Was Mass Effect 2 really that Much Better than MEA?

funny you should say that but it actually took me until my.third run before i really fell in love with ME 2 and by extension ME.

And while i really enjoyed the game the first time i am now having a blast with it for my second. Especially after the patch.

Yeah, Cerberus were a little cheap (especially once Kai Leng was introduced... )

That office tho...and the view!  (and I don't mean Miranda's arse)

Bigger doesn't always mean better. Andromeda's worlds look incredible and feel fully realized and Organic. ME2 graphics still look good to this day and the writing is decades better than what was seen in Andromeda....the way the Collectors was introduced as a massive threat and how they was zeroing in on human colonies was implemented well. The urgency and threat felt real and organic. The more linear focused storyline with side-missions (in the form of DLC) that streamlined into the overall story didn't feel like it was tacked as some fetch-quest or task.



And finally the cast...all of the characters were unique and didn't feel like a generic shell of other characters and all had strong unique personalities.....Andromeda's characters?....Lacking in depth and personality. The only two squadmates i took with me on missions was always Drack and Vetra and i only took Jaal on missions where the angara was involved to get some chatter from him...but most of the characters are forgettable....in ME2 i worried about if all of my squadmates would die in the end. That is great character design and writing in that it made me care for those characters in the manner that it did.



Andromeda is not a bad game by any means, but it is lacking in key areas in terms of story and character development. That said tho, parts of Andromeda look absolutely incredible....I stopped and just looked around at the scenery multiple times and the overall design of the Vaults?.... .....superb!....it felt like something truly alien designed those Vaults....

So I played MEA for 2 and 3/4 of a playthrough, 217 hours total. I stopped playing April 15th and have been playing the OT ever since. Finished my first OT playthrough (ME1, 2 and 3) and now working on my second OT playthrough (well second since I started playing OT in April). So this little preamble is to establish the details of all 4 ME games are very much fresh in my head.

ME2 is the far better game by miles. I liked the combat in ME2, and the OT in general, way better than MEA. But this is not about fighting in hallways or from cover. Where MEA really fails for me is one-time use augmentations on crafted gear that will be made obselete when I hit the next level or 2. So I held on to them and did not use them until the final mission - which really prevented me from tinkering with my play style or technique. And I can't expirement with augmentations - some of them are very bad and totally nerf your weapon and best you can do is load a previous save.

The characters in ME2 were much better. Garrus as Archangel, Mordin as the non-hippocratic doctor, Grunt who was for all his strength and pride a baby brother for Shepard. To name a few. I enjoyed the dialog with most of them, and most of my memorable quotes in the OT come from ME2. "I had reach, she had flebility", "If I know Grunt your answer is coming at muzzle velocity", "Shepard is my battlemaster, he has no equal".

Loyalty quests were no comparison either. The only one I liked in MEA was Cora's and Jaal's. It has some interesting choices and the impact on the final mission was clear. In ME2 I loved that I could use the loyalty missions to kill off the characters I did not like. But the stories themselves were compelling. With Tali I could accept her exile, have her father exiled, and shout down the admirals. I learned more about the genophase, Krogan rites of passage, the nature of the geth...all amazing.

In MEA I did not care about any of the crew. I can't stand Liam so I never talked to him after getting into the Tempest, let alone do his loyalty mission. Cora's Ok because it was part of the main plot. With Peebee I was in the middle of some kind of personal rivalry, and her getting upset that I shot her frenemy just reinforced the feeling that the remnant tech they were after was not that important anyways. Drack's was a linear piece of garbage and really just a time sink. Same for Vetra - they could have made it more interesting by getting Sid removed from her duties or face real consequences - but then again just got caught in some internal politics between sisters.

Jaal/Cora's LMs wre the only one that I felt help resolve some real issues.


I could go on an on. But utlimatlely I played MEA for 217 hours and could not stand it anymore, and I have over 700 hours on ME2 and still enjoying it 7 years later.

Whether a game is better or worse than another is based on personal preference and taste, so the question posed in OP is not going to have the same answer for everyone. Especially if one of those games was released in 2010 and the other game was released in 2017. However, what is the popular opinion?

According Metacritic :

Mass Effect 2 (PC) - 94 (by critics) 8.8 (by users)
Mass Effect Andromeda (PC) - 73 (by critics) 4.9 (by users)

According to IGN, Top 100 Games of All Time -   Mass Effect 2 (51st place)
PC Gamer Top 100 -   Mass Effect 2 (4th place)

I think MEA is a good game, and quite fun to play. It's not a great game. In fact, Metacritics's average scores (by critics) is very similar to how I would rate these 2 games, shortly after they were released (ME2 in 2010 and MEA in 2017).

