70 hours in, i cannot get most of the complaints. At all. UPDATED OP#2

I've just played through a 4th consecutive side quest on Voeld that had not a single sassy line in it...



So, yeah, we'll just have to agree to disagree.  I also don't think that the definition of "sassy" is "empty-headed."  So, now all of a sudden, you're actually throwing in something else entirely into the discussion.

And no problem with that. In "reality" a project like that would take mostly young people. As accomplished as people in there mid twens can be, but still young folks, being able to start a new civilization by procreation.

The premisse never bothered me at all, since it seems logical.

It's the same old story. This is what we had to deal with when they introduced voiced characters. Voice acting doesn't allow the option to set several available personalities, because you should have to record a lot of different dialogue lines and there are technical, economical and time constraints. Here is why nowadays many AAA titles like TW3 and Bioware games since ME1 force you to play characters with shaped personalities and if you happen to not like at least one of the 2-3 available options you'll have to deal with one of them. You are not playing your character anymore, but one of the characters they have created. Indeed the range of available options with mute character wasn't limitless too, but you had enough to be able to play more or less the character that could suite your tastes better. 

The real problem with voiced characters is that it costs time and money to record the lines. That's what brought us the dialogue wheel instead of the many reply options of old. I have mixed feeling over fully voiced games. While I still play old school RPGs by Obsidian that aren't fully voiced, I do enjoy voiced characters as long as you can determine who and what they are. I'm not the least bit interested in playing a game where the company decides who you are. What gender, race, class, the lot. That's but one of the reasons why I never could immerse myself in the GTA series, although the modern days street thug setting appeals to me in principle. I had more fun playing Saints Row 2 and 3.

As for Andromeda, from where I am standing, the limitations of the dialogue wheel are really showing. There often only a couple of options to respond. One's the "humorous" one, the other one the serious option. Sometimes there's logical too. That pretty much puts you on rails when deciding for how you want to come over. It seriously limits individual character development.

Of course. It's a videogame, therefore there will always be a limit to what you can do. But if you have 6 options you'll still have more chances to find at least one that you like than when you have a couple at best. Whatever, I won't bring up again the old debate "Voiced character vs Mute Character" because AAA market won't never go back to silenced character. Even Bethesda gave up on it. 

Having played Bethesda games since Morrowind, I can say, they are also masters of the open world concept. With every new game they built on the concept. Rule of thumb, if you create open spaces to explore, make them interesting, challenging and most of all changing. I'm not a fan of FO4s story, but the open world more than makes up for that. I always find myself returning, for the single reason of exploring. What's that new group down there up to? Are they enemies or harmless? Better look through the scope to make sure before approaching. Who's that character travelling the road? Oh, he's a trader, doctor, mercenary, you can recruit for one of your settlements. Caravans moving about, delivering goods, the lot, down to seeing your own settlers being at work at their assigned posts.

If you see these kinds of games, you really come to notice how empty and lifeless the open spaces in Bioware games are. Everything that moves is only there to be shot. Everything that doesn't move is a friendly NPC. That's about all. I have to say, as compared to this, I prefer their linear adventures. The open worlds (although they refuse to call it that) are only fillers to grind for some extra EPs.

But if someone chooses that approach, they should at least get it right. There are lots of people enjoying open world concepts. If they are presented with a poorly done open space, it will automatically diminish their enjoyment. Me included. I can enjoy both approaches, but in the case of Bioware I enjoyed their linear adventures more. DAI being the exception, going by my impression. They regressed from there, as far as their presentation of open spaces to explore goes. Which is something I never would have expected. I would have expected them building on what they already had in place with DAI, if they wanted to take that approach.

While I'd agree in general, it sounds like you're giving Bethesda a little too much credit. Morrowind was well ahead of its time but tbh it needed a better engine to realise what the devs were trying to do. Oblivion was actually a significant step backward in terms of being an open-world game, it was it's questlines that saved it. I'd probably say that Skyrim was the first Beth title that properly managed to create a full open world with a decent set of quests to match.

