Quests that sit in your Log

How is it the game's fault that you guys forgot stuff?

It's odd that the devs play differently from so many of the players.

On a related note, I thought that the actual problem with the ME3 "fetch" quests was that they were quests. I would have put recovered items in a separate "artifacts" tab, have the recipients of found objects show on the map, and that's it.

I can only speak for myself when I say I always try to get the minor stuff out of the way before moving on to the next chapter of the main plot. It might have something to do with playing the cRPGs of old where the main quest would be considerably more difficult than the "side" quests so I'd play the latter to level up for the former. Or maybe it could've something to do with how once you finished the main story you couldn't go back to the world and continue exploring, forcing you to experience all content beforehand. Probably a bit of both.

However, I don't understand how Laidlaw could've talked about "design expectation" when you give players the freedom to experience all the content whenever they want. Irrevocably, a large number of players, by his own admission, will opt for solving all the minor quests rather than pursuing the main ones when given the choice. That constitutes a serious problem when you're trying to maintain a certain pace with the narrative and ensure that players remain within a specific mindset. That is why I posited that Andromeda should've altered its world to fit the narrative (temporarily locking out quests, planets, etc.) like they did with Eos. The first time you set foot on the desert planet you're surrounded by radiation that makes it impossible for you to explore everything the planet has to offer. That is a design choice. Hoping players will choose this quest over that one is not.

Er, it's not silly at all. Mass Effect 2's side missions either involved chatting to someone, buying an item or they involved a mission, even a mini-mission. The closest I can get to the eavesdropping missions in ME2 is when you give Aria a datapad and she gives you location of an Eclipse Smuggling Depot, which you then find by scanning an anomaly on the planet (which is exactly what happens with eavesdropping missions in ME3) and you are given a very small map to fight on for a mini-mission. ME3's predecessor managed that, there are 19 anomaly missions in total and not all of them involve gunning down enemies. So I'm sorry, but that universe where ME item retrievals became anomaly missions has already happened.

ME3's fetch quests, and also are technically anomalies on the galaxy map, involve just scanning and talking to the person you eavesdropped on. After playing ME2 you are conditioned to expect more, that's why they're disappointing and that's why they weren't well received. Valhallan Threshold: Prothean Data Drives would have been a lot more interesting if you had a mini-mission in a Sonax Industries lab to recover the data drives, in a way similar to the ME2 anomalies.

But I can go back further, even ME1 handled scanning missions better. At least when I found one of Matriarch Dilinaga's writings on a planet I would get a little text box to provide some additional immersion to compensate for a lack of exploration. ME3's fetch quests didn't even have that. There was no immersion in it, no interactive gameplay, just scan and go and that's why they were bad.

FWIW when you mentioned ME2's 'anomaly' missions, I assumed you meant N7 missions and I suspect AlanC9 had the same interpretation. I can't really see how you'd link them to ME3's fetch quests.

Because it is poor pacing and just only highlights the fact that MEA suffered from bad narrative pacing.

I actually thought I'd hate those but they are actually fun. Only have trouble with the Unearthed one.

Narrative pacing was fine to me.

I'm still not clear what's wrong with missions going on hold, or how you're defining pacing problems. I mean pacing problems that are inherent to ME:A in [particular, as opposed to the inherent pacing problems that come with any game that even tries to be OW.

Well, it works in a psychological sense. If a player is putting both the N7 missions and the item retrieval missions into the same "mission" box and then comparing them, the item retrieval missions will look like there's something missing. It's a fairly common cognitive glitch -- letting taxonomy drive perception is one of the worst habits humans have.

This is exactly why I suggested that the item retrieval tasks shouldn't be classified as missions in the first place. ME:A improves on this aspect of ME3 by moving the miscellaneous collection stuff to its own category.