Why MEA did not work for me

That's on the same lines as saying the building crew set up the scaffolding and urged the tenants to move in. No building, but a helluva framework.

Yes, I agree, they set up a helluva framework. But they left it at that and called it a day.

hah. No, not quite. They filled the story with characters, background, worlds and did a damn fine job of it.

At least get my name right. 

Okay, I'll take this from the top down.


You almost lost me right here from falling into the common trap of passing a subjective opinion as an objective one, despite mentioning subjective opinion right before it. Objectively, Man of Steel and Batman v Superman are not particularly good movies, the former was slightly better than the latter. Going into the specifics as to why would be completely OT so I won't. All I will say is we can all subjectively get enjoyment out of anything that is objectively sub-standard, vice versa and everything in-between. All the power to anyone that can get enjoyment subjectivity out of objectively the worst thing made. That's something that can't be considered wrong and it also can't be disputed. I can accept that far more easily and readily from folk who are honest on that front, as opposed to those that try to make something objectively bad this brilliant thing people "just don't get" or whatever reason they wish to use.


Fully agree with this, can understand their initial state upon landing and that is perfectly logical in most cases. I took severe issue with what happened after fixing everything. Eos as an example, so we turn the radiation down to normal levels - hooray! What happens after that? Err.....the radiation value.....goes down? That's great and all, but literally nothing else changes, all the benefit the player has is less life support hazards to worry about. The pre-fab buildings come down, but once all that is done nothing else happens. Same with the snowy place (can't even be bothered looking up the name) hooray, I've raised the temperature.....the ice will melt.....except, no matter how long I stay, the ice never melts! The temperature is simply not as cold as it was before, so yay, another numerical number changed - that I can't see the implications of. (Apart from not as many suit hazards.....again!) It almost comes off as a set of primitive attempts to show longer-term implications of the players actions. We might have been *gasp gasp gasp* at this during the turn of the 21st century, but we'be been there and had stuff like that for years now. DAI had the same sort of issues, it would seem nearly none of those lessons were learned, or worse they were simply ignored. Quantity over quality seems to have prevailed once again for Bioware, both DAI & MEA have some very large and spectacular looking landscapes, but they lack the required "life" to feasibly sustain them. You can travel literally miles in any direction and have nothing but naked landscape, there is no joy to be derived from that.



Broadly agree with this, while conceding it is at the same time, it's actually a hard balancing act to get right. If you pull too far from "center of the universe" for want of a better term, you risk isolating the player too much from key events, and ergo unintentionally robbing them the impact they have on the world they are inhabiting. MEA's very plot all but required you to be at the forefront in order to be able to do what you needed to. Otherwise you'd have had to play as one of the rebels instead. Now while that could have been a neat twist for the player and story, that unfortunately doesn't coincide with the game's initial vision of exploration and all the rest of it, thus making that path unfeasible.

I personally would have taken the ME4 plot to anywhere of the 99% of the Milky Way Galaxy that was unexplored. There was the perfect plot device to go with in order to achieve this - the Mu Relay, which as explained in ME1, drifted trillions of KM from it's original location due to a nova. Take a team through there to chart a bit of the stuff there, only to find when it's time to come home it's actually inactive. (Due to the reapers eventually turning them all off during the events of ME3.) Only the SR-1 and some of it's crew even knew it still existed, let alone it's actual location, so it's a secret feasibly kept safe after the Normandy 1 get's blown out the sky. The plot for ME4 should have been made out that, you have to make a living out of the new cluster you're in. That would have safely combined the world building and exploration aspects most folk craved, on top of keeping characters from the established races. Ho-hum though, that's just me and my opinion, but I think that would have made a more lore believable game compared to the one we were handed. Heck, make the twist for a 2nd trilogy that no matter what Shepard had done, the reapers eventually reverted/came back to start reaping again, so your end game role for these new games was you planted the seeds for the OT races to help uplift the new species rise against the reapers and defeat them for good this time. You can play a character either 50k years on from ME4 if you didn't import saves from the previous 2 games, or if you did you get to play as your ME4 one who went into cyro. The concepts need more defining sure, but I think those broad ideas could work very well.


I agree with this as well, we shouldn't have seen the Kett until quite a while into the game. The planets were screwed up due to the faulty vaults, that was problem enough for me, especially for habitat 7. I don't think the Kett were needed in all that initial phase. (Other than to give the player something to shoot at early on.) If you cut them out, essentially things stay the same. Things could have been built up more, you send people and shuttles out - they start vanishing without explanation, they know about the scourge already - so it must be something else. This could have made a good investigatory point for the player to carry out to then have the big reveal.


