The Mass Effect franchise is a beautiful hobo.

I thoroughly enjoyed the single player campaign on Normal and am running it again on Insanity. I'm enjoying it even more because of the added challenge. I also enjoy the mutliplayer. I largely ignored all the naysayers and decided to make my own opinion of the game by playing it unbiased.

I found it to be a huge, immersive game with lots of personality and lots to do. Very fun combat and very diverse worlds to visit. It's not perfect, but it's definitely better than 95% of games out there imo.

I was much the same, didn't pay too much attention to pre-release stuff.   I enjoyed much of the game as well, I can definitely see where many of the complaints come from even if I do think much of it gets overblown, but I can see how much of it is valid.  Doesn't change the fact I liked the game, just gotta hope they fix those issues in the next game to make it even better.

You mean beautiful murder hobo.

See Fryda's interviews.

It's not better than 95% of games out there.

Excellent little verbose analogy and I share the sentiment. Andromeda isn't all bad, and at times you can feel "yeah, this is Mass Effect again!" but it's so modest about it and it adds on so much fluff that detracts from it, in the end you just question whether it'll be worth a round of assess/address/improve for a sequel. They need to fix a lot of things and it can turn into a good sequel-franchise... but it's just not got the forward-moving potential the original trilogy did and I think it's maybe time I move on from Mass Effect. Oftentimes I just feel myself forcing myself to play it because I want to like it but I'm just not that impressed.

There are some good and interesting concepts I wish to discuss if I post a full writeup review one day. I'm already taking some notes, but I may wait until a lot of patches and fixes have been done and I also need the entire thing to sink in to the point where I can look at it from a top-down POV and grasp the whole of the experience. It's an undeniably big game, but even so it ends up feeling slightly small and shallow towards the end when you've colonized every planet, seen all Loyalty missions and power through the main plot's finale. There's a lot of fundamental missteps that stem from BioWare learning the wrong lessons throughout the last 7+ years of making AAA games. Social things and american things too that influence them... I'll have to be careful how I address this in a review if I do so, if it even has a place in it. We'll see.

I'd compare the game to a fresh graduate. Not the top of his class but with the willpower and potential to grow into something great.

I can understand some of the disappointment. When I first booted the game for the 10 hour trial. I was massively disappointed too. I kept also seeing the extremely negative reviews. But by the end of my 10 hour trial. I was in love and thirsty for more.

One of the reviews I saw claimed the story got really great around the 20 hour mark and then really terrible. I kept waiting for that terribleness to happen. Every main quest I did I kept dreading this would be the one. And then I finished the game. What the review made me be afraid of never happened. The planets were admittedly quite bland and needed longer stories and more lore, it was a bit silly they stopped being relevant the moment you left them. But the main story never let me down and the game made me laugh more than any other BW title before.

I feel a lot of the reviews keep focusing on the wrong things. The terrible animations (lol). The massive amount of bugs not seen in AAA games (*cough* Skyrim etc *cough*). Or the supposedly shallow characters (I rather enjoyed that most of the crew didn't have daddy issues this time around). There was a lot of good in MEA too, but the reviews seem more interested in feeding the hate train. And I'm not saying it's a 5/5 game, but it's not a 2/5 either.

So yes. MEA is a fresh graduated. Being lynched in the job market in favor of the veterans because they are young, new and don't get everything right on the first try.

Oh blue rose of Meridian...

I agree with most of this instead.

But add on that it comes from a family of success.

But they're only human... and humans screw up sometimes. Whomp whomp. Better luck next time! (I hope there is one.)

Kinda vague, no? I mean, are we talking about games within its own specific genre, or just games in general? If it's games in general, I'd be inclined to say: nuh uh.

Even people always says something like "5 years and 4000m dollars budget and they make this?"I feel like they never has enough budget and money in the first place.
It is obvious that they put lots of thoughts into this game,they bring all those mechanics from ME 1 back, the exploration was based on the DA:I but improved a lot. The game has more content than any of the previous Bioware game.

May be if they have some extra budget to hire some more people, they might able to make this game more polished.