Honestly, should Andromeda been a bit more alien?

Yes, just two aliens is an example of a poor design decision.

What you've described also sounds like a more imaginative and fun game.

They had a great start, I thought. Habitat 7 with the scourge and all that looked and felt very alien. And the fact that we could scan all the plants and stuff and they all looked weird was great. Plus flying rocks for some reason, meeting the Kett for the first time, seeing remnant tech for the first time and walking through that first abandoned Kett base, turning machines on willy nilly and getting zapped by one, gassed by another, all that was brilliant.
The problem was: That was it. After that first mission, we had basically seen everything alien there was to see in Helios. From there on, it got a routine very quickly with only ver few exception (like the first vault on Eos). The angara don't even count because they are pretty lame rubber forehead aliens and didn't really feel alien at all unfortunately.


It would have helped a lot if they had managed to introduce more alien stuff throughout the game. Not everything would have needed as much detail or relevance in the main plot as the remnant for example but just give us a bit of weirdness for each mission.
I'd go so far as to say that ME1 had much more alien stuff in the game than ME:A. You get the geth on Eden Prime, the Thorian on Feros, the Rachni (with the queen) on Novaria and finally a frigging reaper on Virmire. All of those encounters seemed very alien to me.
Andormeda lacked that after the tutorial. Ok, so Eos has the vault, I'll give em that. But Hawarl has nothing really alien on it (the plants look cool, I'll admit but fluorescent fungus really shouldn't be the pinnacle here). Voeld maybe has the angara AI but we've dealt with heaps of those in ME (hell, we've got on in our head). Kadara got nothing, it's even populated mostly by MW species. Elaaden? Well, maybe that giant worm but we never really get to interact with it, so for all we know it's just a glorified Architect.

So yea, Andromeda could have used some more alien weirdness, if only to remind us how far out we are. How about a gaseous alien, floating in the air somewhere? Or a swarm intelligence? Or just more weird ruins of a city, carved into the bones of giant animal skeletons? I don't know, get creative guys, it doesn't have to be super relevant, it just needs to remind us that this place is nothing like home.

You see a lot of alien concepts.

Don't spoil.

Wait, so was it poor design choice by the devs to not have Drell, Vorcha, Yagh, and Collectors in ME1?

Well the galaxy map in this game is far, far bigger than the Hades Gamma Cluster in the OT, or any cluster for that matter.

Also, why do people keep acting as if meeting more races means meeting races native to the cluster.  The Kett aren't from the cluster, so that means inter cluster travel is possible.  The Initiative may not be established, but that doesn't mean the galaxy has to be the same.

The Angarans aren't even native to the cluster.  What happened to the race that was native to it.  Could some of them be hanging on somewhere.  There were ways that more races could have been in the game, and made sense.  

Please stop.

ME1 involved half a galaxy to play in, not a single cluster. Oh wait, I forgot realism is just an excuse to you. 
Bioware said that the games will involve expanding more and more into Andromeda, so we will encounter more alien species. Also, finding two alien races has nothing to do with finding a new part of space. Most of space has no life, so even finding two new intelligent species is amazing. 

oh crap i thought i was reading someone else's post got a second.

To answer your question though its not settling for mediocrity its making sense. We've only seen more then one alien species in a cluster like twice in the MET. Hell most clusters didn't even have a sentient native race. It was consistent and logical within the rules of ME.

No it isn't. There are only 30 or so systems in the Heleus Cluster. You see that many stars or many more in the other clusters. The only difference is here we explore every star while in the Shepard Trilogy we only go to a few.