Mission/Level/Gameplay/HUB/World Design Critique, Praise, Ideas

Having finally got around to doing the Archon ship mission I regret having got side tracked from the main story.
I actually think a tighter focus would be beneficial- or at least maybe have all the colonisation stuff be done after the main story (although as I haven't finished the game yet I'm not sure how that would work with the plot).
It feels like two threads pulling in two directions at the moment.

I think that a bit more railroading in mission choice would help the game oddly enough.

Anyway I loved the Archon Ship level, the main gun deck was a great bit of design for example.

Same goes with bosses. The bosses in the game are great for a 3rd person shooter. The Architects, Fiends, Destroyers, Mechs, Destined Kett, etc were all good additions, but they are typically only a one time thing excluding the Fiends. It would have been nice to have more of these boss types randomly appear at enemy camps in the overworld as to shake things up a bit.

I also think Vehicles could have made a good boss type. Why the Kett drop ships dont have guns is beyond me. Even fighting a shuttle or drop ship on foot would have been great. Getting ambushed by one while driving the Nomad would change up gameplay and make it more fun. Giving the vehicles weak points almost like DEstiny bosses (spider tank) would be a blast.

If the story isn't about the crew itself there shouldn't be Loyalty missions IMHO. They should just be like in ME1, DA:O or DAI where it's a series of smaller missions and otherwise the crew should develop as part of the plot like in ME3, so that each crewmate has a specific mission in the main plot where they have special agency, and otherwise they just have a lot of unique lines in normal missions.

Loyalty missions are so thorough that they actually take up a good bulk of the overall budget spent on missions in ME2 and this one. In ME2 they were actually main missions, and in this one they're often like the main missions but not essential, but because there is no overarching story about Ryder working with his team in some mission that only they can handle together, it felt like I was just meandering about in half of the missions. Cora's was good because it featured an ark, so it was actually essential to the plot in a way. Vetra's, PeeBee's and others's are too personal and self-contained and if you think about it you could've had a longer, meatier main story that felt more like KOTOR without everything being broken up into these filler arcs.

Honestly as I've said structurally MEA is very solid. It's one step back from DAI and towards DAO which was probably Biowares best world. It had strong main plots with b each zone and by and large each zone had its own interesting plot.

Its a far more integrated world then dai. So maybe they just need to continue tightening the bolt. Make it to where like on Kadara make it more then just go there and pick up vehn terevs beacon but make the actual getting the beacon more connected and more of a foot wetter in the collective and outcast side plot.

Said before, but, specifically, I wish viability of planets and Andromeda overall would affect the outposts and the Nexus. If you open a Science pod, your outposts have some extra scientists running around, with some interaction opportunities. Open a military pod, and you see a few more guns and barracks. Open a commerce pod and some more merchants appear.

Also have it affect the Nexus, with more and varied people.

And have the outposts start greening up (or melting down) just a little. A conversation with a crewmember or a colonist about the first flowers to bloom or the first harvest would have been a great reward for increasing viability.

Some more little homesteads and caves to explore. Having people actually living in them as viability and the game progresses.

Please, different animals on different planets. It makes no sense to have the exact same animals on these incredibly different planets.

Some more varied buildings than prefabs, for goodness sakes. It makes every colony look like every other colony. It's also inefficient not to build to suit the local environment.

Mishrava was probably my favorite "level" in the game. Having to figure the right way up was pretty fun.

As for maps:
Kadara needs less mountains.  That is a nightmare landscape. No map should ever be almost entirely mountains. 
Elaaden was too vast and barren. Too much driving to get to things. 
Eos felt ideal though more mobs to fight would have been nice.
Havarl was too dark. Walls in all directions. Small and boxy. It felt oddly out of place. But it was a nice map but would have felt nicer if it were more on the open side with better lighting. 
Kadara port was not a favorite. Going from the port to the badlands was tedious. 

