Did Andromeda's side-quests live up to your expectations?

Where's the "Eff shit-stirring trolls" option?

MY DUDE! Do you get off on making these pointless threads? To your actual question I felt that MEA improved from DAI in terms of side quest content.
The firefighters quest line was huge and the ryder family secrets(does that count as a side quest?) was amazing imo. The planet main storylines were really damn good. My favorite side quest has to be working with reyes because he is such a good character witha great voice actor .

Agree on that, The best way to summarize it is that the best side quest of DAI (like taking a red templar fortress in emprise du lion) equals to the ok side quest of MEA (like retrieving a sick female human that the roekar wants to use against the iniative). Overall MEA did a way better job on side quests because each planet has his own "main" quests, eladen is the power play between krogans, kadara is the mob war between sloane and the collective, havarl is meeting the sage of the angara religion, and there is much more that are great even if they are not in that category like the anti AI hacker or the first human birth of the andromeda galaxy.

So yeah even if there is some shitty side quests in the tasks category (like scanning minerals or bodies), they can easily be avoided because they are separated from the other side quests.

Kinda made me laugh.
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For me, it's a really close decision between ME3 and ME:A. With ME3, one has to consider that missions like Admiral Koris and Grissom Academy were, in fact, side quests... and they were very near the quality of the Priority Ops. Some of the tasks were not as "fetchy" as some claim. The 3 task set given to Shepard by Aria was a good example of a very relevant small task.

ME:A had a ton more quests overall... over 200; so it is to be expected that there would be a fair number of "fetch" type quests. What ME:A did that it takes a little bit of reading and some luck to realize is just how many of the little individual tasks are actually connected to each other and how they flow into some of the larger side quest missions in the game. A good example of that are the little quests on Eos connected to Site 1 and Site 2. Separately, they don't mean much, but combined, they do tell a story about the AI's first colonization efforts... that the sites were located on land that was caving in and would have been doomed anyway, that a single shuttle did escape the kett attack,... and you later find that shuttle by scanning. A plight of open-world format is that it is entirely possible to do things in an order that causes that connection to get "lost." This was also a problem I had noticed when I tried playing TW3. ME3 had the advantage of having a more linear design... it was just a shorter game overall and, back then, they didn't take the time to even try to connect the little tasks together to form clues to a larger story.

ME:A also has some pretty significant side quests that stand all on their own. The various loyalty missions, which generally span several smaller quests building to one larger one that eventually wins the squad mate's loyalty. The vaults themselves (with the exception of Eos and Aya) are basically side quests because they can be skipped over and the game can still be completed.

So, to answer the main question - Yes, the side quests in ME:A overall lived up to my expectations. In my opinion, most of them were very much superior to TW3 in that I was more able to connect the little quests to some sort of tangible relevance to the main story. In TW3, the little letters one found really didn't apply much to the main story... they just provided some atmosphere... We were attacked by pirates or highwaymen or we're orphaned children with no food or here's the location of a cache of loot somewhere.

Bioware also provided quite a variety of quests overall... some people do like scanning quests, some people do like collecting things to fulfill quests, some people like mini-battles as quests, some people like puzzle-solving as quests... and in ME:A there is enough different ones and different ways to get things that people can skip what sorts of quests they don't like and still readily finish the game.

Man, they were mediocre, but better than DAI which had terrible side content. ME3 by far, some side quests could have been part of the critical path. Love it. No comparison with MEA. And if we are to make a connection to TW3, it's even worse. MEA's worlds are just dead with no life or whatsoever, aside from a few, there's little to no incentive to do them because they change absolutely nothing or lack any weight. They just end. The ones worth doing are companions related, and even some of those are terribly paced.

Are loyalty quests side quests or main quests?

Sleeping Dragons man.

Is a loyalty mission a side mission?

Cause if it is, then ME2 wins hands down, because that game is almost entirely a side mission

If it's not, then MEA wins hands down.

You can complete ME2 without making anyone loyal.  There are consequences in that the members of your crew will die and Shepard will die... but the end credits do roll.  I don't think there is a way to have Shepard live is no one is loyal (but themikefest is the person who would know for sure). 

Bioware does tend to muddy the waters because they'll have it set up that you must complete X number of such quests, but the choice of which ones you do is up to you... So, in ME2, you do have to complete some of the Recruitment Missions after Horizon before you can enter the Omega Relay, but you don't have to complete them all and which ones you pick are up to you... so, one really can't say specifically that, say, Thane's Recruitment is a Main Quest and Samara's Recruitment isn't.

If ME2's loyalty missions qualify, then it gets my vote. As for Andromeda, I found the vast majority of the side quests in that game to be manifestly dull.

I feel like I might be the only one who preferred the quests of DAI to MEA. Don't get me wrong, I think MEA was more consistent, but I think that DAI had better highs. 

The whole Crestwood story arc is entirely optional and offered multiple cool objectives (take castle/open dam/delve into deep roads) with a tangible impact on the area (lake drained/weather change). The Western Approach and pursuing Servius into the Tevinter ruins offered something similar. Choices at the end of sidequests also had a more tangible benefit in terms of companion approval/disapproval, recruiting agents and opening new missions on the war table. ME3 tried to achieve something similar with war assets. 

You also had the Calpurnia/Samson sidequest that could have a large impact on events in the Temple of Mythal. For Calpurnia, I totally missed her quest on my first playthrough, but later on when I discovered it, it completely reshaped how I perceived her as a character. 

(To counterbalance this though you get endlessly annoying collectibles and superfluous and boring areas like the Hissing Wastes. I'd actually lump Emprise du Lion in with that category but different strokes for different folks )