So "we moved on". Did it benefit the franchise afterall?

It might be a good game for those who have never played the OT.  Most of the push back comes from those that have.  I think Bioware was in an impossible position.  Create a brand new game, new characters, and in a new location, but keep the flavor of Mass Effect. 

The direction they wanted to take the game is really very different than what the OT was and just didn't work or feel like Mass Effect for me.  Maybe it's not fair to compare MEA with the OT, but I can't just forget the 12 PT I have done with the OT.  If they didn't want comparisons then they should have left "Mass Effect" out of the title and have no references in the game at all to the OT.  Even then though if the writing was the same then I still wouldn't like it.  Just felt weak compared to other Bioware games and didn't grab me and pull me in like other titles have.  They went for more of a shooter crowd who doesn't really care all that much for writing/story.  They seemed to place more stock in combat and MP.  This seems to be the direction they are going and if that is the case then let the series end.

It's still sad... tragic even... people who claim to love RPGs driving one company out of business that has made some good ones.  Some of the original individuals are still there... even though others have left.  Being a sub of an American conglomerate is almost an inevitability for a lot of Canadian industries... I've see it happen in lots of different sectors.  Survival after being taken over  is usually difficult... in this case, it's been made even more difficult by this hate campaign that exists.  Regardless... still it's one less company making RPGs.

It is a tragedy.  But not in the way you think.  

Bioware did make good RPGs in the past.  But the emphasis should be  in the past.  The last really great RPG that I think they made was DAO.  since then the emphasis has been more and ore on "streamlining" and watering down RPG components in order to draw "Call of Duty's crowd"   Since being acquired by EA Bioware has been abandoning its roots and alienating the "people who claim to love RPGs"  Yes yes I know "evolve or stagnate"  but Bioware has gone way too far in the other direction.  

And given Bioware's next project is reportedly not an RPG at all, and there has been no news of another Dragon Age game (or any other RPG in the works) for quite some time, it's a little late to bemoan Bioware no longer making RPGs.  They've been dying as an RPG developer for years.  Maybe EA finally decided to pull the plug.  Or maybe we'll get more watered down RPGs in a few years and Bioware will continue limping along a while longer.  Who knows?

I can recommend some indie companies that make the kinds of games they used to, though.

I suspect the studio would have released a mediocre title in the Milky Way just as they did in Andromeda.

In your opinion... some people like ME3, DA:I and even ME:A.  Even though the games haven't met your rather strict expectations for RPGs, they still are RPGs... and even if you don't class them as RPGs, they are still respectable games that many millions of people have enjoyed playing.  Regardless, it's a tragedy in the human cost to the employees of Bioware.  As a result, I have no sympathies for the rather heartless people who have targeted this company just because they bought a single game they didn't like the ending to... wasting all of $80 (if they paid full price)... and as a result saw it fit for them to berate the employees of the company mercilessly online for five years... and some of those have even done worse (i.e. issuing death threats, etc.).. and now they look for some sort of vindication of their behavior here by denying that they've contributed to the problem rather than facilitated a solution.

"In your opinion..."

I never said that ME3, DAI or MEA aren't RPGs.  The only one I have said is not is the upcoming "Project Dylan" or whatever they're calling it, which they have outright stated is not an RPG.  I have said they've been watering down their RPGs for years (which is true) and now those chickens are coming home to roost (which is, I admit, speculation on my part)

Tragedy for Bioware employees?  Sure.  It's always a tragedy to employees when a business is mismanaged.  Though I think there are more important things to waste your hate on than people who complain on an internet forum.

Nice job trying to demonize me by subtly trying to lump me in with the knuckleheads who send out death threats.  That has NEVER happened before  

I would have preferred to stay in the Milky Way but still not play as Shepard. Shepard's story ended with ME3. Don't know why people got so hellbent on wanting to keep Shepard. Even if Shepard survives destroy you have to retire him from the franchise at this point. There are a lot of interesting political scenarios that could play out in a post reaper war Milky Way. I would have been fine with them picking a canon ending to ME3 just for continuity's sake so they could have a starting off point to continue the next game in.

To quote you - We won't ever agree... because you obviously like making meaningless snide remarks.  No peace, obviously... so please continue carrying on... we'll see where it leads in another 5 years.  I doubt it will be better RPGs.

