I think for many fans, compared to other games from the time, the difference in graphics from the original trilogy was not what they expected. And there is always the Sheppard-dependence to consider.
The characters from the original trilogy are quite iconic, and none of the Andromeda ones lived up to that standard. The story to me was fine, I liked the “things were looking better than this when we set off” sort of arch. And I did enjoy the world building. But many people didn’t. And these days, disgruntled fans have many platforms to make themselves heard.
I still put as many hours into Andromeda as I did into ME III
Played a bit of AI War 2 the other day. It’s nice to see how far the redesign of the redesign has come over the years. It’s definitely a more interesting game these days.
I played a simple game against just one level 7 AI and a “scourge” faction, playing with a blitz strategy to take only a few key worlds to not look like a threat until I found the AI core. The new “bastion” worlds were an interesting twist, and when the AI core suddenly phased out of existence and started moving invulnerably and inexorably towards my homeworld, I had to scramble to adapt. Good stuff, and the whole campaign finished in 2 hours.
I think Andromeda’s characters mostly hang with or surpass the second-string round of original trilogy characters. There’s just no Mordin or Wrex. (I mean, the Krogan in Andromeda is still one of my favorite characters, but not Wrex level. Neither was Grunt, let’s face it.)
Yes, I think they were a bit on the bland side. Characters like Garrus, Mordin, Jack or even Joker are difficult to top. Although I did enjoy Cora on ME:Andromeda, and Jaal to a degree…
If I may go on a bit of a tear here:
Let’s start with the disclaimers: I love Mass Effect. I love allMass Effect, so I am not an impartial observer.
That stated, ME:A was a big fumble from a story-telling and gameplay standpoint, IMO. There are a huge (some might say excessive) number of fetch-quest equivalents: Go here, then here, then here, then back here, then back to the 2nd place you went, and then go back to the Nexus to complete it. Oftentimes they are layered: you need to do the first pointless effortless fetch quest to unlock a second, equally effortless fetch quest… or it requires you to go back to a place you were already a dozen times, but THIS time to a slightly different place that wasn’t accessible before.
But worse than that; they have an entirely new galaxy… and it’s The Milky Way v1.1. All races are bipedal and use weapons and technology that is so interchangeable as to be identical to all tech from the original galaxy. Guns are conveniently divided into Pistol, Shotgun, Submachinegun, etc… Shields operate like shields. It’s not even that there is no technology divide (which, if you think about it, is insane… the Andromeda Initiative is using tech that’s 600 years obsolete in their own galaxy where all tech is driven by the Reapers, but there are no Reapers in Andromeda! AND the whole method of FTL straight up doesn’t work… if it did, why is anyone back in the Milky Way still using Relays!?). Even the Milky Way has Hanar and Elcor as interesting non-bipedal races, but no races in any way remotely different or interesting in Andromeda? Not ONE? Sigh…
And speaking of Reapers, did I mention that there are no Rea… oh, wait. There are. Allow me to introduce you to the Kett, or if you prefer, Bio-Reapers-Lite. Half the calories, all the tropes. Which is fine! ME is based on tropes, but it then subverts and expands on those tropes in interesting ways… and here, it’s just the Reapers, again, but less interesting. Less threatening. If Andromeda came out before ME2, I would be more okay with it, but as it stands we know about a threat that does what the Kett does, but better, and more deadly (TOO deadly, really, as in ME3 the galactic threat of the FLEETS of Reapers is definitely the story spinning out of control, but that’s an aside).
But wait! There’s more! I’m okay with a little Deus Ex Machina. I expect a certain amount of it in my sci-fi… it’s okay. But the entire ME:A hinging on SAM and Ryder… that was a bridge too far. It was just… too perfect. It fit too neatly. They crafted an AI-shaped hole, and then wrote the story around it. Sloppy, lazy writing. It’s “Chosen One” brought to an insane degree, and for no good reason. It doesn’t earn it, it just drops it in our laps and expects us to be okay with it.
And one last pet-peeve… for whichever imaginary friend you find holiest, take the person who decided to put so much interesting, funny, oftentimes critical plot dialog happen IN THE GODSDAMNED CAR, and then have EVERY TRIGGER OBLITERATE THE DIALOG INSTANTLY dragged out into a street and smothered politely with an oversized scone until dead. Some of the dialog in the car is great, and the fact that the second anyone starts talking I have to HAMMER the brakes and hope I stopped fast enough… or reload and hope it randomly triggers again so I don’t miss it a second time… UUUUUgggggggghhhhhhh…
Did I mention I really like ME:A? I do! I even own a couple t-shirts of it (sure, I own 6 “N7” t-shirts, and 5 sweaters, but that’s beside the point). I had fun! It has some interesting moments… the dialog is sharp and witty, a lot of the characters show potential (my favourites are Vetra and Suvi, personally, but I like that the comments above picked different favourites!.. and I was this close to liking Peebee as an interesting variation on the Asari, but her eyeshadow is just too distracting, and her character oscillates between “funny” and “annoying” too often for me). I wish we got more of Ryder being overwhelmed by the situation, and less of an N6 (because she’s not quite an N7… get it…), and the cutscenes where the crew doesn’t respect her because she hasn’t earned it… and Addison dislikes her because she’s not her father… there was some real potential in there.