Thanks for the tip on augmentations, if I ever get back to MEA I will give it a try. Regarding loyalty quests, my biggest beef is that it seems like a forced copy & paste story mechanic they brought over from ME2. So I see it as very lazy game design. To explain my point better I would like to compare with the OT.
In ME1 there are no loyalty missions, its all favors or 10 minute sidequests for 3 people on the squad due to their unique situation. In ME2 its all about the suicide mission and removing distractions or helping these people resolve issues or obtain closure. Its not a loyalty test to decide if you are going to be shot in the back. In the final game you were gathering assets so no loyalty missions per se, but you had some individual moments with your squaddies. In ME3 shooting beer cans with Garrus from the top of the Presidium was story appropriate and a result of progression across three games. But in MEA the rock climbing, bar fight or seed planting looked like a useless time sink to spend 1 on 1 with people I did not care about. This is not happening in a vacuum, it ties in with the very long load animations (unskippable and unmoddable) that you have to go through to get to those useless scenes (go to planet, land, go to badlands, drive nomad to spot...etc...f*** that)

I feel like they just copied and pasted elements from the OT without trying to tell a new story and had no sense of how they would build these relationships up across multiple games. Everything about my squad seemed forced and contrived. In my first playthrough of ME1 I was really upset Wrex died. In ME2 I had no idea Wreav was a stand-in for Wrex. When I heard other people talking about meeting Wrex on Tuchanka, I actually went back and loaded ME1 again to keep Wrex alive. By comparison, if characters could die in MEA there are none that would replay the game to save. Cora is a close call, but I wouldnt redo a playthrough for her.

Ok this is a contraversial thing to say...please don't judge me...one of the things I sorely missed in MEA were the sound effects associated with Incinerate and Inferno ammo. In ME2 they cause the enemy to create such elaborate sounds of agony and despair. It was nerfed or dialed down a bit in ME3. But in MEA its gone completely, the enemy suffers in silence. I know I sound a bit like Elnora in the Samara recruitment quest...but the sound effects associate with those two powers were a factor in deciding to play the OT again.

I just finished a playthrough of me2. Haven't played it since 2012 so that was fun. While meA is a bigger game so much of the time you spend in meA is just useless sidequests or time spent travelling unnecessary long distances for no good reason. In me2 it felt like all the things I did had meaning and that the game didn't intentionally waste my time for the sake of seeming like a bigger game (note that I only did recruitments/loyalty missions and main quests).

Writing for the characters is also miles better and it's not even close. In me2 I actually care about my squadmates and talking to them is interesting, in meA I generally don't care much allthough some of the banter in the nomad can be good. I also wanted to do almost all their loyalty missions because I didn't want them to die. The chatter among random npc's also made me laugh multiple times throughout the game, can't recall that happenening in meA.

I liked meA overall and anjoyed it but I can't get through a 2nd playthrough, there is too much filler content and the game just deliberately wastes your time with the back and forth fetch quests and long travel time between planets. And the writing is a bit lackluster. I did enjoy the main quest and getting to build my character with whatever powers I wanted though, and the combat was fun. 

And while me2 is from 2010 I still think the faces and animations look overall better. Nothing bothered me in that game like how the asari clone army or director addisons or sara ryders face bothers me in meA.

I didn't even do half the loyalty missions because the game didn't give me incentive to. Have not done liam, drack or pebee, maybe I should do those?

No way you can compare the packages for the salarian or Aria as time consuming as the side quest crap on MEA. I strongly agree with the previous post - MEA has a shitload of time sinks that serve no purpose except to make the game take longer than it should. And to be fair TW3 had the same problem, but that does not excuse MEA

I was just zipping between planets and systems and scanning in ME2 and ME3 last weekend, and I said to myself "I can't believe I took this for granted". In the time it takes to go and scan all planets in a solar system in MEA I will have finished scanning all available clusters in ME2/ME3. And going to planets with nothing in them does not contribute to the completion percentage. Its 7 years since ME2, 5 years since ME3 and both games make MEA feel like a waste of my time. I liked MEA and I preordered it but it was not long before I realized it was the nostalgia of playing a new ME game after so much time rather than genuinely enjoying all the time sinks.

The more I played the OT afterwards the more I hated MEA.