My opinion on the game, six month later ...

People keep making ME:A/Witcher 3 comparisons, but I'm just sitting here disliking every game CD Projekt has ever made...

People keep making ME:A/Witcher 3 comparisons, but I'm just sitting here disliking every game CD Projekt has ever made...

I do. Don't lynch me, please!

I actually had to Google that...

Not a fantasy buff in general.

We'd need to have the actual cost numbers to make this argument stick. Is the ROI really greater, on average, for the bigger games? Could be. In baseball, analysis shows that most players are better off swinging for home runs rather than batting average. And of course, for every TW3 there's a KOA, but this shouldn't be a big concern for EA since they're big enough to survive a flop or two.

I'd have been happier if DA2 was considered to be the model. I'd like smaller releases more often. But it looks like that model has failed.

My opinion of Andromeda, six month later, and more importantly, having finally played witcher 3, has changed somewhat.

Unlike a lot of people, I didn't play W3 before playing Andromeda, because I didn't like W2 all that much. At the release,  I didn't get why people are drawing comparison between them since in my mind, Witcher series so different for Mass Effect. Reading threads on this forum praising W3 actually convinced me to get that the game and play it. 

First of all, the games are very similar, direct comparison is fully justified. Both are narrative driven RPG, with heavy reliance on cut scene to tell story and diagloue choices to build character. Both are open world, both have crafting/inventory/codex/scanning.... Even the quest systems are setup similarly, with main/secondary/side. Romance and relationship with NPCs are important aspects, and supposedly choices made in game will influence the outcome. They are so similar that I can't tell who is copying whom.
I apologize to people on the forum to whom I said comparing the two franchises is stupid.

It also proved to me that open world is not a death sentence to RPG. I had thought that Andromeda's story suffered from having to cope with being an open world game, and that content will inevitably be stretched too thin, and that boring fillers are necessary evil. I will say that I am wrong on that point. Open world games maybe harder to make, but it just means one has to work harder.

Second, I said before that I didn't care much about graphics glitch or facial animation. I take that back now after playing W3. Now I realize how important animation is, especially facial animation to tell a story in a visual medium. Long story short, I ended up being torn between the game's romance options, which is surprising since one of them has never been the the previous games. I think what sold me on Yennefer is how well her expressions are animated in scenes, that you can actually see her sadness, anger, bitchiness and disappointment on her face. Those animations are worth a thousand dialogues.

Before now, I have hated on Andromeda's writing, and blamed pretty much everything I hated on what I thought were inconsistent/bad writing. Now I wonder if the animations and cut scenes had been done better, maybe the entire game would have felt different.

Anyway, that's just how my thought on Andromeda has changed. I didn't have a chance to compare the two games when Andromeda first came out since I havent played W3 at that point, I felt I missed out on some very insight forum discussion.

I believe if they released day one with the next few patches included (meaning worked on more) including the Jaal Bi change included, the game may have been received better. Not perfect but tons better.