Oh, and where are the Quarians!? This story would’ve been SO MUCH MORE INTERESTING if suddenly have have 1/5th of the entire colonization effort adamantly against any use of AI… and don’t get me started on all the missed opportunities the colonies on distant worlds had.
Anyway. I enjoyed it. I really did (and am so far enjoying my 2nd playthrough… the combat is tight!). But yeah. Sloppy writing, lazy world-building, and so, so much wasted potential.
I liked ME:A a lot. But I’m the weirdo who found ME2 the weakest of the lot. Cerberus just kind of set my teeth on edge at the opener and I had to make myself play the first half. It kind of felt like a hard turn toward cyberpunk from space opera/mil-fi. I’d have preferred a bit more Forever War in the blender that was ME2.
Let me say quite clearly though that ME2 is still one of my favorite games in a favorite franchise and that systems improvements to play over ME1 were notable.
The promise of ME has always been that your decisions matter. Every choice you make has the potential to be permanent… it was always more of a promise than a reality, even in the first game, but the threads they created flowed through the entire series. And the end of ME3 was… not. It doesn’t matter what your choices were, the ending was always the same (red beam, blue beam, green beam, explosions, and then a little after-game-epilogue that hints that maybe a few of your choices maybe mattered a little). But I can’t really blame Bioware for this… the promise just got too big. There were too many variables to make an intelligent branching-narrowing narrative out of. Even if you limit it to, say, three big choices per game (let’s say… Spare the Rachni or not, spare the council or not, make Udina or Armstrong head of the Human sphere for ME1, and then Keep the Collector Base or not, save all the crew or not, and… oh, Quarian Fleet decisions for ME2, and then help the Quarians or the Geth or both, cure the Krogan or not, and let’s say a would’ve-been-smarter choice between the Turian homeworld and the Asari homeworld for ME3), that’s 27 potential unique endings. And the game always gave you more choices, or at least the illusion of more endings. So I get it, they couldn’t possibly do that many, but they still should’ve done, like… 4 or 5 really unique endings that all tied back to the previous decisions in some way. Even a bit! Even having elements of your previous choices have an impact in a meaningful way in ME3 would’ve been a big step (like, I think the Rachini choice, one of the biggest theoretical branches in the game, was completely irrelevant by ME3, as was the choice to keep or not save the Collector Base… those should’ve been MASSIVE changes to ME3, but instead both were just like “Whelp, we don’t care, everything is the same here” moments.
The reality of ME is that Shepard is a fighter. You give her a no-win situation, and she finds a way to win. She refuses to let things stand “just because”… if the options are either wipe out the Geth or the Quarians, Shepard finds a way. Collectors are protected by a blackhole and an impenetrable fortress? Shepard finds a way. You tell her that it can’t be done, and she does it… and the ending of ME3 she is presented with three really crappy options (Evil, More Evil, or THE WORST OPTION EVER) and she’s like… okay. Yep. Those sound like my only options.
NO. No. Bad Bioware. NO.
Shepard has always stood for the multifaceted nature of humanity (or all sentient life if you’re a softy like me). She believes that the team has to be diverse, handle everything that comes her way, because there is always a way to win… and if you can’t win, you find a way and then you win. But there’s this Deus Ex Machina again, a super-evil dropped at the END of the denouement, and is like “Well, ya can’t win this fight!” and Shepard… agrees. She just gives up.
(Aside: I am aware there is a fourth option to fight in a futile gesture that accomplishes nothing and results in the WORST ending, but that’s again because the story got away from the writers. They made the threat far too big… the Reapers should’ve been big, and scary, and they absolutely should’ve been defeatable if all the species in the galaxy worked together. The Crucible was lazy writing to compensate for the far-too-big threat of the fleets of Reapers)
I have heard a theory I rather like, which is that the “ending” of ME3 was originally proposed as the work of Harbinger finally getting its mind-control claws into Shepard. It’s never explained why Shepard is immune to the Reaper-control, and we know that N7/Spectre training isn’t enough to protect you, so the theory was that the awful choices presented were supposed to be Harbinger trying to convince Shepard to give up by presenting options HARBINGER thought would be appealing to Shepard, and after Shepard kicks the stupid options to the door, the real final battle would begin… but then Bioware ran out of time and money, and so cut the ending short there instead. And I like that theory because it’s clean, it explains a lot, and it doesn’t completely re-write the final bad guy nor does it give Shepard the most inane decision choices in the game at the most pivotal moment. And it explains the kid’s constant appearance in Shepard’s dreams/reality throughout the game… it’s Harbinger started to worm its way into Shepard’s mind, to make her doubt and question herself. To try and un-Shepard Shepard.
Did I mention I hated the ending to ME3? I’m not sure I’ve made that clear. I really hated the ending. But the rest of the game was so godsdamn good that I forgave it. I don’t think they could write themselves out of the hole they made themselves, and while I think they could’ve done better… the game itself was pretty solid. So I forgive them the awful, awful ending.
