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

Jun 7, 2017 16:54:40 GMT RoboticWater said:

Jun 7, 2017 16:33:37 GMT @carefull said:

Are you kidding me? Andromeda has awesome areas with road, fun to drive vehicle, and great planetary story.

The Nomad is better than the horse, but structurally, that's exactly how Inquisition worked. Zones with self-contained storylines and exploration.

It has a variety of side missions that offset the gather quests.

Again, still structurally indifferent than Inquisition, and I'd argue the quality to crap quest ratio still isn't all that great.

Everyone is voiced in Andromeda.

Literally every BioWare game since Mass Effect has been fully voiced. How is this even a feature?

The main story is clear, split away from a bog of areas.

Kinda? That's still exactly how it works in Inquisition

And, unlike Inquisition that crushes my PC every second time I play it, has a cutscene that never triggers, Andromeda was bug free and crushed... never.

It's spelled crashed, and anecdotes aren't evidence. I've heard far more reports of serious bugs for Andromeda than I have for Inquisition.

Also, everyone looks at least good enough in Andromeda, but in Inquisition, they are ugly.

Still has nothing to do with structure, and no, on companions alone Inquisition has a more visually pleasing cast, but even the secondary and auto-generated characters look pretty universally better. Hell, before the patch, many people's eyes in Andromeda looked flat out disturbing.

And, I had an awesome romance in Andromeda, while Inquisition did not let me play the character I wanted to play if I wanted a good romance.

What? The romance system works exactly the same between these two games. That Andromeda conveniently had a romance that appealed specifically to you doesn't have any bearing on the formula. But once again, no, the romances in Inquisition were almost uniformly superior with more nuance (albeit slightly) and relationship hitches than those in Andromeda.

Gods, I've already played Andromeda twice, and I barely made myself finish Inquisition. Oh, and MP... did 10 hours in Andromeda, just read the info on DA one... and never even dared to load it.

Let me reiterate: you implied that Andromeda is less formulaic than Inquisition. You've yet to show how Andromeda's formula, no matter how well (or poorly as the case may be) it was executed, is significantly different than Inquisition.

I vehemently disagree with your opinion of Andromeda, but regardless of your subjective assessment of the game, your objective understanding of it's formula is factually incorrect.

Incorrect.

In Inquisition, the roads are NOT marked on the maps, and you cannot get to many areas either by horse or on foot. You get those Operations that lock away parts of many maps. In Andromeda pretty much everything is accessible on each planet. In Inquisition you have to go there and back to Skyhold to unlock areas. In Andromeda you do it on the planet itself via Vault.

in Inquisition you had to unlock a specific amounts of Power Points to proceed with the Main Quest. In Andromeda, the story progression happens naturally, and is not locked out behind a repetitive task. You don't even have to unlock the Vaults to progress through the story.

Inquisition has most of the quests related by a text message pinned to a tree. Pretty much every quest in Andromeda has an actual Questgiver you talk to.

The romances in Inquisiton are more locked out than in Andromeda, because the restrictions are only by gender, and in Inquisition, the locks are also by your species. So it is harder to create a protagonist that can romance someone you want to romance.

Seriously, good looking cast in Inquisition? Fat old one-eyed Iron Bull as an LI and the second LI a gut who is looks like an adding biker with a gigantic beard? Cullen is on the death door, and Solas stepped out of a nightmare rather than a maiden's dream. And all of them having permanently shiny pale, pale and paler faces and brows/eyelashes that are so terrible it's better not to put them on. And you can't continue the game if you added mods that made characters look less objectionable. ye gods.