Andromeda is awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!

... as I said, I'm not disagreeing with you... They could have made each joke line predictable.  The consequence of that is that each joke line has less of a chance of being "spontaneously funny" to the player.  In humor, part of it is an element of surprise that would get removed if the player was able to decide ahead of time that they are "phishing" for a joke line at this specific point. 

Some RPG players are highly driven towards this notion that they need absolute control over their character to role play.  I'm not in that camp because I want the developer to be able to craft their stories... and they cannot really do that if they have no control over what sort of range of personalities their most important character in the story is to have.  In Ryder's case, there is an element of "spontaneous" humor to his character that is not optional... just as much as Shepard being a hardass soldier was not optional in the original Trilogy.  You could give Shepard a degree of softness... but not a whole lot and Shepard would still sometimes spontaneous do something that was somewhat "badass" thing without the player being able to specifically prevent it.  For example, when meeting the merc in the tower during Thane's recruitment mission... sure, you don't have to push him out the window... but there is no option to not intimidate him in any way.  No option for Shepard to say, "Allright, I'm scared of all the reinforcements you're threatening me with, so I'll just throw up my hands and surrender."  Why?  Because such a statement from him at that moment would be completely out of the range of "allowed personalities" for Shepard within the game.  Why is such a cowardly personality not allowed in MET... because it doesn't suit the story that Bioware wanted to tell.  There was also no option for Shepard to find a way to just sneak past him and just leave him talking on the comms.  Again, why... playing Shepard as a stealth infiltrator wasn't within the range of the game.

An occasional "ill-timed" joke is part of Ryder's basic/fixed personality.  Those ill-timed jokes can be extremely occasional or more frequent, depending on what the player selects.  Should the available options been given better, more accurate icons... sure.  In other areas as well.  For example, I didn't like selecting a "flirt" option with Vetra quite early in the game and hearing my Ryder commit to always being there for her"   Even though it did not actually lock him into a romance, it's a line to me that sounded like it should have and "my Ryder" at that point in time was basically flirting with everyone... guys, girls, aliens... and probably would have flirted with the wildlife on each planet had he been given the option... because that's the personality I wanted to give him at that point... but that was, in reality, outside the range the game allowed.

Sigh. TW3 and HZD are highly regarded, story-driven RPGs, and they are both unrelentingly open world. And Skyrim, while not being particularly story-driven, is still one of the most popular open world FRPGs of all time.

Correlation is not causation. Open world is not the problem. Devs who don't know how to drive story through gameplay is the problem. 

I like Shepard, but I'd put her below the Dragon Age protags, which can generally come off as being more charming or amusing, but most of all, intelligent. 

Ah, the good old ostrich strategy.

If anything it's the bandwagon haters who have joined me, not the other way around. I hated the very idea of this game back when it was being floated around by fans in Casey's "Tell us what you want for the next Mass Effect game thread" on old-prime BSN. Intergalactic travel was not technically possible for the Mass Effect species at any point in history. We're talking about a galactic civilization that had huge logistical and technological problems getting from one star cluster to another without the use of Mass Relays. The idea that they can pull intergalactic cryo-carriers out of their asses is a concept as absurd as 18th century Prussia launching people into space on chemical rockets. Frederick the Great was great, but not that great.

With all that said, I completed the Origin trial and played the vault on Eos with the help of my good friend Edward Thatch, but I quit after that because it did not feel like a valuable investment of my time. Instead I've watched main story content from Eos to the ending on youtube, and I haven't been impressed with any of it. If I were to sum it up with one word, that word would be "bland".


Mass Effect: Andromeda is the Deus Ex: Invisible War of the Mass Effect franchise. Yes, it's a Mass Effect game, but it's not worthy to be considered a Mass Effect game.


I played long enough to know there wasn't going to be a massive improvement in terms of my enjoyability of the gameplay, and I was fairly certain the story would not improve either - an assertion confirmed by readily available gameplay on youtube.


I've watched main story and companion content on youtube. The game doesn't improve from Eos.

Shep was my first Bioware protag, and she will always have a special place (all four of them, the fifth never made ME3).



(The ME3 import did terrible thing to faces I have to say, looking back on it - even with the lazarus mod).
But in comparison to Ryder, she is a bit weak as a character. I'd class her as a one dimensional badass; there is hardly ever a moment where she is just normal. She always has to be superwoman; a never failing player insert. I think the nadir is Rannoch where all she has to do is shout to stop a 300 year old war.
My (now two) Ryders are already more memorable as characters, if not for her one-liners.

i found the story writing in MEA to be higher then the three previous ME games.

Why would you hold out for something like that?  They never "patched out" the shrieking that occurs when Kaidan/Ashley and Presley were fighting over the descent into Ilos.  They never called Marina Sirtis back to redo her abysmal delivery of her death scene.  I've yet to hear anything in ME:A that even remotely approaches the horibble VA deliveries of some lines in the old Trilogy... and as gets argued infinitely here, the "bad dialogue" perception differs from person to person and is really just a matter of people having different tastes in humor.  I really think Bioware will leave it to the modders to mock up different "alterations to the game's story and people who want to use them can.  The precedent was set long ago by the likes of mods like MEHEM.  There is really no need for Bioware to spend a bunch of money to keep pandering to people who will just wind up modding the game to suit themselves anyways.

Explanation of "My face is tired." - She's tired of putting on a "public face" for 14 months straight with 1000 people a day riding her for everything.  The patches have fixed the eyes and added hand movements that make the expression feel more "natural"; although part of Addison's character is that she uses somewhat idiosyncratic speech (janky poetic expressions).  One can commonly hear such things from people who have learned English as a second language and some people with dyslexia actually.  It was a common thing with one boss I had for a number of years to skew common idioms such that one really had to "work" at understanding him sometimes.

You don't like her character, that's fine; but the writing of her is not objectively "bad dialogue" - it's actually pretty ingenious.  I don't think Bioware are going to remove it just because the internet flipped out over it.  They've corrected it now as far as they are likely going to.

Just because I say there is a problem with open world games doesn't mean that I think all games have that problem and frankly popularity doesn't always mean something is good either, it means that it is popular.  Its saying that players are fine with broken games as launch because of Bethesda and they should be willing to accept Andromeda.  Just assuming that when I say "open world syndrome" doesn't even mean I am applying it to the genre, I apply that to the developers who are chasing a fad in game development. 

Not every approach to a to making a game works in an open world game and frankly I think if BioWare was to make a good open world game people wouldn't like the changes BioWare would make to their game and get a  reaction very similar to Anthem.  The approach BioWare takes for their story and characters requires a more fixed environment to help propel the story forward.  I haven't played Horizon Zero Dawn since I have no plans to give Sony money again for personal reasons, but with the Witcher Geralt's design as a character helps move the story along instead of the world elements themselves.

People don't like Addison because on first meeting, she doesn't treat the player like a demi-god.

I think she's great.

The facial animations after the patch were much better. Well, some of them at least.

not really.