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

I wholeheartedly agree with your main point: larger worlds need to have something fun to do in them.

But what's "fun" need not have anything to do with the story.

Consider Skyrim, which arguably is pretty weak with respect to story. It's still one of the most actively played and loved games on Steam. Why? Because a) it's highly moddable, so modders have been steadily creating new content to play, and it's a sandbox. You can ignore the main quest completely and go do whatever you want, including rolling 10,000 cheese wheels down a mountain, if that's what's fun for you. All that open space should be filled with emergent gameplay opportunities, e.g., sandboxing. Let me build my own castle and go make war on my neighbor. Let me wander the world as an itinerant blacksmith, mining ore and making gear to earn the 10,000 gold that I set as my own victory condition. Let me kill every NPC in existence, with extra points if the kill is environmental, like I bump them off a cliff. Play is limited only by the reasonably realistic rules of the simulation and your own imagination.

Also, size and open world aren't necessarily related. Usually open worlds are larger than closed ones, but that need not be true -- Deus Ex:Mankind Divided is a small semi-open worldish game, with the main Prague map being tiny in comparison to say, Skyrim, but still featuring both sandboxing/emergent gameplay and some decent story quests, though the main quest is a bit of a botch. Point being, if a budget is limited, I would much rather see a game downsized but still open world, rather than made a closed world or left large and filled with junk content.

We definitely differ on this though.  I prefer my sandbox games to not have any developer-crafted story to them.  I want to be able to essentially create my own story from absolutely scratch, build a huge amount of my own setting (with or without friends).  Minecraft does this very well - albeit in a very block-by-block sort of way... but at least I can play it with a group of friends (one the Xbox... even with 3 other friends while we sit in my living room also shooting the breeze and drinking a beer). 

When I play SP RPG-stories, I'm looking to be told a story (albeit a somewhat flexible one).  I'm interested in where the developer wants to take things... not just in where I want to take things.  I want to experiment with different character builds... but always within whatever "imaginative" framework the develop has set for that game.  If the developer wants to lead me through a mystery using a series of clues... I'm perfectly happy to follow those clues in a sequence... rather than see the whole mystery jumbled up by "open-world" free to roam syndrome so that it's not a mystery story anymore.  If the developer wants to make some sort of story purpose to my character changing in certain ways over the course of a story, then I'm OK with following that development in the sequence the developer sets. 

I'm just not looking for these RPG games to do sandbox things for me.  I prefer to play sandbox games for that.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Chris Schlerf was a massive Halo fanboy. Truth be told I was skeptical of Bioware hiring him as lead writer as not a lot of Halo fans were happy with Halo 4 plus he hasn't had much writing experience outside of said game. That being said, I found the Archon more interesting than the didact but that's not saying much.

Diadact good Archon better. *Drack said coyly.* 😇

More precisely, there isn't much to discover that isn't part of an explicit major quest line. There's plenty to discover on Havarl if you're doing A Dying Planet. I'm not certain you can even get into those places if you're not.

It was, and is, a legitimate concern. Having the lead writer leave a project, for whatever reason, can seriously derail something like a movie or game.

Seems to be some confusion: Knowles was a designer, not a writer. Though...a foggy memory wants to say that Gaider took over for someone else in the middle of producing DAO...but that could be a memory of the ME:2 writer's departure...it's hard to keep track.

Oh, no, I got it. It was the lead designer that changed. Knowles quit and Laidlaw took over...

Dark Souls 2 had that issue. Partly the reason I really disliked that game.
But anyways, time for me to get back on topic, I partially disagree, but that is mainly in regards to the crew on the tempest. World building was definitely a big downside of ME:A. It'd be nice if, the more you progressed throughout the story, the more your outposts would expand. Ambient music? I thought there were only, like, one or two tracks that I liked, the romance ambient being one, probably my favorite romance ost I've heard in the entire series, other than that, there wasn't much music playing at all. Stuff like the combat music in Andromeda overall felt forgettable and generic. I thought something like the combat music from Therum was soooooo much better, even if it was missing from the OST.

People's problem with Halo 4 was that the MP was worse than 1-3's and that the main story dared to depict Master Chief as anything but a mindless killing machine. I personally liked 4's campaign, not as much as CE or 2, but way more than 3.

The Didact was only an interesting character if you read the tie-in novels by Greg Bear, otherwise he comes across as having an unexplained chip on his shoulder for humanity. That's ultimately a fault of the game. Tie in novels should not be necessary to explain the motives of the game's villains. It's honestly the same problem the ME Revelation book created in regards to Saren.

I agree.  Much of the time, the stance and movements of the NPC''s in ME:A just don't seem natural.  More of than not, they are just standing someplace and then when activated for a conversation,  will just "pulse" (like heavy breathing).  If the do move around, it's usually limited to some sort of nonsensical pacing (Majordome Bell-Scott) or mindlessly waving a datapad about.  If they could get all that just to feel a bit more natural, it would improve things immeasurably.  There were a few brief moments where the movements did seem more natural (e.g. when Raj was working on the panel and he jumped when it exploded), but once the conversation started, we we back to the same old "pulsing" motion.

There were bits of weather in Andromeda... it was often raining on Havarl, it was raining with some lightning during Drack's loyalty mission, and there was a breeze evident on Elaaden; but to be effective, they are really going to have to intensify it.  The hazard mechanic seems to be bugged - most noticeably on Voeld, but it's also somewhat irratic on Eos.

I actually found that the little stories underlying many of the side quests fit quite well together and would at times weave a larger back story - The little quests on EOS are like this... Naming the Dead, It Doesn't Add Up, Waking up to the Future, Ghost of a Promise, The Secret Project, and finding Clancy's and then "PeeBee's camps weave together a compelling narrative about what caused Sites 1 and 2 to fail.  However, the open world  can work against this narrative since to really be impactful, most of it should be done prior to to talking to Bradley the first time.  I also found that a lot of the nuances in the narrative are actually buried in some of the squad banter in the nomad... which is very hit and miss (depends on which 2 squad mates you happen to have with you when driving over particular "trigger" areas of the map and how quickly you're driving since much of the banter can get cut off by merely going through an area too fast or when a battle starts).  They do need to work out a better presentation for all of this.

While I'd certainly concede that there's some overlap between Halo and Mass Effect, a core premise of the whole Mass Effect concept is basically investigating the unknown past, which kind of comes with the territory of ancient alien structures in a sci-fi setting. Similarly, the concept of a plot device that converts people into enemies is an insanely broad thing to ascribe to Halo - we had this kind of thing played straight with Indoctrination and Husks.

I mean, the basic logic you've stated above has been repeated as broad plot in god-knows-how-many fictions, including the MET. Hell, if we remove the sci-fi specific elements you're not a million miles away from the Uncharted storyline.

I know the op is upset at losing money over this game, but that does not mean he/she should stoop to broadcasting fake news. Awesome indeed, do you really expect the Bioware populace to follow suit and in such disillusionment?