Haveing thought about it the last few days I think everyone expected more than they got with the amount of time between the start of development and when the game came out. But I believe most of that time was spent in switching over to the Frostbite engine, remaking all the Mass effect game assets in the new engine instead of just using the Unreal engine like the first 3 games. Because EA wanted to save money on licensing and royalty cuts. I would say the game itself only was developed in the last 3 years. The rest of the time was sitting up Frostbite to work for a Mass effect title. I though the writing was good but not epic and leads to a lot of story potential as far as DLC and sequel.. That being said the whole game was not a whole story it felt like a long drawing out of the first part of a story and when you got to the end of the game it felt like the start of the climax. But then you got the credits. in other words, this game felt like a foundation for the next game. which kind of makes sense but the long buildup did not pay off as the story was starting to come togeather at the end. Still, This game would have never lived up to the original trilogy because that set a new standard in gaming and RPG's in general. So this game would have been panned no matter how it was done. But this game did what Mass effect 1 did except did it in a way longer form and that was to set up a new franchise. The day one problem just gives ammo right off the bat to panning the game. which is what happened. overall a good start story wise but it needed to have the glaring problems fixed before release.   

I'll tell you right now, that's not how videogames are made. Games aren't houses; you don't pour the foundation first and then start building, it's a waste of time. While engine techs are busy making the framework, game designers are prototyping, artists are designing assets, and writers are fleshing out the narrative. And you do realize that plenty of other games are made from scratch (sometimes including the engine) in 5 year increments, right? Hell, plenty are done in just 3. Andromeda isn't special here. It's big, but it's not groundbreaking. 

Also, I wouldn't really describe the jump to Frostbite a money-saving effort. Unreal 3 was on its last leg by the time ME3 came out, so there's no way BioWare would use it in the new console generation. You can't just port stuff to Unreal 4 either as far as I'm aware, but even if you could just drag and drop assets, I doubt BioWare would do that. It's not like assets are simply transferable between games. Did you notice how all the weapons and armor changed over the course of the trilogy? Those were all new, from-scratch assets, because BioWare needed their game to look its best.

The code doesn't copy over, but again, 5 years (with access to the expertise and documentation of ~5 other Frostbite studios by the way) is more than enough time to get it to work. If, however, it isn't, then it's down to the producers to keep their game's scope in check. 
This is decidedly false. Inquisition was met with decent critical praise despite being arguably worse than Andromeda in most mechanical regards. Why? Because Inquisition had meat to it. It wasn't perfect and it got lost in the minutia, but there was enough stuff to enjoy. Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts stands out as one of the better quests in the entire series, and it's flanked by a number of other well-made quests as well. Andromeda doesn't have that consistency in quality.
The big difference is that Mass Effect works by itself. Take out the hints of other Reapers, and Mass Effect is just a solid story set in a well-built world.

It also helps that Mass Effect was wildly innovative at the time. It was essentially the foundation for modern RPG. Mass Effect gave us a glimpse of the potential for this new emerging genre on top of an already intriguing adventure. What does Andromeda give us? The potential for some vaguely interesting plot threads and what I would hope is a more competent implementation of the relatively overdone open world adventure game? 
That's not all that exciting. It should go without saying that all games should work on their own. We shouldn't need some nebulous promise of "sequel potential" to simply enjoy the story. It's unfortunate then that not only is Andromeda boring in its own right, but its sequel potential isn't that invigorating either.

The fact is that Andromeda wasn't doomed to fail. We shouldn't come up with excuses for it, because Andromeda's problems aren't external. Time constraints didn't ruin the game. Expectations didn't ruin the game. I'm sure neither of those things helped, but a good game could overcome them. BioWare just didn't take any chances. They delivered a product so safe yet so unpolished that of course it pales in comparison to its predecessors. It has the inconsistency of an innovative game without the actual innovation.

Despite the hiccups and bugs and such (of which I experienced very little on PC version and I played three times through) the only thing that keeps it from being as re-playable as the other games I play over and over is that the Ryder twins are not larger than life.

People are ordinary in RL. We play RP games as an escape to be something larger than what we are. For those exciting hours we are Shepard, we are the Inquisitor, we are the Warden, Hawk, the Witcher, the Dragonborn Dovakiin, the Jedi bearing a lightsaber, we go forth boldly on the Enterprise. It makes a player feel capable, strong, the hero.

As Ryder, I play a kid that never really becomes something bigger, who could never fill their distant (and now deceased) father's shoes were it not for Sam and even then, it feels like the successes are more accident than coming into one's own. Instead of being on a ship with a team of specialists with some expertise in their fields, I feel like my character is fresh out of college with a handful of people that are also just out of college and they're sort of wading through it.

Andromeda might have been a really great game if we'd been playing Alex Ryder (or Alexa for female protaganist.) Andromeda would have been so much more, at least to me, if we'd entered this brand new galaxy of hope and danger while in the shoes of the capable hero that everyone was expecting to be looking up to when they woke up from Cryo.