Yeah they didn't quite pull this off. Apart from the low gravity planet (which I did really like) nothing else really different was offered and that was a shame. All worlds could have been very distinctive with their own qualities, but too many as you say were far too the same.


Not much to add to this, again the same as DAI much of the side quest were very MMO/busy work type. Very disappointed in them, and also at the return of "loyalty" missions. (Not so much the missions themselves, just the concept of having to gain "loyalty" again from folk who are at the very core professionals at what they do.)


For me I think the reason for this is very much the downside of when you try to appeal to a "broad" audience - you end up appealing to no one. Other games as you correctly point out, are prepared to go that bit further in the one specific direction and it doesn't do anything to harm them, even though it may be controversial in someway. That was what really struck me about MEA, I can't even think of a particular moment where I really had to tug at my own morals to think through/make a choice. It was pretty clear what choice there was to make, and even then it was usually from a selection of "right" choices of a varying degree. It was almost as if no risks were taken for fear of offending/upsetting someone. DAI had it's flaws for sure, but at least there was some clear and differing choices on the table for you to take, though admittedly not as broad as it's two preceding games were, but still there in some form at least.

We'll see how it goes I guess, though I'm not hopeful of the future. I thought lessons would have been well heard and learned after both ME3 & DAI, but it's clear for the most part they weren't. I held off buying MEA for a couple of weeks and got it as less than half it's initial price, and very glad I did as the product was sadly not worth the full price. I have enjoyed it in fits & spurts for sure, but it doesn't hold a candle compared to the OT, which I still play years on despite the ending. (Which I now just head-cannon as Citadel DLC being the post-victory story.) It's very much back to the drawing board for Mass Effect, but the problem is I think they've botched it so bad two times running now they may not be allowed to do that!

Very good opening post, I enjoyed going through it to respond.

Some people even left this sub forum because of the rampant negativity.

Of course, we've been hearing the static NPC argument since Bio's games were being compared unfavorably with mid-period Ultimas. But I suppose the state of the art really could have finally evolved to that point after  a couple of decades.

It's a provable thing.  All one has to do is count the number of negative sounding thread titles vs. the positive ones to verify that the forum discussions are most decidedly not 90% positivism and only 10% negativism.

Do you have any proof?

Just wanted to say that I agree with the OP on all their points, very well thought-out. Couldn't have said it better myself.

To your point about new races (only two in Andromeda) - yeah in the OT, we had several new races. Here, the Angara didn't seem as interesting as the Quarians, Salarians, Turians, etc. They might have looked interesting, but the rest of them was just mediocre and blah. I also kept thinking of them as 'Australians' in space, due to their accents.

I feel like ME:A kinda was just riding the coattails of the OT and thought that was enough - it wasn't. Bring back the original writers (Drew K), original composers (Jack and Sam) and THEN they would have had a much better result, I AM SURE.

We're not comparing numbers of individual haters with the number of people who like the game... we're comparing negativism and positivism.  Just because you're probably individually responsible for starting a large number of those negative threads I'm referring to... don't whine now because they're being enumerated into that general sense of negativity vs. positive-ness on the forum.

There are probably a few more individual people here who have said they like the game... because new people are coming here stating they like the game not expecting to be met with the sea of negativity they get for just stating that they like the game.  Also, counting likes and dislikes doesn't do it because people get likes for things like helpful tips, build advice... useful stuff that's really neither positive or negative.  The "positive" people here have also, on occasion, given fair criticisms of MEA or talked about bugs they experienced and received some of their likes for those comments.  Even enumerating those likes vs. dislikes... you still would not get to a 90%/10% split... so, the statement is an exaggeration... and it seems that it's mostly the negative nancies who have to resort to such blatant exaggerations... because their actual logical arguments are so weak.

  To be honest, I've only posted here  because the OP made the argument that this is some sort of safe haven for fans when it's not exactly true. So are you gonna post proof that there are only a handful of haters or are you just keep making assumptions about me?

You keep proving my point.  If there’s a negative thread, I could off the top of my head list dozens of “positive” users who WILL post in that thread, and i know exactly what they will post.  I could probably go through every negative post on the last 10 pages of this forum, and you would be in every single one of them, talking about how you like the game, and how you didn’t have that problem, and blah blah blah.

It’s not that difficulty to make assumptions about people like you.

Meanwhile, as far as haters go, there’s me - maybe 3-4 other vociferous posters I could name, and some neutral users that would probably skew negative.  Unless you think there’s a silent majority of non-posters that are lurking in the background, but all of those review threads and polls people like you keep pointing to, lead me to believe otherwise.

Most of the haters are in the youtube comments