Was Mass Effect 2 really that Much Better than MEA?

The jump jets are amazing.  I love them so much.  I wish they could be retconned into all previous ME games.

I actually like Cora, even though a lot of people find her boring.  I think she needs to find her heart/place and then she'll really shine, and I wish they'd given her that chance.

I really love the angara.  They are such a fascinating race.  And Jaal is hilarious (even if his VA makes it sound like every sentence has no emotional connection to the next).  He's my favorite character, tied with Kallo.

Aya is gorgeous.  Actually, all of the environments are pretty gorgeous.  Havarl, Aya, and Meridian are my favorite worlds.  I love the dense, lush life especially.  The take off and landing scenes are serious eye candy (though after watching them 50 times, they start to wear thin).

There are touches of humor in the crew board, and the emails that are hilarious.

I want to learn more about the Jardaan.  They seem very interesting, and I seriously hope they aren't Protheans 2.0.

Happy?

Okay no need to be so rude.

Thanks for noticing it.  And yeah the thumbnail.  Different from my usual one, but that glitch was just so amazing that I had to use it. 

Well really BioWare games in general is basically a meme factory, though I think ME provides the very best ones, especially since some of them are seemingly mundane, yet terribly tragic. 



Even Chakwas refuses to ever use Shepard's name. Bitch! 

I'm not in the excuse business in the first place. (Probably because my personal scores for the games are much closer together than yours are.) I just participate in these threads to put the blame in the right places -- for instance, the incoherence of the Reapers is an ME1 problem even if they stuck ME3 with the bill.

And I don't expect Bio to improve in the way you apparently think they should. In my experience Bio quality is random. And I want it to be random, because that means that they're doing new stuff instead of refining old stuff. Again, easy for me to say since I don't think any Bio games failed. (Well, maybe the NWN OC, but the toolset carried that game.)

I've been fortunate to not have many bugs.  The ones now that annoy me are the helmet bug when you go to kadara slums and have to reload latest save, the SOS quest that closes the game when you get close to it, and the annoyance of the New game plus with no casual outfit on my current play through. All the framerate issues, floating characters, etc are gone which is good. 

Still Constantly get the one armed collective exiles on Elaaden though. That's pretty funny

 Yeah..... Everywhere on the internet, there were people thrashing the game yet bought it anyway.

Well I bought it because I played on hubby's account for a while, and decided the gameplay was pretty good, and I could get it for 30% off, so why not.  And it's enjoyable enough.  But it's not fantastic (to me) and has a lot of issues that need fixing.

If I didn't care about Mass Effect and Bioware a lot, I wouldn't bother being here.

Shoving that one guy out of Dantius Towers will always be one of my favorite Renegade interrupts.

And don't forget the modding.

I hope they did buy it or at least play the 6 hr demo before trashing it, it would be difficult to take their opinion seriously if they didn't play it at all.  But if they buy MEA2 after MEA knowing how disappointed they are right now then yeah apparently BW is doing something right. For me, ME ended with ME3 ( I liked ME3) and this game just confirms it. I loved the Assassin's Creed franchise way more than I will ever love any BW game. But I gave it up when I realized the franchise became a black hole I threw my money into. 

What I will never understand are people who despised ME3 yet signed up for MEA. 

I'm not really sure what incoherence that is, but it's fairly easy to tell that ME3's problems aren't caused by Reaper inconsistency earlier in the franchise. That doesn't excuse the absurd amount of screen time dedicated to Cerberus, or the ham-fisted dialog (more so than usual, at least), or an ending which went totally off the deep end, or many of it's other issues both Reaper-related or not.

However, let's say that this was, in fact, the case: Mass Effect set up the Reapers in such a way that ME3 couldn't possibly reconcile the inconsistencies. Then BioWare should alter the Reapers a little. Much like thermal clips, I'll take a bit of garbage if it results in a better experience. I don't think this was ever the case, but BioWare is no stranger to re-writes; better that they re-write for the benefit of the story rather than its detriment. People would complain, but I'd rather have consistency complaints then "this is just awful" complaints.

I genuinely don't see what the first two games did to totally mess up ME3. Other than choice and consequence, which BioWare committed itself to in the beginning, I can't think of anything that couldn't be written around, even if it resulted in these supposed irreconcilable inconsistencies. I think it was Mr. BTounge's critique of the ending which said that it's fine if narrative coherence is jostled as long as it largely stands firm (his example being that it didn't make sense that Legion had to die uploading himself to save the geth, but that's OK because the sacrifice still fits well with the story).

And again, if you want to place blame for Andromeda, then it should be placed far more internally than any game in the trilogy. It was supposedly a fresh start, yet turned out to be a rehash of problems plaguing both BioWare and open world games as a whole.
But Andromeda's problems aren't with spontaneity, they're with sameness. Andromeda plays like a generic open world adventure game with another generic BioWare plot and all the same open world flaws and BioWare jank that it should have known to fix. On the other hand, Prey is a critically flawed game, but I still hold it within high regard for being fairly unique among contemporary games, but among its Immersive Sim peers as well. And Dead Space 2 is a stripped-down and refined version of the first game, but I still hold that game in high regard because it's just so damn polished and consistent.

Andromeda is neither of these. It's so middle-of-the-road that it hurts.

There are a few here and there but the real good discussions tend to get buried pretty fast.

Like this one:  Sepphyr's Visual Analysis

Probably one of the best critiques on this forum and it can't stay anywhere near the front page. Probably because everyone agrees.