What does DA:I in space mean, and why is it so horrible?

The game was good, a solid 8.2 for me.
It won several prizes in 2014, included game of the year.

But a few people now decided that the game sucks and started using it as a way to criticize MEA.

It means some people have such poor memories that they can only compare a new game to the most recent game they played, as if any given new game needs to be compared to anything in the first place. Some people can only judge something by comparisons, rather than on its own merits.


We point and giggle at such people.

Same here, really enjoyed the SP, still fire up MP from time to time.

Some people however go through the phase of enjoying something for ages, but then really enjoy slagging it off later, sure DA:I had some faults, but it's still a good game.

Just my opinion.

Mass Effect and Dragon Age have always been two very different franchises, each had their own unique feel to them. But with Andromeda featuring so many game mechanics that are copy pasted from Inquisition, they run the risk of feeling like exactly the same game, albeit in different settings. Not necessarily a bad thing, but certainly not a good one either.

My guess is that people think there will be a return of certain elements from DA:I like large open zones with not much side content beyond fetch quests or collectibles, the game forcing you to do the underwhelming side content in order to progress in the main questline, having to establish camps/keeps everywhere, etc.

Which we have actually seen in today's video that you will be having to establish camps in the form of forward outposts. Although that particular aspect never bothered me much with DA:I. Some form of fast travel is usually good to have in large open maps.

Dragon Age Inquisition is the worst game ever made, and it is so awful it is absolutely impossible for someone (except for Bioware) to create something worse than Inquisition.

I love DAI, it's a great game for me. Like any other game, it has it faults but it does a lot of things so well. ME:A has taken a lot of the positives from DAI and people are worried that they will just do a copy but that won't happen. Even though it's bioware, they are different teams and have a lot of differences. Don't listen to people who bitch about stupid things when they haven't played the game.

Well that sort of makes sense, you wouldn't want to settle in an area where you can get attacked by potential predators every half hour. 

Honestly, the one thing that annoyed me (more than the threadbare MMO side-quests even) was that Bioware liked placing loot and even some shards on locations that required platforming, and DAI definitely did not do platforming.

Other than that I enjoyed wandering around the zones in DAI.

Because we are going to have our limbs ripped off by f-ing space bears! Srsly, the bears in DAI were worse than dragons.

Overall DAI was a good game, but some of the things that made the game longer didn't make it better IMO. I spent 160 hours on my one playthrough and then couldn't muster the enthusiasm to play it again.

Along with the "pretty but empty areas" complaint, some of the things people didn't like in DAI were:

1) Cumbersome hand-collection of small quantities of materials for crafting (Look, five iron ingots! Spend 4 seconds watching animation of picking up ingots. Walk two feet. Look, two more iron ingots! Spend 4 more seconds watching the same animation of picking up ingots. Walk 3 feet. Look! Another 2 ingots! etc.) I actually found the most empty area refreshing because I could just run through the desert investigating a faint light in the distance without feeling I needed to stop every 2 steps to pick up another elfroot. This problem looks to have been fixed in MEA as we will be picking up larger quantities of fewer things rather than minute quantities of a gazillion things. Also automatic mining by probes/the nomad.

2) Shallow sidequests (though I didn't find them as bad as DA2's "find random hemorrhoid cream in a mine, give it to some guy for no reason"). There were some good ones (a creepy haunted chateau where you solved a mystery in order to get a fight and some treasure), but there were a few "go bring me 10 bear hide blankets/ram's meat" quests with no story payoff. (If we had seen the refugees using the blankets that would have helped.) I think a dev specifically said that there will be no "fetch 10 quests" in MEA.

3) Way too many things to collect besides crafting materials: bottles, shards, mosaic pieces, books... The minigame for finding where the shards were was fun, but getting to the places by awkwardly platforming was not my idea of a good time. I hate jumping puzzles. There will be jumping in Andromeda, but it looks much smoother and hopefully more fun. Also I hope there will be smaller collections of things (e.g. Matriarch Dilinaga's writings in ME rather than 140 tiny bits of glass in DAI.)

4) Crafting being cumbersome. Crafting was kind of fun in concept, but having to collect recipes, then ingredients, then make things that turned out to be not that great because comparing recipes was kind of tedious, then trying to scroll through the companions' inventories to compare what they had to what you made, then having to move to a different crafting table to start over again if you wanted to make a weapon instead of armor was time consuming and boring. Not to mention that you could make something useful, but only realize it was hideous after you already wasted your ingredients on it. They fixed that in DAI after I stopped playing, I think, so crafting should be more streamlined and customizable now.

5) Getting resources by sticking flags in other peoples' stuff and claiming it for the inquisition. There may be a similar mechanic in MEA, but at least there is no evidence of flags.

6) The war table, where you set NPCs to do a task that took actual real life time to complete. So, say I wanted some flunkies to investigate rumors of trouble in some town. I dispach flunkies. It will take them 2 hours of real time before they report back. Meanwhile, I continue playing. They report back that they were the wrong people for the job and wound up burning the town down, killing many people including my character's mother. Now I have to load a save from 2 hours ago and send a different team of flunkies AND replay the other stuff I had already done. Some of the missions took 12 hours of real time, so if you didn't like the outcome, it meant replaying 12 hours of stuff you had done in the meantime. I took to queuing up long missions before I went to bed, so the next day I could just see how things turned out without setting myself back. In MEA there will be a war table like mechanism, but you could instead choose to do the mission yourself in SP or in MP rather than sending NPCs. I also doubt they will have any more 12hour missions for NPCs in MEA.

All in all "being DAI in space" isn't a terrible thing IMO as DAI was a pleasant game and some of the good things about DAI have made it to Andromeda that I'm excited about (i.e., more extensive party banter). I do feel that Bioware heard the complaints about the less good stuff and has taken steps not to repeat past mistakes. Heck, some of the stuff was fixed for DAI itself, though too late for me as I had stopped playing by then.

One thing from DAI that apparently hasn't made it to MEA that I wish had is the ability to change your custom face after the game begins.

In my case, because I fear the devaluation of the identity of Mass Effect franchise. DAI is a great game, and so is ME, but putting pieces hacked from one into the other doesn’t imply it will work. Or that it was such a good idea to begin with...

I like DA:I, but one big issue I have with the game is that it has ten major explorable areas but that the main questline mostly takes place in separate mission areas. It feels like the game was designed around sidequests in these ten areas and that the main questline was an afterthought. I really hope that's not the case in ME:A and that each major planet has a place in the main storyline.

Edit: Eight areas.