Did we need the Kett?

I find the Kett to become old news pretty fast, then you start to hunger for something different to shoot at.

My feeling is the creative team behind Andromeda just decided to take the safe approach with the story.  You could probably come up with something similar to the Kett  looks/story-wise in probably an hour or so on your own.  I find it hard to believe they spent 5 years in development and this is the best result they could muster. 

Agree to disagree and all that, but I would have preferred a game about exploration and planet specific enemies/conflicts/dangers/what evers.  Andromeda was supposed to be about those things.  Exploration, discovery, and being a Pathfinder.  Instead it all ended up just being another space marine pew-pew marathon.  The story telling at times tries to say the game isn't about those things which just creates a huge disconnect since playing the game is all about shooting everything that moves.

I liked the concepts of Andromeda and the Initiative and being a Pathfinder but it all that ended up just being window dressing with no impact on the gameplay or the narrative direction. 

Guess we'll never know now.  I certainly think it is well within possibility to make a game that doesn't entirely center around shooting faceless targets for 100 hours.  In fact there are many, many successful games out there that do just that.  Whether or not Bioware could pull that off is another question entirely I suppose.

As I previously entered into on this thread, conceptually the Kett are a nonsense, there is no way that the Andromeda Initiative could hope to colonise a cluster that already had a militaristic colonial force occupying it for the last 70 years without having a large armed fleet of ships themselves to control the skies above their colonised worlds and protect their supply routes. It would be like Lithuania trying to found a colony on Cuba in the 1500's. If you really wanted to keep the Kett, with the whole genetic hijacking and goal of weaponising the remenent technology, and still have them make sense they would have to operate like the collectors from ME2, striking out from an unknown base in devastating surprise attacks, but given their existing similarities to the collectors/reapers this would have probably have been a bridge too far.

The shame is though, the premise of ME:A was an absolute goldmine for a talented sci-fi writing team to work on. There are so many themes to explore here, the ethics of terraforming worlds with indigenous life, what if the environment is already compatible with our physiology? How then do we deal with dangerous flora and fauna, wipe them out, learn to co-exist? The first tentative steps on a new undiscovered planet, starting out simple with scans and sample taking, the wonder of the first encounter with a new alien species... the shock at it suddenly leaps and coils itself round Liam's neck. Drama as he flails around pleading for help while Dr Lexi shouts at you over the comm to take it alive for study, then humour as Liam vents his frustrations at either Lexi or Ryder, hell it might even have endeared some people to the Liam character.  Trite I know, but then I'm not a talented sci-fi writer, just an avid consumer

OK, so then you have sentient life. ME:1 introduced around a dozen sentient alien species, delved in detail into their physiology, history and politics without you even having to read the supplemental stuff in the codex. ME:A had the ability to approach this in even greater detail, seeing how worlds shape their evolution and culture. Not entering an existing built galaxy where everything is known, discovering it. Imagine trying to piece together the relationship between the Krogan, Turian and the Salarian for the first time.

So is this new sentient life hostile? Why, can we even understand? can we make peace? Or is it friendly? If so, is it trustworthy? What is its level of technological development, more or less advanced than us? Does it have FTL capabilities? Bear in mind that the cultures of the Milky Way only have FTL because of the Prothean's. Life in the Andromeda galaxy could conceivabley be far more advanced than us without access to this technology. How do they react when they discover that we have this 'holy grail' of technology? Would they attempt to take it by force? How do the Initiative races feel about trading this technology given the history of 'technologically elevated' races, more importantly how do the other Andromeda races feel about you giving out access to this tech?

I think this is what depresses me most about ME:A, they had fresh slate to work off to create a vibrant and interesting galaxy populated by original and detailed species and cultures. What we got was just lazy nonsense that was crowbar'd in for development ease, instead of the scouting 'Pathfinder' teams turning up with the Nexus, where it would have made sense. We have the scouts turn up 14 month later just so that we could have worlds already populated by easy to design Milky Way species in copy/paste prefab environments with the developers just keeping their fingers crossed that we never stop to think about how or why any of this stuff is there and if they have already been pretty successfully colonising planets for 14 month, what the whole point of Pathfinders even was.