As for missions/quests:

Having more missions involving Kett would be great. The main missions are pretty solid. I wish we had more of them because there are maybe what? Five? The quest with the Salarians about getting intel on the kett, that really brought up what I thought was a rather important point that was sorely missing. We should have done what we could to get more intel on them. We should have infiltrated more bases, more ships, gathered intel, learned about them since they are THE major foe of the story from the minute we arrive planetside on habitat 7. The way it is handled with the salarian traitors is comical. As if they handed over a ship of salarians and got all sorts of intel about the kett for it. The kett would just assume squash them like a bug before having a conversation with them. We should have worked with the angara more and infiltrated bases, ships, maybe captured a kett or two. Any kind of battle mission with the kett especially focused on gathering intel on them would be great.

More architects but not as the final boss. The actual architect battles were far more fun that the final one I thought. 

I did like the mix of linear and open world because the open world, all of it was side stories/missions and they felt fitting for idea behind being a pathfinder. That whole set up I think was very well done. So well done that for me I did not even think of what I was doing on the worlds as side missions. They felt like main missions. But again I would have liked more direct involvement with the kett in main story missions. Voeld was enjoyable to me because of that. Lots to do there with the kett and it never felt old. Might be some of the best missions in the game IMHO.

Lexi's  side task into learning why the scavengers were so violent should have been a much larger quest. It would have been nice if it were not treated as an afterthought and more proactive. 

I loved the vaults and exploration of them. I wish they were even more involved with more mysteries in them. I hope for the next game we get to explore many more vaults and learn secrets about the Jaadan and angara. I hope they have secret passages and paths and rooms filled with all sorts of discoveries. 

loyalty missions need to be succinct. I think putting things on hold and having to check mail, have conversations, go to another planet is very time consuming and not really fun. It becomes a chore because they don't trigger well. Peebee's was the worst for this and really feels the least rewarding. I kind of want to throw her out of an airlock.The middle of the game begins to get bogged down with these.

Kadara is very slow pacing to get it viable and right then you are trying to handle up to six loyalty missions where they are going off in stages. It's a nightmare. Pacing is flat out tedious there.

Someone had mentioned in a post having missions in SP that are similar to the MP ones. I think something like that would be a great addition. Also, there is no post game content unless you just want to clean up tasks and some quests. Having something like the MP missions in post game might be nice. I'm not really a huge fan of random mobs on the map as they have done. I prefer it to be organized like the bases but I'll take them if it's all you get. You need to really have more opportunity for combat in the game in a more focused way rather than hopping out of the nomad and attacking little groups. 

With what we were given I think tying the Archon to every planet in some fashion would have given the story more strength, for it would have been more like Saren for every planet we went to for the main story mission we went there because we were chasing Saren.

I don't mind open world, but I think the planets were a little too big for what they were offering. I did like that the quests/tasks on the planet tied closer to what was happening on each planet unlike Inquisition, but I think I would have liked more planets that were the size of the asteroid that was used for Vetra's loyalty mission and just had one planet that required a lot of exploration for they all started to feel the same by the time I reached the end of the game. I would even have been fine with the different planets having multiple smaller zones.

I liked the Nomad, I don't even mind that it doesn't have weapons for it feels like it fit into the design they were aiming for.

I really don't know what to say about the crafting in the game, it was definitely far superior to what I felt about the crafting in Inquisition, but at the same time it felt cumbersome and restrictive. I really liked the way they handed weapons/armor in Mass Effect 2 and 3 where you found the item and then could just equip it and mod it the way you like. Right now I have calculated I probably need to beat the game four more times to be able to unlock all the different weapons and armor to experiment around with if I wanted to unlock everything.

interesting idea.

The Normandy upgrade mechanic and role assignment in the Suicide Mission aspects of ME2 were far more meaningful than the loyalty part, I thought, which always felt really cheap and tacked on, even with the "loyalty or death" thing in place. Personally I thought Wrex was the only one that had something that really felt like a loyalty test.