Anyone else wish habitat 7 would be a full map?

It feels like they had put more effort into the habitat 7 map. Would make sense, considering it is the first look you get on one of the game's exterior maps, so they wanted something shiny to impress the players.

I don't know about that but then I do tend to take into account that they did tone DAI down a little bit I think in order to make it a little more compatible with the last gen systems (PS3/360) when it comes to evaluating it. So perhaps I'm a little more forgiving in matters like that.

That's why I wrote A.I. instead of AI, but it didn't help, it seems.

I wouldn't have minded jumping from floating rock to floating rock with the Nomad.

In general, I do think all the "big" planets (Voeld, Eos and Elaaden) would have been better off just being half of their size and instead have 2-3 more planets.
The sand and snow deserts really were over done. I'd much rather have seen Elaaden be something else as well, maybe volcanic, I found Peebee's loyalty world to look spectacular and wouldn't have minded a bigger map in that style rather than another desert.

My favorite is probably Havarl, which looks really very alien but Habitat 7 certainly also had a cool vibe to it.

If they do make DLC or a sequel, I hope they go for more diversity like this.

Edit: Corrected typo and changed dessert to desert. I actually wouldn't mind a huge dessert world. Just imagine the chocolate mouse mountains.

I was excited to go back, only to find out that I can't set foot on the planet again.  Would've loved one post-game mission on Habitat 7 to explore it again/under different circumstances.

Yeah the planet had already past the point in which the vault could repair it I think which was why the Initiative have to do it the old fashioned way as Kallo puts it. Whereas the other planets where you activate the vaults haven't past the point of no return yet like Habitat 7 and HO47c (the turian world) had so those worlds could be saved which you do by activating the monoliths and vaults.

Somewhat. I think the broader problem is that if they were going to do six explorable planets, they didn't really have the room for four of those (Voeld, Eos, Elaaden and H-047c) to effectively be desert planets with the single jungle planet being so much smaller.

Being realistic, they should really have tried to do something very different with each world. They were kind of on the right track with Kadara (with its weird mushrooms and rock formations) and Elaaden itself is a phenomenal piece of work, but Eos felt a bit too generic and H-047c just needed to be more. The contrived reason for why we couldn't leave the Nomad felt very forced.

Havarl really needed to be on the same scale as Eos (if they don't have the Nomad then fine, compensate with more impassable areas like what they did with Pandora in the Avatar game), and they needed something like a marshy, creepy planet (think Dagobah - the Frostbite 3 can do this kind of thing incredibly well, just look at the DAI Jaws of Haakon DLC), and perhaps a tropical/paradise planet (which ironically I think Hab 7 was originally before the scourge).

The other thing about Havarl was that is was dark, and it was raining.  It was the only planet I think where you used your suit light, which I thought was really cool.  It had jungle, marsh, weather, and darkness.

The other planets could have been better with more weather effects, blowing snow, sand, which would have given more of the uninhabitable vibe.  It's too hot, or too cold just didn't work for me.  I almost remember seeing something pre release where there was blowing sand and they talked about sandstorms and stuff.  But I could be mistaken.


  

First, a tundra is not desert.  There is plenty of precipitation on Voeld... it's in the form of snow and ice.  There is plenty of snow falling on Voeld before you reset the vault.  Resetting the vault causes the skies to clear and then there are even stars and aurora borealis revealed.  During Drack's loyalty mission, it is also dark and raining and there is even some lightning.  There are little dust devils that come out of the sand on Eos.  I've seen a breeze moving the trees about a bit on Elaaden at Paradise.  The weather effects are not as intense as TW3, but they are there and are, quite frankly, more varied than TW3... and I'm frankly getting real tired of people asserting that they are non-existent.  Also, if this is/was to be the first game in a series... then there are plenty of opportunities coming up for different environments.  Why do people want them to blow the entire wad on the first game... just so the second, third, etc. games can have nothing left to add?  There is also the prospect of seeing more dramatic changes resulting from the vaults on these same worlds in future games. 