I'm also not really sure that's a fair appraisal of Bioware open worlds, either. They're definitely behind Bethesda when it comes to open world design but their chief problem is they stretch themselves too thin on quest design and try to compensate with fetch quests. When they actually *do* nail quest design, they go way ahead of Bethesda. DAI's Still Ruins quest, for example, was light years ahead of anything I came across during my playthroughs of Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim. As for whether their worlds are 'lifeless' - I guess that depends on what you mean but I certainly felt that it was a vastly lesser issue than the number of fetch quests. I certainly didn't feel stuff like DAI's Storm Coast or MEA's Kadara were 'lifeless'.

It's not really about it being "empty" for me; it's about how it sacrifices the continuity of the story to accommodate the player going willy nilly all over the place in any order.  As a result, the story can only be made in little blocks that can be shuffled.  They also largely forfeit any references to time elapsing because the developer has no idea whether or not the player will spend an equivalent of 1 in-game day in this or that spot or the equivalent of an in-game month there and whether or not the player will clear an area of everything and then move on or bop back and forth among multiple areas.

I'd rather have the writer tell me the basic story in the logical progression they first envisioned it and then let me play around with the character's personality within it that framework rather than vice verse.  As I said, TW3 had a very alive environment... it certainly was not "empty" but my experience with it was that the story become such a jumbled mess of little details that I just could not connect with it... lost track of it completely... and then lost interest in it completely.  ME:A is going a little better... probably because I'm more interested in sci-fi than magic and witchcraft and I also know the Tirlogy.  Therefore, even though we're in a knew galaxy I do have some familiarity with it to at least connect to the little easter eggs they plant throughout the world; whereas with TW3 (because I had no background with the previous games), even all those easter eggs were meaningless to me.  Still, if the story in TW3 had been told in a less disrupted manner (disrupted by side quests and massive travelling between locations), I might have been able to connect to it and stick with the game.

Big just for the sake of being big just doesn't do it for me... regardless of whether it's big and full of "stuff" really unnecessary to the main story or just big and empty.  By default, side quests are unnecessary to the main story... or they would be main story quests.  People say to ignore the side quests then.  Sure, that can be done... but then I don't want to have to travel through a huge environment by-passing everything that pops up either.  I think one solution is to tighten the area of the main story to a central location only and add the other stuff on the perimeters... give the player a pre-game toggle that enables those outer areas and quests.  That way, I could decide ahead of time to play a shorter game in a smaller area with a real focus on the main story and you could decide ahead of time that you want to go out of your way to play a bunch of side quests.  Win-win.

Perhaps it's just the cold freezing my brain; but my playthrough story is starting to get a little muddled on Voeld.  I'm sure there are ways to organize it so that it seems a little more "timely" and less scattered; but without playing through once first, I certainly don't know how I would be able to pick and choose the quests so that they make more sense.

Well, right off the bat, I met some sort of pilot that whisked me off on a mission before I had actually met the resistance leader... when I realized that I was supposed to go into the facility to meet someone by a different name (which Jaal had said, but I did not catch), I back-tracked to an earlier save and did the proper meet-up and then followed that leader's instructions to stage a rescue of some troops, and then somehow go waylaid again trying to get to that place and found myself looking for the Asari Ark... and I still didn't know what's with the pilot at the beginning who wanted to whisk me away immediately on that other mission... so I decided to go back and do that one... then my son cuts in to tell me I should have cleared the monoliths on the planet before undertaking the mission that pilot wanted to give me... so now I've back-tracked again and am just trying to get into the vault... stumbling into innumerable side quests just trying to drive from location to location and lay down the forward stations.  Now, after all that, I have a save file error and several of the most recent autosaves won't load... so I'll be backtracking again (at least I hope an earlier manual save will load).  Meanwhile, I've unplugged the Xbox (again) and am clearing my cache... just in case.