and had D&D like spells, that would be cool.

At least that’s something!

I really, REALLY, loved DA:I (and is clearly the other of the two Bioware games on my top three best games ever-list). The story is great, the characters are great, the plot twist at the end is glorious, the worlds are beautiful. Sure the combat gets repetitive but that didn’t bother me much because THE CHARACTERS.
There’s just so much there to love. Just talking about it makes me want to start a 9th playthrough.

That said - I never played the other two games so I came in on a fresh slate.I have DA2 borrowed now, lying around, and will finish it before Christmas.
But yeah, I would definitely hate seeing that franchise go, but that would also surprise me. They sure talk about it like a fourth game is happening.

I don’t know if you did the same mistake as me in my first playthrough - which was pretty much finishing everything in Hinterlands before even getting out of Haven and getting to Skyhold.
The sooner you get to Skyhold, the more versatile the game becomes, a lot quicker :)

I thought Sci-fi wasn’t MY thing… up until Mass Effect. :(

Way to keep your chin up. Salute!

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I don’t think I quite finished it, but I was going down that road until I decided it would be a mistake. I definitely stuck around too long though.

re: Bioware going away if Anthem fails

Hate to break it to ya’ll, but the Bioware you knew from the Baldur’s Gate, NWN, DA:O, and hell, even ME1-3 days, is gone already.

Bioware is an EA brand name now. It’ll get added to EA’s corpse pile soon enough.

To be honest, I never much gave a damn about those games. In fact, Bioware basically didn’t exist for me until KOTOR came out, and if Mass Effect is done it will go back on the de facto ignore list for me. They aren’t important to be as some monolithic RPG factory, just in terms of what they can present that interests me. I’m hoping Anthem is cool, but it won’t replace Mass Effect, not for me. I’m rapidly getting to the “don’t much give a shit” phase of my relationship with them.

watching dreams crumble

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I was just watching a Russian girl stream ME2 on Twitch, and she closed off nearly in tears, telling everyone to keep Mass Effect in their hearts, to tell their friends, tell their kids about Mass Effect. So I’m not the biggest ME evangelist out there.

If it matters, I recognize the Dragon Age games are well made, it’s just not my bag, baby.

I didn’t realize Bioware’s situation was so dire. The sense I’m getting from this thread is that if Anthem fails to meet expectations the studio is done. I’m guessing Andromeda bombed then? I know the reviews were mixed, but I figured the Mass Effect brand would guarantee decent sales figures. Andromeda’s an okay game. It’s kind of ugly, but the gameplay feels largely the same as the earlier games, so I don’t quite understand the hate it gets from fans of the original series. I’m only about ten hours in though.

Just so we’re straight, that’s me speculating, and I have zero inside information. I think it’s pretty clear that Andromeda bombed, given how quickly EA is backing away from it. Maybe Bioware has a longer leash than some other internal studios, but then given what happened with Vicarious Visions, Pandemic, etc … who knows?

I couldn’t bare to watch someone play that right now. Even checking twitter now is painful. (Because I follow pretty much everyone at Bioware. Yes - I’m stalking them)

Probably also explains why it’s already available on Origin Access. Of course, so is Battlefield 1 and that looked successful.

If Andromeda hadn’t bombed, they’d be making DLC for it. It was planned, after all.

Now, I think the reaction has been incredibly over-harsh, but that doesn’t make any difference to sales stats.

I’m not staring at any hard sales numbers but based on the fact you no longer even have to purchase Andromeda outside of the $5/month service and they shuttered the development arm of the studio that made it and cancelled all future DLC, I think it is safe to say that it did not meet expectations.

I can summarize my feelings about Bioware’s writing as a studio pretty easily by saying without exaggeration (or Alzheimer’s) that I don’t remember the name of the antagonist in either of their last AAA titles. I don’t even remember what the motivation of the guy in DA:I was, which is pretty incredible considering that was like an 80 hour game, even if 60 of it was doing fetch quests.

Both games had nice moments with the protagonists, DA:I was actually a pretty decent game because the characters were charming and their interactions were numerous and enjoyable.

How many people that worked on even say, Mass Effect 2 still actually work at Bioware? My feeling has been that the Bioware that actually made the games most people loved without controversy has been defunct for quite some time now.

As stated by my own self above: none of the primary decision makers or artists are still around. The whole speech about the “old” Bioware being long dead wasn’t hyperbole.

edit: Chris Hudson came back, I think, but I don’t think he’s going to do fuck all to Anthem to elevate it into a glorious SP experience.

I assume you mean Corey Hudson?