The environments, story-wise, were not supposed to be able to really sustain life... so why should people expect to have a lot of lush planets.  It goes against the story.  If a colony prospect was really lush and nice, they could have just dropped all 100,000 people off the Nexus in one spot... end of story.  It doesn't take much space to support a population that small really.

I agree. They should have halved the size of the four main nomad planets and compensated by cutting out a bunch of the generic Kett, Remnant and Outlaw camps, and then added a couple more planets of that size with their own distinctive landscapes. Alternatively they could have made those additional planets more linear, like Habitat 7, each with their own meaty side quest..

Open world is all the rage but I'm not convinced Bioware stopped to realise that the bigger the world is, the harder it is to keep a tight narrative and steady pacing. It actually blows my mind that at one point they were seriously aiming to do dozens of proc gen planets. Madness.

This is essentially pedantry for the sake of it (and if we're going down that route, Voeld is not tundra). 'Desert' is in this case being used in the sense that four of the planets were essentially barren rolling landscapes with realistically the same hazards (heat, radiation, cold - it was all just 'you can't stand outside for too long or you die'). While this isn't necessarily a problem in of itself, it becomes a problem when they only put 6 explorable worlds in there to begin with - the net result is they start to feel too similar.

The argument about planets needed to all look like deserts in order for them to not support life is a bust, too. We're talking about science fiction here - the devs could literally create whatever worlds they wish within reason. We could have had arboreal planets with a lethal ecology meant it could not support AI colonists in its current state (think Kashyyyk from star wars). We could have had volcanic planets like Peebee's loyalty mission where the atmosphere was sulphur and there were lava flows. We could have had water worlds where the amount of land wasn't sufficient to found a colony. We could have gone real leftfield and had planets with shifting crystal formations or gone full-on sci-fi and had a planet that looked like it should be habitable but contact had been lost with everyone sent there. Can we please not pretend that the devs had their hands tied by the story when the devs themselves write the damn story. Hell, expanding Havarl into a explorable area somewhere on the same scale would have done the job.

The argument that 'its the first game in the series' doesn't really cover this either, as ME1 was the first game in its series and the devs managed to pack tropical, temperate, ruined city, snow, volcanic and a smattering of derivations of all these into a single game intended to run on an underpowered console.

I get that it had questionable development and that, if Kotaku are to be believed, too much time was wasted up front with this whole procedural world fad. But it's exactly this result that triggers questions like the subject of this thread, and a counter-argument that tries to paint the devs as somehow being forced into sameyness and pedantry about the definition of a desert isn't going to convince anyone.

If you want to get pendantic... hazards of any kind are really just depletions to health and shields on a meter in a game and every is just different colored pixels.  There are no environments at all.  No real effects.  Voeld is not a desert by any definition.  It is a barren landscape... but barren is what doesn't sustain whole lot of life.  If you put a bunch of vegetation on a planet, it sustains a lot of life.  They had to do a handwave with Havarl to explain it away for it to fit the story line they were taking.  So, Voeld, Eos, and Elaaden have very different details about them.  Yes, they are all barren landscapes, but they are barren landscapes each of a different style.  Just as H-047c is still a barren landscape of a different style.  (Yes, I agree it would have been nice to get out of the Nomad and bounce around in low gravity, but it was also a different experience from the rest of the game to have to target bubbles).  Still, the feel of the Nomad was quite different on the ice on Voeld than it was in the dunes on Elaaden... so even as open driving environments, they were not the exact same experience.  (Maybe it's that this sensation of differences in how the nomad rode is really just experienced by those of us who use a controller though... I honestly have never tried driving games on a PC.)

There nature of their barren-ness does tie into the story... with Voeld "ice runners" supplying the water to the other two planets and the Nexus (per Mayor Prija in the Voeld outpost).

The changes they could invoke on those landscapes, particularly Voeld, could be quite interesting.  Most of the settlements on Voeld are on a lake ice... what could happen to those settlements as the planet warms and the ice melts?  It could be interesting... even as a DLC.

Sure, more variety is always better... but insisting that what we got is all the same is just another exaggerated generalization to amplify a complaint... a very common tactic here.