It's not the game, it's what the game represent

Having gotten to play a large chunk of the game, I am jumping on the "game bashing" wagon. The game does deserve a lot of the critique it gets, and I think the professional reviewers are actually being polite to only focusing on the issues specific to the game but not on the culture that creates those issues.


Seriously, the conclusion I can reach is that this game is the prime example of "design by committee" and how that can go wrong. There are alot of hyperbole going around about how the game is "broken". I don't think it is. Although issues with the game are plenty, I wouldn't say any one issue cause the game to be the way it is. It's that so many issue, while minor, are so asinine that they drag down the entire game. The game itself even when evaluated only on its supposed strength, story telling, gets a B-, that's me being generous.

Lets run down the list

Not Bad Parts:

The setting is interesting, I like exploring, I like sci-fi and I like space-based story. That's why I am cutting the game a lot of the slack. The story telling is not as good as the trilogy, but it's not "bad", it good enough. It has its good moment, but in between the good parts, there are tons of "meh" parts. I never thought I would say this but think that the game might improve if some of the contents were cut.

They really put into a lot of effort to make the star system map look awesome. Obviously this alone won't carry the game, but I love it. I would even say that I wish I had more to do in the star system map, but the game is already stuffed with too many random errands, making more random errands is not the answer.

Bad Parts:

Again to emphasize that I don't consider these issues to break this game or render it completely unplayable or unenjoyable. They are however, incredibly stupid, mostly avoidable and make me hate BioWare more than I hate this game.

Characters are ugly and generic looking. I think that sentence is self-contradictory but somehow is true. Ugliness mostly apply to the player character, and that mostly have to do with the CC, I won't focus on that since everyone knows what I am talking about. But the other issue is that NPCs are too similar to each other, even the important named ones. I understand it's hard to do with alien faces, since how are us human suppose to tell two turians apart? Thats why turians have face paintings, Asari have unique tattoos and sanitarians have different look horns and shades of different color. If that's not enough, then clothing and armor also works, even give NPCs scars or wounds. I think this game does a crappy job of making the important NPCs standout from the background. Did it ruin the game? No, but it did make me feel BioWare is just being lazy.

Crafting/Inventory

This system as it currently stands is crap.
I assume in game design, you want whatever you put into a game to either serve the game play or the story. The inventory system serves neither. Why is there an inventory limit in RPG games? Because it doesn't make sense that you have a infinitely large backpack and unlimited strength to carry it. Why is there an inventory limit in ME:A? who the fuck knows? You are only carrying you current weapons, mod and consumables, and there is another "limit" on what you can carry called holster which is tied to your combat skill. Is there a cargo space limit on Nexus or Tempest on how many items Ryder can store? I don't know about that, but I do know that I can hoard as much copper as I want.

Crafting is the same. It sounds good in theory that you can customize your equipment and research new alien tech, but why do I have to research guns that are already present in the Milky Way? Am I coming up with Unique weapon version that is different from their Milky Way counter-parts? And how about letting us compare the spec of the things are are researching to what we already have? Was game play enhanced by letting me run between research station and the weapon load out station? Was it more realistic story wise? And don't get me started on the mining operations and planet scanning, there is no way that those things are profitable or sustainable. The paltry amount minerals you get cannot possible justify the equipment and fuel used to extract them! You are literally expending a huge high tech mining probe for an amount of copper that's not even enough to make a gun.

Power/Ability

I have harped on this issue on other threads, but the more I play the more it bothers me. Seriously, in previous game, you are given 7 or 8 ability, and you can easily access all of them fair easily and fluidly. Now that we are given way more powers to use, you would think that they want to come up with a better system to to accommodate more powers. It is fair to say that having too many powers make things go messy, and I agree. But that's an issue that the developers created when they scrapped the class system. And how did they design around the issue? By forcing you to access only 3 powers at any given time? You know what this is like? Its like if I decided that your car is not sexy enough so I give you an engine upgrade. But then I realize that you driving too fast might be dangerous, so I cut the speed limit in half and put up road bumps everywhere. Congratulation on your new and faster car, now you get to drive at half the speed and over all the bumps.

Conclusion:

You know what all these issue comes down to? Laziness or indifference. This is what you get when your product are designed and optimized against a checklist of items that the marketing department gives you. I bet the higher ups at EA gave them a directive to include larger world, so they did. But like in any corporate setting, they are just meeting goals and agenda by doing the least amount of work to get by. The boss said bigger world and more NPCs, they never said the NPCs have to be as good as before. Same thing with inventory and crafting, they just know that have to throw one in, they never spend the time needed to make those features improve the game or conform the the lore. Ditto for the abilities capped at 3. They know they wanted to scrapped the class system, but they don't want to bother invest in a new innovative system that is actually better and more fluid, so they just import the MP system into SP.

So yea, I bash the game as it stands, not so much because of the game itself, but because how I see the mistakes are made. BioWare brand stands out because they are not like everyone else who does all the stupid shit, and now that's not true anymore.