I think out of all the endings, I was sort of Ok with the one I got (close all Mass Effect travel and sort of do a simbiosys of artificial and biological beings). Well, I wasn’t particularly impressed, but seeing the other options, I think I got the better deal.
Still, I think the massive campaign to retake Mass Effect was overblown. It’s a bit like GOT. It’s only a game, or a book, or a series. I understand that many people were really invested into it, but in the end, it is up to the creators… agree or disagree with them, but that’s it.
With the stipulation that I like all of them and have played the first two ME games twice (3 is on the agenda for a second playthrough but it may be a while), I do agree that Andromeda suffers from sloppy writing, lazy worldbuilding, and wasted potential…but, like the characters not being up to the very best of the series…these are all flaws I find in the previous games as well, just maybe not to quite the same degree. Andromeda should be an ME1 level exploration of this crazy cool new sci-fi space with cool colonization stuff and problems acclimating to the new galaxy’s environments and wild new aliens and so on, and it just is so much less than that, and it’s a pity. But, also, for my tastes there’s a lot of big picture ways 2 and 3 should have run with all the cool stuff in 1, and they either don’t or fuck it up. (culminating in the ME3 ending, of course, but certainly not starting there). There is a lot of goodwill earned by the smaller moments and callbacks, the awesome characters introduced in the later games (especially 2), and in particular the whole genophage arc. But…the first game writes a big picture check the sequels just don’t cash to my satisfaction.
I felt that the problem with the ending wasn’t so much that your decisions didn’t matter, but that it was 3+ evil endings when an evil ending didn’t fit at all.
The consistent message through the games had been “if you do everything 100% right, you can find the best answer”. And that wasn’t what happened. The red ending being the canonical “best” felt like it went against Paragon choices, agreed with Cerberus’ destructive tendencies, just didn’t feel good. I expected the three endings AND a 100% white option. I chose to view Citadel DLC as the real ending
As for Andromeda, I can’t remember a single crew-member character from it and I think that’s what sank it. The audience doesn’t have to have Shephard + crew if you replace them with an engaging new team. The graphics could be broken and it still wouldn’t sink the game, but if the character is missing from NPCs then nothing else will fix it.
That was a pretty good view (aside from the random coconut-ridiculousness, but since I haven’t seen anything else this guy has done, I realize I wasn’t the target audience for that). Thanks for linking it!
I do think video games have a harder time with this concept of choice because you want specifically to allow players to start on any one of the games (otherwise, your upper limit on Game 2 in the series is the number of people who purchased Game 1, and modern economics doesn’t work that way… I mean, it doesn’t work in a lot of ways, but one of the fundamental ways it doesn’t work is the assumption that success is defined by infinite growth). ME2 did a pretty good job of allowing you to step into the game fresh with the “interview” conducted after you woke up, which I really liked, but ME3 to a large extent threw all of that away.
Anyway. I’m still enjoying Andromeda, but I am again reminded of the many little stumbles (Why doesn’t the Nomad have any guns!? Just, like, an assault rifle with infinite ammo or similar to shoot the stupid little bugs all over the place! Doesn’t have to be an utterly OP-cannon like the original ME1 Nomad-equivalent had, but something so I don’t have to jump out of the car every twenty meters!), but still enjoying it.
I really wish I could play the Mass Effect everyone talks about.
I tried it on two occasions, and didn’t get on with it at all. All the ethical quandaries were the usual Bethesda cliches, the writing and gameplay was clunky, it felt entirely soulless.
I’ve been bitten by these Bethesda-type games too many times now. Fallout, Mass Effect, Elder Scrolls - they have the Molyneux effect. Amazing premises, but all very binary and formulaic in practice.
This sums up my feelings exactly. I just couldn’t get past a very early point where I was wandering about a space station and for some reason total strangers wanted to tell me all about their personal problems.
You might want to try Star Control 2 if you haven’t yet (the 1994 3DO version is the best, and I believe there are some excellent ports out there now). It’s a very similar story story but with two implacable enemies instead of one, way more places to visit, way WAY more alien species to interact with, and the side quests are all important and necessary to winning the final fight (no one needs you to data-mine a business rival to make sure they aren’t infringing patents, for example). Granted, the voice acting ranges from really good to really awful, but it was 1994; we need to make allowances.
Greatest game ever made, bar none. Also one of the funniest, and most clever.
My ONLY complaint is that you’re not told there is a very definite ticking bomb that will see you lose the game when you start. You’re told eventually, but by then you may have spent 1/5th or 2/5th of the time you have to solve the (brilliant) puzzle.
The Traddash themselves are worth the price of admission.
How did this game go under the radar for me?? Must be because it never got translated to Spanish… (publishers were like that in the 90s with regards to the Spanish market)
I will have a look. Looks very much my kind of thing…
Having discovered that Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords was released on mobile devices at the start of the year, I picked it up along with its predecessor (which I played sometime back in the mid 2000s).
I’m looking forward to getting to it, especially because it appears as though they have tried to make the mobile version compatible with existing PC mods for the game. Just need to finish off my Persona 5 Royal play through first, which has just passed 150 hours…
