Kotaku: The Story Behind ME:A's Troubled Five-Year Development

Ratings are simply one persons opinion of what they thought of the game and nothing more. For those who don't put much stock into the writing or story of MEA, might rank the game higher than someone who thinks writing and characters are more important for them (I'm in that category). Combat might be smoother, I wouldn't call it better, but on other parts it fails hard.

I would give MEA a 60 just based on the writing and characters alone. I could really care less about any other aspects of the game. As long as the combat is at least mediocre then I can play it. I have sunk thousands of hours into the OT and I thought it's combat was good enough, but certainly not great. I think Bethesda does a better job with combat, but worse with writing and characters. I view MEA as the FO4 of Bioware. Streamlined RPG with better combat. Not what I look for games from Bethesda or Bioware.

I think a 70 is fare for what we got and even that is being generous from my point of view. I gave TW3 an 85 based on story characters alone. I have never liked the combat in the Witcher series. TW3 was a bit better, but still didn't really like it.

I don't typically judge a game by how many bugs it has unless it has so many that I can't even play the game without crashing. Most bugs can be fixed. You can't fix bad writing and characters so no amount of patches are going to fix whats wrong with MEA for me.

Remember that all this back and forth here are just opinions and you know what they say....

Oh come on. The buggiest Bioware game is still far less buggy than the least-buggiest Bethesda game, but they get a free pass because of "modding". CC was fine, just not amazing. Story and atmosphere were way better than many "open world" AAA titles. Does Skyrim even have a story? FO4's story is also pretty bare-bones and ridiculous when you look back at it. I think less than an 80 is ridiculous when you compare to other games.

I will say MEA is far better now post-patches than it was at launch, but at launch I still had a lot of fun and thought it was a worthy ME title. It's not as polished and visionary as HZD, but it's still great, or at minimum good.

MEA earned it's 70 score. Compared to other rpgs this gen like Witcher, Fallout, Bloodborne, HZD, and others it's just not as good. This game has great combat but it lacks in everything else. It's story is just meh, the characters are okay, the CC is shit, all the enemies are the same with different colors, the planets are dead, the choices are nonexistent, anything that is somewhat interesting is left unfinished and it is as buggy as a Bethesda game on a Sony console.

Combat and Cora's ass is what this game great. 10/10 on her ass Bioware.

No one play Bethesda rpgs for its main story. We do it to explore,  learn about the people and locations,  the lore and the side quests.  

ME2 is considered the best ME and it story is on par with a Bethesda story. ME2 just had great characters but a sub par story. 

Fallout 4 vanilla without mods is at best a 6. Once you head back to Sanctuary with your new taskmaster, Preston, in tow, the game nosedives. If you think I was angry about Fallout 4's miserable launch, guess again. I didn't preorder from Bethesda and I never will. If anything, I'll wait until all the DLC is done and wait for the modders to FIX the game. With modding, the game becomes at best an 8 (at best... most of the time, it's sitting around 7) because your pick-a-path adventure is severely limited when you look at your overall choices. There is only one ending I liked and that came way after the modders managed to make it possible. Fallout 4 moved forward in a few places, but seriously regressed in others where it matters most to me: character development, storytelling and companion dialogue (with the exception of Nick Valentine thanks to the Far Harbor DLC and Dogmeat who has no dialogue. So, think on that.) Fallout 4 is good with 112 mods. Seriously, that's how many mods I'm running to make the game playable. Andromeda, zero mods (and I love mods) and it's base is a solid 7 with more DLC to bump it up like it did for Inquisition. Inquisition as a whole, gets a 9 with all the DLC. It has its' faults though. Game flow being the most important issue, but storytelling, character dialogue, background music, the bard singing and all sorts of little things that worked. What held it back from getting a 10 is the game flow, the lack of real modding tools and the war table timers. I'm looking forward to Dragon Age 4 with absolute hunger. 

From my time with Bethesda games most of the people that complain about their games being "super buggy" are the ones that don't know how to properly manage their mods.  Both Skyrim and FO4 playing a fully vanilla game for my first run I came across very few bugs and nothing major and certainly not game breaking.  I can't say the same for MEA.

One could even say, ME2 had no story to mention. But it played to Bioware's traditional strengths. Creating believable and engaging characters. That's why it's still - probably - my most favorite game in the ME series.

PS3 version of Skyrim was a train wreck.  It was so bad we got DLC much later and it took a year for them to patch it.

FNV, still my favorite Fallout game, has been developed by Obsidian, with Bethesda only being the publisher. Now Obsidian is hands down my favorite studio. They never once produced something I didn't play to death for different reasons.

With Bethesda games it's, as has been said, a sandbox experience. In hopes of this sandbox being made much more interesting by the modding community. Exploring, in the case of FO4, creating settlements where I would love to hang out for a stretch, and looting. I never expected to get a great story from Bethesda. Not since Morrowind when their concept was still novel. It's the different expectations tied to different companies that make or break their products. In the case of Bioware I expect more than a skeleton of a story and most of all I expect unique characters that are fun to engage with.

I see your point and double-down. BioWare is the master storyteller. Yes, Obsidian has some great titles (South Park: the Stick of Truth is a whole season of South Park neatly wrapped into a game; Fallout New Vegas suffered from the crappiest launch ever. I swore off preordering their stuff after that, but it is the best of the franchise), but I'm not buying anything from them until I read the UNOFFICIAL patch list. BioWare's companions are legendary. I can't say the same about any other publisher. From Baldur's Gate to now, BioWare 1.0 and 2.0 own all of my favorites.

/shrug If we were able to make Unofficial Patches for ME, or any other game for that matter, I'm sure it would look much the same.  The unofficial patches are loaded with things like keyword fixes and collision issues and object placement changes and navmesh changes and hundreds of tiny changes that don't really effect much.

I'm more referring to bugs you see in normal gameplay, bugs that prevent you from completing quests or getting warped around during conversations or having 2 Draks in your kitchen.  Just the bugs I experienced while playing the game.

Edit:  The Unofficial Patches with those small fixes that you don't notice in gameplay become important when you start mod'ing your game.  Fixing those kind of things makes a more stable mod'ing platform to prevent you from encountering issues with things like Dirty Edits and Deleted References and all kinds of bad things that can happen once you start piling different mods on top of each other.