Learning from Andromeda, Lessons for the Future.

for me its the characters.

I find James Bond Villains to be more interesting tbh.

Wonder if I should watch a James bong movie again, it's been quite a while since I saw one.

Actually I was thinking about this a little earlier. With the idea of making Aksuul the main anatgonist for MEA I would have had him go after Meridian/ the Vaults like Ryder, and like Ryder wants to use them to RESTORE worlds, but also make them hostile to the MW species. But, he fears that Ryder and co would do the same thing if given the chance given his experiences with the Kett.

I must have missed that post.  

And if it is a structure its a structure most video games don't seem to follow that well.  Even the MET both parts of the individual games, and the series as a whole, really didn't do that well in this regard.  That is the point I keep trying to drive home.  Yes it may be simplest, yes to me, I really like what they did, but whatever we call it, imo Andromeda is better written structually, and in terms of personal preference, then the MET, any of the Dragon Age games, and a great many other video games. 

I'm not asking for the game to switch genres, I'm asking for it to bend or not bother. If the genre conventions of your game negate the central conflict of your game, you need to change one of those things to fit the other, and ideally, you wouldn't streamline the conflict to conform with the genre, but expand upon the genre to adequately express the conflict.
I didn't say "make it completely realistic," I asked for the struggle to be realistic, i.e. not structured around a cartoonish villain and not solved by the flip of a switch. Hell, the game could've kept the vaults as a space magic solutions, but made the conflict less about some mustache-twirling dude and more the potential conflicts about using the technology.

And this doesn't necessitate the game becoming a politics sim (though an aspect of that might be welcome in an RPG); you can still have your pulpy action and adventure, but structure the story beats around some more complex issues. This is an RPG, a genre specifically equipped to explore the intricacies of a world. It's a shame to waste it on contrivances. To bring up The Witcher once more: it's a game built around am apocalypse scenario with cheesy, grimdark villains (which rightfully deserve some criticism), but it holds up because of the more complex dynamics cropping up around that conflict. And I suppose I'll admit it: maybe Andromeda's problem isn't that the main narrative needed to be so much better (though it certainly could have been), but that its supplementary material just wasn't good enough hold it all together.

And once again, you're still thinking within the framework of the existing Andromeda. This game didn't need to be about survival either. It may well be that Mass Effect isn't really the kind of universe that could adequately portray that sort of survival conflict, and in that case, it really shouldn't bother. There are other stories it could have told with better stakes and more fidelity.
Yeah, I didn't really want a sequel to the Mass Effect trilogy, but even if I did, I don't think a perfect retread of all its faults is really good way of going about it. I would think that you might want to capture what's best about the franchise, and the franchise is at its best when it stages pulpy sci-fi action against social (soft-science) conflict.

The problem for me is that it just seems the critics had a very different gaming experience then i did.

Even if you are talking about just the environmental problems each one had to involve multiple complex solutions in order to make work. Which since a lot of people don't like to be challenged mathematically they did patch in a work around but each vault still had you solve complex puzzles, fight bad guys, and then run from a death cloud. If that's simple i don't think i want to play your complex.

The technology also had issues, i believe it was brought up a couple of times the.potential pitfalls of using the rem tech were...but then with SAM, it actually became a central part of the narrative how bad SAM was.

And yes we can all agree that the MAIN villain was a bit cartoonish. But he was only b one small problem AND he also wasn't solved by a simple button press.